‘But Arinta—’
‘Is a story! And you’re not her!’
Her words hurt but I wasn’t about to let her see that. ‘I don’t think I’m—’
‘If you’re telling me that is the way out, I’m going. And you’re coming with me.’
‘You can’t tell me what to do!’
‘I’m older than you.’
‘I don’t care.’ I snatched the wood-light from her. ‘I’m going without you.’ Not looking at Lupe I strode towards the passage shimmering with heat.
A sudden pulse shook the ground beneath me. I stumbled and almost fell. Lupe had been brought to her knees.
Another, more violent shudder ran through my body. A single crystal fell from the cave ceiling high above, and shattered between us.
We locked eyes for a moment.
Then the world caved in.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
The noise was tremendous, like ten thunderstorms and fifty fireworks and a hundred Tibicenas jumbled together.
I ran to the side of the cave, pressing my palms to my ears, but the sound tore through me, forcing me to the ground as if under a giant thumb. I curled up, teeth chattering, head thumping. The ground roiled like the sea, and I waited for the rock to crush us, or to open up beneath me…
It did not. With a final smatter of pebbles, the tremors stopped. I opened my eyes, squinting through rock dust. Smashed boulders and crystals lay piled the full length of the cave, dividing it in two.
Lupe was nowhere to be seen. I shouted her name but only an echo came back. I stood up and searched for a way past or over the rock wall, but the boulders were packed solid and my arms shook as I tried to climb them. There was no way out, except the tunnel behind me – the one that led to Yote.
I cowered against the hot wall of the cave. Tiredness covered me like a cloud. I wrapped my arms around my knees, and sobbed.
The cries came echoing back, sounding distant and detached. Eventually I stopped, so I didn’t have to listen to myself. But the distant sobbing did not stop. As I listened I thought I could make out a word…
Is … ella. Isa …
It was my name. And that voice – it was Lupe!
I ran my hand over the wall, and found a crack splitting its curved side. I followed it as far as I could reach. Then I pressed my mouth to it and said, ‘Lupe?’
I placed my ear back over the crack. Nothing. Even the crying had stopped. Perhaps I had imagined it?
Then a voice, faint and tentative, spoke my name.
Heart singing, I spoke into the same place, ‘Find the crack. Speak into it.’
I waited impatiently, ear against the rock, and then Lupe’s voice came, as clearly as if she were standing beside me.
‘Isabella? Are you there? What’s happening?’
Like the crystals, it felt as if Gabo was in this somehow. Chest tight, I replied, ‘I’m here. I think it’s a voice line.’
‘A voice line?’
‘Gabo and I had one, in our room. They carry your voice. Something to do with the curve of the cave.’
‘What happened?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I lied, eyes fixed on the tunnel, certain I knew.
‘What now? I’ve tried climbing over the rockfall.’
‘Me too. What about the tunnel to the exit?’
‘Blocked.’
Clearing my throat, I tried to make my voice strong and calm. ‘The way we came into the cave, is it clear?’
The sound of her breathing vanished, and I pictured her moving across the cave to check. A few moments later, her voice trickled into my ear again. ‘It’s completely blocked. There’s a gap near the top, on the side. I think I could move some…’ She sounded exhausted.
I steeled myself, but Lupe spoke before I could.
‘I will try. Then get you across. We’ll find a different way, take one of the other paths—’
‘Lupe—’
‘And then we can get out of here, go home. I’ll start now.’
‘Lupe, it won’t work. I – I think you should go.’
She talked over me, faster and louder, her voice thick.
‘I think I can do it.’
‘It’s all right, Lupe.’
‘No, I will, I just need to rest my arms …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Yes, you should rest. And then you should go back.’
‘I’m not going anywhere!’ Anger flared in Lupe’s tone. ‘And you need to promise me the same.’
The low tunnel was emanating heat. I had already decided what I was going to do. I had decided the moment I saw it. So I lied, yet again. ‘I won’t go anywhere.’
