CHAPTER 43

I sit down on the sand and then gratefully fall onto my back.

I’m going to die.

The thought comes into my head with little fanfare. It’s simply there, factual as a brick.

I’m going to die, it’s true. Starve if the infection doesn’t take me first, or maybe a slime will make its way down here and I’ll end up a pustule-ridden walker in the deep.

Good.

If anything, death sounds like a welcome reprieve from the exhaustion I feel now. If there’s any justice in the world, I’ll be asleep when it comes. The sick warmth that flushes my cheeks and makes my eyes water is already dragging me under. I hope I don’t dream. There’s only one thing that stops me from just curling up into a ball and drifting away. I can hear him buzzing close by.

“Malco?” says Rue.

“Hmm?”

“Do you really think this is the time for sleeping?”

“Can you think of something better I should be doing?”

“Finding a way out of here?”

I sit up in a flash. The last voice wasn’t Rue’s. A wave of vertigo washes over me, and when my vision stops its swimming I look around, searching for a Challenger. But there’s no one there. Only a couple rows of torches remain lit now, and the gloom is nearly absolute.

“Who said that?”

“I did,” says Rue.

“No, not… Nevermind. I’m sick.”

I touch my forehead. I really am sick. Burning up already. I lay back on the sand and close my eyes. Immediately the edges of the world become rounded, the hardness less noticeable. I can drift here. Drift and think of home.

I hope they didn’t kill Medrein for my stunt in the arena. I hope he gets home to Reach to comfort Dala, I know she’ll need it after she learns of my…

I frown. Thinking of death doesn’t help with falling asleep. I switch to thoughts of Rev. Hopefully Rev will make it home, and… Again, the reality of the situation, that I pushed my unconscious sister into whatever deathtrap the Godtouched designed for the dungeon’s finale, doesn’t paint the cheeriest future. I think hard through the fog that’s building in my mind, clogging the normal channels and pushing me to find the best memories, the most precious ones of days under the sun or nights sprawled on furs in front of a good fire talking to… Katha.

Suddenly, it hits me. Not that I’ll never see Katha again, but that with me gone there will be no one to get her back. No one to find out what they did to her, what actually happened when they took her to be a Challenger. I think of her lost, alone, trapped, despairing, calling out to me incessantly in her mind, saying—

“Malco?”

This time I come completely awake, struggling to my feet with my heart hammering against my ribs. The room is nearly dark, with only a row of torches remaining.

“Rue? Did you say that?”

“I didn’t say anything, Malco.”

He’s not where I saw him last, but slithering through the sand around the drake’s paws. I know it wasn’t him. Know it because I know that voice, so different from Rue’s nearly-human musical hum. It’s a voice he’s never heard, one that’s branded into my mind.

“Who said that?” I call out into the darkness.

It’s the infection. It has to be. The fever is cooking my thoughts, turning fancy to reality. I’m hallucinating, I tell myself, over and over, though for all the conviction with which I think it my body doesn’t seem to buy the explanation.

I spin in place trying to look into every shadow at once and tripping over my own feet. Another torch goes out, the dying light flutters in the pit, and then I see her. Her hair just as bright, her eyes just as piercing.

“Took you a while,” Katha says.

She’s standing in the halfway place where light becomes gloom. Her feet are bare, her arms tan, and her dress is the one she was wearing the day she was taken. To my side, I see Rue raise up a little cloud of dust as he buzzes a question. I raise a hand to calm him.

“Is that really you?” I ask.

I take a step forward, but she retreats as I do, keeping to the shadows.

She’s just like I remember, an image plucked from my very memory. That’s how I know, how doubt makes its way inside, how my hopes crumble even before she answers.

“I—"

“It’s not. It can’t be,” I say. “You’re some trick, or I really am sicker than I feel.”

“Hey! Don’t call me a trick, knucklehead,” she says with a haughty, offended expression, and then a smile breaks across her face. It dwindles when I don’t rise to the insult.

“You’re right,” she admits. “I’m not really here. But that’s not the same as not being real.”

“But is it really you, Katha?”

