Beautiful Darkness

Common Thread

I had barely slept. Link's arm was swollen and purple. None of us were in any shape to trek through the muddy forest, but we didn't have a choice.

"You guys okay? We should go."

Link touched his arm and winced. "I've felt better. Like, I don't know, every other day a my life."

The gash on Liv's face was already beginning to scab over. "I've felt worse, but that's a long story, which involves Wembley Stadium, a bad trip on the tube, and far too many doner kebabs."

I picked up my backpack, caked with mud. "Where's Lucille?"

Link looked around. "Who knows? That cat's always disappearin'. Now I know why your aunts kept her on a leash."

I whistled into the trees, but there was no sign of her. "Lucille! She was here when we got up."

"Don't worry, man. She'll find us. Cats have that sixth sense, you know?"

"She was probably tired of following us around, since we never get anywhere," Ridley said. "That cat's a whole lot smarter than we are."

I lost track of their conversation after that. I was too busy listening to the one in my head. I couldn't stop thinking about Lena and what she'd done for me. Why had it taken me so long to see what was right in front of me?

I knew Lena had been punishing herself all this time. The self-imposed isolation, the morbid pictures of headstones taped to her walls, the Dark symbols in her notebook and all over her body, wearing her dead uncle's clothes, even hanging out with Ridley and John -- it was never about me. It was about Macon.

But I never realized I was an accomplice. Lena had a constant reminder of the crime she was trying herself for, over and over again. A constant reminder of what she lost.

Me.

She had to look at me every day and hold my hand and kiss me. No wonder she was so hot and cold, kissing me one minute and running away from me the next. I thought about the song lyrics, written over and over again on her walls.

Running to stand still.

She couldn't get away, and I wouldn't let her. In my last dream, I told her I knew about the trade. I wondered if she had the dream, too -- if she knew I shared her secret burden. That she didn't have to carry it alone anymore.

I'm so sorry, L.

I listened for her voice in the corners of my mind, the faintest possibility she was listening. I didn't hear a sound, but I saw something, fleeting images in my peripheral vision. Snapshots rushing past me like cars in the fast lane on the interstate ...

I was running, jumping, moving so fast I couldn't focus. Not until my vision adjusted as it had twice before, and I could make out the shapes of trees, leaves, and branches rushing by. At first, all I could hear were the leaves crunching beneath me, the sound of the air as I moved through it. Then I heard voices.

"We have to go back." It was Lena. I followed the sound into the trees.

"We can't. You know that."

Sunlight broke easily through the leaves. All I could see were boots -- Lena's thrashed ones and John's heavy black ones. They were standing a few feet away.

Then I saw their faces. Lena's expression was stubborn. I knew that look. "Sarafine found them. They could be dead!"

John walked closer and winced, the same way he had when I saw them in the bedroom. It was an involuntary reflex, a reaction to some kind of pain. He looked down into her golden eyes. "Don't you mean Ethan?"

She avoided his gaze. "I mean all of them. Aren't you at least a little worried about Ridley? She disappeared. You don't think those two things could be connected?"

"What two things?"

Lena's shoulders tensed. "My cousin disappearing and Sarafine showing up out of nowhere?"

He reached out and took her hand, lacing his fingers between hers the way I used to. "She's always been somewhere, Lena. Your mother is probably the most powerful Dark Caster in the world. Why would she want to hurt Ridley, one of her own?"

"I don't know." Lena was shaking her head, her resolve weakening. "It's just ..."

"What?"

"Even though we're not together, I don't want to see him get hurt. He tried to protect me."

"From what?"

From myself.

I heard the words, even though she didn't speak them. "From a lot of things. It was different then."

"You were pretending to be someone you weren't, trying to make everyone happy. Did you ever think he wasn't protecting you but holding you back?" I could feel my heart beating faster, my muscles tensing.

I was holding him back.

"You know, I had a Mortal girlfriend once."

Lena looked shocked. "You did?"

John nodded. "Yeah. She was sweet, and I loved her."

"What happened?" Lena was hanging on every word.

"It was too hard. She didn't understand what my life was like. That I don't always get to do whatever I want ..." He sounded like he was telling the truth.

"Why couldn't you do what you wanted?"

"My childhood was what you would call strict. Straitjacket strict. Even the rules had rules."

Lena looked confused. "You mean about dating Mortals?"

