Vas had gotten a few good hits in in the hallway, then tossed him in a floater and flew him here. To this tunnel, to this mildew-trash smell and this particular darkness.
“I remember,” he said, and he slipped past Isae so he could take the lead.
He was still sweating, so he unfastened the heavy fabric covering his armor and tossed it aside. This path was hazy in his memories, and the last thing he wanted to do was go back to that time, when everything had ached and he had felt so weak he could hardly stand. Eijeh had met him and Vas at the back door, and he had curled his fingers around the armor that covered Akos’s shoulder. For a tick it had felt comforting, like his brother was trying to steady him. And then Eijeh had dragged him to the prison. To be tortured.
Akos gritted his teeth, squeezed his knife, and kept going. When he rounded the first corner, saw the first guard in his path, he didn’t even think, he just erupted. Slammed the shorter, broader man into the wall, using his chin to drive his skull into the stone. A knife scraped Akos’s armor, and a tongue of fire issued from the palm of the guard’s hand, put out immediately by Akos’s touch.
Akos slammed the guard’s head back again, and again, until his eyes rolled back and he slumped. A chill passed over Akos, his hair standing on end. He didn’t check if the man was dead. He didn’t want to know.
He did glance at Cisi. Her mouth was twisted with disgust.
“Well,” Isae said—chirped, really. “That was effective.”
“Yep,” Teka said, and she stepped right on the guard’s leg as she kept walking down the next hallway. “Whoever we run into here is a Noavek loyalist, Kereseth. Not worth crying over.”
“Do you see tears on my face?” he said, trying for some of Cyra’s bravado and falling short when his voice cracked a little. Still, he kept walking. He couldn’t worry about Cisi’s opinion of him. Not down here.
A few more turns, and Akos wasn’t sweating anymore; he was shivering. The hallways all looked the same: uneven stone floor, dusty stone wall, low stone ceiling. Whenever they stepped down, Akos had to duck so he wouldn’t scrape his head. The smell of trash was gone, but the mildew was back in force, choking him. He remembered staring at the side of Eijeh’s head as his brother yanked him forward through these passages. Noticing that Eijeh had cut his hair short, just like Ryzek.
I can’t watch you destroy yourself for someone who doesn’t want to be saved, Cyra had said the night before. He had shown her just how deep his insanity ran, and she had refused to go along with it. It was hard to hold it against her. Except he did. Had to.
The door up ahead didn’t look right in its stone-and-wood frame. It was made of black glass, opaque, and the locking mechanism was on the side. A keypad. Cyra had given them a list of combination options—all of them, she said, related to her mother in some way. Birthday, death day, anniversary, lucky numbers. Akos still couldn’t see Ryzek as a person who cared about his mother enough to lock his doors with her birthday.
But instead of trying even one of the combinations, Teka just started unscrewing the plate that covered the keypad. Her screwdriver was as delicate as a needle, polished and clean. She moved it like it was a sixth finger. Popped the cover off the keypad and set it down, then pinched one of the wires under it, eyes shut.
“Um . . . Teka?” There were footsteps coming from behind them somewhere.
“Shut up,” she snapped, pinching a different wire. She smiled a little. “Ah,” she said, and it was clear she wasn’t talking to them. “I see. Okay then, come along—”
All the lights went out except the emergency light above, which shone down on them from the corner, so bright it left spots on Akos’s eyelids. The glass door sprang open, revealing the glass floor that Akos remembered from his very worst memory: his brother forcing him to his knees in front of Cyra Noavek. The pale emergency lights glowed in the floor in the prison hallway, dividing it into grids.
Isae sprinted through the doorway, and ran right down the middle of the hallway, looking left and right every time she reached a new cell. Akos went in after her, scanning the space, but feeling separate from it at the same time. Isae was running back now, and he knew what she was going to say before she said it.
Somehow he felt like he’d known it all along, since he watched his mother flip that button in her fingers, since he realized how easy it would be for Sifa to manipulate them into the future she wanted, no matter the cost.
“She’s not here,” Isae said. Since he’d known her, she’d always been in total control, hadn’t even broken down when she found out Ori was kidnapped. Had never faltered, not even once. And now she was almost shrieking. Frantic. “She’s not here, Ori’s not here!”
He blinked, slow, like all the air around his head had turned to syrup. All the cells were empty. Ori was gone.
CHAPTER 35: CYRA
AFTER THE DOUBLE DOORS to the amphitheater opened, I knew it was time for me to move. I looked at Akos one last time, noting the red stain on his fingertips from preparing hushflower blends the night before, and the white line along his jaw where he had been scarred, and the natural gathering between his eyebrows that gave him an expression of perpetual concern. Then I slipped between the two people standing in front of me and stepped into the pack of soldiers who were about to receive their honor from my brother.
By the time one of them noticed me walking among them, we were inside the yawning tunnel to the amphitheater floor. But I had drawn my currentblade, so I wasn’t concerned.