We emerged into a pitch black room. My senses told me the walls were rough stone, lined with cells barely large enough to turn around in. None of them were occupied.
They threw me into a cell and slid the door closed behind me. I whirled and grabbed the bars, determined to break them. They, too, were made of stone, and they groaned feebly under my efforts.
Another door slammed. They had shoved Meela into the cell beside mine.
“Wait!” I said.
But they left without explanation, without telling us how long we would be there or what they planned to do with us.
I cast my senses around and was relieved to find a pocket of air overhead. They hadn’t put us here to die. I rose and drew breath, trying to think. My head was pounding from where the guard had struck me. How had this gone so wrong so quickly?
Still, I didn’t know what else we could have done. Maybe we shouldn’t have mentioned Adaro—but then how would we have gotten in? Maybe we should have pretended we were here about something else until we were past the guards.
We obviously weren’t dispensable, considering we were still alive. Maybe they wanted to hear what we had to say before making a decision on what to do with us.
Or maybe they were saving us for a public execution.
Couldn’t they have told usanything?
In the cell beside me, Meela was panicking. She slammed her body against the door, each impact pushing air from her lungs.
“Take a breath,” I said softly. “There’s air above you.”
“Don’t tell me to take a breath!”
“Fine,” I snapped. “Suffocate, then.”
There was a resounding thud as she slammed against the stone. “We can’t be stuck here! We’re the only ones who can stop him!”
“Mee, calm down.”
“No! I came all the way here for you, Lysi.”
I ground my teeth. Was she really blaming me for this? “You didn’t come here for me. You came here because you decided this would be the best way to get your revenge.”
“What if he’s on his way to my people? My parents, my friends, even Nilus and my nieces—they’re all in danger, Lysi! He’ll kill all of them. I need to—”
“What, you need to kill him back?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“You have a choice about how it affects you. You can kill him because you have to, but you don’t have to let it do this to you.”
“Do what to me?”
“This …” I waved a hand. The right words escaped me. In truth, Meela had been scaring me lately. Except for a brief time when we’d swum with the narwhals, her aura had become so dark.
“Obsession,” I said. “You don’t care what sacrifices you need to make to get to him.”
She didn’t respond.
I waited, wondering if I’d been too harsh. Was she that oblivious to the way she’d been feeling and acting lately? Or did she really not care who she lost in the process?
After a moment, she said, “You think I like what this is doing to me? It’s like my mind is spending so much time with the thing I hate most that I’m starting to hate myself, too. It’s eating me from the inside.”
I couldn’t think of anything comforting to say. Her confession didn’t surprise me.
“I need you,” she said. “You’re the balance that keeps me sane.”
