She’s the only one here who believes in me.
Praying to the goddess for Eos’s safety, I follow Stavros down silent steps and pull the latch shut tight behind me.
Stavros strikes a match on his jaw, and the sudden burst of flame casts the antechamber in stark relief. Thank the goddess. I hate the dark. No. I hate the things thathidein the dark.
Silence presses into us as we pivot, searching for any sign of Vesper’s sister in the cold dampness of carved sandstone and sediment. Finally, unable to stand it, I whisper, “Eos?”
“I—I don’t see her.” Vesper whirls toward the stairs, panic strangling her voice. “Maybe she ran back up. Maybe we missed her.”
“Not possible. She is not magic,” Stavros disagrees with a firm shake of his head.
Vesper ignores him, peering into the shadows of the stairs. “Eos? Eos,please—”
“Boo.” Eos leaps out from behind the stairwell, a teasing smile bright on her cherubic face, and I nearly leap out of my skin. Her blue eyes gleam with mischief. “You should see your faces. Scared, much?”
Vesper raises a hand to her heart, her gaze watering with relief as Stavros staggers back a step and almost falls in a heap of gunpowder. I throw my hands into the air with an exasperated hiss. “What theshit, Eos?”
“That’s what you get for calling me a child,” she sings sweetly.
A rush of nerves ignites my chest—at the dark, at the mission, at Stavros and Vesper and Eos with herhilariousfucking jokes—and bile burns my tongue. I force it down with a swallow. “It’s not funny. We thought you died.”
For once, Vesper agrees with me. She stalks up to Eos and tugs hard on one of her little sister’s braids, her expression stonier than the walls around us. “Pull that shit again, and you’ll wish you had. Do you know how dangerous it is to be down here? If we’re found… if theycatchyou—” Vesper’s voice breaks on a rising sob, and her touch lightens as she strokes Eos’s silver plaits.
Perhaps they can pass their hair off as blonde on the streets.Perhaps no commoner looks twice under their hoods and cloaks so long as the girls aren’t making trouble. But the king—his guards and soldiers—won’t be so oblivious. They won’t be so kind.
I reach up, fondling a blonde curl of my own, my throat still tight with anger and—and something else. “Let’s just find the fresh bodies and get the fuck out of here.”
“This place is bad,” Stavros says plainly, in that deep, ragged voice of his, before he starts moving toward the far wall.
I stay close behind him, desperate to follow the light. Desperate to avoid the pitch dark and the terrible memories hiding within it. “Couldn’t agree more, big man.”
Still, this place—it’s nothing like the prison I fled. Nothing like the craggy adamant of jagged black walls and sharpened gables. This chamber is smooth. Flat. Wide as the eye can see, butopen. I force my breathing to remain light and even. Calm. Because there is no punishment hiding within these shadowy alcoves. There is nohim.
However, it’s still dark. It’s still quiet. My heart pounds beneath my rib cage, begging me to run. To flee. This place might not be the prison of my nightmares, but it’s stilldangerous.
The ceiling hangs low overhead, pressing down as if to remind us that we’re below the earth—us—where we wouldn’t belong even if it weren’t illegal for commoners to come here. And the architects certainly didn’t make it easy for us to trespass. There is only one entrance; therefore, there is only one exit, and the chamber sprawls so far that we have to walk and walk and walk before we reach anything new.
And walk we do. I manage to step on Stavros’s heel only twice. The third time, he turns to snarl at me, and I force myself to grin, to slow, to allow a bit more space between us. His match casts flickering light upon the western wall, where murals painted in shades of crimson depict Mortem at every divine stage of his celestial existence. A new god with burgeoning wings, arms stretched toward the sunshine as he smiles serenely, peacefully, with his three godly brothers at his side. Then older, a great kingdom rising above him as he wipes sweat from his strong brow. Contemplative. Wise.Powerful.
And finally, Mortem kneeling at the foot of a dais, holding his heart in his hands as a second imprint of him—a shadow self—floats down an icy river.
I laugh bitterly under my breath. Mortem erected the underworld—the Fathoms—only after he fell. After he slaughtered innocents and incinerated half the world.
Now everyone, human or merrow, must answer to Mortem when they die. It’s why this kingdom celebrates Mortem so loudly, so effusively. It’s why they bury their nobility within his temple. It’s why the wealthy don their most expensive jewels and regalia before being encased in these very walls. All in the hopes of impressing—bribing—their renowned god.
Humans are fucking idiots.
“Wherever they entombed the bodies, it isn’t here.” I gesture to each of Mortem’s hateful faces along the mural. “They wouldn’t desecrate the bastard.” That, and there’s no evidence of this wall having been rebuilt in the last few hours.
“Rather hideous.” Vesper stares up at the paintings with me. “You’d think someone in this damn kingdom would understand Mortem was a savage prick.”
I stiffen. Glance at her through my periphery. This is the closest we’ve come to an honest conversation with each other. And though we’ll never speak our truest admissions aloud, I can’t help adding, “I think their heads are shoved so far up Mortem’s ass, they’re snorting his shit and calling it divinity salt. They don’t care about the truth. They’re too afraid.”
They can pretend it’s respect. Reverence. But the Kingdom of Mortia renamed itselfafterhe created the Fathoms—when the wealthiest began to worry how eternity would look in a place like that. With Mortem on its throne, what else could they do but kneel and slaver at his feet? No, Mortia doesn’t worship Mortem out of deference.
They worship him out of fear.
“Cowards,” Stavros says, echoing my thoughts. “Mortem is a dickhead.”
