I slide into the passenger seat, and he closes the door behind me with a soft click. The interior smells like wintergreen, as always. He circles around to the driver’s side and settles in, but doesn’t start the engine right away.
He looks at me. “Where do you want to go?”
I look out at the church. The stained glass windows are beautiful dots of blurry oil paint. So are the streetlights, and the stars, and the faces of strangers. The whole world is, really.A Tuesday Evening on the Street of Chicago. My own piece of pointillist perfection.
I look back at Bastian. “I don’t know.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “I have an idea.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He starts the car, and the dashboard lights up in a soft glow. “Do you trust me?”
I turn to look at him. He’s so beautiful. Sharp jaw, proud nose, that mouth I’ve memorized in a dozen different contexts. “Always,” I tell him.
The corner of his mouth lifts. He reaches over and takes my hand. I don’t ask where we’re going. I don’t need to.
Or at least I didn’tthinkI needed to. But when we pull up behind Frank’s trailer at the Project Olympus site, I snort and turn to look at him.
“Did you not get enough of a dose of this today? Needed to come back for more?”
Bastian merely smiles. “C’mon.”
He comes around the car to help me out. I cling to his elbow as we navigate through the site in the semi-darkness, picking our way to the front of the building. Bastian fishes a key out of his pocket and unlocks the giant door. Then, with a groan of effort, he starts to drag it open.
It takes a second to build enough momentum. But as Bastian strains, his forearms flexing, the door moves one inch, then another, then another, until finally, the whole bronzecontraption swings silently on its hinges until it reveals the mouth of darkness waiting for us.
He comes to stand by me and holds my hand again. It’s a huge rectangle of shadow, with the two of us waiting right on the edge. He looks at me. I look at him.
Then we step in.
I can’t see a damn thing. My vision’s been dwindling for weeks, but this is different. This kind of pitch-black makes everyone equal. Bastian can’t see any better than I can right now.
His hand tightens around mine. “Stay close.”
We shuffle forward together. I can feel the vastness of the space around us—the high ceilings, the open atrium. Everything we saw this afternoon in the light now exists only as memory and sensation. Every breath is sucked up into the rafters.
“Where are we going?” I whisper.
“You’ll see.”
“That’s optimistic, considering the circumstances.”
He laughs. “Fair point.”
We keep moving, slow and careful. My free hand trails along what I think is a wall. The stone is cool and smooth under my fingertips. Bastian guides me around corners, through doorways, his breathing steady in the darkness.
We climb stairs. Endless stairs.
My thighs burn by the third floor. By the fifth, I’m breathing hard. By the seventh, I’m wondering if Bastian’s secretly trying to kill me.
“Hold up,” he says. “Let’s take a break.”
“I’m fine,” I insist.
“You’re wheezing.”
“I’mbreathing.”
