The Irreversible Reckoning

  ***

  The night before they placed me into the General Population, Adam and I sat on his bed, him with his back against the pillows and me lying in the crook of his arm. His hand was holding mine, and I was linking our fingers together and unlinking them, touching our palms together when our fingers were unlinked, and squeezing his hand when our fingers were locked together. All the while, I stared ahead, thinking of Penny, of Violet, of James, of Quinn, Alice, Nick, Rachel, Joe, Tony, Tom, Savannah, Ellie, Oliver… I thought of the Earthean survivors, and I thought of Adam’s people, those who had followed him from his destroyed city to his wife’s village, thinking they would be safe, and who had either been killed or taken captive. I had grown to care for every person in our village over my time in the Council. Their problems had been my problems, and I wanted to put into place the solutions that would help them most. One family’s struggle was all of our struggles, and we never forgot that. Together, Adam, Janna, Don, and I, with the help of the Council, had begun to make things right for those families that had survived so much. Before the Old Spirits invaded, we had been receiving near-perfect approval ratings (though I hate using that phrase, because it is so closely tied with Earthean politics) from each district within the village, and people were finally happier but most importantly, they were feeling safer than ever.

  I suppose if we had focused on our “foreign policy” (another phrase that is annoyingly tied to Earthean politics, and turns my stomach because of my mother, because of what she did in the interest of promoting a stronger “foreign policy”) and hunted down the Old Spirits instead of trying to improve our “domestic policies” (again, gross) for the sake of our people at home, we might not have been invaded. Maybe “foreign policy” is everything. Maybe it is what makes “domestic policy” possible. Maybe my mother really was acting in her country’s best interest.

  Or maybe all of this is bullshit, and it does not matter at all.

  “Tell me something about Pan…” I stopped, “Tell me something about Purissimus.”

  “I love your Earthean American accent when you say it.” He said, “It is so ridiculous but also strangely delightful.”

  “Shut up.” I said with a slight laugh, “I am sorry that we can’t all speak with the elegance and eloquence of the Purissimissian monarchy.”

  “Oh, it is not just the ‘Purissimissian’ monarchy, my dear. It is all ‘Purissimissians.’”

  “You are mocking me right now.”

  “Yes, I am.” He replied, “But know that it is only in jest.”

  “I know that it is only in jest.”

  “Good. What do you want to know?”

  “Something. Anything. What else is out there?”

  He exhaled a deep breath, looking thoughtful.

  “Everything, I suppose. Cities both large and small. Villages. Open space. Oceans. Deserts. Caves. Mountains. Moors.”

  “There are other cities besides Lumiere?”

  “Of course there are other cities besides Lumiere!” He replied with a hearty chuckle, “By the One God, we have cities that are as technologically advanced as some of the cities on your former Orb, we have cities that choose to get along more naturally, we have cities by the sea, cities built into the sky, cities underwater, cities built into the mountain walls, cities all around, Brynna, my love.”

  “Okay. Do you have movies? I love movies.”

  “Though we ‘Purissimissians’ have tried to mimic your Hollywood, it has never quite come to fruition. Therefore, we have every Earthean film imaginable.”

  “Do you have pornos?” I asked, just to be randy, and just to see if I could shock him, which I did. I giggled ridiculously, and he laughed before kissing the top of my head.

  “I was unaware that it was those movies you loved, but yes, I do believe there are some stores in the cities that specialize in them.”

  “I don’t actually like them, I was just curious.” I told him, “If ever we get out of here, I want to go to a city with movies. I miss them terribly.”

  “As do I. Your kind excelled in creativity. The art that came off of your Orb was one of the things over which Janna and I initially bonded. She loves Earthean culture. I find it very interesting, as well. Though I rarely remember their names, I do have several favorite pictures that I have seen from Earth.”

  “Let me guess, they are older, more classical films. Like Casablanca or Gone with the Wind.”

  “By the One God, no.” He replied with a grimace, “Though Janna’s eyes positively lit up when we watched those. I thoroughly enjoyed the film about the man trying to save his wife and her colleagues from Russian thugs at Christmas time.”

  “Die Hard!” I exclaimed, “That is a classic!”

  “That is the one.” He replied with a grin, “I am surprised you know it.”

