by Sara Holland
Everything intensifies. The floor’s rolling turns into writhing. The rumble in the air turns to howling. A seam of golden fire rips open across the floor and then spiderwebs into a hundred glowing fractals, the edges peeling back like burned paper to reveal—
Upside-down mountains. The dead bodies of the Fiorden guards sink down into it, vanishing into the upside-down scene as if into quicksand.
Mountains swim into focus and the star-strewn sky beyond that, the moon swimming indistinct like a quarter at the bottom of a well.
The vault groans dangerously around us, like some giant living creature. The blackness of the floor shreds and burns away, then grows back again, like Fiordenkill itself is fighting to heal the wound in its surface. But it stays open around the suit of armor. I remember what Graylin called it. The wound in the world.
The sound of crackling flames intensifies; more of the black floor peels away to show more of the Colorado mountains. I catch the barest scent of mountain air—faint, but so familiar to me I would know it anywhere—and goose bumps erupt along my whole body.
Across from me, Nahteran has gathered the phoenix flame armor and the duffel bag. “Go,” he shouts, jerking his chin down toward the inverted mountains. “Go!”
“What are you doing?” I step toward him, swaying on my feet.
The sight of the mountains beneath my feet is making me dizzier. It hurts to breathe. I reach out my arms for the armor. Adrenaline and dizziness clamor for my attention, screaming at me to run, but I cling to the mission we came here with. We’re long past the time for secrecy, but the armor—that’s the key—that’s how we can stop the soul trade. I don’t want to leave Winterkill, leave Fiordenkill, without it in my hands.
“Nate, please!” I yell, the nickname slipping out. “Mom left me that gauntlet!”
At that, for the first time since I found him, the expression of calm focus on Nahteran’s face slips. Behind it is an anger that makes my heart freeze. He blinks, and when he opens his eyes, they’re colder than all the ice and snow in Fiordenkill. Nahteran backs away from me. He’s holding the armor, and the ground beneath his feet is still, while I am pulled down … down … down. I’m weightless, I’m trapped.
Brekken struggles through the softening stone and throws himself toward Nahteran, reaching for the armor. But Nahteran spins out of his grasp, easy and deliberate like a dancer.
My heart goes cold. I stare after Nahteran. Pure desperation pumps the blood through my veins and pushes the cry from my lips.
“Whatever you’re doing, we can do it together,” I yell, my voice scraping my throat. “You don’t have to go back to the Silver Prince. We can help you!”
I don’t want to lose you again, I think.
Nahteran turns and runs. Past Graylin and Brekken, who are trapped in the opening just like me, clawing toward me through empty space. Nahteran has the armor and he’s running away. He’s not coming with us. He’s not coming home.
My waist slips through. My chest. I can feel a warm breeze on my legs.
I scream for my brother one more time before I’m sucked down into the stars.
15
The familiar smell of the mountain and a warm summer breeze wrap around me, and for a moment that seems to last forever that’s all there is. I can’t see Brekken. I can’t see anyone. There’s nothing around me but air and stars.
Then I hit the ground hard onto rough, spiky grass and gravel. I roll to a stop on the hillside, pain shooting through my bones. I slowly push myself into a sitting position, head spinning and body aching. Looking around, I can tell we’re in the mountains in Haven, on Earth, a landscape that feels familiar but which I don’t immediately recognize. It’s night and the moon is overhead among stars. We’re high up, and the air is thin and cold, the kind you have to draw deep to get enough oxygen. And yet, I feel a sense of strength and wellness rising in me, from where my legs touch the ground on up. The air goes to my head like wine.
My vision is still a bit blurry, but I see someone lying a few yards away from me, facing away. I see a hand, stretched out against the damp grass, a wrist turned at a painful angle. My heart in my throat, I crawl over and reach out, touching a shoulder—but the person is cold beneath the green wool coat. And then it hits me—he’s one of the Winterkill soldiers who Nahteran killed. I rear back, fighting down nausea.
