Asunder (Incarnate) (23 page)

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.

“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.”

I shook my head and described what I’d seen. No need to go easy on them. I didn’t see how our situation could get any worse.

“Ana!” Stef jabbed a finger toward the archway we’d come from. It was gone. “He locked us in. Now we really can’t get out.”

“We wouldn’t have gotten out anyway!” The constant pulse of the temple made my head throb. “What about that is so confusing? No matter where we are, we’re not leaving. Sam can’t rescue us. Deborl wouldn’t free us if his life depended on it. No one else knows how to use the key. We’re stuck.”

“All right!” Cris rubbed his forehead as though to press a headache into a smaller, more manageable size. “Both of you, please. We need a plan.”

“Like what? Escape?” I scowled and gestured around the room. “The only thing I see is the hole under the altar, and I don’t recommend it.”

“We’re just as bad off as if we’d left,” Stef muttered, just loud enough that it was meant to be heard.

I shook my head. “If we’d left, we would be stuck in a tiny box.”

“You don’t know that. You’re guessing on all of this.” Stef loomed over me. “You’ve been leading us nowhere the whole time, with no idea where you were going or what you wanted to accomplish.”

“At least I was doing something.” My fingernails dug into
my palms, carving crescents into my skin. “You’d have just stayed there all confused. Did you even try to escape Deborl? Or were you too busy being mad because Sam and I didn’t tell you what had been going on?”

“Don’t pretend like you know anything about me or the way I feel.” Her face was pink in the red glow, and I had pushed too hard.

I didn’t care. “I know enough.” She kept antagonizing Sam about his closeness to me, but
she
was the person keeping a stash of his photos and letters. I wanted to hurt her. “I know how you disguise your feelings for Sam. You fooled him, but he’s used to your flirting and never took it seriously. But I know you meant it.”

She stared at me like I’d said she had chicken feet or hands growing from her head, but that was Stef. Pretending even now she didn’t really care.

I knew I shouldn’t, but I said it anyway, my voice low and too calm. “I told him that you love him.”

Her face went blank.

A wiser person would have stopped there, but I went on anyway. “If you were as brave as you claim, you’d have told him lifetimes ago.”

“And I suppose you have? No, that would ruin your tortured newsoul existence.” Her voice grew stronger, angrier. “You can’t let yourself be happy, can you? Well maybe this will fix it: you’re not coming back. There’s no skeleton in
here with your name on it, so when you die, that’s it. Gone. I’ll still love Sam, and thanks for telling him, by the way. Now he’ll have time to figure out a response in our next lives when you’re not here. Are you happy now? You really are as tragic as you think you are, butterfly.”

She might as well have stabbed me; it hurt the same.

There was a whole list of things I shouldn’t do, including asking if she could find his skeleton among all these—I could—and telling her about his reaction when he found out how she felt. But I didn’t do any of them, because it would be cruel and petty. Not that I’d been much above cruel and petty so far, but I didn’t want her to hate me forever. And, romantic feelings aside, she was still Sam’s best friend.

“There’s no point in arguing about it, Stef.” My voice was more level than it had ever been, but surely she could hear the strain. “Because we’re trapped. We’re never leaving this room.”

AFTER STARTLING STEF and Cris into silence, I marched over to Meuric’s skeleton and kicked the skull.

Whatever magic had been holding it together must have failed when the shackles came off. The skull skittered across the floor and dropped into the pit beneath the table.

I kicked an arm, and several bones cracked against one another, the floor, and a table leg. Pieces of Meuric dropped out of sight, making no sound on their way down. If they ever reached an end, I didn’t hear the clatter.

Still angry, I kicked his ribs, hips. Smaller bones turned to powder as my boot hit them. “I hate you,” I hissed, as the last of Meuric vanished.

Stepping around the dust, I almost felt bad for kicking Meuric down a pit again.

“Okay,” I whispered to myself, and knelt by the skeleton now caught in shackles. Deborl. I hated him, too. More than I hated Meuric. The hate twisted inside me like a snake, uncomfortable, but clean and sharp and determined.

I reached for the tarnished silver cuff to search for a lock. If Janan didn’t have a Hallow, maybe he couldn’t ascend on Soul Night. It would make being trapped in here worth it, if I could save everyone else from the fate hurtling toward them.

As I touched the shackle, electricity zapped through me. I screamed, and lost feeling in my right side. My arm hung uselessly.

“Ana?” Cris hurried toward me, looking around for whatever had attacked me.

I shook away the buzzing in my head. “Don’t touch the chains.”

He sat with me until feeling in my fingers returned, and then, more carefully, I climbed onto the table and tried to kick Janan off.

He might have been a human-shaped lump of silver himself. He didn’t move. Cris even joined me, but no matter what we tried, we couldn’t budge him.

The knife, however, did come away when we worked together. Cris pried Janan’s grip off the handle just enough so I could slip it out. The blade was silver at the base, but
the end looked as though it had been dipped in liquid gold. Janan’s hands returned to their original position, but now they held only a memory of the knife.

I didn’t have anything to do with it, though, so I left it on the table.

“You will die!” shouted the walls, incorporeal Janan.

