Incarnate (20 page)

“He’s five thousand years old, Stef.” I pulled my hands off the bars in case she slapped my knuckles like Li would have. “Let him make his own decisions.”

Sam smirked, but the hint of a smile vanished when Stef turned on him. His voice deepened. “What Ana said.”

“Idiot.” She marched away from the window.

Sam frowned and turned back to me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the diaries. I
was
trying to hide them from you, but only because I didn’t want you to worry.”

“I don’t care about that anymore. I think I understand.” A quick glance over my shoulder revealed no one had found me yet, but it was only a matter of time. My knees ached, and my chest itched from pressing against the white stone. “How do I get to the prison from the Councilhouse? Or is there another door?”

“Li was trying to kill you.” His expression was earnest. “I was searching for proof that she wanted to murder you using sylph. Menehem was working on something that might affect sylph, but I couldn’t find anything else about it. I went to her house the day of the masquerade, but she hid any information she had. She, and whoever she’s working with.”

We’d been doing the same research all along. He wanted to prove Li tried to murder me, using sylph so she wouldn’t be imprisoned for it. And I–I’d stumbled onto it, though I’d never quite recognized the threat as he did.

“I know about all that.” I pushed myself up to my knees again and held on to the bars. “It’s okay. Just tell me how to get you out.”

He flashed a hopeful smile. “Go around to the—”

Footsteps. He must have heard them, too, just louder than the wind around the building. And before he could order me to hide, thunder rumbled again and his eyes widened. Stef and Orrin — who was out of my line of sight — swore loudly.

“Go, Ana. Hide anywhere, and don’t come out until the thunder stops.” When I didn’t leave immediately, frantically trying to sort through my thoughts and emotions, he shouted, “
Run
, Ana. Dragons.”

I lurched to my feet and hurled myself in any direction. Meuric had said they’d come. History books said the same thing — sometimes hundreds of dragons. So I ran until I hit a white wall with a door. Shivering, I twisted the handle and glanced over my shoulder — no one yet — and threw myself into somewhere dark and still and heavy.

The air pulsed.

I spun, heartbeat thudding in my ears. No, not my heartbeat. The air. The walls. White light shimmered across a vast chamber. This wasn’t the Councilhouse. It was the temple.

New panic surged through me, and I darted for the door to escape. I’d rather deal with dragons.

But the door was gone.

I BANGED ON the wall until pain knifed through my palms. I yelled until my voice became shards of glass whistling through my throat. I kicked the wall until numbness raced up my toes and feet.

The door was gone. How was I supposed to escape if the door was gone?

My legs quivered as I strained not to crumple to the floor. There was never a door into the temple, not until ten minutes ago, and it hadn’t even lasted. This shouldn’t be possible. Not just the door, but me being the one to find it. Me, who shouldn’t have been born. Me, who was supposed to be Ciana.

There were too many impossible things.

“Calm down,” I whispered, again and again, hoping eventually it would work. “Breathe.” The air was heavy, like inhaling dry water. My head throbbed with the weight and pressure. My thoughts tumbled: how to get away, how to get free.

I drew away from the wall, but the pulsing air didn’t ease its grip on my head. It was like pressing my entire body against the city wall. Being inside Heart didn’t do this, nor did being inside the white-walled homes or Councilhouse.

But this was the temple without doors, the very center of Heart. On clear days, the temple’s shadow swung over the city like a sundial. Thousands of years ago, they’d used the temple to tell time.

I hated the temple. Instinctively, the first time I saw it and felt it was
looking
at me, and then when I felt the pulse through the city wall. Rock shouldn’t have a heartbeat.

There was no sound, not even ringing in my ears, like quiet often did. I hated the silence and throbbing and weight, the absence of temperature. Not cold or hot, but not just right, either. It simply… didn’t feel like anything.

I squatted in front of the wall and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for something to happen. For the door to magically reappear. I didn’t want to call out — no matter that I already had — and risk anything coming to eat me. Or, worse, risk the marble-thick air squashing my voice before it was ever out.

The chamber’s faraway white walls glowed in the same eerie way the outside did, wearing no ornamentation. There were no paintings, pottery, or statues. There were no shadows, hardly any depth thanks to the everywhere-light.

There was only me.

Sam hadn’t said much about the temple. That it was empty, yes, and that there were words on the outside, which Deborl had deciphered. They spoke of an entity named Janan, who’d given everyone souls and an eternity of lifetimes, maybe even built Heart to protect them from dragons and sylph and the like. They were to worship Janan, though they didn’t know how, and he never appeared to claim what they owed.