Stumbling to my feet, I go as fast as I can—which isn’t very fast—in the opposite direction. Looking around wildly, I see Brekken and Graylin uphill, and the relief that fills me is immense. The other guard’s body is a little ways down the mountain. I avert my eyes.
Nahteran is nowhere to be seen. Of course he isn’t. He didn’t jump. He didn’t come with us.
Not knowing what else to do, I climb up to where Graylin is brushing himself off. As I walk, I look around, the landscape starting to make sense and fit onto my mental map. I know these mountains. I look to the west and down the mountain, and there it is—Mirror Lake and Havenfall, tucked between the mountains and wreathed in trees. A few stray lights glitter faintly from its windows.
I exchange a glance with Graylin, hoping to see his regular self-assured smile, to be comforted that he has everything well in hand. That he knows what to do next.
Instead, I see only my own confusion and loss reflected in his face. And I know he’s thinking the same thing as I am.
Nahteran betrayed us.
Back in my little attic room, back in my own bed, my body aches, and the room spins, no matter how still I lie. It feels like all the foreign-world sickness the gauntlet held at bay is crashing in on me now. I want to sleep for a month. But my mind won’t let me rest. I can’t get Nahteran’s face out of my head. My left arm stings under the bandage where he cut me. I can’t shake the weight off my shoulders, the sensation that I’ve lost the most important thing of all. For a second I had a glimmer of hope that we could have him back. But now it’s just Marcus and Graylin and me again, and our little family unit feels smaller and more fragmented than ever.
I hold the pain at a distance, because I have to. But I know it’s there, lurking behind the curtain, ready to crash down on me at any minute. If I look directly at it, if I give the grief too much oxygen, it’ll swamp me. It’s like I’ve lost him all over again. Nahteran. Nate. He was happy to see me. He must have missed me. At least I thought so. But clearly not enough.
Even though Havenfall’s corridors are quiet and flooded with pale morning sunlight and everyone’s still in their rooms, the inn still feels crowded somehow. There’s a heavy, unsettling buzz in the air. Once, when I was a kid, Nate explained to me how gas stovetops worked. For a while after that, every time Mom turned on the burner, I was terrified, fearing that she was filling the house up with gas that would explode any minute. That at any given moment we were breathing it in, turning the air, the walls, our bodies into kindling. That’s what I feel like now. Like the whole inn is filled with something dangerous and flammable, ready at any second to ignite.
Still, the smell of coffee and pastries is a comfort as I open the unlocked door to Marcus and Graylin’s front room. When I go in, Marcus is sitting on the couch, scribbling and crossing things out in a notebook held open on his lap. I know Graylin will have caught him up on what happened at Winterkill, but now we need to figure out what to do next. We hardly flew under the radar like we’d meant to. We lost the armor. We lost Nate. Assuming, that is, that we ever had him to begin with.
Brekken paces by the window. He glances at me with a small smile when I come in, but his eyes slide past mine without really meeting.
My stomach lurches uneasily as I pass him, sensing a cool distance between us. Brekken hardly spoke to me on the walk back to the inn last night. Once we’d both assured each other we were okay, he strode down the mountain toward Havenfall in silence. I chalked it up to him being stunned and exhausted, just like Graylin and I were. But now, I can’t seem to catch his eye. What’s his deal?
Graylin is at the little table by the k
itchenette. Sura sits next to him with a book open between them. Before we went to Fiordenkill, he read aloud to her every morning, hoping to draw her out of her shell. I catch a glimpse of the illustrations—Bread and Jam for Frances.
My heart twists a little as I wave hello to them and go over to sit with my uncle. There must be a stash of picture books somewhere in the inn left over from when Nahteran and I were kids.
“Graylin told me what happened at Winterkill,” Marcus says as he pours me a cup of coffee. “He told me you saw … That boy. Was he really …”
Marcus’s voice trails off as I sit next to him on the couch. The mixture of suppressed hope and forced casualness in his face is a look I recognize well. I take a deep breath. I don’t feel ready to talk about my brother, or even think about him, but I’m not the only one who loved him. I can’t keep what I know from Marcus. He’s Nahteran’s family too.
