He stared at him and Rjmar sighed.
“You can disapprove after we get your female out. I can’t guarantee I’ll find another entrance, but I think I spotted something last time I was here.”
“If you can’t, then we’ll make one. Slowly. From above, away from where they fell, where the stone’s still bonded. But we look first. Go.”
The three warriors melted into the dark, torches bobbing, and he turned back to the pit. He lowered himself flat on his belly across the most solid slab he could find—spreading his weight, refusing to let his own bulk become the next thing to betray them—and edged forward until his head hung over the black.
“Polly.” His voice dropped into the low, warm register she’d curled against on a hundred nights. Not the clan leader’s voice now. The other one. The one that was only ever for her. “I know you can hear me. I can’t hear your words, but that’s all right. You don’t have to shout. You just have to listen.”
The dark below him breathed cold air up into his face, smelling of old metal and disturbed dust and something faintly, chemically wrong—the ghost of the offworlders’s failed experiments.
“You are not alone,” he told her. “You have Tess. You have me, right here, close enough that if you reach up I would swear I could touch you. And you have the warriors on this mountain, and every one of them would go into the ground for you, because you are one of us.” His throat tightened. He let it. Down there in the dark she couldn’t see his face, and for once he didn’t have to hide his expression. “You told me once that the clan protects its own. You were teaching me my own truth back to me, little one. So believe it now. Believe it in the dark. We are coming.”
A pause. The wind. Then, from far below, faint and cracked and unmistakably stubborn—that same thin voice again. He couldn’t hear the words. But he’d know the sound of her defiance anywhere.
He pressed his forehead against the cold stone and, for one heartbeat, let himself simply shake.
Just one. He was allowed one.
Then he lifted his head, because a torch was bobbing back towards him fast across the slope, and Rjmar’s voice rang out through the dark?—
“Njkall! We’ve found a way in, but you need to see it. Now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The dark had a taste.
Polly lay where she’d fallen, her whole body bruised and aching, and the first thing that reached her was that taste—old dust and rusted iron and something acrid underneath, chemical and sour, the smell of a place that had been dead a long time. It crawled into the back of her throat and there, instantly, was the thing she’d spent a year outrunning.
The mine. The recycled air. The dark that never ended and the walls that never moved and the bone-deep knowing that no one was coming to save her.
Her chest locked. Her hands started to shake. The scream built somewhere below her ribs, the old scream, the one that used to fill the whole of her until there was no Polly left, only the fear wearing her like a coat?—
Njkall’s voice reached her.
It came down from above her, distant and muffled through the stone, but she knew the sound of it the way she knew her own heartbeat. She couldn’t make out the words. She didn’t needto. She only needed the fact of it—that low, steady rumble, unhurried even now, and she clung to the sound of it the way she’d once clung to his fur in the dark.
I am coming.She couldn’t hear him say it. She knew he was saying it anyway.
The scream in her chest loosened, just enough. Just enough to breathe.
“Njkall!” She dragged herself up onto her elbow and shouted it towards the faint grey wound of light far above, where the world was. “We’re here! We’re okay!”
She didn’t know if it was true. But she said it, and saying it made her spine straighten a fraction, and that was something.
Then she heard the crying.
Not loud. That was the worst part. It wasn’t the loud, gulping cry of someone who expected comfort. It was the small, awful, choked-off kind, the kind a person made when they’d learned long ago that no one ever came for the tears so you swallowed them, and only the overflow escaped.
“Tess.” She turned towards the sound, groping through the black. Her palm found rough fabric, a shoulder, a body curled tight against a broken slab of concrete. “Tess. Hey. I’m here. I’ve got you.”
“Don’t—” Tess’s whole body flinched away from the touch, then convulsed. “Don’t touch me, don’t, don’t?—”
“Okay.” She pulled her hand back at once. She knew that flinch. She lived in that flinch for a long time. “Okay. I’m not touching you. But I’m right here. You feel how close my voice is? That’s how close I am. I’m not going anywhere.”
“We’re going to die down here.” Tess’s breath came in short, tearing hitches, faster and faster. “We’re buried, we’re buried, there’s no air, there’s no—I can’t—I can’t get a breath, Polly, I can’t?—”
Polly recognized the panic attack the way you recognize your own face in a cracked mirror. The runaway breath. The hands scrabbling at nothing. The eyes gone wide and blind, seeing not the dark room they were in but every dark room they’d ever survived, all of them at once, stacked up and pressing down. She’d fallen into that pit a thousand times. She knew exactly what it felt like from the inside.
