Evertrue

SIXTEEN

NOW

The Everneath. The streets of Ouros.

We stayed hidden as well as we could as we followed Ashe. I remembered back to the day of the Everneath blackout, right before Cole and I had entered the labyrinth. We’d had to hide in the cellar.

I’d slept that night against Cole. I’d thought he was my friend.

We followed Ashe all the way to the edge of the Common. I wondered why Ashe was walking and not flying like the rest of the Shades would do. Maybe it was because he wasn’t a full Shade yet. Either way, I was grateful we didn’t have to try to follow a flying Shade right now. We headed toward the entrance to the labyrinth, and I thought for a moment, with a sinking feeling, that we would be going inside. I fought to keep my feet going, but suddenly they felt like they were made of cement.

I couldn’t face that three-ring circus of death again.

But he walked past the entrance to the labyrinth. Instead, he went behind a wall; and the moment he entered there, the outline of a door appeared, angled downward. Ashe pushed through it and descended.

“Do we follow?” Jack asked.

“If we don’t, we may never have another chance,” Cole said.

Before the entrance could fade away again, the three of us leaped in.

I landed with a thud on what felt like hard-packed dirt. My spine compressed with the impact.

“Ow!”

Cole and Jack landed in a heap next to me, kicking up a cloud of dust. Jack covered his mouth to try to suppress a coughing attack.

What little light there was quickly vanished as the entrance closed off behind us.

I heard someone brushing off his pants. I thought it came from where Jack had landed. “Where are we?” he said.

“Um . . . Underneath the Everneath?” I said.

“Under where?” Cole said, then snickered.

“Are you twelve?” I asked.

Something clicked near me, and suddenly there was a little circle of light. Cole’s lighter. We were in a dark tunnel—not like the spacious caves of the actual Tunnels; this was more obviously a passageway somewhere.

As my eyes adjusted, an icy chill ran down my back. The walls looked like they were made of strands of oil, and those strands seemed to be moving and churning as if they were alive: contracting and relaxing, creating a wavelike movement.

The effect made it seem as if we were in the belly of a black snake, about to be digested. I felt the waves of movement under my knees. With each wave, the tunnel seemed to get smaller.

I stayed crouched down. There was no way I’d be able to stand up in here. The entrance to the tunnel was maybe five feet high and five feet wide, but farther down it looked more like three by three.

“This must’ve been how Jonah felt in the belly of the whale,” I said.

Cole gave me a blank stare, but Jack started to shake next to me. I could feel it. I put my hand on his arm, but he threw it off immediately. I knew it was just a reflexive move. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

But then I realized I already knew the answer. Jack had spent decades buried alive in the Tunnels. As bad as I thought the Feed was for me, Jack had had it worse. I was merely cocooned with Cole for a hundred years while he stole my energy. Jack had been surrounded by dirt, the earth pressing in on him, stealing his breath. He’d felt as if he was suffocating the entire time. And just when he thought he would die from the lack of oxygen, he somehow kept going.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You should go. Don’t do this.”

“I’m not leaving you alone with him,” he said. Now that he was distressed, he was unable to mask his suspicion of Cole.

“We have no idea how far this tunnel goes,” I said. “You can’t do this. Aside from the fact that you can barely fit . . . no. I won’t let you.”

“You don’t have a choice,” he said. “I’m not leaving you. I’m not. We promised, and I’m not about to break my promise Not for this.”

I sighed. Cole just held his lighter, his face showing he didn’t want to get in the middle of anything.

“Listen. What if something happens to us?” I said. “What if we can’t get back out? Somebody has to be on the outside. We should’ve thought of this before. But somebody has to know where we are.”

Even in the dim glow of the lighter, Jack’s face looked pale and ashen. He would be useless to us in this condition, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.

“You might be our only chance,” I said. “Go outside. Put your ear to the ground. Try to figure out if anything is going on.”

“What about my leaking energy?” Jack asked.

Cole pointed toward Jack’s feet. “It wasn’t very strong to begin with. Now it’s barely visible. You’ll be okay as long as you stick to the shadows.”