‘Good,’ she said. Then, in a more authoritative voice, as if I hadn’t already suggested it, ‘I think we should rest now. Are you going to sleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isa?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you going to stay there, near the voice line I mean?’
‘Yes.’
Her fear made things easier and harder at the same time. I lay down, head twisted awkwardly to stay near the voice line, and waited for Lupe to fall asleep.
My stomach rumbled loudly. I ran a hand over it, feeling the hard lines of my ribs, remembering days when I’d frown at our simple meals of bread and whatever fish Da had managed to buy at the market, asking why we didn’t eat like people did in his stories of bygone feasts. A meal like that would be a feast to me now.
One of my favourite tales was about the six villages of Joya coming together in Gromera to celebrate the island’s six-hundredth year of peace. This was in the old days, Da said in his storytelling voice, even before Arinta. People brought wild boar and roots cooked with ground chillies and vinegar, dates in spun-sugar baskets, palm-sized oysters in pearly shells, crabs and lobsters boiled and served heaped with lemon-scented butter, an octopus the length of a man, shoaled in samphire and salt …
My stomach rumbled again. Lupe’s light snores slid down the voice line, pulling me out of the feast and into the dark. I pushed myself to my feet. My head spun and pins and needles tingled up and down my fingers. Swallowing back the sick feeling, I walked five short paces to the low tunnel mouth. I squeezed my eyes shut and let the heat press on my lids.
I stepped forward.
CHAPTER
TWENTY~ONE
This tunnel was different.
The rock seemed the same kind as in the rest of the maze, but the air was thick with a strange fizz of energy. It sparked up through my feet and made them tingle, as if I walked on a bed of upturned pins, not stone.
The noise grew threatening as I followed the path, the channel narrowing. A now-familiar sensation of claustrophobia began to cloud my mind. I would have given all the stories in the world for one breath of cool, clean air. Before all this, I didn’t think I was afraid of anything. Now the dark was only one fear on a long list.
The way the tunnel continued to turn without spitting me back out where I began could only mean that it was coiling, like a shell. The ceiling got lower and lower, until I was forced on to my hands and knees.
Then the sparks started.
At first they were tiny, but as I followed the tightening coils, gaps opened up in the floor of the tunnel, blazing with heat. I put the wood-light in my belt so I could pull myself forward faster. Sparks flew through the cracks, occasionally landing on my clothes. A small flame caught on my sleeve. I fumbled for the water flask and poured a few drops over it.
A wonderful coolness rushed over my skin. Thin bands of blue danced across the fabric where the liquid had landed. I knew it was not normal water – the map’s transformation had proved that – but this was something else. I looked at the flask, shaking it slightly. It sloshed, nearly full.
Arinta entered through a tunnel behind a waterfall, drenching herself in the water to protect herself against the flames.
I poured a small amount on to my arm, waited for the blue to spread, and held it out to one of the flames.
It licked at my skin harmlessly as a breeze. I crouched and carefully rubbed more water over my skin and clothes, until only parts of my back were left unprotected. When I continued it was as if I was doused in ice.
Da once told me about an iceberg that drifted down from the Frozen Circle when he was six, two decades before the Governor arrived. It came out of the Joyan night like a ghost ship, bumping into Gromera’s bay with such force that it gouged a piece of land right out of the earth. It was why Da became fascinated with seeing new places, and with charting them. Because of the ice, he was a cartographer. It’s odd how things are connected. He always said that. Da did not believe in fate but in each decision affecting the next, like a shout starting a landslide.
How many connections had brought me here? The possibilities made my head spin as the tunnel got lower, the cracks in the floor wider. My hip bones scraped painfully along the uneven surface, knees chafing as the space got smaller and smaller, closing around me…
Soon the tunnel was sloping downwards at an impossible angle, and the weight of my body dragged me forward faster than my arms could brace against the sides. The thought came too late that I should have gone feet first. I tried to wriggle around, but could not fold myself without getting stuck.