  “Of course I know it! I saw all of those films.”

  “I have never seen the others, but I do find the first one quite entertaining.”

  “That is so funny. Well, as soon as we get off of this ship, you had better take me to place with movies. I want to see what else you like to watch, because your first choice is so amazingly perfect, albeit unexpected.”

  “It shall be done. I cannot wait to see which movies you find entertaining, and which you do not like.”

  “You would be surprised what I like and do not like. But I will not spoil the mystery now. So I will ask another question. What else is out there? I have seen most of Shadow Forest…”

  “You have seen a tiny fraction of Shadow Forest.” He corrected me.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  “But we were lost in it for three days, and the house was technically a part of Shadow Forest, wasn’t it?”

  Mentioning the house had brought memories of the time we had spent within it barging through to the forefront of my mind. I remembered James and me, sitting on the porch. “You are a handsome devil,” I had said, so randomly, and he had smiled, leaned over, and kissed me. I remembered the nights we had spent staying up well past midnight, talking and laughing while I sat perched on his middle. I remembered the nights we had laid in bed, him drawing or reading, me always reading, or the nights we had laid clutched together in the dark room lit only by the firelight, making love well into the night, almost every night…

  I remembered Penny, how she had made so many friends there. How she had spent her days with me in the kitchen, but how she had flitted about between people, helping them with their tasks and talking their ears off, as they say. Everyone had adored her, in both places we had lived. I remembered how she and James would swim in the lake while I sat on the shore, watching them. I remembered how Violet and Nick had constantly been seen around the house together, how they had spent almost every waking moment together as young couples tend to do. When she thought I was asleep or that James and I were distracted by other things, she had let Nick sneak into her room, and James had told me just to let her be, because though she was young, she was responsible, and they loved each other.

  “And you don’t want to be the mean old witch lady who stands in the way of young love, do you?” He had asked, and I had frowned at him.

  “That is so rude.” I had said.

  “Yes. It would be rude of you to be the mean old witch lady who stands in the way of young love.” He had replied without missing a beat, and I had laughed. He always made me laugh. That quality about him sat in the top three on my list of reasons why I loved him so much.

  He had always trusted Violet more than I did, and that was fine; he had been right. She had stumbled a few times, and a part of me inevitably blamed myself for that. We had been fighting constantly over James being exiled from our home, and I know that she had complained to Caspar about it, and he had listened and agreed with her, while Nick had disagreed. I knew that from reading her mind and Nick’s, and because in Caspar’s mind, I had seen that he knew too many details of the struggle between James and me that only Violet could have
told him. Violet was tough to handle on my own, because James had always had a way with her that kept her calm and rational even as he was constructively criticizing her choices or giving her advice she did not necessarily want to hear.

  James, despite his other faults, was a truly phenomenal father; in that area, he needed no guidance, because he was a natural. That was funny to me, because he had not wanted children with his wife, nor had we wanted to have children of our own. But when he had had Penny and Violet thrust upon him because of the strange circumstances in which we had found ourselves following the end of our lives on Earth, and because of his relationship with me, he excelled in his paternal responsibilities so much so that sometimes he was better at being a makeshift father than I was at being a makeshift mother.

  Once, he had decided on the first semi-warm day of the summer that it would be Mother’s Day, because I had told him a few days earlier that I felt less than sufficient in my maternal capabilities. It had been shortly after he had moved back home, and Violet and I had still been fighting over all that had transpired with Caspar, and Penny was being a hooligan, getting into fights with other kids, or getting into trouble with various people around town; she, Idan, Maribel, Tajel, and a few other kids, Eartheans and Pangaeans, became known village-wide as the Under Ten Mafia, because they were constantly getting into trouble. James and I had just returned from being reamed out by a local farmer after Penny and her friends had stolen some of his crops, and Penny was in her room wailing because I had told her that she was no longer allowed to play outside until she learned to behave herself, and I had spent ten minutes shouting at her, and I never shouted at her… As she had wailed in her room, James had talked me down as I cried, too, telling me that it was all going to pass, they were both in a phase, and we would get through it together. I had known then how much I needed him, and it was then that I realized I did not just need him for my sake, I needed him for theirs, too. I could have done it on my own; women and men raised children on their own every day, but it was hard work. If I could have him around, I would have him around, because he helped me so much.

