“Assuming you don’t disappear, you mean.”
He wasn’t improving her already tested courage. “Ronan, stop.”
He leveled a heavy gaze at her, the sort he normally used to bend Noah to his will.
“If she’s over there …” Blue began.
“Yeah, I know,” he snarled. “Fine. Wait.”
Ducking his head, he pulled off his ghost light and hung it over her shoulder.
She didn’t bother to say, But you’ll be waiting in darkness. Nor did she say, If I vanish immediately into the lake, you’ll have to find your way out of here sightless. Because he’d already known both these things when he’d given it to her.
Instead she said, “You know, you’re not such a shithead.”
“No,” Ronan replied, “really I am.”
Turning to the water, she allowed herself the brief gift of closing her eyes and shaking her head a little with the fear and awfulness of what she was about to do.
Then she stepped in.
49
The lake was wet, which shocked her.
Somehow she had believed that if the corpse was false, perhaps the water was, too. But it turned out that at least two inches of it was very real, and squishing coldly into her soles.
She had not disappeared.
She turned to find Ronan crouched down a few feet up onto dry land, arms wrapped around his knees, already waiting for the darkness to take him. When he met her eyes, he gave her an unsmiling salute before she turned back around.
Gingerly, she picked her way across the lake, her eyes on the true bottom of it and on the ceiling and on the walls — she did not trust anything in this place, especially as dread began to blossom in her, more and more.
She didn’t like to think of leaving Ronan back there in the darkness.
But she kept going, alone, and when she thought that she could not take the blackness in her heart anymore, she came to the edge of the lake and to the tunnel that came after.
She stepped onto the rock, and for just a second, she stood there and tried to let her fear drip off her.
Why do I have to be alone for this?
She recognized the unfairness of this. Then she readjusted the ghost light and kept going.
Blue knew she was going the right way, because she began to feel the subtle tug of the third sleeper. It was like Adam had said — it was a voice in your head that sounded a lot like yours if you weren’t paying attention.
But Blue was paying attention.
It was not far to the chamber he’d described. She crept through the dark hole, feeling a voice inside her say come closer closer closer when the real voice inside her was saying I wish I could run away.
And there it was, as he’d described. A small, scooped-out chamber, low enough that she had to crouch to enter. She didn’t care for the crouching; it made her feel uncomfortably vulnerable.
It is a lot like kneeling.
But it wasn’t the real voice in her head that thought this; it was the third sleeper’s mimicked one.
She wished so much for the presence of the boys, or Calla, or her mother, or — she had so many people that she took for granted, all the time. She had never needed to be truly afraid before. There had always been another hand to catch her, or at least to hold hers as they fell together.
Blue crawled into the chamber. Ronan’s ghost light illuminated the space. She flinched when she realized how close she was to a kneeling man. He was inches away, willow-limbed and somehow familiar, completely unmoving.
Not sleeping, like a dream creature, nor dead, like the valley of bones. But fixed, gazing, intent, upon a dull red door with an oily black handle.
Open
Blue pulled her eyes away from it.
I am a mirror, she thought. Take a look at yourself while I look around in here.
She moved around the motionless man, trying to steel her heart for what she was going to see. Trying to guard against that worst of things, that insidious hope, worse than the third sleeper’s whispers in her head.
But it didn’t help. Because on the other side of the man was Maura Sargent.
She was still, her hands stuffed in her armpits, but she was alive.
Alive, alive, alive, and Blue’s mother, and she loved her, and she had found her.
Blue didn’t care if Maura could feel it or not — she scrambled over and threw her arms ferociously around her mother’s neck. It felt so very comfortingly like her mother, because it was her mother.
To her very great surprise, Maura moved slightly beneath her, and then whispered, “Don’t let me move!”
“What?”
“I won’t be able to prevent myself from opening it, now that there’s three of us!”
Blue glanced over at the man. His brow had furrowed deeper.
“We should just go,” Blue said. “How did you get across the lake?”
“Went around,” Maura whispered. “From above.”
“There was another way?” Now that Blue knew Maura was alive, she had room in her heart for other emotions, like being pissed. She peered around the cave and saw a small opening at the top of one of the low walls just as she saw that the man was beginning to creep toward the door.
Blue didn’t think. Bent over double, she darted over and flicked the switchblade out. “Oh, no. Come with me, dude.”
He seemed to genuinely consider impaling himself on a blade preferable to moving away from the door. Finally he shuffled back a few inches. Then a few inches more. Blue looked for something to tie his hands, but she only had the ghost light. She pulled it over her head and said, “Don’t take this personally, whoever you are, but I don’t trust you when you have your enchanty face on.”
She put the handle of her switchblade between her teeth, feeling slightly heroic, and used the soft handle of the light to tie his hands behind his back. He didn’t protest, and his eyebrows softened in something like gratitude. Now that he couldn’t open the door, he sank onto his knees, shoulders slumped, and let out a shaky sigh.
How long had Maura and this man been down here, resisting the call of whatever slept behind that door? This entire time?
“Are you Artemus?” Blue asked him.
He peered up at her in haggard acknowledgment.
So that was why he was familiar. She didn’t have the long face or deep crow’s feet, but his mouth and eyes were the ones she’d seen looking back in the mirror her entire life.
Huh. Hi, Dad. Then she thought, Really, with these genetics, I should be taller.
She looked back to the other opening, the one at the top of the wall. It was not the most welcoming sort of hole, but her mother had no climbing experience that Blue knew of, so it could not be any worse than the way she had already come.