Luce keeled over and vomited black bile. I put my hand on her back and rubbed in small circles the way my mom used to. She whimpered and put her head on my knee.
She sat up at last, wiping bile from her lips, a thin streak of blood smearing across her hand.
“There’s got to be a way out.” I stood up, sticking my hands out in front of me to feel my way toward the entrance. As soon as I reached the opening of the cave, black iron bars appeared across it. I took one of them in hand—
“Ow!” I cried. An angry welt appeared on the inside of my palm.
“Yeah, they burn,” Luce said. I looked toward the opposite end of the cave. “Nothing back there, either,” she said. “It only goes back about six feet past here, then stops.”
I sat down on the ground. “What about—”
“Magic doesn’t work either.”
When I tried to reach for my Magic, there was … nothing. Just static, like there was some block in the way.
“Looks like you’re right about the prison thing,” I admitted.
Luce looked at the bars thoughtfully. “We’re taught that Magic is always around, right? Just waiting to be let in? What if this is the same place Magic is trapped until someone lets it into our world?”
“Then we’re trapped here.”
I lay down on the cool ground and stared out into the darkness. Time seemed to move at some unknown pace here. With no sun and no difference in the lighting of the cave, hours could’ve passed already, or even days.
I’d been so stupid to not tell Max how I felt about him before we went to see Dani. And now it was too late, and I might never see him again.
A story flashed into my mind. Something Jamie had told me. That when Pythagoras had discovered the Pythagorean theorem, he sacrificed a hundred cattle in his joy. This was despite the fact that his teachings were explicitly against the sacrifice of animals. “It’s an allegorical story, of course, like most of his teachings,” Jamie explained, “not meant to be taken literally. It meant that Pythagoras’s love of numbers was so great, he would do such a crazy thing to celebrate the discovery. Like strip off your clothes and run through the streets.”
“I see,” I’d said.
“It’s why we took the bull skull as our group’s symbol,” Jamie said. “A symbol for how easily myth and mistruth spreads in the absence of fact. It’s also why Pythagoras’s teachings weren’t shared widely to begin with, why they weren’t written down. It’s hard to trust the public to consider nuance. Pythagoras preachedReceive not a swallow in your house.Meaning don’t accept a loud, bombastic person into the teachings because they won’t be able to keep the knowledge a secret.”
Cut not fire with a sword … When the wind blows, worship the noise.All these Pythagorean teachings* that had been in Dani’s notebook, in the note from the party. Hints that I would have known if I’d just remembered.
Another memory. Of me, drawing the sign for the One referenced in the Book of Autumn on top of the bull skulls around campus: the ten-dot triangle inside a circle, adopted from the tetractys.* It was the same symbol the brothers had taken for their Order of Autumn. I guess I thought if I drew it there, it would be clear to me.The One has infiltrated the Pythagoreans. Don’t trust them.But this too turned to a muddy pool in my head.
Because how could I know that the One would take me over so fully, and bury me so deep that I wouldn’t remember any of it afterward?
2 Hours Until Sunset
Luce ran her hand down a slick crevice in the rock. “Look, it’s an oyster mushroom. I didn’t even notice it before.” She smiled. “You know, some people are afraid of fungi because they don’t understand them, but there’s so much good they can do.”
I squinted in the low light. I could barely see my hand in front of me, so I didn’t know how she could see it. I moved closer to her, focusing on movement in the dark. Her finger was stroking the mushroom. The thing seemed to respond in kind, bobbing slightly in contentment.
“I used to be so angry and dejected,” she said. “Like I didn’t sign up for this shit, why do I have to dredge through endless days of bullshit and everything being so hard all the time? But when I got into mycology, I realized something. Even in the soil beneath you, there are millions of fungi. The world is not this cold, dark place. It is so, so alive.”
I nodded. “There’s a lot of beauty in the things we overlook.”
She keeled over again, and I held her hair back. She squeezed my hand as she heaved, her body racked in a cold sweat. “Like you. I never expected to be glad Cella Gibbons was with me in my bleakest moment, but here I am. I’m sorry for being such a bitch to you all these years.”
“It’s okay,” I said, squinting at my shoes in the dark. “I’m sorry I set your car on fire.”
“Eh, the insurance took care of it. Besides, I probably deserved it.”
“No, you absolutely did not.”
I could hear the grin in her voice. “We’re not going to do that thing where we hug and make up and give each other friendship bracelets.”
I looked up at her and smiled. “Matching ones with our names in little beads shaped like hearts.”
