It doesn’t land as a compliment. It hits like a slap, open-handed and loose.Displacing your principles…Is that what I did? “About Brennan?”
“About you. About where your loyalties lie and how much I can trust you. And now I do. Now I know you’re ready.” She extends her hand further, urging me to accept.
My mouth parts, a word cut off in the back of my throat, escaping in a wheeze. I didn’t do this to prove myself to her. This was never supposed to be about me. This was about Brennan, about the safety of the group. Why is everything a test with Arla?
But she doesn’t wait for me to find my tongue. She breezes past me and simply grabs my hand, pulling me the way a tugboat drags a barge through the harbor. “I know you want to see inside. You’ve been so patient.”
My ears prickle. “Inside?”
We are already whizzing into the elevator as Arla jabs at buttons. “My room. In the basement.”
She has me and she knows it. My rational mind is screaming at me to run, to get out before I’m dug in deeper, to forget all this and go on living asafe, obscure life. But then there is the other side of me, the bit I’ve tried to bury under monotony and routine, utility and drudgery. The hunger. The need. Theburn. And she, I am beginning to realize, is so much stronger. She’s taking over. Like my mother. Like my grandmother. She will consume me.
I can’t refuse.
The elevator ding vibrates through my bones and the doors glide open, the smells of the club pouring in like heat, thick and heavy. We cut across it, through the door in the wall and down the storage room until the entrance to the basement greets us. Arla unlocks it swiftly, all grease and speed now, eager to get me into her deepest, darkest confidence. We practically slide down the stairs and then we are there, standing in the shadows of the basement, the brick and mortar looming before us, a column of secrets. A soft light pulses between them, emanating from the mortar itself or maybe from the fine, hairlike cracks webbing the facade. But it’s enough that Arla doesn’t reach for the lights and switch them on. It’s enough that I see what IthoughtI’d seen before—the writing, a tight and slanting script, sparking along the mortar, sealing one brick to another.
Arla whispers in my ear, “You see them, don’t you? The words.”
I’m afraid to answer. Even from here I can see it’s not any language I know.
“Only those who face the dark can see them. He wrought them into the mortar between every brick before he laid it.”
“Who?”
“You’ll see.” Arla squeezes my hand in hers. “Are you ready, Judeth?”
“Yes.” My voice is breathy, a sweet nothing.
“Once I show you this, you can never go back. Do you understand? Everything will change. The whole world will reorder itself. You will be more than the rest of them—the sightless masses who shamble about, thinking they’re in control when they’re nothing. Do you know why?”
I hear Anneli in hervoice—Chaos, Miss Cole… It’s everywhere. A force larger and far more powerful than us…I shake my head, unable to utter a word, rapt from the sight of the glowing bricks, the delicately traced characters between them.
“Because they don’t have this,” she says. She tugs on my hand until I pull my eyes away and meet hers. “Because they haven’tseen. But you will.”
“What is it?” I manage to ask, the poster reeling through my mind in flashes—a fin, a horn, a set of sharp teeth.
She steps forward, and I am a fish in her net, caught in the wake of her orbit, swimming to my fate. At the door she stops. “Tell me you’re ready. I meant what I said: There’s no going back.”
“I—I think I am,” I stammer, furious with myself for letting doubt slice the edge off my words. I’ve wanted to get inside this room since the moment I laid eyes on it, but Anneli’s story is draining my courage.To gaze upon the immortal is a transgression in every language. To see beyond your horizon. To reach for what you were never made or meant to hold.I tell myself they are not the same,weare not the same, her on the glacier before the mountain, me in the basement before this door. But I can’t shake the sense of an overlap in our timelines.
“That’s not good enough, Jude. You have toknow.” Arla’s eyes probe mine.
“How?” It is a squeak. Pitiful.
She exhales. “Because… you would give up everything for it.”
I nod. I can’t go back now. My life is a series of events laid over one another on the screen of my memory—standing on the steps of Solidago for the first time, hearing the voice and the bees, finding the candle in my grandmother’s room, the mantel weeping in the night, Dara’s stricken face, my grandfather’s bulging hands, my mother’s cold eyes. The house like a torch in the darkness. The earth slamming into me. Then waking up, starting over, dragging through each day. The attorney. Roger. The miscarriage. Everything a toneless, tedious, endless spectrum of gray. And then…this. Levi. Arla. The Fathom. The magic. The burn.
I know now what I want. What I’ve always wanted and denied myself, just past the horizon Anneli mentioned and the fire my mother warned me of. And it was never death. It was simply this—transcendence.
An extraordinary life.
It waits behind this door.
And I would give up everything to claim it.
“I—I would,” I tell Arla. “Iwill.”
