Chaos (21 page)

“Guards!” he called out, but from somewhere above and beyond me, I heard the sound of cheering and a high-pitched yelp.

I pushed all worries for Malachi away and yanked on the Tanner, succeeding in pulling him a few inches farther over the edge. “Come on,” I huffed. “You wanted to escape through the portal. This is your chance.”

But he was loosening my grip. With a crack, he broke one of my fingers. Pain blazed along the top of my hand. He broke a second finger with a crunching twist, and my hand fell limp. My other hand, the one still holding on to him and to the grenade, began to slip. He gave a pained chuckle as he reached for it. “What do you have here, little girl?”

He grinned, showing me all his black teeth. But then that smile vanished, replaced by a grimace of fear. Malachi landed on the portal wall like some kind of avenging demon, covered in blood, his eyes dark with fury. His muscles stood out in sharp relief as he raised his arm and hurled one, two, three blades into the Tanner’s body, each movement sending ruby droplets raining down on me. The knives hit with deep thumps, penetrating the man’s tunic and his flesh. The Tanner let out a strangled groan as his muscles went slack. Malachi’s gaze locked with mine.

And then I was falling.

TWENTY-TWO

I
NSTINCTIVELY,
I
CLUTCHED AT
the grenade as I slipped, and one of my fingers sank down on the button.

Instead of plunging into the blue goo, though, I slammed into the portal wall, arms and legs flailing just inches above certain death. Together, Malachi and Treasa yanked me out. I had only a moment to see the wide-eyed faces in the throne room, the blood, the Tanner’s body sliding forward into the whirlpool, and then I tossed the grenade into the portal. “It’s activated,” I gasped.

“This way,” snapped Treasa as the Tanner’s people stared in shock, unsure of what to do.

Completely unaware that the whole place was going to blow.

We lunged for the back hallway and bolted for the bathroom as Malachi counted down. “Six,” he said in a strained voice as we dove into the tiny, stinky space. Shouts in the hallway told us the Tanner’s men were in pursuit.

Treasa moved viper-quick, lifting the wooden frame over the toilet holes. “Only way,” she said—right as Malachi said, “five.” He swayed on his feet, and his shoulder hit the wall, which was when I realized that most of the blood he was wearing was his own. Sil had torn him open, and his strength was fading fast.

Treasa touched my shoulder. “Trust me.” Then she jumped.

I looked down with a flash of worry, wondering if Malachi’s shoulders would fit, but then he shoved me toward the black pit as he said, “Three! I’ll be right behind you!”

I plunged downward, sliding and falling and drowning in stench, my head and hips and shoulders and knees bumping against the slimy surface. From above came a massive bone-rattling explosion, and then the whole world began to shake. I fell forever, dimly aware of a flash of red fire, wondering if I was imagining the screams that rolled over me in a wave, and praying Malachi had made it.

I broke into the open air for a bare moment before hitting the water. It filled my lungs as I gasped. I spread my limbs and kicked frantically, unsure which way was up. Something splashed into the murky river next to me. I opened my eyes.

Malachi. Blood swirled in crimson ribbons around his body as huge chunks of rock landed all around him. The palace appeared to be collapsing on top of us. Forgetting my own panic for a moment and the fact that I was still underwater, I reached for him. Someone yanked at the neck of my tunic, and I glanced over to see slender fingers clutching my shirt. My head emerged, and my body heaved, water flowing from my mouth as my stomach clenched. Ana was kneeling on the rocky shore, trying to help me onto the bank. I jerked myself away from her and forced one word from my mouth. “Malachi.”

I thrust myself back underwater, relying on sheer instinct. Malachi had lost a lot of blood, and I wondered if he’d hit his head on the way down. His arms floated at his sides, his head bobbing, his eyes closed. With my unbroken fingers, I grabbed the waist of his pants and pulled with all my strength. White-blond strands of hair on my periphery told me Treasa was also there, and she wrapped her arms around his torso and kicked upward. Together, we wrestled him to the bank, Treasa’s sure strokes keeping both me and Malachi moving. With Ana’s help, we pushed him onto the stone ledge. The cavern shook, and slabs of rock pelted the water only a few feet away.

“We’ll be buried if we don’t move!” shouted Ana.

“I’ll take his chest. One of you take his feet,” I yelled, barely able to process my own relief at seeing Ana here, alive and unharmed.

I locked my arms around Malachi’s chest. His head lolled on my shoulder. Ana grabbed Malachi’s lower legs and looped her left arm around them; her right arm stuck out at an unnatural angle from her body. We heaved him up, both of us groaning at his staggering dead weight. His sides, back, stomach, chest, and arms were a mess of deep claw marks, revealing torn muscle underneath. His left arm had been shredded by Sil’s fangs. I could see his ribs through the torn flesh on his left side.