So I shut off my emotions as best I can and tell him about how I ran into Nahteran in the halls of Winterkill. How he told me about some mysterious agenda the details of which he couldn’t share. How after he was kidnapped from Mom’s house, the Silver Prince traded Cadius for him and the Silver Prince took him in. How he’s the Prince’s officer now. And of course how he took the armor and ran.
In the gloom, I tell them all what I’ve scarcely admitted even to myself. That I’m afraid Nahteran brought the phoenix flame armor to the Silver Prince.
I don’t want to believe it’s possible. But I can’t forget the sharp, sudden anger that kindled in his eyes when I said Mom’s name. It makes a terrible kind of sense. After all, I always blamed myself for what happened to my brother. Blamed myself and blamed Mom, if I’m being honest. Why wouldn’t he as well?
When I’m done speaking, Marcus looks haggard and haunted. He casts a look over at Graylin, but his husband and Sura are still engrossed in their lesson. I should comfort him, give him a hug or something, but right now it doesn’t feel like it would help. Because I have no peace, no comfort to give.
“Nahteran must have a high status in Byrn,” Marcus says, sounding troubled. “To be doing this kind of thing for the Silver Prince. Even if it’s just a cover story, he must have the Prince’s blessing to be in Fiordenkill, otherwise it would get back to Oasis.”
I press my nails into my palms. The same thing had occurred to me, and even if Nahteran has a secret life of his own, the thought of him being that beholden to the man who tried to kill me hurts.
“You’re sure it was him?” Marcus asks me.
I nod. “I wish I wasn’t.”
A knock on the door makes us all jump. Marcus gets up, his movements stiff, and cautiously opens the door. Willow stands in the hall. Her face is pale.
“Marcus, Maddie,” she says, her gaze shifting from my uncle to me. “I … something’s happened.” She shifts on her feet. “Something you should see.”
She crosses the room to Marcus and bends to whisper in his ear.
My heart sinks down into my stomach as I watch the color drain from his face. We can’t catch a break, I think numbly. What will the next blow be? Where will the mallet fall? Have the delegates found out what we’re doing and rioted? Did Cadius find some way to follow us out of Fiordenkill? Has Nahteran already deposited the armor in the hands of the Silver Prince? Are the two of them tearing open a new rift between Oasis and Colorado as we sit here?
Willow finishes whatever it is she’s telling Marcus and steps away. For a moment, Marcus is very still; then he reaches to the side table and grabs his laptop. I glance at Willow, confused, but her face gives nothing away. We all drift in closer by mutual agreement, fearful silence thick in the air. Brekken ends up next to me, his arm pressed against mine. I can feel the tension in him.
Marcus pulls a news site up on his laptop and then props it open on the coffee table; we all squeeze onto the couch to watch as the opening music of Good Morning Colorado plays. Then an image of Sterling Correctional appears.
SCF. The building I’ve walked into so many times I could do it in my sleep.
It fills the TV screen, huge against a light gray sky. There’s a ragged hole in the brick wall on one side, and smoke pours from it, obscuring the building and making it only an outline, then revealing it again. Dark smoke, thick and strange, moving slower than it seems like smoke is supposed to move.
A headline scrolls at the bottom of the screen in screaming capital letters: EXPLOSION AND BREAKOUT AT STERLING CORRECTIONAL FACILITY.
The shot changes to a young woman reporter standing in the familiar parking lot in front of the building. Behind her, I can see that they’ve roped off the prison with yellow crime-scene tape, and policemen move around the perimeter. In this wider shot, I can see that the smoke doesn’t look normal. It rises into the sky in a slender, dark plume, not dissipating as quickly as it should. The smoke is gray with a greenish tint.
“Good morning, Colorado,” the reporter says. “Ella Martinez here at Sterling Correctional Facility, where in the wee hours of the morning an explosion was reported which could be heard for several miles around. Three guards have been taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and one prisoner is missing.”
Without warning, the scene changes, and my stomach drops and my skin contracts. Mom’s face fills the screen. It’s a picture they took of her in court a couple of years ago. Her skin is sallow above the tan jumpsuit collar, her hair long and limp, and her strange eyes lightless. She stares out of the TV at us, not afraid, not defiant, not anything, just empty.
