Who needs a boy for a map…
Not her.
Spinning away from it, she hurried to her desk where she gathered an unlit candlestick. Her match struck, and the wick flamed. She gripped its holder and moved toward the secret door.
“Please don’t have any monsters,” Lux begged of the gloom—a heartbeat before she stepped inside.
Thepassagewaysmelledworsethan the stairwell to the kitchen: like wet seaweed gone to rot. Lux could see nothing but her candle’s glow in her first few steps.
“This seems a worthless place,” she whispered. Though she also wondered if that was the point. Someone adept at breaking into places not meant for him had once told her if he ever found something that did not make sense, it meant there was something hidden. He’d said he hadn’t yet been proven wrong.
A high creak met her ears. Lux swung back. She held out her meager flame. And she watched as the mirrored door swung fully closed all its own.
A ghost of a girl was reflected back at her when it was done; she could make out the candle in her tight grip. The dense dark wouldn’t reveal her face, and Lux was glad of it—she didn’t need to see the sheen of sweat forming on her brow or the terror in her eyes.
But she did need to be sure she could return to her bedchamber this way. She dug quickly for the key and audibly sighed in relief when a lock showed at once. “Least it seems to work from either s-i-de!”
The floor fell away from her feet.
Lux landed hard on her bottom, slipping then plunging into the pitch. She slid down a steep incline and could not stop. The meager flame guttered; she thought it’d gone out, but when her hand flew up to protect it, it flamed back to light.
Onyx walls whipped past. She curved first one way and then the other. She nearly toppled over twice. And then she did—the incline abruptly ending, expelling her onto flattened floor.
“Why?” she cried, groaning from her place on the ground.
Lux rose to her feet with a huff of breath. She still held the candle, its flame miraculously flickering yet, when she turned back the way she’d come. Toward an impossibly steep passageway, and no way to climb it.
“Dead spaces,” she mimicked, furious at Corvin, and accepting none of the blame herself. She spun around. “If this is also a dead end…”
But it wasn’t.
Not yet.
Lux held her candle over the edge of a stone staircase coated in decades of dust. She teetered at the top. And ahead—
I can make it through this.
But suddenly, she didn’t know if that were true. The path down was as dark as the rest, but this one felt as yawning as a void. Her entire body rejected the idea.
She swallowed. “There’s something down there, isn’t there…”
Lux recalled the first time she’d felt Death. She’d been outside Ghadra’s fog-crept walls. Her mother had been beside her, bent double with a sickle to hack at marsh grass, and she’d been explaining the ways of the world to Lux.
“You should never take more than you give. That’s called greed.”Then she’d handed off the bundle of grasses and dug inside her purse. She tossed a handful of seeds into the soggy soil.
When they landed, sinking into the muck at different depths, a pressure had tapped into Lux’s chest the same.
A dead woman was recovered later that day.
Lux relived that memory now as she stared into the void. She didn’t always notice such subtle premonitions, but today, right now, she felt the lurk of Death on this hidden staircase.
Soon. Soon. Soon,beat her heart, and she would have claimed it as true—if she could still trust it. Unfortunately, her systems were now diagnosed as a wreck.
“But even if there is something…that’s the point, isn’t it? To see if there’s anything to hide?”
She’d thought speaking it might embolden her.
Her fear did not care.
