Asunder

28 TRAPPED

“MISTAKE. IT HAS returned.”

Janan’s voice hit me from all directions, huge and deep and overwhelming. I blinked away threatening tears and glanced at the man on the table, but he remained dead.

Despair splintered through me. I was a mistake. Asunder. And after this life I wouldn’t return. I would never be like everyone else.

“You must leave. This place is not for you.” Janan’s words ripped around the room, and red light gathered on the domed ceiling. It brightened, sucking all the crimson from the walls until they glowed hot white.

The presence faded, leaving the red to bleed back into the walls. Everything became how it had been a few minutes ago. Except my new knowledge of my…temporariness.

“Was that Janan?” Stef’s face was pale and drawn as she gazed around. She lowered her voice. “He knows we’re here?”

“He does now.” I hugged myself. “Usually he doesn’t pay attention to me unless I’m fiddling with the key. He can’t touch you—he’s incorporeal—but he can change the walls. Once he locked me in a small room.”

“How did you escape?” Cris asked.

“I threatened to keep pushing buttons on the key.” Deep breaths. In and out. I focused on anything but the idea of dying and never coming back. “I don’t know how it works, but it must make Janan uncomfortable if he didn’t want me poking at it.”

Cris nodded. “I suppose if the walls are his body, it’d be like me making your arms move around for you. A trust you’d only give your Hallow.”

Janan’s voice boomed again, violent as thunder shaking the ground. “You do not belong here!”

I jumped, my bones feeling like they might vibrate out, and tried not to stare at the body on the table.

Or the skeletons along the walls. There wasn’t really a safe place to look.

“Should we go?” Stef asked, once the rumbling died. Her voice trembled. I hated seeing Stef frightened; she was always so confident.

“No. If we leave this room, he’ll trap us somewhere. I don’t have the key. There’s no way I’d be able to get us out.”

“So we stay here?” Cris looked dubious.

“Doesn’t that trap us here instead?” Stef eyed the door like she might run for it.

“I’ve never been here.” I didn’t want to be here now. “Maybe Deborl made a mistake when he left.

Maybe going somewhere in the temple makes it more likely to be available again. All I can tell you is that I’ve been in the temple twice before, and I’ve never seen this room.”

Stef shook her head. “We’re still trapped.”

“Important things happened here. This place holds answers. We won’t find anything in the rest of the temple.”

“I just want to go.” Stef edged toward the archway. “There’s no way out from here, but the rest—”

“There are no exits.” I balled my fists. “I know it’s hard to understand, but there is no way out. I don’t have the key.”

“Sam will free us.” Cris looked hopeful.

“No, he won’t.” The temple had no temperature—not too hot or cold—but chills raced across my body, and I shivered. “He won’t save us, because he won’t be able to. It was a mob out there. I don’t even know if Sam’s okay.” The last words choked me.

Both of them wore pinched expressions, and Cris touched my elbow. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably working out a plan to take the key right now.”

I shook my head and described what I’d seen. No need to go easy on them. I didn’t see how our situation could get any worse.

“Ana!” Stef jabbed a finger toward the archway we’d come from. It was gone. “He locked us in. Now we really can’t get out.”

“We wouldn’t have gotten out anyway!” The constant pulse of the temple made my head throb. “What about that is so confusing? No matter where we are, we’re not leaving. Sam can’t rescue us. Deborl wouldn’t free us if his life depended on it. No one else knows how to use the key. We’re stuck.”

“All right!” Cris rubbed his forehead as though to press a headache into a smaller, more manageable size. “Both of you, please. We need a plan.”

“Like what? Escape?” I scowled and gestured around the room. “The only thing I see is the hole under the altar, and I don’t recommend it.”

“We’re just as bad off as if we’d left,” Stef muttered, just loud enough that it was meant to be heard.

I shook my head. “If we’d left, we would be stuck in a tiny box.”

“You don’t know that. You’re guessing on all of this.” Stef loomed over me. “You’ve been leading us nowhere the whole time, with no idea where you were going or what you wanted to accomplish.”

“At least I was doing something.” My fingernails dug into my palms, carving crescents into my skin.

“You’d have just stayed there all confused. Did you even try to escape Deborl? Or were you too busy being mad because Sam and I didn’t tell you what had been going on?”

“Don’t pretend like you know anything about me or the way I feel.” Her face was pink in the red glow, and I had pushed too hard.

I didn’t care. “I know enough.” She kept antagonizing Sam about his closeness to me, but she was the person keeping a stash of his photos and letters. I wanted to hurt her. “I know how you disguise your feelings for Sam. You fooled him, but he’s used to your flirting and never took it seriously. But I know you meant it.”

She stared at me like I’d said she had chicken feet or hands growing from her head, but that was Stef.

Pretending even now she didn’t really care.

I knew I shouldn’t, but I said it anyway, my voice low and too calm. “I told him that you love him.”

Her face went blank.

A wiser person would have stopped there, but I went on anyway. “If you were as brave as you claim, you’d have told him lifetimes ago.”

“And I suppose you have? No, that would ruin your tortured newsoul existence.” Her voice grew stronger, angrier. “You can’t let yourself be happy, can you? Well maybe this will fix it: you’re not coming back. There’s no skeleton in here with your name on it, so when you die, that’s it. Gone. I’ll still love Sam, and thanks for telling him, by the way. Now he’ll have time to figure out a response in our next lives when you’re not here. Are you happy now? You really are as tragic as you think you are, butterfly.”

She might as well have stabbed me; it hurt the same.

There was a whole list of things I shouldn’t do, including asking if she could find his skeleton among all these—I could—and telling her about his reaction when he found out how she felt. But I didn’t do any of them, because it would be cruel and petty. Not that I’d been much above cruel and petty so far, but I didn’t want her to hate me forever. And, romantic feelings aside, she was still Sam’s best friend.

“There’s no point in arguing about it, Stef.” My voice was more level than it had ever been, but surely she could hear the strain. “Because we’re trapped. We’re never leaving this room.”