Treasa led the way, and we made surprisingly rapid progress along the path to the tannery. I was grateful for the physical effort and clear goal, which left no room for worry or indecision. While the whole world roiled and trembled, we carried Malachi until our arms twitched and the path became too narrow to risk going on. The water beside us turned white and frothy, and we looked back at where we’d been, where we’d jumped through the primitive plumbing system and into the river. It was a wall of rock now, as if the entire Bone Palace had caved in on itself and sunk into the ground.

“There’s a cavern here,” said Treasa from up ahead. “We’ll need Malachi awake and mobile if we want to make it much farther.”

Seeing as I was about to collapse under his weight and my own exhaustion, I gratefully helped Ana get Malachi into the shallow cave only a few steps from the trail. We set him down, and I pulled him close, holding his face against my neck. Treasa squatted at the mouth of the cavern and produced a small lantern from behind a pile of stones. She lit it with a flint lighter and set it on the pile. Ana scooted near me and laid her left hand over Malachi’s shin. We gazed at each other. “We can both help him,” she said.

I smiled. She loved him, too. He’d been her brother-in-arms for decades.

I smoothed his hair and pressed my other palm over the flayed skin at his ribs. My broken fingers throbbed but were already healing. “Sil did this to him. The Tanner made them fight.”

Treasa looked grim. “If I had tried to stop it, or even delay the spectacle, the Tanner would have known.”

“Known what?” I asked sharply.

Her eyes were focused on her slender white fingers. “That I am not his, and I never have been. That I have been working for a long time to bring about his doom.”

“You knew what he was, didn’t you?”

She wrapped her arms around her knees and nodded. “He had become very hungry,” she said. “And he brought many men and women around to his way of thinking.”

“Which was?” Ana asked.

“That there was no way to grow strong with mercy, or kindness, or patience, or sacrifice. That the only way to thrive was to become as brutal as the Mazikin.” She met my gaze. “I believe in a different kind of strength.”

I glanced at Ana, who shrugged. “I believe her,” she told me. “She could have taken me out after she shoved me down that toilet hole. I broke my arm on the way down and might have drowned.”

“I’ve never been your enemy,” said Treasa. “Although I couldn’t reveal my true allegiance, I have always been on your side.”

“And your true allegiance is t
o . . . 
?”

“I serve the Smith.”

“Great,” I said. “The guy who wanted to publicly torture us.”

“He lives to protect his people,” snapped Treasa.

Malachi moaned, and I held him tighter as I said in frustration, “We asked him to help us! I told him we could get his people out, and he stabbed me for my trouble.”

Treasa’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t dig out of here or break the dome. He has tried all those things, determined to save the innocent condemned to this hell. But he realized that unless he wanted to give up his soul and become evil like the Tanner, there was no way out. He gave up on finding one a long time ago. When you showed up making those claims in exchange for his help, surely you realize what that must have sounded like to him. You wanted him to risk the people he protects for what he knows to be impossible?” She scoffed. “He has done everything within his power to preserve their souls and spare them pain—but also to spare their goodness. This is why he sent me to spy on the Tanner, to gain his trust and find a way to stop him.”

“Were you in the alley the night he captured us?” I asked. “If you’re on our side and you knew what he would do, why didn’t you stop the ambush?”

She gave me a puzzled look. “I suspected you were here to free him,” she said, nodding at Malachi, “but I hadn’t seen anything to indicate you were here for more than that. I helped you because I learned of your desire to destroy the portal, but I still don’t have any evidence that you’re willing to help the rest of us escape this city.”

Ana ignored Treasa’s implied question about our intentions and turned to me. “That night near the Smith’s, Takeshi caught her a few blocks away. By that time, you and I had already been captured. She told Takeshi she was loyal to the Smith, and he offered her a grenade in exchange for information on how to get into the metalworks compound to save us.”

Treasa nodded. “I told him about the master key and made him vow not to kill my master.”

Ana held up her right arm, and I could see the odd dent and the swelling. “When Treasa pulled me out of the water, I was in so much pain and so angry that I was ready to cut her head off. But then she pulled the grenade out of her pocket.”

Treasa looked slightly peeved. “The Guard said it was powerful, and that I could use it to destroy the Tanner, but he said he wouldn’t tell me how until after the two of you were safe.”