  So he had decided that it was going to be Mother’s Day for me, and he had somehow made Violet forget her anger at me, because she had helped with his plan, and Quinn, Alice, and Nick had helped, because, as they told me later, I was their de facto Mom, too. I had awoken that morning, because of the commotion I had heard in the kitchen. I heard pots banging, voices shushing the noise, hysterical laughter, voices shushing the giggling, something being dropped, really hysterical laughter (which was mainly James), and as I got closer, I could hear them whispering to each other.

  “What are you hooligans doing?” I had asked, as I pushed open the swinging door to the kitchen. “My stars…”

  The kitchen had been an utter disaster. For all the world, it looked like the cabinets, refrigerator, and sink had spontaneously thrown up. There was flour everywhere, chocolate chips all over the floor, open containers of various breakfast meats, blocks of cheese cut into pieces, pots and pans strewn wildly about. As my eyes took in the damage, they all stared at me, frozen, their eyes wide, the model looks of deer in headlights.

  “Happy de facto Mother’s Day!” Nick had shouted happily to break the silence, and they had all dissolved into hysterical laughter, and I had laughed, too, because it was so ridiculous, but so adorable, and I had realized in that moment how very much I loved them all, individually and as this strange group, this de facto family.

  All of those reminiscences stemmed from a single mention of our house, and from that starting point, I had traveled through the two years of our lives together. My hands were wiping the tears from my eyes, and I was apologizing to Adam at the same time I was turning onto my side so I could bury my face in his chest and cry there quietly.

  “You will need to start wearing a quick-dry bathing suit shirt, as much as I cry on you.” I told him, and despite his concern for me, he laughed.

  “You may cry on me whenever you feel the need, though obviously, I wish you had no reason to cry this way.”

  “I need to stop. I need to start toughening myself up if I am going to be amongst the world’s biggest and baddest criminals tomorrow.”

  “That is tomorrow. Tonight, you may do whatever you need to do to feel well again.”

  “I don’t think I am going to feel well again for a very long time, Adam, but I will be able to fake it in order to survive out there.”

  “I have no doubt. You have been through so much, Brynna Olivier, and you have survived. I have no doubt that you will survive this, as well.”

  “I wish that you were going to be there with me.”

  “As do I. This room is fine while you are in it with me, but once you are gone, these walls will begin to close in, and I will feel smothered until you return to me. Also, if I were out there with you, I would be able to protect you, though I know you do not need my protection.”

  “I need you, though.”

  He did not reply for a moment, and I knew it was because he had hoped to hear those words from me for a very long time.

  “Yes.” He said, after he had regained himself, “I need you, as well.”

  We were quiet, and I was thinking how affection for me seemed to be built on a foundation of need: I needed the person first, and felt great affection (and even love) for them later. I wondered if that was unusual, but I had no one to ask except for him, and I did not feel like broaching such a deep topic, nor did I think he felt like pondering such a deep topic. We were both exhausted, and we were trying to spend our last few hours together in some semblance of peace. I did not want to sleep, because I did not want to lose any time with him to unconsciousness. I wanted to lie in his arms and listen to him speaking, because I did not know how long it would be until I could see him again. Truth be told, there was no guarantee that I would see him again. There was a chance that I could be killed by one of the other inmates, and there was a chance that he could anger Tyre, and Tyre would kill him. My hands tightened their grip on him, and I pushed myself up further so that I was lying with my head nestled beneath his. His arms tightened around me, and I could tell that he knew what I was thinking even though I was focusing distinctly on keeping him out of my mind. He knew because he was beginning to know me. He was beginning to know how my mind worked without seeing into it when I dropped my guard.

  “You are going to survive out there, my love.” He told me, “And I will survive in here. I promise you, we will see our way through this.”

  “How do you know?” I asked, “When I look forward, I see nothing.”

  “I know, because I know of our strength. I know of our shrewdness. I know of our ability to survive. In your short twenty-four years, you have fought tooth and nail to survive. In my thousands of years, even before my reign as King, I did the same. We are dangerous because we know of our ability to survive against all odds, Brynna. That makes us more dangerous than any of them. The men and women you encounter here will be some of the worst you have ever met. They will be some of the most dangerous. But they are inherently afraid, because they do not know if they can survive, but you do know that you can. I know that you can. And I know that I can survive, as well.”

