It was all gone.
“No,” I said, stumbling forward in the dark.
It surrounded me once more, the darkness. I whirled around to see pickaxes left over half broken stones piled all around them, carts of stone powder waiting to be carried away and turned into paste. The cave in. I was back at the cave in, back where I started.
“No, no, no,” I muttered, shaking my head. “No.”
I took off running at full speed, adjusting my senses along the way. Hands shaking, fear clawing its way desperately up my throat, I ran recklessly through the tunnel, turning left once more and bolting down the hall toward home. I saw it again, went sprinting toward it, and hurled myself into the light. But it winked out again and I was tumbling end over end back in the darkness, back at the miners’ camp.
“No,” I cried out as I fell to my knees. I pounded the stone below me with my fists until they turned bloody, tears streaming through the dirt on my cheeks. “No, no, no! It isn’t fair. It isn’t right. I was right there. I was so close! I—”
“Adrian,” someone spoke, but I didn't turn away from the dark. I glared into it, chest heaving, jaw trembling, choking on a sob. “Adrian.”
“I saw it!” I screamed, not even sure who I was screaming to, not even sure where I was. I couldn’t be here. Not here. Not again.
“Adrian,” someone said again, more urgently, and then familiar arms wrapped around me and I was shaking within them.
With a great sob, I turned and buried my face into Darius’ shoulder just as Roxy dropped to the ground on the other side to wrap her arms around me as well.
Chapter Thirteen
Dante
“Thieves and liars prosper in this hell of a city. Sanctuary is no longer what its name suggests. It is a paradise for the wicked, a haven for the damned. They cry out to their gods and turn their backs to them in the same breath. The Geist did not abandon us. We abandoned the Geist.”
– High Priest Kleomenes in his State of the Sanctum Address, 1893
Kleio didn't ask me to keep his secret. He didn’t even make a request to keep the knowledge he'd imparted to me to myself. But I did.
Days later, I hadn’t quite come to terms with everything my mentor had told me nor his reasons for doing so. My head was spinning with the understanding that the gods I'd worshiped my whole life weren’t gods at all, that there was something even greater than their wrath to fear, and that this battle between good and evil had been raging for centuries. All while we were hidden safely and ignorantly away in our walled city, fighting over scraps of the world theGeist had left us. There were things in motion, plots and plans I didn’t dare attempt to guess at,that I would never be able to understand.Cosmomight have. Even my mother may have been able to grasp the enormity of all I'd learned. But I was just a young man, raised to be a Victor, trained to be a warrior. I’d never been given the tools to know how to think for myself, how to reason out the political fallout and strategic warfare I now understood we faced. EvenKleiodidn't seem to know which side he fell on, didn't seem to believe good and evil to be as obvious of a choice as he formerly thought. That was evidenced by the fact that he knew about Adrian, what she was capable of, and was still protecting her from them. Why?
And for how long?
Adrian was alive. That was another bombshell which had left me laying in bed, staring up at my ceiling in a daze most nights. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t come to terms with what I'd done. I hadn’t killed her but I thought I had and, what’s more, I'd beenwillingto. I hadn'twantedto, but I'd done it anyway. Even though it hurt. Even though it was a knife driven straight into my own heart, I'd been the one to plunge it in. I let my love bleed out of me and failed her when it mattered most. Just as I'd always done. Just as I was always destined to do.
No matter what might happen, I would never be able to set the guilt of what I'd done aside. What would my mother have said about that? Would she have said it was strength to make that choice? Or would she have considered me a coward just as she'd always believed my father to be?
“Get your head in the ring, Viper,” Castor snarled suddenly.
I blinked back to reality to find my blade knocked into the sand at my feet, grinning warrior prowling around me victoriously. I knelt to retrieve my weapon as my opponent reset himself for another onslaught. Castor just crossed his arms, frowning at me with obvious displeasure. I tried to maintain my stance, my balance, but my heart wasn’t in it and my opponentknocked my spear away once more in a matter of blows. I knelt to retrieve it again but heard Castor’s whip-sharp voice behind me before I could.
“That’s enough,” he snapped. “Off to the barracks,Salim.”
My opponent bowed quickly before hastening off to snicker with a group of his fellow soldiers who'd been lingering nearby to watch our sparring. Castor paid them no mind, striding toward me instead.
“What’s with you today?” he asked, voice low, as I retrieved my weapon and knocked the sand from it off on my pants.
“Nothing,” I replied but then added, when it was clear Castor didn't believe me, “I was up late last night practicing phasing withKleio.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie. My mentor had been working me tirelessly to lengthen the time I couldde-materializebefore my strength gave out and I flickered back into existence. I could almost manage a minute now, but that clearly wasn’t anywhere near whereKleioexpected me to be. He hadn't made any attempts to hide his disappointment each time I failed to meet his expectations, but we hadn’t spoken of the revelations he'd imparted to me, either. WithKleio, once a thing was done, it was done. There was no need to rehash what had happened or even to recall it. We both knew what had been said. That was enough.
“A warrior must be able to maintain his strength through various bouts of training. We call this endurance, Viper, and it's just as important as skill,” Castor was saying now, unimpressed and perhaps unconvinced by my explanation. “You know this.”
“Yes, I know,” I admitted, trying to keep annoyance from my tone as I turned to place the spear back on the weapon’s rack.
“Is this about the scouting mission?” Castor asked then and I could hardly stand the sympathy in his tone as my eyes snapped up to meet his.
“No.”
