Asunder

Not rising like a phoenix, Meuric had said. Something else. Something sinister.

I pointed at the two on the floor. “Those two are Meuric and Deborl.” I swept my arms around the room. “And the rest of these are you. All of you. Sam, Sarit, Orrin, Whit, Armande, Sine—everyone.”

Cris and Stef gasped.

“What happened here?” It was probably mean of me to ask, since they couldn’t remember. Janan didn’t want them to remember, or know about the other white walls and towers around the world, or consider certain paradoxes enough to know they were ridiculous.

He did something to them every time they were reincarnated, but maybe now that they were inside the temple, memories would return.

Stef focused inward, a line carved between her eyes. “Janan was our leader. He used to be a man. A human.”

I glanced at the body on the table. “Him?”

“Him,” she repeated. “He wasn’t even anything special. He was our leader, but he was just a human.”

How incredible, all this because of one man.

Stef’s jaw muscles clenched, and her knuckles turned white with strain. “Every time I think I have it, it slips away.”

“It’s all right.” I laid my hand on her shoulder. “Just tell me whenever you know something. I won’t forget.”

Sometimes, being new had its advantages.

“You said he was your leader. Just a man.” I spoke as much for their benefit as my own. Maybe it would spark more memories. “Had you discovered Heart yet?”

“No.” Cris frowned. “And we weren’t in tribes across Range like I thought. We were all together. All of us except for Janan. We were going to him.”

“The story I was told was this: no one agrees how you got here, but you lived in different tribes. Then you all discovered Heart and fought over it until you realized it was big enough for everyone. That was the first time you came together, all million of you.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Cris shook his head. “But that’s not right. That’s not what happened. Janan was our leader, but he’d been wrongly imprisoned. Everyone came to free him. The city appeared later.

After…after we did something.”

I motioned to the table. “Somehow he ended up there. And somehow you all ended up sitting around the room with chains connecting you. How?”

“I don’t remember,” Stef whispered. “I know Meuric bound us in the chains, then bound himself beside the altar and told Janan we were ready. I remember white and wind everywhere—and the very next thing is standing just outside the city wall. We all thought we’d just arrived, but no one knew why we’d come.” She gestured around the room. “Whatever happened in here, it tied us to him forever. It changed him, made him both less and more at the same time. It made us reincarnate.”

Unsilence thickened in the moments between her words, and all of us realized the answer to my biggest question.

I wasn’t going to be reincarnated.

Definitely not.

I hadn’t been here five thousand years ago. I didn’t have a skeleton chained to the walls.

When I died, I’d be gone. Gone, and no one would remember me but through pieces of music and the few notebooks I kept.

I wanted to sit, or speak, or breathe, but it seemed ice radiated from the blue rose in my hair, freezing first my thoughts, then every other piece of me. No matter what I did now—whether or not I escaped here, saved newsouls, and stopped Janan—when I died, that was it. No lifetimes with Sam. No helping to rebuild his instruments, no learning how to play them all, no writing music that sounded like snowfall.

My heart shattered, glass on stone.

Then Janan spoke.

28 TRAPPED

“MISTAKE. IT HAS returned.”

Janan’s voice hit me from all directions, huge and deep and overwhelming. I blinked away threatening tears and glanced at the man on the table, but he remained dead.

Despair splintered through me. I was a mistake. Asunder. And after this life I wouldn’t return. I would never be like everyone else.

“You must leave. This place is not for you.” Janan’s words ripped around the room, and red light gathered on the domed ceiling. It brightened, sucking all the crimson from the walls until they glowed hot white.

The presence faded, leaving the red to bleed back into the walls. Everything became how it had been a few minutes ago. Except my new knowledge of my…temporariness.

“Was that Janan?” Stef’s face was pale and drawn as she gazed around. She lowered her voice. “He knows we’re here?”

“He does now.” I hugged myself. “Usually he doesn’t pay attention to me unless I’m fiddling with the key. He can’t touch you—he’s incorporeal—but he can change the walls. Once he locked me in a small room.”

“How did you escape?” Cris asked.

“I threatened to keep pushing buttons on the key.” Deep breaths. In and out. I focused on anything but the idea of dying and never coming back. “I don’t know how it works, but it must make Janan uncomfortable if he didn’t want me poking at it.”

Cris nodded. “I suppose if the walls are his body, it’d be like me making your arms move around for you. A trust you’d only give your Hallow.”

Janan’s voice boomed again, violent as thunder shaking the ground. “You do not belong here!”

I jumped, my bones feeling like they might vibrate out, and tried not to stare at the body on the table.

Or the skeletons along the walls. There wasn’t really a safe place to look.

“Should we go?” Stef asked, once the rumbling died. Her voice trembled. I hated seeing Stef frightened; she was always so confident.

“No. If we leave this room, he’ll trap us somewhere. I don’t have the key. There’s no way I’d be able to get us out.”

“So we stay here?” Cris looked dubious.

“Doesn’t that trap us here instead?” Stef eyed the door like she might run for it.

“I’ve never been here.” I didn’t want to be here now. “Maybe Deborl made a mistake when he left.

Maybe going somewhere in the temple makes it more likely to be available again. All I can tell you is that I’ve been in the temple twice before, and I’ve never seen this room.”

Stef shook her head. “We’re still trapped.”

“Important things happened here. This place holds answers. We won’t find anything in the rest of the temple.”

“I just want to go.” Stef edged toward the archway. “There’s no way out from here, but the rest—”

“There are no exits.” I balled my fists. “I know it’s hard to understand, but there is no way out. I don’t have the key.”

“Sam will free us.” Cris looked hopeful.

“No, he won’t.” The temple had no temperature—not too hot or cold—but chills raced across my body, and I shivered. “He won’t save us, because he won’t be able to. It was a mob out there. I don’t even know if Sam’s okay.” The last words choked me.

Both of them wore pinched expressions, and Cris touched my elbow. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably working out a plan to take the key right now.”