Then her picture shrinks to one corner of the screen, and facts pop up on a blue background. Ella Martinez’s voice floats brightly over it all.
“Inmate Sylvia Morrow was discovered to be missing soon after the explosion, which took out a chunk of the wall of her cell. She has been an inmate here for ten years following the murder of her young son, Nathan, in 2009.”
My eyes burn, and I take a sip of coffee, trying to chase the feeling away. I know, I know that’s not true. Obviously Mom didn’t kill Nahteran. But it still hurts to hear someone say it, especially in such a dispassionate voice. Especially after what happened in Winterkill, the sudden fury in Nahteran’s eyes when I invoked our family.
“Recently, she was put on death row and was scheduled to move to a more secure facility next month,” Ella Martinez goes on.
My stomach somehow sinks even further—I didn’t know that she was changing prisons, even though I saw her a few days ago. She didn’t tell me.
“She is considered a danger to the public, and anyone with information on her whereabouts is asked to call this number …”
A phone number pops up on the screen in large red digits, while my mom’s face hovers in the corner of the screen. I take a long swallow of coffee, realizing Brekken’s eyes are suddenly, for some reason, on me. But now it’s my turn to avoid his gaze, feeling the burn of suppressed tears all down my throat, trying to blink away the water brewing behind my eyes.
The camera follows the column of smoke rising from the prison, trailing it up into the gray sky. The smoke doesn’t look like anything else on Earth. It looks like magic.
Eventually, everyone drifts from the room except for me and my uncle. We stay glued to the news for a while, hanging on the anchor’s every word, but no more information seems to be forthcoming. Ten minutes in, my phone starts blowing up with texts and calls from Dad that I don’t answer. I silence the phone instead. But the messages glare up at me from the screen.
Have u seen news?
U ok????
Plz call me.
I send a quick text back, not wanting to talk to him or anyone right now with the awful churning in my stomach.
I saw. I’m okay. Call you in a few?
Ok. Talk soon!
“The authorities are probably going to want to question us,” Marcus says quietly. He looks pale and shell-shocked, his stress curls rising high. He turns to me. “Maybe you and I should go camp out at the condo for a few days, just in case they
come looking.”
The condo is an empty apartment in a boring one-story complex on the edge of town. It’s Marcus’s legal address, meant to keep the inn off all official paperwork. It’s where he gets his mail and meets up with any visitors he doesn’t fully trust. But I’ve never spent a night there.
“Why?” I hear myself ask. “We don’t know anything.”
“Just in case …”
The unspoken end of the sentence hangs in the air between us. Just in case what? Mom shows up here at Havenfall?
I should be happy. She was sitting on death row for a crime she didn’t commit, and now she’s out. I should be cheering that she’s made a clean break, wherever she is. How or why shouldn’t matter. But the image of the smoke on the TV screen sticks in my head. The destruction, the hole in the prison wall. Something isn’t adding up. The Mom I know isn’t capable of that kind of destruction. She isn’t even interested in being free.
“I’m going to go make some calls,” Marcus says, and turns to go.
“Marcus,” I start, reaching out to snag my uncle’s arm.
He turns back with a question on his face.
“You don’t know anything about this, do you?” I ask.
I don’t know what I want the answer to be. If it’s yes, it means he’s kept more secrets from me, when I thought we were done with secrets. But it also means that at least someone is in charge here. Someone has answers.
“Trust me,” he whispers, his eyes drooping. “I wish I did.” He doesn’t flinch or look hurt. He just looks at me and shakes his head. “No, Maddie,” he says, and his voice is soft but strong. “I won’t lie to you again. I promise.”
Later, I call Dad.
“So,” he says, none of the usual warmth in his voice. He just sounds wrung out. “Your mother.”
“My mother,” I echo because I don’t know what else to say. I fidget with my comforter, tracing over the edges of the diamonds cut from Byrnisian silk and Fiorden velvet.
