“What was her name?” the captain asks.
“Her name was Allegra,” Dorian says, realizing now that he doesn’t know if it was her real name.
“We called her the painter,” the captain says. “Her hair was different then,” she adds, gently touching one of Allegra’s silver locks.
“You knew her?”
“She let me play with her paints sometimes when I was a rabbit. I was never very good.”
“When you were what?”
“I used to be a rabbit. I’m not anymore. I don’t need to be. It’s never too late to change what you are, it took me a long time to figure that out.”
“What’s your name?” Dorian asks, though he knows already. There cannot be many former rabbits in such places.
The captain frowns at him. It is clearly not a question she has been asked in some time and she pauses, considering it.
“They used to call me Eleanor, up there,” she says. “It’s not my name.”
Dorian stares at her. She’s not old enough to be Mirabel’s mother. Not nearly, she might even be younger than Mirabel. But she looks like her, the eyes and the shape of her face. He wonders how time works down here.
“What’s your name?” Eleanor asks.
“Dorian,” he says. It feels truer than any other name he’s used. He’s starting to like it.
Eleanor looks at him and nods, then she turns back to Allegra.
Allegra’s eyes are closed. A long gash of a wound covers part of her head, cutting across her neck, though there isn’t much blood. Most of her body is covered in honey, sticking to the silk, her fur coat lost somewhere in the sea. It strikes Dorian how lucky he was to survive the fall. He wonders if he believes in luck. The neck of Allegra’s blouse has come undone enough that Dorian looks for the sword tattooed on her chest, but there is no sword. There is only a delicate scar in the shape of a bee.
Eleanor kisses Allegra on the forehead and then pulls the silk cloth up to cover her face.
She stands and looks at Dorian.
“I can take you there, if that’s where you’re going,” Eleanor says, pointing at him. “I know where it is.”
“Take me where?” Dorian asks.
“The place on your back.”
Dorian puts a hand up to his shoulder, touching the topmost edge of the very elaborate, very real tattoo that covers his back. The branches of a tree, the canopy of a forest of cherry blossoms, star-sparkling with lanterns and lights though all of that is background for the centerpiece: a tree stump covered in books dripping with honey under a beehive with an owl sitting atop it, wearing a crown.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS is dancing. The ballroom is crowded, the music too loud, but there is an ease here, a constant perfect movement. His dance partners keep changing, all of them masked.
Everything is shimmering and gold and beautiful.
“Ezra,” he hears Mirabel’s voice, too soft and distant with her face so close. “Ezra come back to me,” she says.
He doesn’t want to go back. The party just started. The secrets are here. The answers are here. He will understand everything after one more dance, please, one more.
A gust of wind separates him from his current partner and he cannot grab ahold of another. Gold-covered fingers slip through his. The music falters.
The party fades, blown away with a breath, and in front of his eyes Mirabel comes into almost-focus, her face inches from his. He blinks at her, trying to remember where they are but then he realizes he has absolutely no idea where they are right now.
“What happened?” Zachary asks. The world is blurry and spinning, as though he is still dancing though he can tell now that in reality he is lying on a hard floor.
“You were unconscious,” Mirabel says. “It was probably the impact, knocking the wind out of you. We didn’t have the most graceful of landings.” She indicates a pile of metal nearby. The remains of the elevator. “Here,” she adds, “I took these off for ease of respiratory assistance but they did remain intact.”
She hands him his eyeglasses.
Zachary sits up and puts them on.
The elevator has collapsed in such a way that Zachary is astonished that they—well, that he—survived the fall. Maybe the Keeper’s blessing helped and the gods were looking out, because there is no elevator shaft above it, only a large open cavern.
Mirabel helps Zachary get to his feet.
They are in a courtyard surrounded by six large freestanding stone arches, most of them broken but the ones still standing have symbols carved into their keystones. Zachary can only make out a key and a crown but he can guess the rest. Beyond the arches is a ruin that was once a city.
The only word that comes to mind as Zachary looks at the structures surrounding them is ancient but it is a nonspecific ancient, like an architectural fever dream in stone and ivory and gold. Columns and obelisks and pagoda-like roofs. Everything shimmers, as though the whole city and the cavern that contains it has been covered in a layer of crystal. Mosaics stretch across walls and are laid into the ground beneath his feet, though most of the ground is covered in books. Piles of them, heaped and strewn over the space, abandoned by whoever had once been here to read them.
The cavern is massive, enclosing the city easily. On the far walls there are cliffs, carved with stairways and roads and towers lit up like lighthouses. Though they are only isolated beacons, everything glows. It all feels too big to be underground. Too vast and too complex and too forgotten.
A fire burns next to the elevator in a structure that looks like a fountain but is flowing with flame, dripping bowls of it draped like crystals over a chandelier, though only some of them are lit. There are similar fountains around the courtyard but the rest are dark.
Zachary picks up a book and it is solid and heavy in his hands, its pages sealed together with something sticky that turns out to be honey.
“Lost cities of honey and bone,” he remarks.
