He didn’t ask. He didn’t want to. But he knew all the same. The voice was gone, the chill that came with it was gone, but their absence left a place dark and cold inside him. He could feel her voice in there, and between the echoes, he could hear-
He tried not to think about it. Tried not to think at all. It was harder than it sounded with all the silence.
“Ask me.”
Her voice jarred him from his internal stupor. He stared up into her broad grin. She stared through him.
“Ask me,” she repeated.
“I don’t want to,” he said.
“I know. Ask me, anyway.”
A voice telling him what to do would have been simpler, he thought. He could just say he had no choice, had to do what it said. But it was him that stared at her, the dead girl that talked, him that sighed, him that spoke.
“What are you?”
“No.”
“What?”
“That’s the wrong question. Ask the right one,” she urged.
“What do you want?”
She looked unsettled at that. He wasn’t quite sure how he could tell that, what with her grin unchanging and eyes unblinking. But the silence was too deep, lasted too long.
“I wanted you to come visit me,” she said softly. “I wanted you to survive.”
“And that’s why you’ve been screaming in my head? All of you?” Ire crept into his voice. “You were screaming so loud I wanted to smash my head open.”
“I know. I heard that part.”
“Then why didn’t you stop?”
“We. . it’s hard to hear down here. Everything is muffled. It’s so dark. There’s nothing but dark down here and I. .” There was pain in her voice, pain older than she was. “We can’t hear each other. We can speak, but we can’t hear. But you. . I could. . we could hear you. We wanted you to be safe. We wanted to talk to you.”
“So you’ve been slowly driving me insane with whispering so we could have a conversation? That’s insane!”
“NO!”
Her voice cracked the ice, sent veins of white webbing across the face of her tomb. Her grin remained frozen, but the voice echoing from inside her mouth didn’t belong in a human being, let alone a girl.
But she was neither.
“Don’t call us that! Don’t say that!” she howled in a voice not her own. “They looked at us that way! They called us that for being what we are! Better than they are! BETTER! They betrayed us! We fought back and they called us insane and they killed us for it! We never wanted this! NEVER!”
He hadn’t ever said the words, not those words, not as she had spoken them. But they were known to him. The anger behind them was his, the hurt bleeding from them was his, the fury, the hatred, the cold. .
That voice had spoken in him. It had coursed through his mind as surely as it coursed through her mouth, with all its cold anger.
He didn’t have to ask what she was now. He knew by that voice. She was like him, like the man in the ice had been, like the voices in his head. He knew. He didn’t want to know.
It had been the wrong question.
The cracks in the ice receded suddenly, solidifying into a solid, translucent coffin once more. Her grin was unchanged.
“Sorry,” she whimpered. “He gets loud sometimes. I can’t stop him from doing. . that.”
“Neither could I. It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right. He’s angry with you. He’s worried about you. He thinks you’re going to kill yourself.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. I know why you’re here. I know what you’re after. He told me. We came here to find her, just like you did.”
“Her?”
The girl’s eyes widened a hair’s breadth. The light beaming from her stare grew, chasing away the darkness and bathing the chasm in a soft blue illumination. Lenk’s eyes widened, too, without light, without glow, without anything beyond horror dawning on his face.
The walls of the chasm were glistening.
The walls were moving.
The walls were alive.
They writhed, twisting over each other, bunching up as if shy and recoiling from him before deigning to twist about and display an under-side covered in quivering, circular suckers blowing mucus-slick kisses at him.
Tentacles. In many different sizes. Dozens of them, reaching around the wall and coiling about each other like some slick, rubbery bouquet of flowers. They reached, they groped, they searched, they sought.
Not for him. They seemed to take no notice of him at all, slithering blindly about the stone, slapping the sand, some as big as trees. Something caught his eye, a flash of pale ivory amidst the coils. Stupid as he knew it to be, he leaned forward, squinting, trying to make out what he thought to be a tiny spot of something pale, white, soft. .
Flesh?
He raised a hand out of instinct, not at all intending to actually touch it. But as his fingers drifted just a bit closer, the tentacles shifted, split apart and with a slick sucking sound, something lashed out and seized him by the wrist.
It came with such gentleness that the thought to pull back didn’t even occur to him. Pale fingers groped blindly down his wrist to find his fingers. An arm, perfectly pale, perfectly slender, blossomed from the tentacles, reaching for him with tender desperation.
It sought him, searched his flesh, taking each of his digits between two slender fingers and feeling each of his knucklebones in turn, sliding up and down between white fingertips. It was as though this was something it had never felt before, this touch of a human.
“She is reaching out,” the girl said from behind him. “Her children are calling to her. She claws against that dark place where we put her, trying to escape. But she can’t escape, not yet. She can’t see. She can only barely hear. So she reaches, and she searches for something to touch.”
He knew. Not by touch, but by the warmth behind her fingertips. The warmth he felt on his brow, in his mind, in his body. The warmth that had engulfed him, told him that he deserved happiness, that gave him his life.
He knew her touch.
He knew Ulbecetonth.
And she knew him. How, he wasn’t sure, but her hand tightened. Her nails dug into the skin of his wrist, clenched him as though she sought to pull him into whatever moist hell she reached from.
As the shadow fell over him, he realized her goal wasn’t to pull him in, but merely to hold him. All the better for the giant tentacle swaying overhead to crush him.
He leapt backward, leaving his skin and blood staining her nails. The tentacle came smashing down, shaking the walls and sending its fellows writhing angrily. More reached out, wrapped around his ankles, tried to pull him back. He beat wildly at them, seizing a sharp fragment of coral and jamming it into the soft flesh of the tentacle. It didn’t so much as quiver. Only with great pain did he pull his leg free and scramble away from the tentacle.
He stalked back toward the girl, rubbing his wrist as Ulbecetonth’s slender arm slipped back between the mass of flesh, disappearing.
“And why. . is she here?” he asked.
“Right question,” the girl said. “This is not an island. This is a prison.”
His eyes grew wide. Jaga held Ulbecetonth. And somewhere on the island, the Shen held the key to her cell. But for what? To release her? Did they even know what they had?
“She’s. . coming closer.” He turned back to the girl. “You called me down here to warn me.”
The girl grinned.
“To warn you, to talk to you, to beg you,” she said.
“What for?”
“Not to die.”
“That’s kind of out of my hands.”
“It is not. Ulbecetonth is coming. The walls between her world and ours are weakened, she’s scratched them so thin. She is coming. And she knows you are here. She hates you. She will kill you. You can survive.” Her voice grew soft, fearful of itself. “If you let him back in.”
“No.”