  I nodded and closed my eyes just for a second. I wanted to remember, down to the finest detail, how it felt to lie there with him. I wanted to remember the warmth of his body, the roughness of his skin beneath my skin. I wanted to remember the slow, rhythmic beating of his heart, and his slow, calm breaths. I wanted to remember how the feeling of lying there with him enveloped me in this calmness that I cannot adequately describe. It was like being cloaked in a tight blanket that was my only defense against some lethal chill, and yet it did not just warm me against the onslaught of cold, it left me feeling only dully the fear I felt of that incoming onslaught. It brought a heaviness to my eyes and a total relaxation of my body, because I knew that even though he was imprisoned, and even though they had the upper hand, he would not allow harm to come to
me. He was the rightful King, and he had remained on his throne for so long because his ability to read hearts left people falling to his will and fearing him tremendously; he possessed unbelievable, almost terrible strength; and his shrewdness and intellect were unmatched. And I had his love, so he would not allow harm to come to me, and he had my love, so I would protect him, too. I could never say those three words, though I could say the Pangaean phrase that was not even an equivalent; “You have my love” was so far above “I love you” that they were not even considered in the same class of sentiment. One was considered almost casual, and one was considered almost divine, as sentiments go.

  “You have my love.” He whispered to me as I began to doze, “You have it in whatever way you will accept.”

  I opened my eyes, tilted my head up, and kissed his lips, holding mine to his for a very long time before kissing him again.

  “And you have mine.”

  Quinn

  Somehow, sleep took hold of both Don and me. It was so heavy and deep that as I was drifting off into it, I feared briefly that they had drugged our food. Just as the fear ascended abruptly, it dropped just as fast, because I was asleep.

  They drugged us, my sleeping mind told me lazily, and I shrugged it off, because what did it matter?

  Either that, or it’s because I haven’t slept for two days, I reasoned.

  My mind seemed to agree with that, and after I turned over onto my side and reached quickly for the blanket so I could cover myself up, I dropped off completely.

  “Quinn?” Her voice was saying softly. “Quinn?!”

  I wasn’t dreaming of her. I didn’t see her in my dream, but it was definitely her voice. I wondered briefly if I was taking a page out of Brynna’s book and picking up some telepathic message she was trying to send me, but then, I felt two hands shaking me, gently at first, but then so hard that as I awoke, I feared briefly that I was going to get whiplash.

  “What?!” I exclaimed, but then, she was kissing me, and I was laughing, because she really was there. Don was waking up, whining about how much noise we were making, until he realized that Alice had come for us, and the cell door was open.

  “Am I dreaming right now?” He asked, and he jumped onto his feet. Alice and I were still laughing and kissing, lying on the cot, her on top of me, her hair flipped over, hanging down in my face. My hands were pushing it away as I rose to kiss her, and she was coming down to kiss me, too.

  “Are you okay?” She asked me, “You look so tired.”

  “You look so not tired. What have you been doing while they’ve been keeping you prisoner? Catching up on your beauty sleep?”

  “I’ve been bathing in the blood of our enemies! It keeps my skin looking young and fresh.”

  “You know, if you were being serious right now, that might have been the most terrifying and erotic thing you have ever said to me. Like, I am simultaneously repulsed and turned on.”

  “Oh, okay.” She said, and she kissed me again, “Then I was being serious.”

  “Stop.” I groaned, because for some reason, it really was turning me on. “You know who you remind me of right now? You remember when we read The Things They Carried? You remind me of Mary Anne!”

  If you have not read Tim O’Brien’s most well-known book (and God, I sound like freaking Brynna when I say that—her ways of speaking are contagious), then you don’t get this reference, but suffice it to say, Mary Anne went into her visitation at a base camp in Vietnam as a sheltered suburbanite and never came out of it. But she wasn’t killed; that would be boring, and if I had said that Alice reminded me of her when the character had died, that would have been insulting. No, spoiler alert, Mary Anne joined up with the Green Berets and became a badass motherfucker, to put it lightly, albeit a totally crazy one. And, you know, it was debatable whether she truly existed. But my badass Mary Anne did exist, and believe me, her badassery was a turn-on.

