I can’t respond. Not with my lungs nearly crushed and a mask of black dirt plastered over my face. But my heart speaks for itself, calling to him with pounding beats.
“I hear your heart,” Eli says. “I followed it all the way here.”
Please Eli, please.Air barely passes through my nostrils. Stale, used air that won’t last long. I don’t know how long it’s been since I fell. The buzz in my ears is constant, the pain permanent. The urges—out of control.
“They’re talking, yours and mine. Complaining about how far apart they are,” he says, clearly trying to distract me.
Liar… tell me more.
“Keep breathing.” His voice is closer, but I’m so tired. My brain clouds, my head weightless enough to float away.
Sleep. I could sleep here. Maybe forever.
Cold air hits my foot. Then my leg. And I’m dragged out from beneath the mound. I suck in the rush of air and choke on dirt, coughing endlessly, hacking up painful, breath-stealing bits.
Eli lifts me into a sitting position. My body is fragile and droopy, caked in dried blood, marred with fresh wounds. He whacks my back, and even that touch in my current state has my blood racing. Once I’m breathing properly again, I shake, blinded and disoriented. His thumb rubs the dirt from my eyes, and I force them open.
And there he is, a knee on either side of my thighs, one arm holding me up and the fingers of his other hand already on my ear. His face issplattered with mud, his legs and torso soiled, his arms coated up to his shoulders. I search for his darkness, expecting the earthy scent, the fingers on my neck, the urge to run, but it’s tucked out of reach. His lightness too. No warm breeze or morning rain drawing me toward him. I only see the gray in between, the unknown. And the highly questionable.
A smirk finds his cheek. The irresistible kind. He leans in and pulls me the rest of the way up to his face by my ear. Then kisses my dirt-smeared lips, long and hard. “Found you.”
“You can touch me,” I rasp, awareness returning with a gush of emotion and even more pain.
“You let your darkness out.”
I take a shuddering breath. “I tried to kill my mother.”
“You’ll get another chance,” he says, as if my concern lay in my lack of success.
“That’s not—”
“Shh. It’s over now.”
I throw my arms around his neck and bawl. My skin touches his, even colder than the damp earth below us, but the contact feels unreal. Like grasping for a memory just out of reach. When I pull back to make sure it’s really him, he balances a teva roll with his thumb and pointer, his hold impossibly gentle considering the strength he harbors. I part my lips, and he slips it between them as smoothly as if they were his own. Next comes the fire stone from his pocket. Then the blaze of red. I inhale. And layers of despair burn away.
Purple smoke rises between us. He doesn’t take a single toke. It’s only my lungs that trap the calming smoke inside, that let it loose in long, slow puffs. I cough once and go back for more. He lifts that roll to my lips until it’s no more than a speck pinched between his fingernails.
When my brain is tinted purple and every thought lands on a cloud before hitting my consciousness, he pulls me against his chest. Those strong arms unwavering, he lifts me up and proceeds down the mound of dirt, a lightness in his step. I bury my face in his neck.
Please don’t let me go. Never let me go.
Every movement is like a fresh attack, each wound reopened. I don’t have the energy to cry or writhe in pain. My interior shrivels breath after breath, punishing me for resisting the urges. And on top of it all, I might still be unconscious under a heap of dirt.
How do I know what’s real? I squeeze my necklace in my fist, but it does nothing. Ametrine is gone.
Eli carries me across the room and through winding passages leading down and down until he slips into a cave much larger than where Zandrite kept the tunnel runners. Around the entire perimeter, water streams down from a crevice where the ceiling meets the uneven walls and disappears into gutters on the floor.
I try not to think of the waterfall where I killed a piece of myself, where I strayed so far from sanity that I didn’t know I’d lost it. But I can’t make the thoughts stop. Ametrine’s voice echoes in my head.You betrayed yourself.
Steam billows up around us, the air moist and thick with the scent of minerals. My eyes dart from one light stone scattered on the floor to the next. He sits me beside a pool of water and plops down next to me, untying his boots.
He notices my eyes set on his hands. “I came back down here for my boots after the arena collapsed.”
Cameback?When was he here? He must have his pack somewhere nearby too, because he’s wearing a shirt now. I nod and stare blankly at the hot springs around me, four of them. Each rivals the size of my tub in Caldera, brimming with sparkling blue water and lit by light stones that sit at the bottom of the gray holes. The edges are worn smooth from the constant gurgle of water.
Eli sets his boots aside, lining them up evenly, one next to the other, then peels off his black socks. “The water will heal you. They’re hot springs.”
“How did you know about this place?”
