CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
The Earth’s Heartbeat
I slid the dress off the bed and changed into it as a giddy girl who was changing in Christian’s bedroom. As if such a thing made me closer to him.
When the dress was on, I no longer needed to stand in front of a mirror to see what I looked like. Dipping into the world of matter manipulation, I could see myself in a way that was far more detailed than what you would see by looking into a mirror.
The dress was all wrong for this place. It looked cheap and flimsy. It was a dress I had worn in my head thousands of times when I was a child in the hospital. I was supposed to go to sleep, but the restlessness of being a person who doesn’t know her future always made me itch in the small hours of the night. I’d close my eyes and in that place behind my eyelids, I could become anyone. I usually chose to wear that dress because that was what I imagined an older version of myself would want to wear as she ran through the fields with tall grass that brushed her fingertips. The flat land turned into the forests of the lower mountains. One day the trees would break and nothing would stop my view of the sea and the dawn.
It all seemed like an exercise intended to get me to sleep in those days. Now it was real because I knew that just because a place wasn’t made with the one hundred and twenty-five elements, that didn’t mean that it wasn’t real.
Christian came up behind me and put his hands on my bare shoulders. “Ready?”
I breathed heavily and opened my eyes. “How am I supposed to do this great thing?”
He kissed my neck from behind, before saying softly in my ear, “I’ll take you to the South Iron Room. Once you’re inside, all you have to do is enter my heart in the Red Forest. There, you’ll find further instructions.”
I knew what he was talking about. I had to go in and talk to him through the mirrored glass in the second chamber.
Rhuk piped up. Christian had been whispering into the ear that had Rhuk and the other diamonds in it. “Please don’t take me out when you go into the chamber,” Rhuk begged in my ear.
“Do you know what he has planned?” I asked the diamond.
“I have no idea. The only way to control a magnetic field is with a larger one, but where do you find a source of magnetism strong enough to control the iron stream for a whole planet? Take me with you!”
“Rhuk wants me to wear the earring into the room,” I told Christian.
“I could hear it. Rhuk, you can talk to me now.”
“Can I go with her into the South Iron Room?” it begged.
“No. Stop being so greedy,” Christian replied firmly.
Rhuk swung mournfully from my ear and all the diamonds chimed like sad bells.
“Just be happy she’s taking you with her to the room at all even if you’re not allowed in the inner chamber. It’s a dangerous place to be, even for a diamond. Let’s go,” he said, taking my hand and leading me out of the bedroom and into the hall.
The immortals were waiting for us. They stood in a desperate line with worried expressions. For them, everything rested on this moment. They had been waiting for it for hundreds of years.
Pricina stood with her jaw clenched and her eyes hard. She had never tried to control a pole and she was over ten thousand years old. This was what she wanted, but sending me into the South Iron Room was insane, like sending a child to defuse a bomb. She didn’t like it one bit, but she didn’t have any better solutions, so she clenched her jaw and her fists together as we walked by.
Brandon was next to her, trying to touch her in some way to comfort her, but she brushed him off. His expression when our eyes met was easy to read. Every doctor who operated on me had that look on his face before he gave me the drugs that turned out my lights. This, like every operation, was a coin toss to him. Fate would say how it would land.
There were other immortals I’d never met lined up to see us. They looked at me with awe, like I was the answer to all their prayers. If I succeeded with Christian, no one would go crazy trying to control the poles again. The problem would be solved. If only that were the only way to lose your immortality.
Axel stood next to Indra, a hulking figure next to her. Apparently, he had decided that he didn’t need to go to the surface to find a new wife. One had been brought to him.
I wondered if Indra felt the same way. Her eyes were on me like she wasn’t aware of him.
We reached the end of the line of immortals who had been waiting to watch us begin our journey to the South Iron Room.
Christian squeezed my hand in his, kissed it, and proceeded down the hallway. “Keep the others off us,” he said to Axel, mentioning the deformed ones
“Already done,” Axel assured him as we left the cluster of people and went a way I’d never been before.
Once out of sight, the carpeted hallway we moved through started moving. Moving faster than anything I’d thought was possible in Nhagaspir like we were standing on the gears of a pocket watch.
“Are you doing that?” I asked, concentrating on holding myself upright through the inertia.
“Yes. I built this place, but I don’t like it.”