  “I’m not wearing any human tongues around my neck,” She said, “But if it will further this weird sexual fantasy of yours, I’ll go collect some right now, because we’re getting out of here!”

  “What?”

  “Come on!” She told me, and she took my hand and pulled me out of the cell into the darkened corridor that led to the stairs. Don followed behind us, and when I looked back, I saw the light reflecting brighter in his huge eyes the closer we got to the slight glow outlining the door.

  “Allie, shouldn’t we…” I started to say, but she threw open the door without a care for who might be standing on the other side of it, and what those people on the other side of it might have been packing. When I ascended the stairs quickly to follow her, I saw why she was not worried: there were sixteen bodies that I could see, but my heightened sense of smell told me that there were more. Maybe they were buried under their fallen comrades, or maybe she had thrown them into some corners of the hallway that were not illuminated by the torchlight. Blood made the floor slick, and Don and I slipped and slid, using the walls to keep ourselves on our feet, while Alice walked through the river of blood gracefully, without the slightest stumble.

  “Babe…” I started, but I didn’t know exactly what it was that I could say. My mind traveled back to when I had found her ripping into that Old Spirit man, back before we knew that’s what they were called, when we just called them “the natives.” I remembered how ignorant I had been before, how I had not even taken a life yet, and I realized in that moment, I never could have foreseen the road that we eventually went down. I never could have foreseen us ending up in that place, wherever we were. There was so much that neither Alice nor I nor Don nor anyone except for maybe Brynna could have predicted, but when I recalled that fight, I recalled my own unwillingness to change, to adapt to the new rules that came with our new lives. It was adapt or die, kill or be killed. I hadn’t been ready to accept that, and I had killed people since then. I had become drunk on the high that follows a kill, I had talked myself through the taking of a living being’s life by saying that it was in self-defense (and it always was), but I still didn’t know if I could have done what Alice did. There were bodies piled on top of bodies, and in the torch-light, I saw for the first time the blood that was covering her clothes, how it was mixed into her blonde hair, darkening it to red, but as I watched her glide so easily through those dead men, and through their river of blood, I didn’t feel angry, as I had that day after Brynna, James, and I had found her ripping that Old Spirit man apart. I didn’t feel emasculated. I was in awe of her. In complete and utter awe.

  “How did you do it?” I asked as we took a step up out of that blood river onto the next set of steps.

  “The same way we’ve always done it, Quinn. I knew that I had to find you, because I knew that we were both in danger, so I switched over.”

  Now, she eased the door at the top of the stairs open and peeked around. Then, she slunk out, treading carefully. Don and I followed suit, because now we were all switching over, our hearing and sight suddenly enhancing as new threats became known first to our instincts and then to our eyes and ears. Alice pressed her back to the wall just at the corner and closed her eyes. She inhaled deeply, and I watched her, totally entranced.

  “You are so Mary-Anne right now!”

  She beamed brightly and laughed soundlessly, but then she grasped my hand and shushed me.

  “I’m in the zone, baby. There are six of them.”

  Before I could agree, a voice up the hall replied:

  “Six of us? How did you know that?” This man, his voice thick with a Pangaean accent, asked.

  Don, coward that he was, immediately tried to run for the door that lead back to where we had come from. I think he would have locked himself back in our cell if it would have kept them from hurting him for trying to escape. But Alice and I were together again, and something told me that her insistence to find us hadn’t just been motivated by her need to make sure I was still alive. I remembered Caspar telling me that she was eligible for a high marriage
because she was still a virgin, and when I looked at Alice, I could sense fear in her heart, and it was not just the fear that we would not escape from there, or that they would separate us again, it was something darker, something she was pushing down deep. Though I could feel it in her heart, there was not a hint of it showing in her eyes. She looked at me for a second, and then she walked out from behind the wall.

  “Alright, Alice.” The same Pangaean guard said, “You’ve had your fun. Let’s go back to your room now.”

  “Why?” She asked, and I could hear only the slightest tremor in her voice. But it was not fear. It was rage.

  “Because you have a big day tomorrow.”