John winced again, cringing this time. "No, it wasn't like that. The way I was raised was because I was different. The man who raised me was the only father I've ever known, and he didn't want me to hurt anyone."

"I don't want to hurt anyone either."

"You're different. I mean, we are."

John grabbed Lena's hand and pulled her next to him. "Don't worry. We'll find your cousin. She probably ran off with that drummer from Suffer." He was right about the drummer, just not the one he was betting on. Suffer? Lena was hanging out with John's kind, in places called Exile and Suffer. She thought that's what she deserved.

Lena didn't say anything else, but she didn't let go of his hand. I tried to force myself to follow them, but I couldn't. I didn't have control. That much was obvious from this bizarre vantage point, so close to the ground. I was always looking up at them. It didn't make any sense. But it didn't matter, because now I was running again, through a dark tunnel. Or was it a cave? I could smell the sea as the black walls streaked by.

I rubbed my eyes, surprised to be walking behind Liv instead of lying on the ground. It was crazy to think I could be watching Lena in one place and following Liv through the Tunnels at the same time. How was it possible?

The strange visions, with the off-kilter perspective and the flashing images -- what was happening? Why was I able to see Lena and John? I had to figure it out.

I looked down at my hands. I wasn't holding anything except the Arclight. I tried to think back to the first time I saw Lena this way. It was in my bathroom, and I didn't have the Arclight then. The only thing I'd been touching was the sink. There had to be a common thread, but I couldn't see it.

Ahead, the tunnel opened up into a stone hall, where the entrances to four tunnels converged.

Link sighed. "Which way?"

I didn't answer. Because when I looked down at the Arclight, I saw something else just beyond it.

Lucille.

Sitting in the mouth of the tunnel opposite us, expectantly. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out the silver tag Aunt Prue had given me, with Lucille's name engraved on it. I could still hear Aunt Prue's voice.

See you still got that cat. I was just waitin' for the right time ta let her offa that clothesline. She knows a trick or two. You'll see.

In a split second, everything fell into place and I knew.

It was Lucille.

The images speeding past me every time I found my way to Lena and John. The ground so close, closer than it could ever be if I was standing. The strange vantage point, as if I was lying on my stomach looking up at them. It all made sense. The way Lucille kept disappearing and reappearing randomly. Only it wasn't random.

I tried to remember the times Lucille had vanished, ticking them off in my head one by one. The first time I saw Lena with John and Ridley, I was staring into my bathroom mirror. I didn't remember Lucille disappearing, but I remembered she was sitting on the front porch the next morning. Which didn't make any sense, because we never left her outside at night.

The second time, Lucille had bolted in Forsyth Park when we got to Savannah, and she didn't show up until after we left Bonaventure -- after I had seen Lena and John when I was at Aunt Caroline's. And this time, Link noticed Lucille was gone when we came back down into the Tunnels, but now here she was, sitting in front of us, right after I had just seen Lena.

I wasn't the one seeing Lena.

Lucille was. She was tracking Lena, the same way we were following the maps or the lights or the pull of the moon. I was watching Lena through the cat's eyes, maybe the same way Macon had watched the world through Boo's. How was it possible? Lucille wasn't a Caster cat any more than I was a Caster.

Was she?

"What are you, Lucille?"

The cat looked me in the eye and cocked her head to the side.

"Ethan?" Liv was watching me. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah." I shot Lucille a meaningful look. She ignored me, sniffing the tip of her tail gracefully.

"You realize she's a cat." Liv was still staring at me curiously.

"I know."

"Just checking."

Great. Not only was I talking to a cat, but now I was talking about talking to a cat. "We should get going."

Liv took a deep breath. "Yes, about that. I'm afraid we can't."

"Why not?"

Liv motioned me over to where all of Aunt Prue's maps were laid out on the smooth dirt. "You see this mark here? That's the nearest Doorwell. It took me a while, but I've figured out loads of things about this map. Your aunt wasn't kidding. She must have spent years marking it up."

"The Doorwells are marked?"

"Looks that way on the map. See these red D's, with the little circles around them?" They were everywhere. "And these thin red lines? I believe they're closer to the surface. There's a pattern. It seems the darker the color gets, the deeper underground."

I pointed to a grid of black lines. "You're saying these would be the deepest."

Liv nodded. "Possibly also the Darkest. The concept of Dark and Light territories within the Underground -- it's groundbreaking, really. Certainly not widely known."

