Evertrue

THIRTY-FIVE

NOW

The Everneath. The High Court.

I turned around, and there she was in all her red-headed glory. But that disguise lasted for only a few moments before she turned into Adonia with the blond hair again. Maybe since we knew who she was, she didn’t feel the need to hide.

Her face looked pale and ghostly. She glanced around her, and with a quick snap of her fingers, she conjured a cage around Jack. Then she turned her attention to me. “Why did you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“If you wanted to rule the Everneath, why did you destroy it?”

I shook my head. “I told you. I never wanted to rule the Everneath. I just wanted my life back.”

“You wanted your life back by destroying mine. You wanted your life back by killing thousands of Everlivings.”

“I’m not killing them. I gave them their mortality back.”

She smiled. A wide, sharp smile that seemed much closer to a sneer. “You don’t know what happens, do you? When Everlivings lose both of their hearts?”

What was she talking about? “They lose their immortality.”

“So naive.” Her eyes narowed, blazing with the anticipation of a fight.

She closed her eyes, and her lids fluttered. I couldn’t feel anything, so I thought this would be the perfect time to strike; but when I went to think of some sort of weapon, I suddenly had no control over my thoughts.

Involuntarily, the memory of my mother dying flashed inside my brain. I tried to think of anything else. Jack’s face. Tommy. My dad. Even my school. Anything. But I couldn’t navigate my own memories. My eyes flew open to find the queen staring at me with her vicious smile.

“Did you know your mother didn’t die from the crush of the car that hit her?” The queen said. “At least not directly. She suffocated.”

Every instinct was telling me to run away, but I couldn’t move. My lungs tightened at her words, and for a moment it felt as if I had been the one crushed by the car. I was trapped and fighting for breath.

I tried to expand my lungs, but it was as if someone were pouring liquid cement down my throat, and my chest was turning to stone.

I squeezed my eyes shut. “Mom,” I whispered.

The queen laughed.

I opened my eyes and narrowed them at her. The queen was lying. She couldn’t possibly know what had happened.

“My mom didn’t suffocate,” I said, breathless. “Why would you say that?”

“Yes, she did. But you don’t remember. You’ve blocked it. Let me help you unblock it.”

Suddenly, another image appeared in my head. A doctor coming to talk to us in the hallway of the antiseptic hospital wing. He’d said her ribs were crushed, and she died because she couldn’t breathe.

“I’m so happy you believe me now,” the queen said. “Because I have something special for the girl who made me think Nathanial was still alive.”

She closed her eyes, and at that moment a glass wall appeared on every side of me. She’d conjured up a giant glass box. I felt cool liquid at my feet and looked down to find that water was filling the glass. I pounded on the walls and the ceiling, so hard that my knuckles split and blood smeared on the glass. But it didn’t crack. I put my hands on one wall and my feet on the opposite one and tried to use the force of opposition to break through. But it didn’t work. The water had reached my chest and was rising rapidly.

Within twenty seconds of facing the queen, I was trapped in a box full of water with a locked lid.

As the water crept up my face, I gulped in one last breath of air. My last breath of life. Glimpses of people flashed through my mind. Tommy. My dad. Jules. Jack. I had failed them all.

I could see the queen through the distorted view from underwater and through the glass. I tried to pound on the glass, but it didn’t even make a sound. I pressed my lips together, trying to make the seal watertight. If it was Everneath water, I didn’t want to drink it and forget I was fighting for my life.

Jack thrashed against the bars of the cage, pushing and pulling. The bars didn’t budge.

This was it. I was going to die in the worst possible way, with Jack in sight but just out of reach.

He was always in sight but just out of reach.

Instinctively, I rose to the top of the water, to where there was maybe half an inch of air, but I couldn’t orient my face close enough to get a clear breath. I would need a snorkel.

Or a straw! I thought back to my training session with Cole and focused all my energy. A faint white line appeared in the water in front of my face. The longer it floated there, the more it transformed into a solid thing.

My plastic straw. I grabbed it and blew the last of my air through the straw to clear it of water and then held it against the top of the lid and sucked in a giant breath.

I got one more breath in before the queen realized her mistake and filled the rest of the space with water.

But I’d bought myself another twenty seconds.

Twenty seconds to do what?

I could see Jack in the cage. He’d stopped thrashing, and now he just had his hand raised, palm outward toward me. I put my hand on my lips and then laid it flat against the glass pane.

I didn’t want to drown. But at any moment I wouldn’t be able to fight the urge to suck in a giant lungful of water.

I closed my eyes and thought about my mom. Maybe I would find out exactly what it felt like to be deprived of air, just as she had been. Maybe I would see her soon.

Suddenly I felt a knock on the glass. I saw Cole’s face, sick with panic. He held a large club in his hand, and the queen was hunched over behind him.

Cole pointed two fingers at his eyes. Watch me, he mouthed.

He pointed to the queen and then used his index finger to draw a heart on the glass. Then he held up a paper with a drawing on it. A wreath with two swords crossing in the middle.

He was describing the shape of the queen’s Surface heart, the one I’d seen when I’d faced her before. The one I’d seen when she fought the queen before her. I remembered how when I’d thought of Cole’s heart, it had come flying to me.

I was out of time and out of breath. I closed my eyes and pictured the queen’s heart.

Suddenly, I heard a tap on the glass. Her heart, a metal version of the wreath symbol, had landed flat against the glass. I focused even more on the heart, and tiny little fracture hairs broke out from the point where the heart made contact. And then came the sound of glass shattering.

Water poured out of the splintered glass box, and I poured out too, the queen’s heart in my hand. I’d been strong enough to conjure her actual heart and send it through the glass.

The queen lunged for me, but it was too late. I’d broken her Surface heart. She paused midstride, then fell to the ground in a slump. Her translucent skin became wrinkled before my eyes; her hair turned from bright blond to gray, then to white.

And then she turned to dust and blew away in a soft breeze I didn’t even realize was there.

Everything she had conjured—the glass box, the cage, everything—disappeared. And Jack, Cole, and I were left breathing hard through bits of dust that used to be the queen.