flesh. As the minutes ticked past he made a growling sound. ‘Why don’t you just burn ’em off?’
‘Same reason you can’t. I’m guessing you’ve tried.’
Cinder was silent. ‘I can’t break the locks,’ I said. ‘But I can shut down the receptor so it can’t receive Onyx’s signal. He won’t be able to tell they’re sabotaged until he tries to zap you.’
‘That’ll work?’ Cinder said suspiciously.
Without looking away, I held up my right wrist, which still held Onyx’s bracelet. ‘It worked for me.’
Cinder shut up then, and the three of us stood there quietly. After all our history, it was a strange feeling to have them just wait there. At last, it was finished. I stepped back. ‘Done.’
Cinder and Rachel looked at their bracelets. ‘Doesn’t look different,’ Cinder said.
‘It’s different,’ I said.
‘I believe you,’ Rachel said. She looked at me. ‘So.’
‘So,’ I said.
The moment stretched out, silent, tense. I stood watching the pair of them, looking at the two possible futures, wondering which one they were going to choose.
‘Don’t get in our way,’ Rachel said at last. She turned and walked towards the nearest exit. Cinder gave me a final scowl and followed her.
As their footsteps faded away into the distance, I let out a long breath and let my shoulders slump. I stood still for a moment, alone with my thoughts, then shook myself and looked across at the secret door. ‘Guys? You can come out.’
Cautiously, Sonder and then Luna emerged. Sonder looked around. ‘Where did they go?’
‘Further in,’ I said. Suddenly I felt very tired.
‘Oh,’ Sonder said, and scratched his head. ‘Well … I guess that’s better.’ He walked forward, rummaging in his bag. ‘You know, I think I’ve seen this layout before …’
Luna waited for Sonder to get out of earshot, then looked at me. ‘We’re going to run into them again,’ she said at last.
I didn’t answer. I led Luna and Sonder into the corridor Rachel and Cinder hadn’t taken, and together we headed deeper.
13
The hands on my watch pointed to 2.13 a.m. As I stared, they blurred and seemed to swim until I was no longer sure what I was looking at. I forced my eyes to focus, knowing I couldn’t afford to sleep.
We’d been inside the tomb for four hours. The closer we spiralled in towards the centre of the facility, the more lethal and hard to bypass the traps and security systems were. Our progress had slowed to a crawl – worse, the number of paths was steadily diminishing, forcing us closer to the others hunting the fateweaver.
Cinder and Rachel were the easiest to spot, and I stayed away from them, not wanting to find out how long our truce would last. More of a concern was Khazad. He had split from the others and was searching the corridors on his own, and in the last hour we’d been forced to hide from him three times. Each time we let him pass, he reappeared again a short while later. I was starting to worry that it wasn’t a coincidence and that he was actively hunting us. I could vaguely feel his presence through the futures of our meetings, somewhere behind us and to the left. Having to stay constantly on the alert was wearing me down.
I shook off my fatigue and looked up at Sonder. ‘Which way?’
Sonder had held up better under the strain than I’d expected, but was looking tired as well. He’d managed to piece together a sketch map in his notebook, extrapolating from the parts of the facility we’d seen and from the designs of other Precursor structures he’d read about. It wasn’t perfect, but it was getting better. ‘Left, I think. It shouldn’t be trapped.’
I glanced ahead through the futures. We were standing at a T-junction. ‘They’re both trapped.’
‘There’s supposed to be a corridor. It might not be easy to open the other end, but … The right way is open, but I think the traps are denser.’
I sighed and slid down against the wall. ‘I need to rest. Try and figure out which path will get us through.’ I closed my eyes and made myself relax.
I’d been sitting only a few moments when a voice penetrated my thoughts. ‘Alex?’
I opened my eyes to see Luna looking at me. She was crouching in the room’s far corner, the crystal cube held absent-mindedly in her fingers, as though she’d forgotten about it. Luna had been quiet for the past two hours, her thoughts and manner more distant since the encounter with Cinder and Rachel, and I knew she’d been thinking about it.
When she spoke, though, the subject came as a surprise. ‘These traps and barriers. This isn’t normal, is it?’
I gave Sonder a glance and he shook his head. ‘No. We’ve found defence systems before, but nothing like this.’
‘I’ve been thinking about it too,’ I said. ‘All I can think of is what Abithriax said. Fateweavers were supposed to be very powerful. If what he said was true, his might have been the only one stable enough to be preserved.’
‘Why, though?’
I frowned. ‘Why the traps? To make sure no one could get it.’
Luna shook her head. ‘No, I understand that. I mean, why would they seal it away and not keep it for themselves?’