“Janan?” I left a mitten where the door had been, then rested my hand over Sam’s knife as I sidled along the wall, careful not to touch the stone more than necessary.

After ten steps, I glanced at my mitten for reassurance — not that it mattered if the door never reappeared — but the mitten was gone, too.

Ugh. In the unlikely event I escaped, my hand would be cold.

I focused on that so I wouldn’t think about where it might have gone. What might have taken it. Nor did I want to think about Sam, or dragons, or what would happen if he was killed.

An archway appeared ahead, almost invisible with the white walls and even light.

If I’d thought it might work, I’d have tried to lay a trail so I could come back this way, but when I checked, my mitten was still gone. Anyway, considering how the door had vanished, I didn’t trust the archway to stay where I left it.

The dragon thunder, which had been growing louder outside, was nonexistent in here. The walls blocked the noise completely, but I wished I could hear what was going on. I kept imagining Sam trapped in prison while dragons rampaged through Heart.

Last time they’d come through, they went straight for the temple, which I was now inside. If I didn’t get out and dragons breached the wall—

I gave up on stealth and threw myself through the archway, tripped, and landed on my hands and knees, top side higher than my butt.

Stairs.

Because there were no shadows, I hadn’t seen the stairs. My eyes ached from the constant white, from trying to discern definition when everything looked the same distance.

With more caution, I groped until I figured out the height and depth of the steps as they descended before me.

Odd. I’d tripped as though the stairs went up. If they went down, then I’d have fallen to the bottom and broken my neck. Nevertheless, they felt as though they went down. I slid my hands over the stone, trying desperately to ignore the temple’s heartbeat.

I stood again, but when I tried to slide my foot down, my toe hit stone. Adrenaline still made my head fuzzy, but I forced myself to crouch and feel again. They definitely went down when I slid my hands over the stone, but as soon as I tried to descend, I bumped into them as though they headed up.

Lying stairs.

Fine. I went up, and my eyes gave up trying to adjust to the everywhere-light and lack of shadows.

The stairs seemed endless, and the opposite effect remained disorienting. I felt as though I climbed, but every time my gaze fell on my feet, it looked like I should be descending. My thighs burned with exertion. Definitely up.

Twice, I stopped to rest and breathe, and to fight the sensation of walls simultaneously near and far. When I reached, there was nothing to either side of me. It was difficult to tell how wide the stairs were. I could crouch and extend one leg all the way without running out of floor, and do the same on the other side, but I’d also been able to feel the stairs going down, so I didn’t trust anything.

I should have stayed back in the big chamber down — or up — stairs. I wouldn’t have known what to do there, but at least I wouldn’t have been so blind and confused, straining all my senses for a hint of anything else in this empty temple. What if I was trapped here forever? Alone?

Surely there was a way out.

At last I reached… somewhere. The floor leveled out, and the light was dimmer on one side of a long room, which made it easier to see, but didn’t cure my headache. And, even though I knew better, I checked on the stairs. They were gone. I doubted I could trust anything to stay where I’d left it.

Fifteen darkened archways led out of the new room, which was about the size of Sam’s parlor. Books sat on the floor at the opposite end. Dark leather covers, shiny as if freshly bound. I almost ran for them — a sign of
something
other than me and a lot of emptiness — but the last thing I wanted to do was meet an ugly death because I hadn’t exercised caution.

“Hello?” The air and walls smothered my whisper. What if there were others trapped in here, caught in the white nothingness?

I listened, but there was only the absence of sound.

Biting my lip, I inched across the room, making sure to test the floor before I trusted it to bear my weight. Or stay there. The stairway hadn’t dropped me, but it had probably thought about it.

The temple’s heartbeat continued. Steady. Drumming. I clutched my knife. It was useless here, but the smooth rosewood handle sent a ripple of comfort through me.

There were only a dozen or so books at the far end of the chamber, but they cast eye-friendly shadows. My headache retreated as my hand hesitated over the blood-red cover. No title. No indication of what was inside.

No dust, either.

Holding my breath, I laid my palm on the front and waited.

“Janan?” I whispered. “Are you there?”

No answer but the rhythmic heartbeat in the air.

My hands shook as I slid the book off the stack. It was thin, but had a good weight to it. Cloth paper, leather cover. The binding creaked when I opened it, but the stitches held. The faint scent of ink tickled my nose.

That had been another thing missing from the temple: odor.

I pressed the paper to my face and inhaled, stupidly grateful for something so simple I hadn’t noticed it was gone. Then, embarrassed even though no one was there, I cradled the book in one hand and flipped pages in search of writing. Answers.

Dashes of black spread across the papers, as though the writer had tapped his pen to make ink splatter everywhere, or a squirrel had gotten ink on his claws and used the paper to clean them. The markings weren’t left to right like the words I knew, or even music.