“Why don’t you lick my shoe?” I propped my boot on dead-Janan’s face. “You won’t do anything to us. Not here.”

Red light swirled around the chamber, and Janan’s screams resounded through the room as he called me names I’d never imagined could be put together like that.

But he was without substance, and we were already trapped.

“You’re just a human, like us!” Not quite true—he was powerful, incorporeal, and consumed and reincarnated souls—but he’d started out human. Reminding him of that was satisfying. “Just a short human!”

“Is that your plan?” Stef asked when the screams faded. “Annoy him until he kicks us out?”

“No. I’m working on a better one.” I flashed a tight, fake smile. “This is just the beginning.” I kicked dead-Janan’s head, but numbness rushed through my toes as though I’d kicked a block of ice.

I hopped off the table and marched around the perimeter of the room.

A few minutes or an hour later, Cris fell into step beside
me and I said, “If you’re here to chastise me for being mean to Stef, I don’t want to hear it.” I twisted my scarf in my hands, hating my obvious fidget, but I couldn’t stay still.

“No, I thought you’d probably done enough of that yourself.”

“Mmm.” Noncommittal. I’d picked it up from Sam, and it seemed to work for whatever the other person wanted to hear.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to get out of here,” I said. The archway was still missing, and there weren’t any signs. No words or pictures to indicate what we should do next. “No key means we can’t control the walls. We can’t make doors or do anything useful. The good news is we won’t get hungry or thirsty, as long as we don’t think too hard about it.”

“Great, thanks. Deborl didn’t feed us before he trapped us. Do you have any idea how long it’s been?”

“A day? A week? Five minutes?” I shrugged. “Time passes differently here, and not even at a consistent rate.”

Moriah had told me time mostly mattered to the person measuring it, which had made me laugh because she built clocks. SEDs and clocks didn’t work in here, but now I was extra aware of every second and how they carried me closer to my end.

“So what we need is someone who can make doors.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Well, yes. Pretty much.”

“Stef?” He waved in her direction. “You don’t happen to have anything on you that would make a door in the wall, do you?”

Her glower was dragon acid. “Go roll around in rosebushes, Cris.”

“I don’t think she appreciates your humor,” I muttered. As if I could blame her. At this rate, we’d be out of Janan’s way in a few days because we’d have killed one another. Well, Stef would kill me, then Cris, and then she’d be here all by herself. And I wouldn’t feel bad for her.

“Few really do.” He kept pace with me easily. “Why are you walking?”

“It feels like if I stop, then I give up. But I don’t know what to do.” My throat tightened with the confession. He was going to think I was weak, just like Stef did.

“Hey.” He tugged my arm. I stumbled and he caught me, one hand on my back. “Sorry. Hey.” He faced me, expression serious. “We’re going to find a way out, okay? And then you’ll rescue Sam from the angry mob, reclaim your books, and find a way to stop Janan from ascending.”

“So while I do all these miracles, you’ll be where?” My whole body ached, and I really wanted to lose myself in the piano, but it was gone. Smashed. And my flute? Sarit had put it in the Councilhouse, but they might have found it.

Cris said, “I’ve been remembering, too.”

I waited.

“Being here has made me remember a lot of things we’re not supposed to know. The memories are so old they feel like dreams or someone else’s life, but I know they’re real.” He looked more serious than I’d ever seen him. No hint of a smile, no friendly stance. He looked sad. “I remember what Janan said he was going to do.”

“What is that?” I whispered.

“He wants to be immortal.”

“But—”

“
True
immortality. Not like we are, trapped in an endless cycle of birth and death and rebirth. And not like what he is now, trapped in these walls. Before, when he was still human, there was
nothing
in this tower. No rooms or light or shifting walls. It was meant to be a prison.”

Even before he started switching old and newsouls, he’d been imprisoned? “Why was he here? Who put him here?” Whatever he’d done, it must have been terrible, and as far as I could see, he was only getting worse.

“Before all this”—Cris gestured around—“Janan took his best warriors on a quest for immortality. People were so afraid of everything, like dragons and centaurs and trolls—”

“And sylph?”

Cris cocked his head. “No, we hadn’t seen sylph yet. Only after.”

“Okay.” That was odd, though. “Go on.”

“Well, he said he discovered the secret to immortality, but
that phoenixes were jealous: they didn’t want anyone else to know their secret. They made this prison—and prisons all over the world—and locked Janan and his warriors away, one in each tower so they’d never band together again.”

“Phoenixes.” I’d known they were real, but I’d never heard of them making prisons or really
doing
much besides flying around, burning up, and rising from their own ashes. Well, Meuric had said a phoenix cursed the sylph, but Meuric had been crazy. Maybe. “The other prisons were towers, like this one? With a wall around?”

“I never saw them, but I think so. I think when we came to rescue Janan from his prison, it was just a tower and a wall.”

“Like the one you saw in the jungle.”

He nodded.

And like the one Sam had seen in the north, I guessed. But none of those towers had anything like Janan. If they did, they wouldn’t have been affected by weather and life. So what had happened to those prisons and prisoners?

