“You have to be in the first room to be One.”
He released me suddenly, stalking away.
“Hey, Pain!” he shouted, making his way through the trees again. “Switch rooms with me!”
“What?” I heard Coen shout back.
I was still leaning against the tree, my heart threatening to jump out of my chest and bury itself deep,deepunderground, where it would be safe. Because I swear to the gods, those boys were going to give me a heart-attack. How was that for karma? A sexy sol was going to kill me by frightening me to death.
And I didn’t just say sexy.
None of them were sexy. And their sexiness definitely wasn’t the reason for my heart-pains. Not that they had sexiness. Because they didn’t.
“Rocks?” Siret strode back into sight, a scowl twisting his lips. “You fall again?”
“Not sexy …” It kind of slipped out. I wasn’t sure how. I wanted to take it back immediately, but he had clearly already heard me.
He blinked. “Well … I wouldn’t put it that way. You go down like a pro. It’s a little bit sexy.”
My mouth dropped open, my eyebrows inching up. Somehow, that had sounded filthy. He seemed to realise it, too, or maybe he was just reading it on my face.Oh, gods in hell. I need to never speak again.
He started smiling, the flash in his eyes driving the heat further into my face. I pushed past him, ready to face my death. Maybe I could ask them to hurry up, and save myself from any more of … whatever it was they were doing to me. Or maybe I could just trip on something and fall onto a nice, suicidal rock.
Yeah.
That’d be nice.
Seven
One momentwe were picking a precarious path through the mountains about a mile from the boundary of the academy, and then, suddenly, we weren’t even in Blesswood anymore. I gasped, my footsteps halting, my eyes going wide. The seemingly endless stretch of mountainous terrain before us had dissolved, and a dark, damp-smelling cave had loomed in around us, only a pinprick of light visible in the distance.
“What in the world of the gods …” I spun around, trying to take in everything at once, even though it was too dark to take in even an inch of the ‘everything’.
“Exactly.” Rome had been the one to utter the reply, sounding right behind me.
He had dropped to the back of the procession after declaring to the group that I kept getting intotroublewhenever he left me unsupervised, whatever that was supposed to mean. He had been the one to plant a hand on the centre of my spine and push me forward, initiating this trip through reality.
“What do you meanexactly?” I asked in the general direction of his voice.
“The world of the gods,” he replied, making me realise that I was staring at the wrong patch of darkness.
I adjusted my eyes, and then it hit me.
No—it didn’t hit me!Because that was impossible!
This cave couldn’t be Topia.TheAbcurse brothers couldn’t possibly know a secret passage into Topia!
“Anything is possible, Rocks,” Siret muttered, grabbing my wrist and drawing me through the darkness, toward the little pin-prick of light. I must have spoken out loud—or else they could read minds.
Knowing my luck, it was the latter.
As soon as Siret’s skin touched mine, my head was flooded with conflicting images. Thoughts. Memories. I had no idea what they were, but the men and women pictured in my mind weren’t anything like the sols I knew. They wore robes as they strolled past insanely gorgeous scenery; lakes, rivers,oceans. Some of them were sitting on floating marble platforms which looked down over miles and miles of sky. Siret was using his trickery gift to fill my head with nonsense, and yet … I couldn’t help the feeling that this particular nonsense was actuallyreal.
Because I was in Topia.Those demon-sols snuck me into fucking Topia!
Emmy wasn’t just going to kill me anymore. She was going to cut me up into tiny little pieces, put each piece of me into a tiny box, and feed each box to a single bullsen, which she would burn, and then she would separate the ashes of the burnt bullsen into tiny little piles, and then she would put each tiny pile of ash into a tiny box, and then—
“Welcome to the world of the gods,” Rome drawled, as we stepped from the cave and into the glaring sunlight.