Jack nodded. Thankfully he was agreeing with us, because there was no way he’d survive in a place this small. In fact, just seeing him made me wonder if any of us would survive it. But Cole and I were skinnier than Jack, and we hadn’t been traumatized as he had.

Jack reached up to where the entrance had been. I wondered for a split second if it would really open again or if we were all trapped here, but it opened under the pressure from his hand.

“Okay. How long before I should start to worry?” Jack said.

“Now.” I smiled. Jack looked at my face and instantly relaxed a bit, to the point where he even smiled.

“Okay, I’ll start worrying right now.” He grabbed my shoulders and brought me close and pressed his lips against mine. I threw my arms around his neck and lost myself in the kiss. His lips parted, and mine did too. I felt the kiss everywhere. And suddenly we weren’t in a snake belly anymore. We were on the Surface, and we both had our hearts, and we were standing in real sunlight. And we were whole and together.

It was that kind of kiss.

Cole cleared his throat.

Finally, we pulled apart. “I’ll see you soon,” Jack said.

“So soon,” I said.

Then Jack leaped out of the hole and closed the door behind him, and Cole and I were alone.

Cole was looking at me with a curious expression.

“What?” I said.

He shook his head. “I just . . . you and Jack. How long have you been together?”

“Years. But it’s felt like an eternity.” I used my hands to shoo him forward. “Why?”

“Because I don’t see it. The two of you.”

I sighed, remembering when he’d said nearly the same thing that day we silk-screened Dead Elvises T-shirts in the GraphX Shop. And now we were being digested by an oily tunnel, and we were still talking about it.

“What?” he said. As he inched farther down the tunnel, he resorted to army crawling after a few yards. I followed suit.

“We’ve had this conversation before,” I said. “When we first met. Right before you . . .” My voice faded away.

“Before I what?”

I looked away. “Let’s get going.”

“No. Finish what you were saying.” He stopped moving, and I knew he wouldn’t start again until I talked.

So I blurted out the answer. “Right before I went to the Feed with you.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Why did you go to the Feed with me?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. We have to go.”

“Yes, it does,” he said, his voice a whisper. “It matters to me.”

I sighed and then looked beyond him to where the tunnel disappeared in darkness. “We don’t have time.”

“In a hundred words or less.”

A hundred words to explain how my mother had died, how her murderer had gotten off on a technicality, and then how I thought Jack had cheated on me. And Cole was there for me. “I made a series of bad decisions. I thought nothing could be worse than feeling so much pain. But I was wrong.”

I finally glanced up at him. He frowned. “And coming with me ended up being worse than the worst pain you could bear.”

I nodded slowly.

“I’m sorry.” The words hung in the cramped air of that tiny hole for a long time. “I’m sorry I did that to you.”

I didn’t know what to say. Cole had never been apologetic for anything that he had ever done. In fact, he’d always believed that being an Everliving, and sucking the life out of someone, was morally defensible. Because it was the Forfeit’s choice. Because it was about life triumphing over the absence of life.

I couldn’t believe he was apologizing now. And suddenly, knowing that he held my heart, knowing that he had tricked me into giving it up, knowing that he had betrayed me . . . now that he was apologizing, I was furious.

“You took everything from me,” I said, my voice shaking. “You tricked me into becoming an Everliving. You did this to me.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. He put his hand over his heart as if he needed to keep it from spilling out. But he had no heart.

“Stop apologizing!” The words were loud, but they were digested quickly in the pulsating walls. “There are some things that you just can’t apologize for. Some things are too big for an apology. Some things . . .” My voice trailed off as I remembered saying something similar to Jack when I’d first Returned.

Sometimes, when someone keeps forgiving someone else, it becomes too much.

“Look, this is not going anywhere,” I said. “Let’s just go.”

Cole nodded as if there were nothing in the world he wanted more at that moment than to get out of the current conversation.

He pointed ahead of him. “Do you want to go first or last?”

I thought about it. If I went last, all I would be thinking about was that if someone was chasing us, they’d get me first. Maybe the same was true if I was in front, but at least in front I knew I was facing the danger.

“First,” I said.

He moved to the side and then held his arms out in an “after you” kind of way. I scooted past him and started to crawl.