“Let me put it this way: if you die in this hole, you’ll never find me, wherever I am, and you’ll never get to ask me if I somehow found a way to reach you in your hour of direst need.”

“Did you?”

She shrugs.

“Gotta find me and ask me.”

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“Well, if I did get out here, find you and all that, I would start by asking why you didn’t manage to pull that one off in my actual hour of direst need. You know, with the giant drake and the people trying to kill me.”

“Ah, but you made it past that one without my help,” maybe-Katha says, raising a philosophical finger. “So this, when you’re busy moping instead of finding a way to solve the puzzle, is your actual hour of greatest need, and my wisdom remains unchallenged.”

I shake my head at this. I’d almost forgotten how insufferable Katha can be, real or imaginary.

“Fine, then what’s the solution?” I ask. “What’s the answer that I’m missing?”

“That would definitely defeat the challenging part of the Challenge, wouldn’t it?” she counters, drawing a naked foot over the cooling sand. “There are things you have to understand yourself, or they’ll always be taken away. Just like I was. Just like that,” she snaps her fingers as another torch goes out and seems amused by the coincidence.

In the growing darkness, she gets harder and harder to make out.

“So what are you doing here, if you’re not going to help?” The more I try to contain it, the more Katha’s nonchalance begins to annoy me. “You know, I’m trying hard to get you back. Wouldn’t kill you to be a bit more forthcoming.”

Katha’s eyes linger on mine a moment. They’re two points of light shining across the empty expanse of the arena, and even from this distance they seem tinged with sadness and not a little mischievousness.

“I don’t have a lot of time,” she says slowly. “I thought seeing me might cheer you up, or at the very least get you off your butt. Mission accomplished, I guess.” She smiles, showing teeth, and becomes serious again. “I don’t have solutions, only a question. And that is: if you knew this was possible, seeing me, saving me, what would do be ready to do?”

I’m being toyed with. I know that. But I can’t tell, not for sure, not really, if it is Katha, if the Godtouched would be as prescient and as sick to take her just to lure me to their games, to use her like this, to bait me… The questions boil over into rage.

“Are you her? Tell me!” I take a step forward and nearly lose my balance on the uneven sand.

“I don’t need you to tell me,” she says placidly. “Search your soul. You’ll find the answer there. Goodbye, Malco. I do hope you make it out of here.”

She smiles again as I walk and then run to her, and another torch goes out. The light changes again in the room, my swimming vision goes out of focus, and when I reach the spot of darkness that was Katha was there is nothing there but air and sand.

It wasn’t her. I know it wasn’t her. But the emptiness of her presence is so large, big enough to fill the arena, the whole dungeon. I stand there for a long time grasping at echoes. Enough that Rue makes his way to me and buzzes softly at my feet, displacing the sand in strange patterns.

I wipe my eyes and feel my forehead – too warm – before leaning down and offering him a hand to climb onto. I raise him up to eye level, his buzzing soothing against my palm.

“Are you all right, Malco? Were you running to get out of here?”

“No, Rue,” I sigh. “Just thought I saw something.”

“Good,” he buzzes more confidently. “I knew you weren’t, because I knew you wouldn’t leave me behind.”

No matter how defeated I feel, the weariness weighing over me, and the constant, throbbing pain climbing up my arm from my wrist, this gets a smile out of me., mingled with terrible guilt.

“I wouldn’t do that.”

Something catches my eye as I look closely at Rue: inside his tiny, dark, and half-translucent body two little objects bob up and down with his movements.

“What have you got there?”

“Oh, that’s right! Here, it’s for you. I thought they might cheer you up.”

The little bodies inside him float to the surface and stay there, held in place by whatever it is that Rue is made of. The dice, now almost completely white. I turn them over and find there are only four pips left: a three on one die, a one on the other.

“And they’re so useful. Maybe you could use them to get out.”

“Thank you, Rue,” I say. “But I think they’re not that useful.”

“Oh.” His buzzing subsides to almost nothing, then comes up again. Rue’s equivalent of a resigned shrug. “I’m sure you’ll do your best.”

