You want to take something away from me, Drains? That hurts more than losing my humanity.
Why? It was simple.
Motorcycles rocked.
Humanity? It varied.
■
“Yo,” Mags said.
Alexis and Ty exchanged glances.
“I’m the postman today,” Mags said.
“Rose is sleeping. She was up late,” Alexis said.
“Yeah?”
“Something about a Barber?” Alexis asked. “Any idea? Might have something to do with what she was saying about us needing the big guns.”
“Huh,” Mags said. “No idea. I’m just hoping those guns aren’t too big.”
“Me too,” Ty said. He looked tired.
“Not me,” Evan said. He looked like he’d lost a few feathers, a few more were sticking up, as though they were on the verge of falling out. “I don’t need to sleep anymore. It’s a luxury.“
“Lucky runt,” Mags said.
“You should sleep,” Ty warned. “It conserves energy, and it delays the time until your next transfusion.”
“Bring it,” Evan said. “I’m saying we should do the fire spirit thing. Make me a phoenix, bro. C’mon.”
“No, bro,” Ty said.
“C’mon, c’mon.”
Ty looked to Alexis for help.
“You got him started on that,” Alexis said, “You egged him on.”
“Damn it.”
“C’mon! Pleeeeeaaase.“
“Ahem, listen,” Mags said. “I have letters I’m delivering in my official capacity as ambassador, and it doesn’t matter if Rose is asleep, because they’re for you… three.”
“Tiff’s hurt,” Ty said. “I’ll take hers to her.”
“Great.”
Mags handed over three letters. The envelopes matched.
Ty tore his open. Evan hopped down to his wrist to get a closer view.
“A declaration of war,” Ty said. He looked up at Mags, concerned.
“Damn, didn’t know,” Mags said. “They said they’d do it.”
“We didn’t-” Ty started. “We thought Rose stopped them from agreeing to those accords.”
“They’re still sticking to them, just not so officially,” Mags said.
“Damn it,” Alexis said.
“For all three of us?” Ty asked.
Mags shrugged, “I can only assume.”
“Picking off the pawns before going for the checkmate, I guess,” Alexis said. Her voice was calm, but her hand jittered as she reached for her pocket. “Damn, need a smoke. I’ll be back.”
“Not in the house,” Ty said. “Rose said not to, and if you burn this place down-.”
“I’m not doing it outside,” Alexis said. “Declaration of war, remember? We could get attacked. I’ll do it in the bathroom with the fan on.”
She muttered some curse word, inaudible, as she stalked off toward the ground-floor bathroom.
“Thanks, real Mags,” Ty said.
“Sorry,” she said. “Good luck.”
His own emotions were betrayed as he hurried to shut the door, barely even paying attention as he shut it in her face.
He slumped against the door, while Evan fluttered up to the top of his head.
“Damn it,” he said.
He looked utterly miserable.
■
The guilt that fixed me was like a spear to the chest. Violent in its intensity, force, and the pain that hit me where my heart was supposed to be.
I had asked this place to try harder. Now it was dawning on me. The objective, the message.
Hitting me where it hurt. I didn’t want to wrestle with the idea until I had more validation, more confirmation.
Keep moving. Wrestle with it when you’re out of here.
In the end, there weren’t many paths to try.
I was at a ledge, not far from Green Eyes. Not far from the gargoyle’s perch where I’d first sat down, gotten my first glimpse of the present.
She’d told me to go left. Her last bit of advice.
Coming back the opposite way, that meant I was turning left, to take the path she’d warned me off.
Another dark tunnel, sloping downward.
Water pattered down on my head and shoulders from above. It ran down the walls in trickles and streams.
I saw light at the end of the tunnel. My path was lit up, brighter than I’d seen yet.
I heard a buzz, a dull drone, like a low note, held continually.
Further down the path, the ground was shattered, ruined. It was limited to chunks that only barely held together, haphazard, with deep cracks between each that I could fit a limb into.
As I got further down, the amount of running water increased, the light grew more intense, and the state of my surroundings grew even more precarious, more crude. I almost had to hop from one shelf of stone to the next.
Twice, I had to stop to calculate which path posed the smallest gamble, three times I had to pause to work out how best to navigate over piles of crumbled masonry, or open chasms that were too wide for me to leap across.
The drone increased in intensity.
The light was in sharp contrast to the darkness here, and the sharp shadows that were cast were misleading, suggesting gaps where there were none, or glare hid the cracks that did exist.
I rounded a corner, and I was blinded.
■
Fell’s grave, the snow falling heavily.
“We’ll come back tomorrow,” the old woman told the little girl.
■
Then light once more. Almost worse than the darkness. My skin prickled with it.
In the midst of whole sections of the Drains that had broken away was a cavern. Quite possibly what the Drains had been before they’d mutated into the drains.
In the midst of that cavern, a face stood out from the wall. It wasn’t stone, but it looked like something close. Bone, perhaps, or calcified flesh.