“Why? I know you haven’t liked the immortals or the things they do, but none of that is your fault. The rooms you created are more beautiful than anything I’ve ever seen. I can’t even imagine where you plan on taking me from here. Where could we go?”
His expression was dull like he was more changed by the flood of knowledge he’d experienced than I understood. “Well, parts of this place are meant to look like my real palace, to help me feel less homesick, but they fail. It’s like I was a prince and taken to an unfamiliar place for the day. Abandoned on a beach, I took a stick and drew the blueprint for my palace into the sand, but I got bored drawing it and stopped. This place is not like one-thousandth of my real home. Why bother drawing the house in the sand when you only plan to be on the beach until the end of the day?”
“Where is your real home?” I asked, intrigued by the answers he could finally give.
“A place of impossibility. Holy chimes, voices like Rhuk’s singing, many stars close enough together to turn the sky white. All the colors human eyes have yet to see. Where all the sounds they have yet to discover meet. Where do the staircases lead you in your dreams? What do the voices sing about?”
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“Why aren’t you asking hard questions?” I laughed. “All those things are about you. That’s what the little angels in my mind sing about: living in a world where you love me… finally.”
I thought he might bend to kiss me, but he hesitated.
I heard something in the walls, like footfalls, or the ticking of a broken clock.
“What is that?”
“It’s the sound of the earth’s heartbeat,” he whispered. “It’s one of those sounds that are yet to be discovered.”
The hallway stopped moving like an elevator that didn’t move up a premade trail, but one that was making a trail for itself. The whole village had been spinning on an axis, rising and falling, taking us to a part of the village where the others were not invited. The end of the hallway found an opening and I saw a space beyond us like a cave, but a place carved out of the middle of a mountain, like stepping inside the hollow of a peach pit.
We had arrived.
It was nothing after the other rooms I had been to in Nhagaspir. Inside, I expected the inner chamber for the South Iron Room to look like a copy of the North Iron Room, but it didn’t look anything like it. The cave was just that, a dark cave. The control room inside was a giant golden ball, lit by a strange indirect light, like gold dust falling in the air. A plaque was carved over the door, and though it was not English, I read it clearly. ‘For The Woman With The White Heart’.
“Where’s the door?” I asked because I couldn’t see one.
“I feel like I have waited for this day forever,” Christian said slowly. “I have waited.”
I gazed at him trying to understand what he was saying.
He loosened his tongue. “It’s the last moment. I should be certain, but I’m at war with myself. The governor of my Red Forest, the one you call King Christian, says he’s been working on you. He says he has put all but the very last pieces into place. His work is finished and there’s nothing left that he can do for you. He says it’s time for the tempering process. The connection is ready to be forged.”
“Are you worried?” I asked slowly. “Because I am. It feels like this whole adventure has been like the first experience over and over again.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ever since Pricina told me that the fruit was rotten. She said that if I went to rescue Brandon, it would change everything. It has. She told me that she couldn’t tell me exactly what would happen, exactly what all this would feel like. The only thing she could tell me was that all of this would be painful, difficult, and treacherous. I believed her, but I didn’t understand. I thought I was willing to endure anything to be with you and I have endured so much.”
He listened carefully, so I continued, “This is going to be like that, isn’t it? Like getting kidnapped three times in a row, delivering the sword, rescuing you only to have your heart gone, and another trap to unravel before we could be together. I said goodbye to everyone I cared about twice. I don’t know what is behind that door. At this point, I understand that whatever it is, even if you told me, I wouldn’t understand. Once this is finished, will we finally be able to be together?”
Christian nodded. “This is the last gate. When you come out, we'll say our wedding vows in front of those idiots, go inside our room, and never come out.” He kissed me.
It was awful to stand at the threshold of change and not know exactly what would happen. How would the world change if the poles flipped? How would I change if I gave up the last shreds of my mortality and utterly gave up being a human? What color was my heart that beat inside Christian? Red? White? Did it matter? There were so many questions, but there was one certainty.
Christian was there. Finally. He was with me.
His kiss was comfort itself and I put all other thoughts out of my head. He was soft and warm. His kiss, which I had longed for so desperately, was finally mine.
