She felt the blood blossom beneath her nails.
He felt the sand rub beneath her buttocks.
She felt the agony inside him, the muscle of his abdomen contracting so hard it hurt to have it pressed against her.
He felt the scream inside her, the snarl broiling behind her lips as she leaned up and caught his in her teeth, the blood beneath her canines.
She felt the hardness of his stare as he opened his eyes and met hers.
He felt the ferocity of her embrace as she pulled him closer onto her, wrapped her thighs about him, pressed the soft flesh of her neck into the sloping curve of his shoulder.
Her gasp.
His breath.
Her hair.
His blood.
Everything they had.
With no more voices.
With no more people.
There was only shadow.
And the world moving beneath them.
ACT THREE
TWENTY-TWO
“Are you asleep?”
“Yes,” Lenk replied.
“Are you dreaming?”
“Mm.”
“About what?”
“Nothing,” he said through a yawn. “Nothing at all.”
“That doesn’t sound very good.”
“No, it’s nice. I can’t see any fire. I can’t hear any voices.”
“Should I let you sleep, then?”
“I think I’d prefer being awake.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
He opened his eyes at that. Kataria lay next to him, her arm coiled protectively around his neck. Her eyes were closed, her body rose and fell with quiet breaths, growling in a dream as he moved beneath her. Unstirring. Unwaking.
The starlight was gone. The dim glow of the kelp had become dimmer, leaving only a vague imagination of what light was supposed to be like. Lenk stared into the shadows of the chasm. Out of the corner of his eye, something slithered away, retreating into the darkness.
“Go back to sleep,” something whispered, somewhere down there.
He blinked. Tears stung at his eyes. The air was thick and lay across his bare chest like a blanket. Even if he could convince himself that this was simply part of a dream, the sensation of gritty sand clawing its way between the flesh of his buttocks was distinctly waking.
For a moment, he wondered if he ought not to just go back to sleep. He wondered if he should lay there, with her body pressed against him, with her scent still cloying his nostrils, and cling to it as though it were a dream.
He was still wondering that as he rose to his feet, but only until he found his trousers. After that moment, even though he wondered why exactly he felt compelled to follow the voice into the darkness, he knew that he would feel better if he went into the unknown wearing pants.
Shadows consumed everything as he descended. Sound went first, so that even the crunching of his feet on the sand was inaudible. Light was next, the purple glow eaten alive. And then he, too, felt as though he were dis appearing into the darkness as it ate everything.
Or almost everything.
Somewhere, incredibly distant and far too close, there was the noise of something sliding across the sand. In glimpses, he caught the reflections of light that wasn’t there against something slick and glistening.
Something was down here with him.
He wondered if that weren’t a good enough reason to turn around.
He didn’t. He had to keep going. To protect Kataria, to find a way out of the chasm. He had a whole slew of reasons he didn’t believe. Perhaps it was just primitive, mothlike stupidity that drew him toward the light.
That light. That tiny little blue pinprick at the very end of his vision that grew steadily brighter as he approached it. He felt compelled to follow it.
After all, it was talking to him.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” it said from somewhere far away.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s harder to hear you. You were loud before, but now. . sorry. Could you hear me? Up there?”
It was no more than a whisper, faint like a fish’s breath. And because it was so faint, he knew it. He had heard it before. The light grew bigger, not brighter, as he drew closer.
“Yeah,” he said. “Clearly. You tried to warn me.”
“You seemed afraid. I thought I should try to warn you. Did she kill you? Are you dead right now?”
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
“That doesn’t tell me anything. We always talk, even when we’re dead. And when we’re dead, we do nothing but talk.”
“Oh,” he replied. “Then, no. I’m alive.”
“That’s good.”
A great fragment of rock was all that stood between him and the light, something immense and jagged that had been of something even more immense and less jagged. The glow spilled out around it, a blue light that bloomed expectantly.
He had occasionally had cause to doubt the interest of the Gods in the affairs of men before. Here was proof, this single opportunity that Khetashe gave him to turn around from the disembodied voice in the darkness and return to a warm, naked body in the sand.
He had only himself to blame, he knew, as he rounded the stone and beheld the girl.
A girl.
A very young girl.
Despite the gray of her hair and the sword in her hand, she couldn’t have been more than fifteen years. At least not past the age where people stop being a mess of angles and acne and crooked grins that they think look good and start being humans. She had such a grin, a big, bright one full of teeth situated directly between big, blue eyes and a big, black line opening up her throat.
It was the grin that unnerved him. More than the spear jutting through her chest and pinning her to the black shape behind her, more than the sheet of ice that encased her like a luminescent coffin, the fact that she was still smiling as though she might ask him to go pick flowers at any moment made him want to look away.
He still wasn’t sure why he didn’t.
“Don’t stare,” she chided. “It’s rude.”
“Sorry,” he said.
Her smile didn’t diminish. Her eyes didn’t waver, the blue glow from them remained steady. She didn’t even look at him. Yet there was something, a crackle in the ice, a strain at the edge of her grin, that made him turn away.
“Do you have a name?” he asked.
“No.”
“Oh. Well, I’m-”
“I know.”
He was aware that he was staring again. As it happened, not staring at a talking dead girl was somewhat more difficult than he anticipated. He cleared his throat, forcing his eyes away again.
“Sorry, I just thought you’d be older.”
“I am very old,” she replied.
“Less dead, then.”
Though, there was little reason why he should expect her to be that. The last one he met was even more dead than this one.
The image flashed into his mind. A man encased in ice in a cold, dark place, corpses entombed with him, arrows jutting from his body, eyes wide, mouth open and screaming. He thought of it for only a moment, the thought too unnerving for anything more.
“I remember him,” the girl said before he could.
He cringed. Not that it was all that surprising that she could see what was happening in his head, but having people in his mind was something he had vowed to never get used to. She noticed this. . or he assumed she did. It was hard to tell with her face frozen in that grin.
“He talks to me,” she said.
“The man in the ice?”
“Him, too. We all talk to each other, through him. We could hear you through him, but faintly. You keep yelling at him. He doesn’t like that.”