Cris seemed somewhen else, heavy with his memories. “We all went to rescue Janan, but instead, he said the secret to immortality meant he had to stay in the prison—for a while. He said phoenixes had made this tower, so it was already infused with their magic. And the rest of us were to wait for his success and return.” Cris gazed around the red-lit chamber. “Can you imagine five thousand years existing only in stone, just waiting?”

“He’s
eating newsouls
.” I clenched my jaw. “I’m having trouble sympathizing with him.”

“I didn’t mean—” Cris lowered his eyes. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, five thousand years. That’s a long time.”

So long I could hardly imagine it. “I shouldn’t have snapped. I’m just exhausted.”

“I understand.” Cris flashed a pale smile. “Janan shed his mortality, but souls still need something to contain them.”

What did that mean for sylph, then? It seemed hard to believe that anything without a soul could love music as much as they seemed to.

“All this time, he’s been waiting, growing, gaining power. If he ascends on Soul Night and becomes truly immortal, no need to consume newsouls to survive, then he won’t need to reincarnate us.”

“What about the Hallow? Meuric said if he had the key, he would live.”

Cris smiled grimly, voice low and filled with hurt. “Why should Janan bother? We’ll be unnecessary, even Meuric and Deborl. With Janan free of the temple, there will be no need for someone to guard the key.”

The key. Another thousand questions revolved around that little box. Where had it come from? “The night of Templedark, Meuric said that birth isn’t pretty. It’s painful.”

“Add the Range caldera to that,” Cris said, “and you
have—nothing. When it erupts, there will be nothing left but Janan.”

I wanted to be sick. I hadn’t even considered the caldera, but the earthquake swarms, the lake level…

The caldera beneath Range wasn’t just moving through one of its natural cycles. No, it was getting ready to erupt. There
should
have been lots of warning. There
should
have been years of evidence beforehand. But nothing about Janan was natural; the unrest in the caldera
must
have been his doing.

When Range erupted, the devastation would be complete. The ground would be ripped apart. Lava would pour across the forest, killing everything in its path. Ash would fill the air, blocking the sun. The world’s temperature would drop dramatically.

Not that anyone would be around to see that happen.

Heart—even Range—would be a hole in the ground.

Cris shoved his hands in his pockets, frowning at nothing. “Soul Night is still months away. There’s still time to stop him if you can escape.”

“By ‘you’ I assume you mean ‘we.’”

“No, I mean you. And Stef if she’d like to escape as well.”

From the other side of the room, Stef called, “What?” and stood. “You thought of a way out?”

Cris nodded as she rounded the stone table. “Ana, I have to confess something first.” His tone made me shiver.

“What?”

“Please understand the last thing I want to do is hurt you, but”—he glanced at Stef, who didn’t react—“I think you need to know.”

I waited.

“Janan is using us, yes, switching oldsouls and newsouls to feed himself. But he didn’t deceive us or trap us, in spite of these chains. We were told he’d gain knowledge and power to protect us when he returned, truly immortal. All we had to do was bind ourselves to him and he’d do the rest. We were afraid of the world, and of him, so we said yes.” Cris gestured around the room. “We all made the agreement to be bound. We chose to be reincarnated.”

It must have seemed like such an easy decision; after all, who wanted to die when you could live forever? “You didn’t know about the newsouls?” Surely they hadn’t known. Sam had been horrified when he learned the truth, and Stef and Cris were the same. The people I knew would never make that trade.

“Understand that we were young,” he whispered, his face ashen. “We were young and in a dangerous land that spat boiling water and mud. There were dragons and centaurs, trolls and rocs, plus the regular animals that live in Range. Half our number had already been killed on the journey here. We were—still are—terrified of death.”

Stef dropped her gaze. “It was selfish and desperate,
but those were wilder times.”

“No.” I spoke as if denying it would change anything.

My heart beat itself into knots. I wanted to say I’d never make that decision, but how I felt now—knowing that no matter what I did, my life would be short—I might accept such a bargain. One more life with Sam, with music, with everything I ever wanted. All it would cost was someone who’d never know what they missed.

This would have been so much easier if I could have hated everyone for what they’d done.

Cris closed his eyes. “I don’t want to think about how many souls that is, especially considering how frequently some people die.”

“Hundreds of millions of newsouls.” Stef’s voice turned raspy. “I’m so sorry, Ana.”

I was sick and aching. Sam had made the deal, too. Sam who loved me.

It stabbed like betrayal no matter how I reminded myself it was so long ago. My Sam. My friend Sarit. Lidea, who loved Anid so much. Geral, who thought Ariana was the most precious creature. All my friends. Everyone I’d ever trusted.

They’d all made the deal.

The people of Heart were so terrified of newsouls replacing them, but in truth, they’d been replacing newsouls for five thousand years.

A sob choked out, but I wiped my cheeks and tried to put
the grief and anger aside. I was too worn to deal with it now. “Okay. So what’s your plan? How does remembering how Janan started all this help?”

Cris was quiet for so long I thought he didn’t really have a plan. “Someone needs to be able to open a door. I’ll do it.”

“Without the key?”

He closed his eyes. “
A
key. Not
the
key.”

It took me a minute to follow. “No. You can’t.”