“Ev.” I reach out and hold their hand. “We’re walking down a haunted mountain in the dead of the night. There’s nothing that can stop you.”
We step out of the tree cover and onto the barren mountain slope. It looks so different at night. The sunflowers seem to be sleeping, though their yellow leaves still reflect the moonshine. They’re slowly turning east, to where the sun will rise hours from now. Beyond it, the lava bed appears like a black hole on the side of the mountain. It’s hard to tell where the edges are, and to me, it seems it devours all light.
Beyond both, Flagstaff. And north of it, Stardust. The small, suburban community we call home. Where I will happily tell Ever I want to spend the rest of the summer with them, even if it means sitting inside the bookshop when they work until the owners throw me out.
But first, the road stretches out before us. Blocked. Cracked. Broken. Almost three miles to go. It might as well be three marathons. As soon as we leave the tree line behind, I can see the shadows move alongside us. It’s quieter here, and I hate it.
I want to cling to my determination, but shadows crawl up on me, like hands of ice along my spine.
While Ever and I pick up the pace again, Maddy falls back to join us. “Can you keep up? Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “You?”
“We may be the most unlikely people to make this trek in the dark,” she says.
“Someone should tell the Konigs to—” fix their road, I want to say, but the words die in my throat. If we make it out of here in one piece, the Konigs will only be told one thing now, and it won’t be anything about their road.
“I don’t…oh.” The words register with Maddy too. She pulls her eyes back to the road ahead, and a sense of distance washes over her. She pushes her hands deep into her pockets.
She’s in pain, and so am I. With every step, lightning bolts of pain flash through my legs. My shoulders and hands are aching too. All my joints are revolting against me, ready to dislocate at any moment. I’m bursting in slow motion.
When Carter and I talked about the trip to and from the cabin, carrying me down seemed like the worst idea ever. I was wrong.
I try to keep my balance by leaning into my crutches and into Ever. They notice and stick as close to me as possible. I can feel them worry. I can feel them struggle with words. We’re always too aware of each other.
But at the same time, Maddy is drifting, and we’re still breaking.
“Help us,” I whisper. “Don’t let us be afraid either.”
“I don’t know how.” Ever’s breath shakes. But then they clear their throat, and like Maddy did earlier, they find a distraction. “If you were in Gonfalon, what would Feather do, Finn? If he were on the run from an enemy in Yester Tower? On his own, without his friends?”
I almost laugh, because I know what they’re doing. I almost cry, because I know what they’re doing. I almost kiss them, because I know what they’re doing. Still, it takes me a moment to find my voice. “He’d try charging down the mountain first, and if that didn’t work, he’d stick to the shadows.” We’re not the same, he and I. And thankfully, I still have some of my friends with me. “But after all this time and after all this training, he’s still a city boy. He’d probably get eaten by wild boars before he reached the foot of the mountain.”
They punch my arm, and it’s a different kind of pain. One I don’t mind so much. “That’s a terrible plan and I forbid you following it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious,” they say vehemently.
“Me too.”
I know they’re grinding their teeth. Feather’s lack of self-preservation in-game has always been one of the things that annoyed Ever most. It’s why I loved playing it up.
Ever sighs. “So what would Feather really do?”
They’re slowly and successfully distracting me—and hopefully Maddy too. “He’d be a bit more careful. He’d try to remember what—” My throat tightens, but I push through. “What Corrin taught him about surviving. Depending on who he’d lost, on how events unfolded, he’d want revenge. Or he’d want to disappear into the secret side of Gonfalon. The side that Lente knows as well. One that doesn’t play by council rules.”
Maddy glances over her shoulder, her eyebrows almost up in her hairline. “How daring of you.”
“I know my way around,” I counter.
“What would Myrre do then, Mad?” Ever asks, their voice a bit softer, their breathing steadier.
Maddy shakes her head. “I don’t know, honestly. Part of me wants to say she’d give up. I don’t think she’d be able to manage on her own.”
“You can’t,” Ever says with determination. “It’s in the council rules that you can’t give up. You’re forbidden.”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” she protests, but Ever is unbreakable.
“It is as long as I’m game master. For now, these are the rules, even if we leave this game behind on this mountain tonight. Giving up is not allowed.”
Maddy doesn’t answer, not immediately. She keeps walking as quickly as we all can handle, and the landscape around us keeps changing. From sunflowers to lava flows. From dark, to lighter, to dark. The path remains uneven, but our footing is a little steadier.
“Then Myrre would continue running,” Maddy says eventually. “She’d run until she ran into someone who could help her survive everything that’s still to come.”
There’s something to her voice that I can almost place, but not quite.
Ever flinches. “Oh, Maddy…”
I add up the pieces and everything grows cold. “Maddy and I are supposed to be the final victims, aren’t we?”
Ever glances back in the direction of the cabin and with that, the spell has broken once more. “I think so. I mean…it would
