She didn’t have time for further pondering. Still bent, she shuffled toward the tunnel opening she’d entered by. She called into the darkness: “Ronan?”
Her voice spread and softened in the space, eaten by the black.
A pause. Somewhere, water dripped. Then: “Sargent?”
“I found her! There’s another way out! Can you manage to get out the way we came?”
Another pause. “Yeah.”
“Then go!”
“Really?”
“Yeah, there’s no point if you can’t cross!” It was more dangerous for him to be there in the dark and unknown, and she wouldn’t be able to take her mother and Artemus back that way.
My parents, she thought. I can’t take my parents back that way.
This made her frown.
She returned to Maura. “Come on. You can move without opening the door. We’re going to leave.”
But Maura didn’t seem to be listening anymore. She was gazing at the door once more, frowning.
Artemus’s voice sounded in the dim, surprising her. “How are you able to bear it?”
His voice was — accented. She wasn’t sure why she was surprised. It was something like British, but clipped, as if English was not his native language.
Blue considered other options for tying her mother’s hands; she wondered if she could force her to leave. It would be horrific if she had to fight her. “I’m a mirror, I guess. I’ve just turned it back on itself.”
“But that’s not possible,” Artemus said.
“Okay,” she replied. “Well, then, that’s probably not what I’m doing and you know better. Now if you don’t mind, I’m trying to figure out how to get my mother out of this cavern.”
“But she can’t be your mother.”
Blue was taking less of a shine to her father than she’d hoped all these years. “You, sir, have a lot of suppositions that you’re considering fact, and I think, in a better time, you should take a long think about everything you’re sure is true. But for now, tell me if I can drag her out of this place and up that hole. That is the way out, right?”
He twisted his hands so the light showed on her a bit better. “You do, in fact, look a little like her.”
“Good God, man,” Blue said. “Are you still on that? Do you know who else I look a little like? Your face. Have a think on that and I’ll just figure this out myself.”
Artemus fell silent, sitting with his arms tied behind him, expression thoughtful. Blue wasn’t sure if he was indeed having a think on what her face looked like or if he was falling back into the thrall of the third sleeper.
Blue took her mother’s arm and gave an experimental tug. “Let’s go.”
Her mother’s arm went rigid, resisting not Blue, but the concept of moving at all. Then, when Blue released her, Maura immediately stretched out a hand to the door.
Blue slapped it. She turned to the door. “Let her go!”
The voice tried to creep in around her defenses. Open the door and you’ll all go free, and with a favor. Surely you want to save that boy’s life.
The third sleeper was good at what it did.
Even though Blue knew there was no chance that she would open the door or accept its help, she felt the offer chisel its way into her heart.
She wondered what it whispered to her mother.
Blue slid off her sweater. She took Maura’s hands — Maura resisted — and then tied them as well as she could by twisting the sweater arms around them. She tried not to care about how the sweater was surely ruined and stretched out now, but Persephone had made it for her, and that felt as dire as everything else. Every concern and every joy had become equal, priority erased by terror.
Blue took Artemus’s arm by the elbow and Maura’s arm by the elbow, and she dragged them up. At least as far up as they could go in this little room. Shoving them against each other and pausing a lot to lift them back off their knees, she began to inch them away from the door and toward the hole of the cave. She didn’t care if they were all bruised and bleeding by the time they got out of here — just as long as they got out of here.
But then a mass of bodies suddenly tumbled in through their exit.
50
The cavern had never been large to begin with, but as Blue keeled back onto her butt, it seemed ever smaller. The population of the room had suddenly increased by three people. The person in front had glorious blond hair and a gun, and the man behind her had pinched nostrils and a gun, and the person behind him was —
“Mr. Gray,” Blue cried gladly. She was so grateful to see him that she couldn’t believe he was real.
“Blue?” the Gray Man asked. “Oh no.”
Oh no?
A second later she saw that his hands were tied behind his back.
“What?” asked the blond woman with the gun. She directed a flashlight at Blue’s face, momentarily blinding her. “Are you a real person?”
“Yes, I’m a real person!” Blue replied indignantly.
The woman pointed the gun at her.
“Piper, no!” the Gray Man said, and jostled himself so hard against the woman that her flashlight dropped from her hand. It hit the rock and went out immediately. The only light came from the ghost light that tied Artemus’s hands.
“Classy, Mr. Gray,” Piper said, blinking, eyes glancing in the direction of the ghost light and then returning to him. “I wasn’t going to shoot her. But it might be time to shoot you now. What do you think, Morris? I defer to your professional judgment.”
“Please don’t,” said Blue. “Please, really, don’t.”
“We could shoot this one, too,” Morris replied. “No one will ever make it down this far to find them.”
Behind her, a few pebbles skittered down from the ceiling, or somewhere near it. Blue wondered with dim anxiety if they had unsettled the caverns by letting a herd of animals gallop through them.
Piper pointed at Maura and Artemus, finally giving them her attention. “Are these people real, too? Why do they look like that?”
“Maura,” the Gray Man said, only now taking his gaze from Piper and Blue. There was a breathless note to his ordinarily brisk voice. “Blue — how did it come to —” He frowned, a familiar sort of frown, and Blue knew that he was hearing the third sleeper whispering doubts and promises in his head.
Another pebble dropped down onto the cavern floor.
“All right, never mind,” Piper said. Her eyes, clear and intent and certain, were on the door. There was not a doubt in Blue’s mind that she had come to wake the sleeper. “Let me think. It’s so damn claustrophobic in here. You know what, you can just go, strange girl. That’s fine. Just pretend like you never saw us.”