As I tried to manoeuvre back again my palm hit a loose rock. It was too late to find something solid to hold, though I tried, nails scrabbling for a crack, anything to stop me falling. Finally I managed to wedge my bare foot into a crack, wrenching my ankle. Something gave in the soft pad of my foot and I bit my lip until the throb eased.
Ahead of me the tunnel fell away in an almost vertical slope. I brought my knees up to my chest to lodge myself in place, and craned my neck. At the bottom, it opened out – on to what I could not see – but smoke was billowing up, starting to fill the tunnel. I coughed as a rumbling noise funnelled up with greater ferocity than ever before.
I slip-skidded down to the opening, and gasped, drawing acrid smoke into my lungs. Below me, a gigantic, fiery mouth gaped at the centre of a pit, opening and closing, spitting out molten rock. A fire pit. Ledges ringed the walls, flickering with heat that struck me like a blow.
The skin on my cheeks was blistering, and my insides felt as raw as my skin. My head swam and I heaved myself backwards, cramming my legs across the tunnel to keep from falling, coughing and shaking uncontrollably.
Though it felt like for ever, it could not have been more than a matter of minutes since leaving Lupe in the cave. Yet here I was, wedged inside the very rock of Yote’s lair. Like Arinta, a thousand years before.
I thought of all the people I had not been able to say goodbye to. Da, in the thick dark of the Dédalo. Pablo at the riverbank. Lupe, sleeping trustingly above. What would happen to her? Would she survive this?
Enough. I had to get closer to Yote. I may not be Arinta, but I had to try to save Joya.
I lowered myself carefully, so my legs dangled down to the ledge below. It was a long drop. I was about to let go when the shaking started again. But it was not the same as the tremors in the crystal cave or the Tibicenas running. This was deeper, more menacing even than a Tibicena’s howl. Just as I tried to pull myself back, my hands slipped, sending me hurtling, feet-first, into the abyss.
My hips hit a ledge with a crunch, breaking my momentum, and I found myself hanging from my forearms. Legs swinging uselessly, kicking out over a searing nothingness, my body shook worse than ever. I clawed at the gritted rock, tearing my nails. It was no use. I did not have the strength to lever myself up.
But now it came to me, strong as a voice in my ear: I did not want to die.
Lupe was right. I was not Arinta. I was not special. I wished Lupe were here now, pulling me up with her long arms. But she was asleep, still trusting my lies. And now I could not even do what I came here to do. I could not save her, nor Da, nor Joya.
My grip gave way. As the ledge shuddered with another violent shake, I fell.
I landed hard on the ledge below, breath knocked viciously from my lungs. My back felt broken in two, white-hot pain sizzling across my legs and the nape of my neck. For a moment – maybe a minute, maybe more – I could not move. My body was full of molten sand, the ground was not beneath me, though I could feel it solidly there.
Liquid blackness behind my eyes, in my ears. Quiet, at last.
Then, bright stars pricked the air as the rumbling tremors grew. I could feel them, a persistent ripple moving as though the earth itself were water, rolling waves around me. I could feel them. I was sure. But still there was nothing beneath me, as if I was hovering. Part of my brain was all pain, all noise; the other was nothing, nowhere, not there.
Something was very wrong. Though I was sure I could not, I sat up – didn’t I? – I peeled away, coming free, my body dropping behind me like a cloak. I did not look back at it, slack on the ledge. I felt it left there, and the me now crawling to the edge felt rock gritting my knees as I peered over.
Yote hung before me.
He was not the writhing mass of smoke and molten rock that had filled the pit, but a form that was close to human, only huge, emerging from a column of fire that raged beneath his six limbs, spreading from a torso that swirled with ash clouds.
He spoke, in a voice that brought smoke rushing up from beneath him and sent it tumbling around until I choked. The voice rattled and rasped, like the death throes of a Tibicena. But inside me, the me kneeling on the edge of the ledge, a point of pressure opened up near my eye, and from this place I felt his words burrow into my brain.
What do you want?
