Eluvie woke suddenly. She was still near the surface, the hole above her had closed and she was in darkness. She felt mildly ill again and this time, she recognized it as more than nervousness. The strength she had absorbed from the sun still filled her. She felt stronger than she ever had in her life. But she also felt as if someone had held her upside down for a significant amount of time.
She almost asked the ghost to open a tunnel for her - for light and to estimate the length for her nap, but something stopped her.
The ground was shaking. And the shaking was coming closer.
“I need help,” she said. “Open a tunnel.”
Nothing happened.She didn't panic immediately. Perhaps the voice had fallen asleep too.
She began digging a tunnel of her own. It was slow and despite her efforts, the shaking seemed to be coming closer.
She moved as quickly as she could, calling to the ghost the whole time and being met with silence. She was aware of the hole she was leaving behind her, a flaming arrow pointing the way to her location, but there was nothing she could do about it.
He can't be asleep, she thought.
Her mere thoughts had woken him the first time. Now, he was asleep with a strange device shaking and tearing through the earth. No, he was ignoring her.
"I'll tell everyone about you!" she said. "You promised to help!"
Her hole broke through a patch of dirt and joined an opening. It was a much larger tunnel with a smooth, cylindrical shape. Something was at the end of the tunnel: a metal cylinder with a tiny glass window and the hint of a figure inside it.
Eluvie pulled back into her own tunnel and began frantically digging in another direction.
It soon happened again. Her tunnel intersected another, larger one. She could not see the device that had made it, but that meant nothing. She backtracked about a hundred meters, found a promising spot, and began a new tunnel.
Please don't let me meet one again, she prayed.
By this point, she had lost all sense of direction. She believed that she was traveling in a mostly eastern direction, but that was a calculation from all her previous turns.
Once again, she broke into a larger space. But, this time, it was not a tunnel. It was a room.
"There she is! Release it!"
Eluvie barely had time to recognize the speaker. A wave of fluid rushed in from the door of the room, spilled from two enormous stone vats. She pulled back into the tunnel, but the fluid followed her in, filling the little gaps she left along the tunnel's wall, seeping into the soil, and hardening almost instantly.
She strained and pushed, but the now-solid fluid had no give.
"She's in here!" a man screamed. "It worked!"
Eluvie kept struggling, though the effort was achieving nothing.
Internally, she cursed everything: her own foolishness, the ghost's faithlessness, the heavens' cruelty.
Lady Mirab entered the room, walking on top of the now-hardened and transparent fluid. There was a tight but pleased smile on her face.
"You should feel ridiculous," Lady Mirab said, "crawling about like a worm. Bring the jug!"
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Someone handed her a jug. She took two steps backward and then poured its contents directly onto Eluvie's position. A brownish liquid spilled out of the jug and melted away the glue everywhere it touched.
Eluvie had seconds. The glass rod sat clutched in Lady Mirab's other hand. Whether they killed her or erased her memories, the result was the same: defeat.
There were still parts of her that could move. She had foolishly condensed herself into one dense mass while digging the tunnels, but almost a tenth of her was untouched by the glue. She focused on those parts, put all her energy into it, and pulled away from Lady Mirab.She expected that it would feel like trying to tear herself apart, but there was no pain. The rest of her remained stuck despite the effort, but she did not give up. She kept pulling. She told herself not to give up, that good things happened to good people, that there was no world where people like Lady Mirab could live happily with their crimes.
She split into two.
One part of her remained stuck in the glue while the other began rushing away from the first: propelled by all the force she had put into it.
Eluvie was so stunned that she forgot to be afraid. She could still feel both parts, just as she could feel her arms and legs when she was in human form. The distance did not seem to matter: not to her sensations and not to her sense of control. She could watch Lady Mirab from one part and, with the other, navigate the maze of tunnels she had made.
Lady Mirab poured the liquid from her jug until the top of Eluvie’s tunnel was exposed, and Eluvie with it. Then, she smirked, pressed her glass rod onto Eluvie, and held it there until the world faded into darkness.
She woke up once more before the procedure. Lady Mirab was scolding everyone in sight because, in Eluvie’s new form, they couldn’t harvest any blood from her. The broken piece of gold was in the ground where Eluvie had left it, halfway down a tunnel. Eluvie forced it to travel until it reached a dead end far from the diggers’ tunnels. She could no longer hear the sounds of the movement, so they were probably gone. But she did not want to be found if they came in to fix the tunnels.
She moved dirt around until she had covered herself up. Meanwhile, her main body, back in the clinic, remained completely motionless.
Lady Mirab pressed the rod to Eluvie, again. It did not seem that she had suspected anything. She did it casually, with both her eyes and attention still on Amu.
Eluvie fell unconscious again.
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Eluvie was in the sun - its blessed warmth was unmistakable, incomparable to even the coziest fire - and a rough, male voice was singing a lullaby.
“Do you, little girl, know what the gentle river said?
Do you know, do you know, how such taunting little meant?
From the mountains, I have come,
To the ocean, I return - ”
“Amu.”
Amu froze at Lady Mirab’s voice. His song ceased, and he stopped rocking the glass bowl he was cradling to his chest.
“What are you doing?” Lady Mirab asked.
Amu tilted his head, as if he couldn’t understand the question. He held the bowl with one hand and gestured to her with it. “The hourly 15-minute sun trip.”
The liquid in the bowl, thick and golden, swirled a little as he moved it.
Lady Mirab took several steps forward. As she did, she passed from the shadow of the palace’s door into the full noonday sunlight and squinted as she did so.
“I meant,” she said, “why are you singing that ridiculous song?”
Amu returned to cradling the bowl. “Singing helps human babies,” he said. “It certainly can’t harm here.”
Lady Mirab walked up to him and stood an arm’s length away, irritation on her face.
“Is this what I pay you for?”
Amu rolled his eyes and mouthed something, but Lady Mirab continued speaking anyway.
“You said that she would wake up yesterday. I don’t know if you can tell, but it is no longer yesterday.”
“Let us keep our tempers down,” Amu said in a sing-song voice, “and remember the conversation we had. Remember who will lose her council seat if anything goes wrong.”
He looked down at the bowl of fluid. “Mama is very worried about you, yes she is. That is why she has been harassing me every day for a month, even though I told her that seeds take time to germinate.”
Lady Mirab looked annoyed, but counterintuitively, Amu’s disrespect seemed to tame her temper. “How do you know it is still viable?” she asked. “Perhaps when we -”
Amu cleared his throat very loudly. Fear flickered onto Lady Mirab’s face. She shot a glance at the bowl, and then changed her tone.
“When she fell ill,” Lady Mirab said, “could it have damaged her seeds?”
“Only if she was treated improperly,” Amu said. “And if that is the case, there is nothing you can do about it. We have another week until there’s reason to worry. Just go inside and please, for heaven’s sake, stop bothering me while I do the work you pay me to do. This is actually important.”
Lady Mirab eyed him for several more seconds, then turned to leave.
“Wait,” Amu said. “Won’t you say goodbye? What kind of mother are you?”
Lady Mirab sighed, leaned over the bowl, and pasted a smile on her face. “Grow well, sweetie,” she said, “and get better soon.”
Eluvie felt as if death itself had hugged her.