“Technically it’s a Harbor, though most Harbors are city-like,” Mirabel clarifies as Zachary returns the unreadable tome to its resting spot. “I remember this courtyard, it was the Heart of this Harbor. They would hang lanterns from the arches during the parties.”
“You remember this?” Zachary asks, looking out over the empty city. No one has been in this place for a very long time.
“I remembered a thousand lifetimes before I could talk,” Mirabel says. “Some have faded with time and most of them seem more like half-forgotten dreams but I recognize places I’ve been before when I’m in them. I suppose it’s like being haunted by your own ghost.”
Zachary watches her as she stares out over the broken buildings. He tries to decide if she looks more or less real here than she did waiting in line for coffee in the middle of Manhattan but he cannot. She looks the same, only bruised and dust-covered and tired. The firelight plays with her hair, pulling it through tones of red and violet and refusing to let it settle on a single color.
“What happened here?” Zachary asks, trying to wrap his thoughts around everything, part of his mind still swirling in a golden ballroom. He prods another book with his toe. It refuses to open, its pages sealed shut.
“The tides came up,” Mirabel says. “That’s how it goes, historically. One Harbor sinks and a new one opens somewhere higher. They change themselves to suit the sea. It never receded before but I suppose even a sea can feel neglected. No one was paying attention anymore so it wandered back to the depths where it came from. Look, you can see where the canals were, there.” She points at a spot where bridges cross over a stretch of nothing.
“But…where’s the sea now?” Zachary asks, wondering how far down the nothing goes.
“It must be farther down. It’s lower than I thought it would be. This is one of the lowest Harbors. I don’t know what we’ll find if we have to go deeper.”
<
br /> Zachary looks at the book-covered remains of a once-sunken city. He tries to imagine it filled with people and for a moment he can picture it—the streets teeming with people, the lights stretching out into the distance—and then it is a lifeless ruin again.
He was never at the beginning of this story. This story is much, much older than he is.
“I lived three lifetimes in this Harbor,” Mirabel says. “In the first I died when I was nine. All I wanted was to go to the parties to see the dancing but my parents told me I had to wait until I was ten and then I never got to be ten, not in that life. The following lifetime I reached seventy-eight and I did more than my share of dancing but I was always going to be mortal until I was conceived outside of time. People who believed in the old myths tried to construct a place for that to happen. They attempted it in Harbor after Harbor. They passed down theories and advice to their successors. They toiled down here and on the surface and they had a lot of names over the years even as their numbers dwindled. Most recently they were named after my grandmother.”
“The Keating Foundation,” Zachary guesses. Mirabel nods.
“Most of them died before I could thank them. And in all that time no one ever considered what would happen afterward. No one thought about consequences or repercussions.”
Mirabel picks up the sword from where it rests on the ground. She gives it a practiced twirl. In her hands it appears featherlight. She continues to spin it as she speaks.
“I—well, a previous me—smuggled this out of a museum concealed down the back of a very uncomfortable gown. It was before metal detectors and guards don’t check down the backs of ladies’ gowns as a general rule. Thank you for returning the book, it had been lost for a very long time.”
“Is that what we’re doing here?” Zachary asks. “Returning lost things?”
“I told you, we’re rescuing your boyfriend. Again.”
“Why do I feel like that’s not—wait,” Zachary says. “You’d seen the painting.”
“Of course I had. I’ve spent a lot of time in a bed that faces it. It’s one of Allegra’s best. I did a charcoal study of it once but I could never get your face right.”
“That’s why you wanted us both down here. Because we’re in the painting.”
“Well…” Mirabel starts but then she gives him a half shrug that suggests he might be correct.
“That’s not fate, that’s…art history,” Zachary protests.
“Who said anything about fate?” Mirabel says but she smiles as she says it, the glamorous old-movie-star smile that looks frightening in the firelight.
“Aren’t you…” Zachary pauses because Aren’t you Fate? sounds like too absurd a question to ask even when casually discussing past lives and despite the fact that he already almost believes that the woman in front of him is somehow, crazily, Fate. He stares at her. She looks like a regular person. Or maybe she’s like her painted doors: an imitation so precise as to fool the eye. The shifting firelight falls on different pieces of her, allowing the rest to disappear into shadow. She looks at him with dark, unblinking eyes and smudged mascara and he doesn’t know what to think anymore. Or what to ask.
“What are you?” Zachary settles on and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
Mirabel’s smile vanishes. She takes a step toward him, standing too close. Something changes in her face, as though she were wearing an invisible mask that has been removed, a personality conjured from pink hair and snark as false as a tail and a crown from a faraway party. Zachary tries to remember if he has ever felt the same nameless ancient presence from her that he felt with the Keeper and somehow he knows it was always there and that the vanished smile is older than the oldest of movie stars. She leans in close enough to kiss him and her voice is low and calm when she speaks.
“I’m a lot of things, Ezra. But I am not the reason you didn’t open that door.”
“What?” Zachary asks even though he is certain he already knows what she means.