Closer to the walls of the arena I can see better. I sit down, sliding my back against the wall and settle Rue on my knee. I shake the dice in my good hand, let my myself get hypnotized by the clacking. With a little imagination, it almost sounds like the crackling of logs on a fire, the jumping of sparks the chattering of knives against plates…

Bu the mounting cold pulls me back. It’s getting chilly now. Whatever was keeping this level a little above a comfortable temperature is now going the other way, and with my only shirt is stuck to a wall somewhere, all I have left is wrapping my arms around myself and rubbing to keep myself warm, making the dice sing their merry song with each rub.

I stop. An idea worms its way into the forefront of my mind. Speed, strength… I wonder what else the dice will boost. I wonder…

With a foot, I draw a mostly level surface on the sand.

“Rue?”

“Yes, Malco?”

“Can you stretch yourself right here on the sand like you did in the pedestal?”

He slithers down from my knee and to the spot I cleared. Starting as a blob, he begins to seemingly melt as he pulls himself in every direction at once, ending as a little flat surface with some thickness still to it.

“I think this is as far as I can get,” he says, his voice strangely altered. “It’s hard to hold onto the sand.”

“It’s perfect. Now hold still.”

I tilt my hand and let the dice tumble on Rue.

“Ooo, bad luck,” he buzzes. I have no idea how he can see the pips, but he’s right: it’s two blanks.

“One more,” I whisper.

Roll. Two blanks again.

“Come on,” I say, biting my lower lip as the dice tumble once again, jumping on Rue with all the grace of falling rubble. At the moment of collision, Rue buzzes inadvertently, like the beginning of a question. The dice shake, tremble, and then roll to a stop.

“Nice!”

“You didn’t do that on purpose, did you?” I ask suspiciously, staring at a blank and a one.

“Do what?”

“Exactly. All right. Uh… Memory?” I say. It sounds more like a question instead of the exclamations I used to grant myself greater speed. But as I watch, the single pip disappears.

For the first few seconds, I don’t feel any change. Not surge through my body, no electric sensation in my head. What I do feel, building and growing, taking over my thoughts and my fever, is a calm and a quiet, my mind becoming sharper as the background noise fades. I focus and manage to grab onto a single strand of thought, directing it this way and that like a swift and obedient horse.

I close my eyes and think of home. The crackle of logs in my mind becomes as clear as if I was there. Katha’s presence, the smell of the hills, all our conversations, sparing with Rev in cold winter mornings… Each memory is a painting, nearly as real as the sand I sink my hand into. I explore the hills again, I wade into the Steel river each time for the first time, my skin breaks the icy surface and down below I find Katha, swimming like she belongs in water, smiling like home.

Tears fall down my cheeks. I feel the passing of the seconds, the meager allotment the dice provide running out one by one, never enough. I push the horse to ride harder, to go faster, trying to feel all of it before the inevitable end.

But the obedient beast begins to show signs of resistance. It turns in new and unforeseen directions, dragging me away from the sun of Reach and into the bowels of the earth. I see tunnels, doors, blood, but these are not distant memories, they’re places I walked in just a few hours ago.

I’m in a dark placing, panting. A sliver of light pierces the gloom, and then it’s stretched open as the cyclops, cruel searching eye swiveling, bursts into the room. I remember this, I protest, sweating despite the cold. I know what happened, but it’s more a fever dream than a thought, not something I can control or escape. The cyclops trips into the pit and is caught by the spikes, I attack it and it falls again. I grit my teeth as the memory advances, inexorable, and I look into the pit. The eye, pierced by the sharp spikes. Sweat on my tongue, salty and wet. The cyclops dies in the darkness of the hole, turns to smoke, and something clatters down below…

I tremble as the memories abate and leave me all at once. I open my eyes to an onslaught of light from the single torch still burning. Rue is perched on my good hand, trying to bring me back.

“Malco!” he says when my eyes blink open. “Are you all right?”

“I…” I wipe the sweat from my face, suddenly too cold. “I know a way out.”

“You do?”

“Yes!” the memories ebb like water from broken cup, but my direction is clear. “I know where the key is!”

There’s a way.

There’s a way!