“Sorry,” she mumbled as she forced herself through the flimsy door.
Inside, the cabin was barren and rotting, nothing but dust and pine tree debris, the forest reclaiming the construction. The passage of time had made that which should have been durable just another biodegradable carcass, a bag of bones soon to become dirt save for the pick-up sticks of nails and the two four-paned windows that would survive longer.
“Over here,” he said as he went across to the far corner.
As his heavy weight made the floorboards groan, she hoped for his sake there was no lower level. He was liable to fall through.
Crouching down, he tucked his fingertips into a knot in a board, and as he lifted, he brought up a three-by-five section that was more solid than you’d think.
“We go down here.”
Ahmare went over and didn’t accept the hand he put out to help her descend a ladder that was just thin cross-hatches tied to two poles with twine. As she carefully lowered herself, her sinuses became filled with a complex bouquet of rot and mold and mud, and she decided, if she got out of this alive, she was going to Disney World.
Okay, fine. Not Disney World, because really, how was a vampire going to handle the land of sunshine, sunscreen, and screeching human children. But she was going to go somewhere where they had air-conditioning and air fresheners and beds with clean sheets. Running water. A refrigerator.
A shower with multiple heads.
Or how about just warm water.
With both her brother and Duran.
Ahmare got to the ground and flicked the light of her phone on. Plastered walls, the earth held back by what looked like clay packing. Dirt floor. And ahead, a narrow passageway, the terminal of which her illumination could not reach.
Duran jumped down, as if he knew that his bulk was going to make kindling out of that ladder. “We go that way.”
Not that there was another option.
“Wait,” she said. “You need to close the hatch.”
“No.” He flicked on his flashlight and pointed it into the void, the beam perfectly round and distinct as it widened from the pinpoint of the bulb, like something out of a Nancy Drew illustration. “At this stage of the game, I want Chalen’s guards to follow us.”
As he started off, striding fast, she followed. “Are you crazy?”
“Trust me.”
Duran’s skin was alive with warning as he strode through the damp and cold passageway. It wasn’t because anyone was behind them.
On the contrary, it was what lay ahead.
He knew the turns and the straightaways by heart. Knew also that this stretch of their entry was the most dangerous. In all other parts of this infiltration, they had options, defensible covers, vistas to bolt off into. Here? If for some reason their presence had been sensed and the Dhavos’s defenders were sent out, they would have to rely on a direct, hand-to-hand fight. And with him still logy from the feeding?
He doubted either one of them would survive.
And feared the even worse outcome of his father taking Ahmare prisoner.
On top of that, there was the risk represented by Chalen’s guards, but he needed them. The cult would currently be centralized at the arena doing the nightly “ablution” ceremony whereby they were washed in a metaphysical sense of their sins of the previous twenty-four hours by the Dhavos. Assuming that practice hadn’t changed, this was going to give him and Ahmare a chance to get in, get disguised, and get going. Chalen’s guards, on the other hand, weren’t going to be as efficient as he and Ahmare in finding their way around—and when they were discovered, chaos was going to ensue.
A perfect smoke screen for him and Ahmare to hide inside as they got the beloved. And then he pared off and did what he had come to do.
A final curve in the passageway and they were at the vault door. This one was similar to the one he had put on the bunker and, in fact, had been his inspiration.
Stopping, he went for the keypad, and entered the six-digit code that he’d gotten from spying on a defender using it inside the compound.
No backup plan. If this didn’t—
“Is it working?” Ahmare said.
“It’s the right code.” He reentered the digits. “At least it used to be.”
As he waited, his heart pounded in his—
“The pound key!” he said as he hit the symbol.
With a clunk and a grind, there was a shift of gears, and then . . . they were in.
The air that escaped was dry and many degrees warmer than the draft-and-damp they were in. But the smell of it, the over-conditioned, not-even-close-to-natural, piped-through-tinny-ducts sting in his sinuses rode ingrained neuropathways to the oldest part of his brain.
The part that had been forged when he’d been young and his mahmen had still been alive—and life had been all about her suffering.
“Are you going to go inside?”
