Above us, everyone is losing their minds, yelling, but it’s just noise, useless. I shut it all out—Ivan’s begging, their panic, the fire in my own lungs—silencing it to focus on the one thing that matters: Sisk.
“Keep moving your legs,” I grunt, my voice strained as I fight the suction. “Swim. It’s just a pool, Sisk. Swim.”
She’s shaking violently, her eyes wide with terror. “I can’t swim,” she sobs, the words breaking. “I can’t, Jax, I can’t?—”
“Yes, you can,” I snarl, pulling her tighter against me, my own muscles screaming. “You can. You’re brave. You’re strong. That’s why I love you. You can do this.”
Her sob catches, her eyes locking onto mine. And right when I think I can muscle through it—we sink. Slowly. So slowly, it’s like we are being savored.
“Sisk—look at me.” I call for her.
She’s shaking, tar creeping up her neck.
“Look at me,” I repeat and she does. “Make a wish.”
She shakes her head and screams as the tar hits our chest, then our shoulders, our throats. Every part of me wants to thrash, instinct begging me to fight back, but the crushing pull… it’s exactly how he described it. My grandfather’s stories, the ones I always dismissed as old man’s tales, flash in my mind. “The Pit is an unnatural force,” he’d warned. “No point in fighting what will always win. You have to join it instead.”
I close my eyes.
I’m eight years old again, standing in my grandfather’s office, the room lined with black-and-white photographs of Tar City when it was nothing but mud and ambition. Blueprints are spread across his massive mahogany desk, showing the Mines, the extraction tunnels, and the land parcels outlined in red ink—ownership lines, our name written in the margins. My grandfather sits behind the desk like a king pretending he’s just a man, his silver hair slicked back, his suit tailored within an inch of arrogance, a gold ring heavy on his hand as he taps the map with one finger.
“This town,” he tells me, voice calm and certain, “was built on what other men were too afraid to touch.”
I stare at the dark shaded section on the blueprint.
“The Tar?” I ask.
He leans back in his leather chair and looks at it.
“People think it’s cursed,” he says. “People think it’s evil.”
“Is it?”
“Nobody knows what it is, what it wants.”
I remember stepping closer to the desk, curious and fearless the way kids are. “Why not?”
His gaze drifts back to the map. “To know what something wants,” he says, “you have to ask it.” He looks at me.
“And nobody’s ever been brave enough to.”
The memory fractures as the tar climbs over my neck and tightens my vision. Panic claws through me. I don't know if it can hear thoughts, but it's all I've got left. “What do you want?”
The pressure shifts and the memory of the blueprints flickers again—the way certain parcels of land were circled, the way my grandfather once muttered, “Every city has a foundation. Ours just happens to be alive.”
I speak into it again, the words forming in my mind, a thought aimed at the darkness. “Save her.” The tar tightens around me. “Save her and I’ll do whatever you want.”
A pulse, then—a voice inside my head, my own voice but warped.“NO LIMITATIONS?”
Sisk chokes.
“No limitations,” I answer in my mind.
WE HAVE BEEN WAITING. FOR SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT DROWN.
“Save her,” I think again. “And I’m yours.”
A voice folds into my skull.WHY SHOULD WE TRUST YOU?