  So that’s what it was. Caspar had not been bluffing about her marriage. He hadn’t told me that it was happening soon, let alone that it was happening the following day. No wonder she had chosen that night to try to escape. If I knew Alice, I knew that she would rather die trying to break out of there with me than live and be forced to marry some Old Spirit man she didn’t know and who would more than likely be a sick, cherry-picking (as my Dad would say) old man.

  One of them was walking towards her, but the man who had spoken first was stopping him by saying, “No, no! Do not strike her. That is her new husband’s job. Fetch him now.”

  “Who is your new husband, babe?” I asked, and I came around the wall.

  “Oh, you know…” She said, “Some fifty-five-year old ‘nobleman,’ formerly of Earth, with a pencil dick that I’m surprised he can get off the ground, if you know what I mean, and you should.”

  “Oh, Mr. Wesley, you are out, too.” The Pangaean man told me, “You all can kill him. He is of no use to us.”

  “And your boys downstairs were of no use to you. Why don’t you go see what she did to them?” I asked, and my eyes turned red first before slipping over to white, “Then you’ll know what you’re going to look like when your boys come looking for you.”

  There really wasn’t a more badass note that I could think of to start the fight, so we attacked.

  Alice rushed forward, jumped onto one of the men, and clawed him on both sides of his face twice with both hands. Then, she threw her head down so she could bite into his neck with enough force to reach the bone. I killed the first guy I reached just by ripping out his jugular with one hand, and his carotid artery in my palm was still pulsing, spraying me with blood. Two other men rounded on me, reaching for their guns, but I managed to grab them both by their heads, spin them around, and slam them into the wall side by side, so that they were facing each other and so one man could watch the other man’s head flatten as I bludgeoned him against the concrete wall. When they were both dead, I spun around to see that the man who had spoken was pulling Alice backwards, one hand around her neck, constricting her breathing, and the other wrapped in her blood-soaked hair. With the air she managed to draw in, she was gasping, and even though we were nowhere near the outside, a strong wind began to blow, because she was afraid, and her power was going to wreak havoc in order to save her. A whirlwind was beginning to spin into a funnel-shaped cloud, and it was blocking my way to her. But even through that small tornado, through the blood and dust and dirt and sparks from the torches that were whirling within it, I could see her lips beginning to turn blue, her eyes slipping back into their normal brown, and my body reacted. Lunging forward, I dove into the whirling tornado and was thrown with a surprising amount of force around in a loop. But luckily, my power joined with hers, and I was able to control that strong, whirling wind so that it pushed me outwards into the man, knocking both him and Alice to the ground, with her crushed beneath his sizeable weight, unfortunately, but still, he was no longer strangling her. I grabbed him by his ponytail, pulled him off of her, and kicked him in the ribs. I gasped and fell to the ground; kicking the concrete wall would have hurt less than kicking him. Alice was up onto her feet, and when he tried to rise onto his (because my kick, despite it being hard, had done nothing to hurt him let alone hinder him), she spun around, kicked backwards, and nailed him perfectly in the face so that he stumbled backwards and fell onto his ass. She was facing him now, and when she kicked high into the air, her foot made hard contact with his face, right under his chin, making his head jerk backwards to hit his shoulders, and when her high kick came down, she connected with the back of his head, throwing him forward so that he slammed into the concrete floor. With that foot, she pressed into the back of his neck until a crack sounded, and I looked at her, my eyes and mouth opened wide, because she had just killed a six foot seven Pangaean Herculian pretty much single-handedly.

  Don slunk out from behind the wall and stood beside us as we caught our breath. Her hand reached over and took mine. My fingers tightened around her small, slender hand, but we continued to look forward at the men we had just killed.

  “Well…” Don started to say.

  But at the same moment, Alice and I turned and threw ourselves together abruptly, and began to kiss so passionately and with so little thought as to where we were, what was happening, and who we were with that Don tried three times to say whatever it was that he had wanted to say and stopped three times, dejected, maybe because we obviously weren’t listening, or maybe because he didn’t have some blonde woman there he could hold against the wall and kiss (low blow, sorry not sorry) while we were kissing.

