Cyrus stepped forward. The floor was colder beneath his bare feet, and his faint silver light didn’t seem to penetrate the darkness beyond the door. He moved all the way in.
The room was an empty cube, entirely lined with the same black riveted steel as the door. Cyrus stretched his lit hand from side to side, to the ceiling, to the floor, straining his eyes. The floor in the center of the room was patterned — a small circle surrounded by a large ring of flat steel petals, like a black armored sunburst. In the very center, there was a keyhole. Cyrus moved toward it, easing his bare feet onto the broad steel petals. They were the source of the cold, and for a moment, he thought his feet would freeze in place. He knelt and inched forward on his knees, breathing hard.
“What do you think, Patricia?” Cyrus whispered. He was already pulling out his keys. His legs were frozen, his hands were almost pale. The gold key slid down into the floor. But he didn’t turn it. He looked over his shoulder at the door and listened for footsteps. Nothing. He should go back. But retreating now would only mean coming back again later. Tomorrow. Next week. He wouldn’t be able to leave it alone. Not for long.
Cyrus shivered. He was here now.…
Bracing himself, Cyrus turned the key, and the floor began to fall away beneath him. Jerking the key back out, he dove onto his side, rolling clear of the growing hole. Steel whispered to steel as the petals dropped to form another spiral stair. Cyrus scrambled to his feet. Frigid air rolled across the floor, and pale-blue light flickered on the ceiling above the shaft.
“Right,” Cyrus said, and he moved to the stairs. Patricia tightened on his fingers. He knew what he was doing. Maybe. This had to be one of the Burials. There could be a dead body at the bottom — maybe a frozen body. Maybe two. But whatever it was, he was going to see it. He was going to go down even if it froze his feet off.
Why? He could hear Antigone’s frantic, absent objection. You can’t. You shouldn’t. Don’t!
Cyrus bit his lip and inched forward. Why? Why had he gone through every room in the Archer, opening every drawer, every closet, and lifting every mattress? Why had he pulled tires from streams and wormed beneath the floorboards of barns and climbed into the ceiling of his mother’s hospital room? Because he needed to.
As he descended into the cold blue light, Cyrus clutched Patricia’s body as tightly as she clutched him. Green mixed with blue, flickering like fire. But it couldn’t be fire. The colors were wrong. And it was cold.
Around each step, Cyrus expected to see the source of the light. But around each step, he found only more steps. The steel ran out and became stone. Another slow turn and his feet splashed into moving water. Cyrus didn’t even notice.
In front of him, a large room was full of fast water, swirling in a whirlpool that reached every wall. Down in the whirlpool’s mouth, before it became a throat, there was a nest of icy blue-and-green flame. In the center of that nest, a black stone column ran down out of sight. On top of the column, a man sat with his legs crossed. Cyrus could see the thick iron bands that clamped his crossed legs to the stone. But he could not see the man’s arms. Fifty feet — at least — of brown beard and hair had tangled around his shoulders and arms and was stretched out in the swirling water like seaweed, even reaching the walls. The man’s face was oddly peaceful, even noble. He looked like he was lost in some distant, slow-moving dream, or was savoring the warm crawl of a summer breeze on his face — as if his surroundings, the water, the stone, the cold fire and iron bands, were all illusion. His eyes were closed, and his skin was translucent white. In the center of his forehead, there was a brutal hole the size of a bullet.
While Cyrus stared, the flames between him and the man receded slightly. Something liquid, something warm and alive, reached into him. He could feel it racing in his veins. His jaw locked, and every hair on his body stood up and screamed.
Kill me.
He heard the voice, but the man on the column had not moved. His eyes were still closed.
The Reaper’s Blade. Come. Cut me loose from this flesh.
Cyrus’s right foot slid forward and down a step, deeper into the rushing water. What was he doing? He tried to jerk his foot back. He tried to pull himself away. His other foot was moving forward. The flames shrunk further.
I can live in you—
In a rush, the flames rebounded, roaring to the ceiling. The voice was gone, ripped from Cyrus like his own gut. Gulping, gasping for breath, Cyrus fell backward onto the stairs.
As the flames receded to their original height, the bearded man raised his head slowly, opened his eyes, and looked into Cyrus’s.
Crab-crawling frantically, Cyrus made it up around the first bend and out of sight. Coughing, still fighting for breath, he rolled onto his knees, scrambled to his feet, raced up the stairs, and tumbled out onto the steel floor. Then he crawled back to the keyhole, slid in the gold key with a shaking hand, and managed to twist before he dropped onto his face. The stairs rose slowly back up into the floor.
His hands were twitching. His stomach, knotted in fear, was loosening into nausea. His face, pressed against the icy steel floor, still dripped with sweat. Patricia stared at him from around his finger. She’d loosened her grip, but his finger was stinging. She might have bitten him.
“I’m sorry,” Cyrus mumbled. “I’ll listen to you next time.”
He forced himself up. He needed to get out. Now.
He managed to pull the big door closed quietly, and made sure that it had locked. Then he staggered for his little spiral stairs and the long trek home.
He stopped. Voices. Laughter rolled out of the stairwell. Flashlights.
No. Cyrus spun around. No, no, no.
He ran down the length of the hallway on boiled legs, rounded a corner, sprinted another length, and dead-ended at a door. Not locked. He didn’t need the keys. Dropping them into his pocket, he slipped carefully through onto a cold marble floor. Another hallway, this one with sconces on crowded walls, burning low enough that the paintings and maps were mere shapes in shadow. He popped the still-glowing Patricia off his finger and raised her to his neck.
Beneath his bare feet, the floor became rough with mosaic.
A final corner and he knew where he was. He had reached the main hallway — big leather boat, reptilian skin, fresco-mapped ceilings and mosaic-mapped floors, all sleeping in shadow. He slowed down. Two chatting watchmen disappeared through a distant door.
Cyrus could see the entrance to the Galleria. Another fifty yards and he would be at the dining hall. Through the dining hall and he would reach the kitchen.
Food. At the suggestion, his body roared to life with complaints. He needed something to settle his stomach and refill his veins, something to take the wobble out of his legs and the panic out of his mind. He needed something to make him stop shivering and shaking. Then he could start his trek back.
Battling to keep his breathing low and his feet from slapping, he jogged close to the wall around statues and tables and tusked skulls.
He reached the dining hall and ducked out of dimness, through swinging doors, and into black nothing. He had only ever seen the space from behind a heating grate, not well enough to pass through it blind, but he didn’t bother Patricia again. Pausing inside the doors, his wide eyes strained for the faintest dusting of light. His pulse thundered, his ears rang, and the dim outline of a door appeared in the distance.
A plane passed overhead.
Cyrus felt his way through a graveyard of tables, burdened with upside-down chairs, bumping and adjusting his course until he finally reached the kitchen door and pushed it open on tired hinges.