Ana snorted. “He figured that if you were stupid or lying about being on our side, you’d end up blowing yourself up. I didn’t know you’d still have it with you.” She looked over at me. “After I broke my arm, I couldn’t make it up the ladder, so I told Treasa to get the grenade to you, that you’d know what to do. She said she’d take care of it, told me where to find a cache of supplies, and said she’d bring you and Malachi back if she could.” She winced. “And I was left to wait down here.” She looked downriver, toward the place Takeshi had been carried away.

She hadn’t had him to help her heal, and it probably reminded her of how she’d lost him as she sat down here alone, healing badly. I ached for her. Where was Takeshi now? Was he suffering?

“He was supposed to come back,” Ana said in a small voice. “He should be here right now.”

“What?”

She closed her eyes. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter now.”

I didn’t know what to say, so instead I looked upriver at the wall of rock, now acting as a dam. The water level had already dropped well below the stony shore outside our cave, only a trickle where a raging current had once been. The avalanche of stones had completely cut it off—for now. “We’re going to have to leave soon. The river’s eventually going to bust through the dam, and I don’t want to be sitting here when it explodes.”

Ana gave me a smile full of sorrow and nodded at Malachi. “Then focus on how much you love him.”

I ran my tender, healing fingers through his hair and pressed my cheek to his, letting my thoughts float to that dream I had of him in the sunlight, of him turning his face to the light and enjoying its warmth on his skin. In that dream, there were no circles under his eyes, no scars on his body, no echoing memory of pain and fighting. He’d laid his weapons down, and he was able to rest. Malachi was a warrior, but in his heart, he wanted peace. He didn’t enjoy the battle, even though he’d always done his duty. He wanted a simple, happy, ordinary life, a dream he’d never had a chance to pursue. I wanted it for him. I’d never met anyone who needed it more. Whether I was part of it or not, he deserved that.

I laid my palms over his wounds, my thoughts turning those images over—wishing hard, but not for myself. Not for what I wanted from Malachi, only what I wanted for him. I smiled as I felt heat return to his skin, as I watched open wounds stop bleeding and knit themselves together.

He was starting to stir when Treasa cocked her head. “Do you hear that?” she whispered.

“What is it?” I asked.

Ana jumped to her feet, holding her right arm. “Someone’s coming.”

I held Malachi tightly to me. “Can you tell if it’s Mazikin or human?”

She released her arm and drew her knife. Next to her, Treasa did the same. Hesitantly, Ana peeked out of our cavern.

Then she gasped and let out a sound halfway between a sob and a shout. She was out of the cave before I could say a word. I carefully laid Malachi down and grabbed a sharp rock, preparing to fight yet again. I stepped out of the cave, rock held high. Takeshi was standing in the slippery empty riverbed. Ana was in his arms, shaking as she clung to him.

He looked over her shoulder and saw me standing on the shore. “You’ve accomplished your mission. The dome is open. Let’s get out of here.”

Malachi was sitting up when we returned to the tiny cavern, running his fingers over his new, gruesome scars. Before he turned away to sling a cloak over himself, I saw a flash of despair in his eyes. I could tell that he was losing himself, wound by wound. My voice loud and overly cheery, I said, “Up for another hike?”

He leaned out of the cave and sighed as he saw Takeshi. “I should have had some faith,” he said.

“When I saw the Tanner’s map and how the tunnels connected to the river, I knew what I had to do,” Takeshi said, releasing Ana but keeping his fingers wrapped over her badly healed arm.

Ana put her hand over his. “I agreed to let him go try to retrieve the grenades. I thought we’d need them to kill the Queen and destroy the portal.” She looked at me. “I didn’t count on you, Zip, and your mother taking care of the Queen without them.”

“But I have them now,” Takeshi said, lifting his tunic and revealing five grenades, slung diagonally across his belly, nearly covering the grisly scar. “And we can use them to escape.”

Malachi accepted Takeshi and Ana’s help in rising to his feet, then walked by my side as we ducked out of the cavern and descended into the riverbed with Treasa in the lead.

“Did you know the Tanner was evil?” I asked.

Takeshi nodded at Treasa. “I suspected, but Treasa confirmed what he really was. I knew you were probably trapped, and I’d been prepared to blast you all out of there grenade by grenade—but just as I got to the square, the palace began to collapse. I also heard a sound, like fabric tearing, that nearly brought me to my knees. From the southeast, there was a blinding light.”

“Raphael opening the dome,” I said quietly.

We were able to hike much more rapidly in the riverbed than we had on our way to the palace, when we’d been edging along the narrow rock ledge. Malachi draped his arm around my shoulders. His steps were steady enough, but he was leaning on me as if he was trying to save his strength—or maybe gather it. After a while, we passed the narrow arch that marked the beginning of the catacombs beneath the tannery. “Shouldn’t we go up that way?” I asked.