"We have to go!" I shouted, scrambling to my feet, Kaelen helping me up. "We have to get to the Throat! The distraction worked too well!"
"The path is clear!" Thane yelled, having pulled himself from the stone. He pointed to a dark openingunderthe Titan bone that had been revealed when Flynn flipped the table. "There!"
We ran for the opening.
Marissa-Hera unleashed a wave of force that tore the ceiling open. Rocks the size of houses began to fall. It made what she did before look like child's play. Like she'd been skipping stones across water rather than trying to destroy something.
We dove into the darkness beneath the Titan bone just as the world collapsed behind us.
The last thing I'd expected was to slip down a steep chute, but that's what we did before tumbling unceremoniously into the dark, leaving the screaming goddess behind.
When we stopped, we had landed in a small, spherical chamber. It was lined with crystal pillars that hummed with a low F-sharp.
The Throat.
"We made it," Flynn gasped, checking his limbs. "We're alive."
"For now," Kaelen said, standing up and brushing dust from his shredded clothes. "But she will dig us out."
I stood up, walking to the center of the room where crystals that I could only assume were supposed to be the keys waited.
"Then we'd better change the song quickly," I said, pulling the journal from my waistband.
I opened the book to the page with the runes. I looked at the crystals once more trying to figure out how they matched up with what Master Theron had written since he'd never actually seen this place.
My heart stopped.
The crystalline structure was cracked down the middle, dark energy oozing from the primary fissure while spiderwebbing cracks spread in all directions around it.
"It's broken," I whispered. "The mechanism, it's broken."
"Marissa," Elias said, his voice quiet. "She was drawing power from the bone. She must have damaged the structure."
"So we can't change the frequency?" Flynn asked, panic rising in his voice. "We're still bait?"
"We're worse than bait," Kaelen said, looking at the ceiling where dust was sifting down. "We're trapped rats."
TWENTY-FIVE
Flynn
I paced the perimeter of the spherical chamber, my boots scuffing against stone that was smoother than glass. It felt like walking inside a giant pearl that someone had taken a sledgehammer to.
"Thane, can you get us out of here?" I asked hopefully.
The disappointment in his eyes was answer enough as he stepped away from the wall. "It's not rock or any kind of stone I'm familiar with. It's not responding to my touch."
Kaelen wasn't wrong about us being trapped then, especially if Thane couldn't get whatever this room was made out of to cooperate. I could smell the truth of it in the air. The scent of the broken crystal was sharp and metallic, like licking a lightning bolt, but underneath that was the musk of enclosed fear. Ours. It coated the back of my throat, bitter and thick.
Above us, the ceiling boomed. A dull, rhythmic thud.Thump. Thump. Thump.
It sounded like a heartbeat, if the heart belonged to a goddess who was currently dismantling a mountain to get at the marrow inside. Dust sifted down in fine, grey curtains, coating my bare shoulders and catching in my lashes.
"Stop pacing, Wolf," Kaelen snapped. He was standing by the cracked crystal structure in the center of the room, his hands glowing with a useless, agitated heat. "You are using up the air."
"I’m pacing because if I stand still, I’m going to climb the walls," I snarled back, spinning on my heel. "We’re in a dead end, Kaelen. A literal dead end."
I gestured violently at the crystalline walls. It looked like a giant pipe organ carved from quartz, rising from the floor in jagged, hexagonal pillars. But right down the center, a fissure leaked a black, oily substance that smelled of rot and old pennies. The dark energy Marissa had been siphoning. It hissed where it touched the pristine floor.