“It is your own damned fault that you didn’t open that door when you were however old, no one else’s,” Mirabel tells him. “Not mine and not whoever painted over it, either. Yours. You decided not to open it. So don’t stand there and invent mythology that allows you to blame me for your problems. I have my own.”
“We’re not here to find Dorian, we’re here to find Simon, aren’t we?” Zachary asks. “He’s the last thing lost in time.”
“You’re here because I need you to do something that I can’t,” Mirabel corrects him. She shoves the sword at him, hilt upward, forcing him to take it. It’s even heavier than he remembers. “And you’re here because you followed me, you didn’t have to.”
“I didn’t have to?”
“No, you didn’t,” Mirabel says. “You want to think that you did or that you were supposed to but you always had a choice. You don’t like choosing, do you? You don’t do anything until someone or something else says that you can. You didn’t even decide to come here until a book gave you permission. You’d be sitting in the Keeper’s office wallowing if I hadn’t dragged you out of there.”
“I would not—” Zachary protests, infuriated by the sentiments and the truths behind them but Mirabel interrupts.
“Shut up,” she says, holding up a hand and looking off behind him.
“Don’t tell me to—” Zachary starts but then he turns to see what she is looking at and stops.
A shadow like a storm cloud is moving in their direction, accompanied by a sound like wind. The flames on the fire fountain waver.
The cloud grows larger and louder and Zachary realizes what he is looking at.
The sound is not wind but wings.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins has seen an owl that wasn’t of the taxidermy variety only once before, not far from his mother’s farmhouse, on a spring evening just before dusk, perched by the side of the road on a telephone wire. He had slowed as he drove by because there were no other cars and because he wanted to make sure that it was, in fact, an owl and not some other bird of prey and the owl had stared at him with undeniably owl-y eyes and Zachary had stared back until another car came by behind him and he continued driving and the owl remained, staring after him.
Now there are many, many owls staring at him with dozens and dozens of eyes and they are getting closer. A shadow made of wings and claws, descending on them. Owls swooping down from above and soaring through streets, disturbing the bones and the dust.
The fire falters in the changing air, sputtering and dimming, darkening the shadows so the cloud of owls consumes first one street and then another as it moves closer.
Zachary feels Mirabel put a hand on his arm but he cannot look away from the dozens—no, hundreds—of eyes staring down at them.
“Ezra,” Mirabel says, squeezing his arm. “Run.”
For a second Zachary stands frozen but then something in his brain manages to react to Mirabel’s voice and follow her instruction, grabbing his bag from the ground and bolting in the opposite direction, away from the darkness and the eyes.
Zachary runs through the archways and toward the buildings and down the first street he reaches, tripping over books and faltering, trying to hold on to both his bag and the sword. He can hear Mirabel behind him, her boots hitting the ground a fraction of a second after his own, but he doesn’t dare look back.
When the street splits he hesitates but Mirabel’s hand on his back nudges him to the left and Zachary runs down another street, another dark path where he cannot see more than two steps in front of him.
He takes another turn and the echo on his footsteps has vanished. He glances back and Mirabel is gone.
Zachary freezes, torn between retracing his steps to find Mirabel and continuing forward.
Then the shadows around him move. Deep hollows of windows and doorways on either side of him are filled with wings and eyes.
/>
Zachary stumbles backward, falling, dropping the sword. The stone path beneath him scrapes his palms as he tries to steady himself.
The owls are above him, he cannot see how many in the shadows. One grabs at his hand, claws biting into his skin.
Zachary retrieves the sword and swings it blindly, its blade catching on claws and feathers, cleaving into blood and bone. The screeching that follows is deafening but the owls back away long enough for Zachary to get on his feet, slipping on blood-splattered stone.
He runs as fast as he can, not looking back. He has no sense of direction in this labyrinthine city so he settles for following his ears, moving away from the sound of wings.
He takes turn after turn. This alley turns onto a road that takes him across a bridge, the nothingness beneath it deep with something golden far below but Zachary does not pause to look. He reaches the other side and there is no road, no path, only a gap followed by the remains of a staircase that commences above his head and continues upward, missing the rest of its steps.
Zachary turns back and the city seems empty but then the owls appear, one and then another and another until they are an indistinguishable mass of wings and eyes and talons.
There are more of them than he’d thought possible, moving so quickly that he cannot imagine they could ever be outrun. Why they even dared to try.
Zachary looks at the stairs above him. They seem solid, carved into the rock. They’re not that high. The gap in front of them is not that wide. He could reach them. He tosses the sword onto the lowest step and it stays there, steady.
Zachary takes a breath and leaps upward, one hand finding its grip on the stone stair and the other settling on the sword and then the sword slips, taking his grip with it.
And so the sword pulls Zachary Ezra Rawlins away from this broken stairway in a forgotten city and instead sends him sliding down into the darkness below.
DORIAN HAS NOT spent much of his life covered in honey so he had never before realized how it can get absolutely everywhere and insist on staying there. He fills another bucket with cold water from the barrels stored in the ship’s hull and pours it over his head, shivering as it cascades against his skin.
The Starless Sea Page 34