I tried another book. Same nonsense scribbles. No matter how many pages I flipped, the markings never made sense.

I’d felt this before, knowing that something should work, but unable to see how. I’d been ten years old. Li had taken one of Cris’s books and skimmed through it, hmm-ed like she understood the ink splatters, and repaired the septic system with ease now that she’d read how to do it.

After she’d gone to bed, I had sneaked into the library and opened the book she’d read, but it didn’t make sense. It was just ink on paper.

But then I’d placed the book on the table and squinted right, and suddenly saw the way everything made lines and spaces.

It had taken another year to figure out all the letters and words, but I’d known they
must
work somehow. I’d trusted that they did.

I needed the same kind of trust with these. Spending a year in here deciphering them was out of the question, but perhaps it would be wise to look for anything useful — like a map — before heading off through any of the archways leading from the room.

Before I could settle on the floor to sort through the books, the temple heartbeat paused. The temple
gasped
.

Murmurs snaked through the temple. That didn’t help the heaviness of the air or the general discomfort now that the heartbeat was back, but it was the first sound other than mine, and it sent shivers along my back.

When the whispers grew louder, I pulled off my backpack and tucked a few books in with my clothes; it was hard to say if I’d find this room again. Then I crept away, head cocked like that would help me figure out where the sounds came from. But, like the light, the whispers came from everywhere.

I wanted to call out and find out who was here. The words were out of my throat before I realized, but I trapped them behind my lips before they could fully escape. If it was Janan, if he was real, I wanted at least a second to prepare. Observing him before he saw me was probably impossible, but this was the place for impossible things.

It was just, this Janan had demanded worship and then left. Even if he did give people souls and eternal lives, he’d abandoned them to figure everything out on their own, defend themselves from dragons and sylph and a hundred other creatures that regularly tried to destroy Heart. If Janan
was
real, the most he ever did was protect the temple when dragons wrapped their bodies around it.

And the dragons must
hate
Janan if they went right for the temple every time.

The whispers softened. Some sounded like weeping.

I chose the nearest archway, knowing it might be foolish and I might never get back to the book room. But if something was happening, there might be a way out.

The archways had been dark before, like light simply wouldn’t touch them, but their light shifted as I stepped through, into a hall. The darkness had been an illusion. The walls were black and slick as oil, but glowed eerily. The illumination pulsed in time with the heartbeat.

The hall seemed impossibly long; the light at the other end was so tiny. But when I blinked, I stepped through another archway and had to cover my eyes at the blinding white.

It was as big as the first chamber, and as bright, but it wasn’t the same. A brilliant pit lurked in the middle of the room, its walls white as far down as I could see. I tried not to get too close to the edge; someone — Janan — might rush up behind me and push me. The new weight in my backpack took adjusting to, also.

Murmurs hissed again, rippling like a sheet flaring over a bed. The sound still came from everywhere at once, like the heartbeat and pressure.

I lurched away from the pit as the room twisted. Blurs ran up one side of my vision and down the other, a giant circle of shadows as the ceiling fell to the floor, and the floor rose to the ceiling. The pit climbed the wall like an enormous spider. The room turned upside down. The walls groaned and grumbled as though in pain.

The stone under me stayed put. Probably. It was hard to tell. When everything stopped grinding, I was on my knees, palms pressed against my eyes so hard my cheekbones ached.

The temple’s heartbeat steadied. Light beyond my fingers eased, and when I peeked, the room had turned completely upside down. Hesitantly, I stood and tried to decide between looking up at the hole, or fleeing this room. The archway was still there, and on the floor. For now.

“Here,” the temple whispered. “Newsoul.”

I didn’t move.

Was it talking to me? Was that Janan? I could hardly breathe for all the questions gathering in my throat.

“You know what I am?” I bit my tongue as soon as the words slipped out. I couldn’t trust the temple to tell me the truth. It made me queasy inside, and the whole place was weird and upside down. There was so much emptiness, and the books made no sense. But I needed to know. If this was Janan, maybe he could finally tell me what had happened to Ciana. “Why was I born?”

“Mistake.” The word dripped through the stones like sweat. “You are a mistake of no consequence.”

The absence of temperature hadn’t changed, but I shuddered and hugged myself. I’d always known I was a mistake. Always been told I didn’t matter…

“Ana?” Not Janan. This second, higher voice belonged to a real human.

I spun on my heel to find a boy standing in the black archway. Short brown hair, thin cheeks, and eyes that held millennia of experience. He only
appeared
as if he was fifteen years old.

“Meuric.”