He ended the kiss and said gently, “In a second, I’m going to walk back to the North Iron Room. Rhuk can tell you when I get there. Once I’m there, take Rhuk and the little diamonds off, and go inside. Here’s the door.” He pushed on a panel that popped the door to the inner chamber open.
A magnet had been keeping it closed.
“When did you build this?” I asked. “It looks fancy.”
“Over five hundred years ago.”
“Did they have magnets like this five hundred years ago?” I questioned.
“It doesn’t matter what humans have. I can make anything I can imagine.” He swung the entrance open.
Inside, the room was lit by lights under the floor. They illuminated a chair made of yellow metal. It was not anything like the chair in the Ocean Room. This chair was a wave of gold designed to fit the curves of a woman’s body and support her head.
I didn’t need to say what I thought of a room he created five hundred years ago to suit the curve of a woman’s body. He could tell from my expression.
“It doesn’t matter what it looks like,” he deflected. “It is merely a place for you to think.” He smacked his tongue. “When Rhuk tells you I’ve made it to the North Iron Room, take the earring out, go inside, close the door, sit in the chair and enter the Red Forest. You have to wake up the fourth version of me.”
“I thought I had to go to the mirror that would have become a window,” I retorted.
“You don’t understand. I am merely going to the other room as a formality. You don’t need to speak to me to correct the poles.”
“If you don’t have to be in the other room, then I’m doing the pole flip alone? I thought you said we needed to do it together?” I asked, suddenly feeling deceived.
He bit his lip and favored me with a playful expression. “You misunderstand. I’ll be there, but it is the fourth version of me in your heart who will play the final role with you. I’m going to the other room because I don’t want those idiots upstairs getting the tiniest inkling as to what we’re doing. It would give them hints on how to jump forward and I’m not sure they’re worthy. If they were worthy, they would understand what is necessary to accomplish this without hints. Wait for me to get to the North Iron Room.”
He turned, thought twice, and turned back to me to elaborate. “You’re nothing like them, you know. During all this, all your thoughts are about love. How to love me. How to be with me. You’re not doing this because you want to control the world, be a savior to the whole world, and have the whole world worship you. You’re only doing this because I’m asking you to do this for me. You’re not even greedily wondering what the fourth version of me knows, so you can get the shortcut to being a fourth-level god. Someone with your priorities is the most worthy. I’ll give you everything I am.” He pulled me close, laid his lips on my forehead, and breathed his scent into my hair.
Suddenly, I understood that all those times he dared me to be something more had all been for this moment. This moment was what he had been thinking of whenever he dared me to be fearless and to go ahead and do something that didn’t make sense.
“You won’t be alone. I’ll be with you.” He kissed my head, my lips, my palms, and then swung around to leave.
I felt terrible as I watched him leave. Watching him leave made me feel like I was doing the rest by myself. I wasn’t. He was going to be there with me in my heart, so I was not alone. Why did I have to go through certain parts alone?
Like an idiot, he blew me a kiss from the mouth of the tunnel. It was a kiss like one a man blew to his wife before he went off to war, but not exactly… It was the kiss a man blew to his wife before she went off to war.
I heard the sound of the hallway crackling through the rocks to take him back to the main part of Nhagaspir. It sounded like anvils hitting a stone floor, one after another, smashing, breaking, and falling through. It had been quieter when I was inside that section of the hallway with him. It had been quieter when I was in it because he was blocking the sound. The sound of the Earth’s heart beating was the sound of mountains crashing against each other.
“What do you think, Rhuk?”
It sighed. “This must be done. The magnetic poles are fluctuating madly. Three airplanes have crashed because of mistakes in their magnetic guidance systems since you arrived in Nhagaspir.”
I almost choked on something in my throat. “Really?”
Rhuk swung a nod. “Your man must have been dawdling when he brought you here, trying to spend as much time with you as possible. His trip back took a quarter of the time it took to bring you down here. He just stepped inside the North Iron Room,” Rhuk announced. “It’s time.”
I moved to pull the earring out of my ear.
“I don’t like this,” Rhuk complained. “I want to be with you until the end.”
“Christian says no. You have to wait out here.”
Amid the many protests, I dropped the diamonds in the heap on the stone floor. I crossed the threshold, pulled a lever on the inside of the door to lock it, and placed my body in the curve of the chair.
Whatever happened next… would be what happened next.