I tripped over a cloth. My flashlight beam sliced through the darkness and lit up Guyer’s black cloak. The glyphs along the trim gave me pause. I knew how expensive it was, and seeing it in the dirt was a reminder of how much Guyer had put on the line for me. The least I could do was pick the damned thing up.
“Get him out of here,” I said. “I’m right behind you.”
I stooped, gathering the cloak in my arms. Guyer and Jax were not more than three paces ahead of me, and I could catch up with them easily. But as I grasped the cloak, concealed shards of glass sliced into my left hand. A tingle danced over my palm and up my arm, a charge of energy that I recognized immediately. In the struggle and darkness, Guyer’s vial of next gen manna had shattered, and now the liquid I couldn’t seem to escape seeped into my bloodstream.
I realized I’d slowed, lagging behind Gellica and Jax. It didn’t matter. They were only a half-dozen paces away. I could still catch up.
But the sound of a sigh brought me to a full stop. It was the exact sound my old man used to make as he slipped into his easy chair and settled in for a night of cheap beer and reruns.
To my left, the red light was back, cresting like whale spout from the newly hewn shaft in the middle of the room.
“There is no way in Hells,” I muttered, and stumbled after my friends, away from whatever was in that hole.
It wasn’t going to let me get away that easily.
The ground trembled, and I fell, knees striking the rock-strewn ground. The cut in my hand throbbed as if infected, and I was filled with buzzing rage. Where was Jax? Where were Guyer and Gellica? They’d left me there, abandoned me to rot in that pit. Their betrayal pierced me to my core, and I wanted to shake them, to make them understand how they’d hurt me. If I could just get my hands around their throats, pin them down and beat their weak skulls against the rocks, then they’d know how I was the real victim.
I threw my head back and screamed my rage, but even in the full grip of my anger, I knew it wasn’t right—the rage I felt wasn’t mine. It was real, but it wasn’t true.
I staggered to my feet, took three stumbling strides to the lip of the red-lit hole, and screamed into it.
“Get out of my head!”
The light in the pit shifted, from red to a shade I didn’t recognize. A moment later I saw something else. It was fuzzy and unclear, the way the manna-laced glyphs on Guyer’s cloak defied focus. Dirt slid down my forehead, falling into my right eye. I blinked, and the shape of the thing transformed, becoming sharp angles and crisp lines.
I pawed at my eye, wiping the dirt away. The thing returned to its nebulous state. I covered my right eye with my hand, and immediately I saw the angles and lines return. I switched my hand to my left eye, and saw delicate swoops and spirals, pulsing and spinning at countless different rates. I dropped my hand, and both eyes only saw the fuzzy, furry cloud in the center.
And then it changed.
It was a woman, belly swollen with life. It was a Barekusu guide, shaven and abandoned on the side of the road, then a road-kill ice hare crushed and forgotten, belly swollen with the gases of decay. It was an incomprehensible question whose truth I could feel deep in my bones. It was a fungus blooming from a discarded rind, its freshly birthed spores set free to ride the breeze and weave in the winds, pulled into a loose figure eight before landing on the entwined hands of a Mollenkampi couple, their foreheads touching, whispering multitoned words of love as remnants of their meal rotted in their teeth and squeezed through their stomachs. Death for life, life to death in an eternal prison that meant freedom and I was shouting, screaming words I didn’t know, wishing the thing would let me go, let me go, let me go.
I managed to push myself backward, or pull myself forward. It was impossible to say for certain. Because all I could look at was the thing in the hole below, and the incessant whirl of transformations that reduced the warped bodies of murder victims into dull echoes by comparison. It shifted again, a sudden flurry of activity at its fringes, like fur suspended in air, each strand wiggling in a separate direction yet somehow all pointing at me, tracking me like the multifaceted eyes of an insect.
“Car-ter.” A singsong whisper.
My head throbbed like no hangover I’d ever had. The voice pinched my sinuses and made my teeth ache, but I couldn’t turn away. I blinked, realizing that tears were rolling down my cheeks even as thicker drops hit my lips, bringing the tang of copper. My nose had started to bleed.
I took an unsteady step backward, waving a hand to catch my balance. I struck the thread that led down to the boulder sitting somewhere in the shaft, no doubt being devoured by manna rot.
I blinked, and the shape pulsed inward-up and vibrated faster. The buzzing got louder, the invisible barber now forcing the shears inside my ear, shaving thoughts off my brain and letting the clippings fall to the rough rock floor. I reached up, covering my face with Guyer’s cloak. Near the strand that led to the hole were the faintest threads of the spell meant to cause the collapse on the surface.
“Carter!” A human voice caught my ear. Harris’s voice. I turned, my hands still caught up in the threads tied to the cracked ceiling, a web of destruction I’d helped prevent from collapse. Harris was closer, flashlight illuminating