To stop you, as Arinta did.
My voice was lost, fluttering desperately from one self to another, caught between throats. I was on my knees, I was on my back. But Yote seemed to hear me. Again pressure pinched my skull.
You’re too late.
Fingers closed on my shoulders. I shut my eyes, ready to fall.
CHAPTER
TWENTY~TWO
‘What are you doing?’
I was rising, my body pulled upwards.
‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’
It was Lupe, shouting at me, dragging me, my arm across her shoulders as heat sent the air roiling around us. Cracks were opening in the walls and she squeezed us through, my head knocking on the rock.
Now I could feel the pain, all of it, through my back and shoulders, cutting across my legs, tearing at my head. It did not matter that Ma’s map of the Forgotten Territories lay in shreds in my pocket. It was like carrying a map of the journey on my skin, each scrape a path that drew us further on, each bruise a reminder. And Yote’s words, burnt into my brain, a line of white-hot beads threaded deep inside.
You’re too late.
The ground gave an enormous wrench, and I felt Lupe carrying us forward even as a chasm opened beneath her feet. We curled ourselves into a tight tangle of limbs, and dropped like stones.
I wished for the end to be quick, to smash us against rock, or into fire. But instead we clattered painfully downwards. The labyrinth would not release us. Yote wanted us in the depths of his maze, where no light beyond his could reach.
The rocks grew smooth under my back. A roaring sound filled my ears, like water and fire and wind all mixed up together. But the shaking had stopped. I stopped rolling.
I turned on to my side so I could see Lupe, my head spinning, the wood-light jutting painfully into my hip. We seemed to be in another cave, but this one stretched high, the ceiling out of sight.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m getting used to falling down things.’ Her face was pale. ‘I wish the ground would stop moving.’
‘How did you get to me?’
‘I shifted the rocks.’ I noticed her hands were covered in cuts, her fingernails shredded, her thin legs scraped. How had she carried me?
‘Isa, what happened back there? I thought you were dead.’
‘So did I,’ I joked, but I could not tell her about the peeling away, the two selves, spea
king to Yote. She would not believe me. I did not know if I believed myself. ‘I think I must have fainted—’
But I was saved from coming up with an explanation, because Lupe was no longer paying attention. Her eyes were fixed behind me. ‘Isa, turn around.’
She looked as she had in the crystal cave. I followed her gaze, and felt my jaw drop.
Behind me, inches away, a black fire was cascading. A waterfall, a firefall, held in place by an invisible barrier. But the fire was not only travelling down. It was also pushing upwards, outwards, swirling this way and that. As if we had fallen beneath the sea, were watching it churn through glass.
Glass. I crawled forward.
‘No!’ Lupe shouted. ‘What are you doing?’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Watch.’
I pressed the wood-light slowly into the black fire. Lupe gasped as the surface gave slightly, like the skin on milk. Then she pulled herself forward, so that we lay side by side on our bellies. ‘This is incredible! What is this stuff?’
‘It’s glass,’ I replied.
‘Glass?’ She frowned. ‘Like the windows in my house?’
‘Yes.’
‘But how is it here?’
That roaring sound, the sound like the sea.
‘It’s molten sand. Da—’
‘Da told you, of course, but how does it work?’
‘It’s sand. We must be under a beach. When you melt it, it forms glass. I’m not sure how exactly. This is black because of the bits of shell in the sand.’
‘Isn’t sand always bits of shell?’
‘And other things, like crystals.’ I frowned at her. ‘I thought you wanted me to tell you.’
‘I do.’
‘Da said that if you looked at glass close up, it would look like everything it’s made of, melted together. Sand, too. Sand would look like tiny shells.’
‘How does he know?’
I flushed. ‘He’s just guessing. But it would make sense.’
I waited for her to mock me, but she only said, ‘I’d like to see sand close up.’
We watched the fire churn, silent a while. Then Lupe asked, ‘Does glass melt, then?’
The Girl of Ink & Stars Page 13