Ahmare asked the question quietly, as if she knew he was locked in place. And the truth was, 99 percent of him was screaming for him to pull a turn-around-now and sprint back to that rickety ladder. In his instant fantasy, he was free to escape through the forest, backtrack to the ATV, and take off with Ahmare, running from Chalen and from his father, free to be in a world with only the two of them.
It was a nice piece of fiction.
In reality, he had Chalen’s tracking collar around his neck, a conscience that would not let his mahmen’s death go, and her brother stuck in a hell Duran himself had been in for two decades.
“Yes,” he said roughly. “I’m going in.”
Crossing the threshold made him ill, and he paused again. But then he looked back at Ahmare. She, too, was hesitating, in the way you’d pause if you had a gun in your hand that might, or might not, blow up in your face if you pulled its trigger. And that wasn’t about where they were going. It was clearly about her guide.
He reached out a hand. “I know where we have to go. I’m not going to let you down.”
As she focused over his shoulder, he was well aware of what she saw: darkness, thick in a way only the subterranean shadow could be.
She did not take his palm, just as she hadn’t taken it as he’d wanted to help her down the ladder. It was as if she had to prove to herself she could go it alone, even if that was not how she was proceeding in—and he could respect that.
But he needed her to hear something.
He put his hand on her shoulder, and she must have read something in his face because she went still. “Listen to me,” he said. “There are four exits in the compound, one at each point of north, south, east, and west. This is the easterly one. They all dump out in various ways at the base of the mountain. The codes are six digits, and they progress, starting with the northern one.”
He ran through the sequences with her and she got them quick, repeating them to him. “And the pound sign,” he added. “Don’t forget the pound at the end. If anything happens to me or we get separated, you need to find one of the spokes in the wheel. The compound is set up in a centralized plan around the intersection of the four compass points. The corridors that curve are not what you want because they’ll just keep you in a circle. The straight ones take you either out to the exits or down to the arena, you got it? Those are what will save you, and you’ll know you’re heading out instead of in because everyone else will be going in the opposite direction, in case the alarm is sounded.”
“Okay. Right.”
“One more thing. This whole mountain is rigged with explosives. You will have three minutes once the red lights come on.” Duran didn’t bother to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “The congregation is brainwashed by the Dhavos. They believe once those red lights start flashing, the end of the universe has arrived and they are supposed to be praying. Do not try to save anyone. Let them go to the arena, they’ve made their decision because of their delusions and that’s their destiny. Nexi and I are the only two people I know who’ve broken out of it. You are not going to win that debate, and more to the point, you need to get yourself out, okay? Do not try to save anyone. You’re the only one who matters.”
She nodded. And then, “Duran . . . thank you. For everything.”
He stared at her face. There was a dirt smudge at her temple, fine curls had escaped her ponytail, and the flush of their exertion to get to the cabin had dulled in the cool temperature of the underground passageway.
Her eyes met his like she was reading his mind.
As they both went in for the kiss, he knew this was good-bye. One, or both of them, was not making it out of this suicide mission alive.
And what worried him most was that she maybe didn’t get his message. When he told her not to save anyone . . . it included himself.
Chances were good she was going to have to leave him behind when the mountain blew, and he prayed her need to save her brother’s life was going to override the light that glowed, soft, warm, and kind, in her eyes as she stared up at him now.
“No one matters but you,” he said roughly.
22
AS DURAN SPOKE, AHMARE did not like the expression on his face. Nope. Not at all.
“Don’t forget me, okay?” he said softly. “You don’t have to mourn me, but just . . . I want someone to remember me.”
“I’m not hearing this—”
“Just in case the Fade is a lie, I don’t want it to be like I never existed at all.”
Before she could argue with him, he squeezed her hand and then reached around and pulled the vault almost shut. Without another word, he started off, and it was as Ahmare stared after him in despair that she noticed a glow far off in the dark distance.
It wasn’t a security light. Running to catch up with him, the illumination was seeping around the jambs of a closed door.
There was no keypad this time. Just a garden-variety handle like the ones in her gym, and given what waited for them on the other side, she felt like the portal should have come with surgeon general’s warnings, an airbag, and a crash helmet.
“One . . . two . . .” Duran gripped the handle. “Three.”