  “Come on.” I told her, and paying him no mind, we stormed up the steps and reached the first populated floor of the bunker. It was a large open room, freezing cold, with doors spaced out along the walls from one end of the massive space to the other on both sides. I had no idea where those rooms went, and I didn’t care, because the door at the far end of the room was the exit, no doubt. But those many doors showed that the bunker was vast, that there was so much more to it than just the deeper levels containing the cells from which we had just escaped and this huge, cold, open space in which we were currently standing.

  “It’s too easy.” Don said, “They must know that we’re trying to escape, and they’re waiting for us on the other side of the door. Or maybe they’re waiting in these other rooms, or these corridors, whatever is behind those doors. They have guns.”

  “So, what should we do?” Alice sniped at him, “Should we just go back to our cells and call it a night? Let me be given as a prize to some noble Old Spirit supporter who is going to…” She stopped, because she couldn’t say it. She couldn’t even think it. For the first time since she had rescued me, I saw her battle-hardened exterior falter. It was for just one second that her eyes glassed over with tears, which she quickly swiped away, and her body tensed, not in preparation for another fight, but because of the petrifying fear she rightfully felt at the thought of being handed over to another man.

  “And by the way, Donald, you’re welcome.” She snapped, and the moment of weakness, for lack of a better phrase, dissolved, and she was just as strong as she ever had been. “You’re riding our coattails to freedom, so you’re welcome.”

  “I’ll thank you once we’re out of here.”

  “You should thank us right now!” She snapped, “You’d still be locked down in that cell, counting down the hours until your execution, which, by the way, was scheduled for midday tomorrow. Public flaying and then left to the elements. They have these black crows that follow them. Symbolic, right? Wrong! Crows aren’t evil creatures, they just go where the food is, and they only eat the dead, so of course they follow the Old Spirits. The ‘elements’ that you’ll be left to are the crows. Did you know that every person who has ever been flayed alive and ‘left to the elements’ is eaten by crows within the first day? They say the birds go for the eyes first, and the person only stops screaming once the birds peck their tongues out.”

  Don was shrunk back, his comically huge, comically blue eyes widened to their farthest reaches. I wanted to laugh, but the thought of what she was describing was so horrible that I couldn’t. I was picturing it, being tied with my hands over my head to a post, whipped until all of my skin was gone,
and then left to be pecked to death by crows. It was so brutal that it was worthy of a place in Ancient Greek literature; in fact, I remembered something about someone being pecked to death by crows in Tantalus for all eternity. I couldn’t remember my Multicultural Literature class that I had taken in high school, though, so I couldn’t remember exactly who it was or why he was there. Whoever he was, I doubt he deserved that.

  “They were going to put you out easily, they said.” Alice told me, and her voice lost all of its edge, all of its harshness. Her eyes were their normal blue when they met mine, and once again, they were full of tears. “They were going to shoot you. ‘Like they did to your dear friend, James,’ Paul said, ‘Right in the back of the head.’ You know he’s gone, don’t you? James is gone, Quinn.”

  “I know. I know, baby.” I told her softly, and I squeezed her hand, “We’ll talk about him when we leave here. We’ll grieve for him as much as we need to grieve, and I know it will be a lot. But first we have to get out of here. Right?”

  She nodded, and together with Don, we crossed that open space to reach the door. No one ran out to stop us there, and the door led to a spiral staircase that rose up so high, I could not see where it ended. If I squinted really hard up into the dark, I could just see a very faint outline of light, and it was not the light of torches, it was the light of day. There would definitely be guards right out front, but I was not worried about them overpowering us. I hoped that they would be there, because they would have guns and knives and other weapons. They would have enough for us to take so that we could make our way into the woods. I didn’t want to think for too long about where we were going to go, or how long we could possibly last in the depths of Shadow Forest, where there were Shadows and trebestia and Old Spirits around every turn, among other things.

  Once again, we were faced with that awful uncertainty that could only be felt to its full, terrifying extent there on Pangaea, on that endless sprawl of land the size of four Earths combined, with its unknown creatures, its unknown natural threats, and its war that raged in every corner, far and wide.

  “I have a plan, Quinn.” She told me softly, and with her face angled upwards towards that faint glimmer of light, she took my hand, placed her foot on the step, and led Don and me on our ascent into the darkness, towards the promise of light.