“What the hell were you thinking?” Darius exploded at once.
“Dar,” Roxy started.
He didn’t even seem to hear her as he took a step toward me.
“Six hours without water, Adrian,” he shouted. “And you didn’t know how long it would be when you destroyed those pipes. It could have been days, Adrian.Days.Dahlia, Warren, Maurice, Sophie and Graham, without water. For days. Did you even think—”
“I was confident in your girlfriend’s abilities,” I snapped, raising a brow as I crossed my arms.
Darius stopped, mouth open and gaping as he searched for the words to respond to that.
“Why, Adrian?” Kane asked instead, stepping forward with something like disappointment in his expression.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone,” I confessed, shoulders slumping. “I just…Ican’t. You don’t understand. It isn’t right.Darius, your parents think you’re dead. Anyone who's ever loved someone who was Culled thinks they’redead. Nobody up there knows we’re down here. That isn’t right. Your parents deserve to know. They deserve to have their son back. My mom deserves to have me back. My brothers deserve to know what happened. And I can't understand why I have to explain that to you, of all people.”
“This is just how things are, Adrian,” Darius said, shaking his head. “It’s how they’ve always been. How can you thinkwecould be the ones to change it?”
“You used to believe we could be the first in a thousand years to defeat the Trials,” I reminded him. “And Idid.So why can you believe in that possibility but not this?”
“I—I’m not the same man I was, Adrian,” he confessed, quietly.
“No,” I agreed, letting my eyes rove over him once again. “You’re not.”
The silence settled thickly around us. Neither Darius or I spoke but rather stared at one another as if we could feel the force of our broken friendship as it wrapped itself around us and smothered us in heartbreak.
“Adrian—” Roxy started, taking a step forward.
“Get out,” I said before she could get any closer. At the brief flash of sadness in her eyes, I added, more gently, “please. I just need to be alone right now.”
They all exchanged glances but did as I asked, filing past me in silence. I heard the door open and, a moment later, they were gone. Alone in my apartment, I took a deep breath, letting the loneliness settle over me, wondering if I would see them again, if what had been broken between Darius and I could ever be repaired.
I looked down at my hands and phased, watching as they disappeared and reappeared before my eyes. It was a skill I'dforgotten about during my time in the Underground and yet I'd gotten out of my cuffs easily using that particular Blessing and had been ready to phase right through the door as well. But maybe physical barriers weren’t the only substances I could phase through.
Before I knew it, I was moving, my feet carrying me toward an abandoned tunnel that had become all too familiar to me in recent days. Darius and his friends wouldn’t follow this time, not after I kicked them out of my apartment, not after the words my oldest friend and I had exchanged. I had the time and I was alone. This time, I would do it.
The tunnel was just as abandoned as it had been ever since the cave in, ever since it had been repaired. The evidence of the impact had been plastered over, the rocks all moved to be of use somewhere else. No one who happened upon this dark corner of the Underground would know what had occurred here or where it might lead. But I did. And it wasn’t something I would forget.
I flexed my fingers at the opening once before stepping forward into the dark. It took only a few steps for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, until I was sidestepping fallen pebbles and thick cracks in the floor. I knew the way by heart, knew where to step, where to turn, and then I saw it; the sunlight. It streamed into the dark tunnel, illuminating everything so quickly I had to raise my arm to shield my enhanced eyes from the beams. I lowered them a moment later and watched as they faded from visibility, disappearing into thin air. I took a tentative step forward, then another. I held onto the intangibility as I stepped into the sun, into Sanctuary, into home.
A pair ofDeckersran by on their way back from wherever they'd been. They passed right through me as if I were no more than a ghost. I felt their presence for an instant, like a cooling sensation in every part of me, but then they were gone, off down the street. I stared down at myself, unable to see my own feetagainst the cobblestones, and was stunned. They couldn’t see me because I wasn’t here, not really.
Looking up to where the stairs lay in front of me, I took another step, then another, heading toward the steps that would lead me up to the Third Ring. Nothing stopped me. Nothing pulled me back. It was as if whatever magic shielded Sanctuary from the Underground didn’t recognize me as a tangible being in this state.
But it was getting more and more difficult to remain intangible. Even as I made my way forward, I felt the strain of maintaining the magic. Sweat broke out on my nonexistent forehead and my invisible hands began to shake, but still I stumbled onward, refusing to stop. It wasn’t until I reached out to grab for the railing only to fall straight through it to the ground below that I cried out. A scream escaped my lungs as my knees slammed against the stones of the ground just before the stairs. A fewnearby Deckershesitated, necks twisting in my direction, but I was already gone.
I blinked against the darkness of the tunnel, tears stinging my eyes as the rock stung my knees. I gulped in a few breaths and fell onto my side, wincing as I looked down at my knees and found them bloody. Little stones were stuck into my skin, other portions were scraped raw entirely. I just fell back onto the cool stone of the tunnel, stared up at the cavernous darkness of the Underground, and laughed.
It was a light exhilaration at first but grew quickly into hysterics. My shoulders shook as tears streamed from my eyes to drip down the sides of my face and onto the stone beneath me. I’d done it. I’d reached Sanctuary. I’d gone home. I’d done what they all said I couldn’t.
And though I’d been pulled back after a time, though I’d not seen any of my friends or family and had ultimately ended up back in this dark,godsforsakentunnel far beneath them, I’dgone farther than I had before. I’d gone farther than anyone ever had before. Just like I’d completed the Trials no one else had finished in a millennia, but I’d failed those in the end. I wouldn't fail in this.
Phasing was the answer. Now, I only had to practice.
Chapter Seventeen
Dante
“The light is the sin but also the salvation. How is a man to contend with what he doesn’t understand? How can I stand against the gods with only the jewel to guide me? Who lives inside?”
