Even in the quiet of my own thoughts, the word made me feel sick. Gone.
I kept my hand in my pocket, fingers wrapped around my brother’s paper bird, as if somehow through it I could summon his competence and confidence. I chose paths at random, listening for the sounds of wind or the smell of fresh air, but instead the air grew more still, more quiet. I sensed we were moving downward, not upward, and the further we went, the warmer the air grew.
Despite my uncertainty, despite the fact that we were utterly lost, I felt myself breathing easier and standing straighter with every step. I was growing used to the iron supports in the stone around us. I’d stopped long enough to absorb some magic from the machines in Tansy’s pack, and I felt the power shimmering inside me like sunlight, intangible but no less real.
Twice we encountered people coming the opposite direction, but we were able to duck down a side tunnel and avoid being seen. The third time, however, came when we were walking down a long corridor without any branching tunnels. A man and a woman came around the corner unexpectedly, chatting. Oren hissed and I jumped, turning and treading on his feet as I tried to escape backward down a route that didn’t exist. He put his hands on my shoulders, steadying me, as Nix zipped inside the collar of my shirt.
I reached inside me for the bits of power I had left, ready to use it against them if I had to. I’ve been in a prison twice now. I’m not going back.
I took quick, shallow, steadying breaths, every nerve alive, every muscle tensed. I felt Oren’s hands grow rigid on my shoulders as they approached.
They walked straight past us without even looking.
I stared ahead at the spot where they’d been, too shocked to even turn and track their progress away from us, down the corridor we’d come from.
“. . . not like we can tend them ourselves,” the man was saying, voices echoing back to us through the tunnel. “Or grow anything down here.”
“True, but self-sufficiency is the first rule. Prometheus insists on it. How can we justify—” And they turned a corner, voices fading into unintelligible murmuring.
Oren let out a long breath, the air stirring my hair. I shivered, pulling away abruptly. He just shrugged, looking as confused as I felt.
Nix peeked out from my collar. “They don’t recognize you as escaped prisoners,” he noted.
“But surely they know we’re strangers? That we don’t belong here?”
Nix considered this, emerging the rest of the way from my collar and dropping into the air so that he could look us over. “Unless there are so many of them living here that they don’t all know each other.”
We kept walking, silent, shaken. Just how many people could be down here? I wished that I could see the outside, see what time of day it was. Were these people about to turn into ravenous shadows at any moment as well?
It was then that I realized Oren was siphoning less power from me than he had been. What had been a steady stream was now a trickle. Either he was somehow needing less magic to sustain his human form, or—
My eyes caught a glimmer of violet light as we turned a corner, and it hit me. No wonder I’d been feeling better, stronger, brighter. There was magic in the air. Iron all around, still, but it was containing the magic, holding it in. Like the Wall in my home city.
We stopped long enough to share a meal, dividing up the last of the cheese from my pack. It would’ve been a meager meal for one—between the two of us, it barely seemed like anything at all. My ear had stopped bleeding, and I rubbed the dried blood off my neck. I couldn’t do anything about the stain on my shirt, but at least I could minimize how warlike and battered I must look.
When we started moving again, a few more people passed us by, none of them giving us so much as a second glance. This time we knew to act as though we belonged there, but nevertheless my skin prickled. I instinctively reached for my power every time, ready to fight.
It was Oren’s idea to follow the people.
“When you’re hungry and snares aren’t working,” he said, keeping his eyes down, trying not to look at the stone ceiling and walls surrounding us, “you follow animals to find their dens. You can follow a bird back to its nest for the eggs.”
The people had to be going to and from something, he pointed out. There had to be a base somewhere. Storage for supplies or weapons. Places to sleep and eat.
So the next time we heard the sound of footsteps, we went towards them, ending up at a T-junction. As a trio of tunneldwellers approached, we fell into step behind them, trailing enough that they wouldn’t try to talk to us, but close enough that we could see where they were headed.
Eventually we ended up in a hallway that was rectangular instead of the round, squat tunnels we’d been in since the prison cell. At the end of it was a huge iron door. Oren put a hand out, touching my elbow, and we slowed, watching the trio carefully. I knew what he was warning me about—if the base was behind that door, then the people who had captured us could very well be on the other side of it. And they would surely recognize us, even if the others didn’t.
One of the tunnel-dwellers, a man with thick salt-andpepper stubble spreading across his jaw, reached out for a leverlike handle and hauled back on it. The doors slid open to either side, vanishing into the walls. Inside was a grate, which he slid open as well. He and the other two stepped into what appeared to be an empty room and turned around as one. It looked hauntingly familiar. The man who’d opened the doors reached out as if to close them and then spotted Oren and me.
“Well?” he said, one hand on the grate.
“E-Excuse me?” I stammered.
“Are you going down?”
Oren’s hand tightened on my elbow as he took a step back. Suddenly, my memory clicked into place. I knew what this was—I’d been in one before.
“Yes,” I blurted, reaching out for Oren’s hand and then heading for the box. For the elevator.
I could hear Oren gasp a quick, anguished breath as we squeezed into the elevator. For someone who didn’t like being underground, this must be torture. I wound my fingers through his, putting my body between him and the elevator’s other occupants. Though my mind recoiled at his touch, knowing what he really was under the veneer of humanity, the rest of me tingled, goose bumps rising along my arms despite the warm air. I turned my head away, not looking at Oren’s face.
The grate screeched as the man with the stubble slammed it closed behind us. Then he opened the lid of a box that stood on a post in one corner and banged his fist into a round, flat button. The elevator gave a lurch—Oren’s fingers went rigid in mine—and then with a surge of magic that sang through my head, the whole thing went dropping down.
I was glad it had been so long since the last time I’d eaten a proper meal. My stomach felt like it climbed into my throat, and my feet tingled, desperate to make it known that they were still in contact with the floor.
I looked up and saw that Oren’s eyes were closed and his face almost serene, far calmer than I’d ever seen him. Only the tightness of his grip and the glint of sweat in the hair at his temples betrayed his terror. Here he was no monster—he was just a boy trying to trust that I knew what I was doing. I leaned against him and felt the tension in his body relax just a fraction.
For a moment, it was like none of the past few weeks had happened. It was just me and Oren—there was no sickening tang of blood in the air or hunger inside me. The walls between us vanished for a few precious seconds.
Then the box stopped with a shudder and a screech of protesting gears, and I stepped away. I took a deep, quiet breath. We had to act like we made this trip all the time. I kept an eye on the man with the stubble, watching everything he did in case we needed to get back up the same way we’d come down. All we needed was to figure out the quickest way out of this place.