"So what's the problem?"

"This." She pointed to two words scribbled across the southernmost edge of the largest page. L O C A S I L E N T I A.

I remembered the second word. It sounded like the one Lena said when she laid the Cast to keep me from telling her family she was leaving Gatlin. "You're saying the map is too quiet?"

Liv shook her head. "This is where the map falls silent, I'm afraid. Because we're at the end. We've reached the southern shore, which means we're off the map. Terra incognita." She shrugged. "You know what they say. Hic dracones sunt."

"Yeah, I hear that one a lot." I had no idea what she was talking about.

"'Here be dragons.' It's what sailors used to write on maps five hundred years ago, when the map ended but the ocean didn't."

"I'd rather face dragons than Sarafine." I looked at the place where Liv was tapping her finger. The web of Tunnels we had come from was as complex as any highway system. "So what now?"

"I'm out of ideas. I've done nothing but stare at this map since your aunt gave it to us, and I still don't know how to get to the Great Barrier. And I don't even know if I believe it's a real place." We stared at the map together. "I'm sorry. I know I've let you down -- everyone, really."

I traced the outline of the coast with my finger until I came to Savannah, where the Arclight had stopped working. The red mark for the Savannah Doorwell lay just beneath the first L in L O C A S I L E N T I A. As I stared at the letters and the red marks around them, the missing pattern slowly surfaced. It reminded me of the Bermuda Triangle, some kind of void where everything magically disappeared. "Loca silentia doesn't mean 'where the map falls silent.' "

"It doesn't?"

"I think it means something more like radio silence, for a Caster anyway. Think about it. When did the Arclight stop working the first time?"

Liv thought back. "Savannah. Right after we" -- she looked at me, blushing -- "found everything in the attic."

"Exactly. Once we entered the territory marked Loca silentia, the Arclight stopped guiding us. I think we've been in a sort of supernatural no-fly zone, like the Bermuda Triangle, since we moved south of there."

Liv looked slowly from the map to me, working it out in her mind. When she finally spoke, she couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice. "The seam. We're at the seam. That's what the Great Barrier is."

"The seam of what?"

"The place where two universes meet." Liv looked at the dial on her wrist. "The Arclight could've been on some kind of magical overload this whole time."

I thought about Aunt Prue showing up when she did -- and where she did. "I bet Aunt Prue knew we needed the maps. We had just entered the Loca silentia when she gave them to us."

"But the map stops, and the Great Barrier isn't on it. So how is anyone supposed to find it?" Liv sighed.

"My mom could. She knew how to find it without the star." I wished she were here right now, even a ghostly vision of her made from smoke and graveyard dirt and chicken bones.

"Did you read that in her papers?"

"No. It was something John said to Lena." I didn't want to think about it, even if the information was useful. "Where are we again, according to the map?"

She pointed. "Right there." We had reached the long curving line that followed the inlets of the southern shore. Caster connections wove their way together and apart until they met at the edge of the water like nerve endings.

"What are these little shapes? Islands?" Liv chewed on the end of her pen.

"Those are the Sea Islands."

Liv leaned over me. "Why do they look so familiar?"

"I've been wondering that, too. I thought it was from staring at the map for so long."

It was true. I knew those shapes, curving in and out like a group of lopsided clouds. Where had I seen them before?

I pulled a handful of papers -- my mother's papers -- out of my back pocket. There it was, tucked between pages. The sheet of vellum covered with a strange Caster design that looked like weird clouds.

She knew how to find it, without the star.

"Hold on --" I slid the vellum on top of the map. It was like tracing paper, thin as an onion skin on Amma's cutting board.

"I wonder ..." I slipped the translucent sheet into place over the map, the outlines of each shape on the vellum lining up perfectly with the shape on the chart beneath it. Except for one, which materialized in a sort of ghostly silhouette, only appearing when the partial outline of the map grid met the partial outline of the vellum. Without both the vellum and the map, the lines looked like meaningless scribbles.

But when you held them just right, it all came together, and you could see the island.

Like two halves of a Caster key, or two universes stitched together for one common purpose.

The Great Barrier was hidden in the middle of a Mortal coastal chain. Of course it was.

I stared at the ink on the page, and beneath it.

There it was. The most powerful place in the Caster world, appearing through pen and paper as if by magic.

Hidden in plain sight.