The Throne of Ash

In the underground lab of the FDRI, a monitor chirped, and Luca Ferrara stopped stirring his coffee.

"Otis."

"I see it." Otis was already leaning across the console, one hand flat on the desk, the other hovering over a dial as though it might bite. His glasses had slid halfway down his nose. He had not slept in a way that counted for two days. "Space One. Subject Zero's pod just spiked. Heart rate one-forty, cortisol through the—" He broke off. "No. Not Archie's. Look at the third trace."

"There is no third trace."

"There's a third trace."

There was. A thin amber line had appeared at the bottom of the screen where no line was supposed to be: ragged, furious, a signal with no pod attached to it. It rose and fell in a rhythm that Luca recognized, because he had spent fifteen years training himself to hear it in his sleep. It was the breath of someone fighting for air.

The spoon fell out of his hand.

"That's the old channel," he said. "That's the first channel. We closed it. I closed it myself, Otis, I closed it the night that—"

"Luca—"

"Elena."

Across the lab, in the shadows behind the pods, William Cross lifted his head from his phone and, for the first time in two days, forgot to pretend that he wasn't listening.

…

The throne room of Thornkeep was at the top of a tower that, by every law of geometry, should not have fit inside the keep.

They climbed to it through a spiral stair that kept changing its mind. Stone steps became tile, tile became carpet, and carpet became the thin gray non-slip rubber of a hospital stairwell, with a yellow stripe at the edge of every tread. The weeping had come back. It was louder now, and it had words in it, a muttered stream of them, and Archie could just make them out under the sound of his own boots.

...said ten minutes. He said ten minutes. It's been... it's been...

...cold. Why is it always cold...

...Luca? Luca, I can't see the door...

At the head of the stair stood a pair of black oak doors. They were open.

The room beyond was enormous and bare. A high vaulted ceiling vanished into darkness. Tall windows ran down both walls, and through every one of them the sky was the same dead bruise-purple, without moon or star. At the far end, on a shallow dais, stood the throne: a plain heavy chair of carved stone with its back to a stained glass window that had been smashed, long ago, from the inside out.

And in the throne sat a woman.

She was not the thing they had seen in the nursery, the faceless shape of dark. She was real, or as real as memory is. She was small and thin, in a pale blue hospital gown that was too large for her, with a plastic bracelet on her left wrist and a clear cannula looped over her ears and under her nose. Her hair had been dark once and was now cropped to a fuzz. Her face was gaunt. She had her knees drawn up on the stone seat and her arms wrapped around them, and she was rocking, very slightly, back and forth.

Behind her, the dark rose like the folds of a vast cloak.

"Elena Vasquez," Jin said, softly. He was reading the bracelet. His voice had a curious dry crack in it. "Date of admission. Fifteen years ago. March."

The woman's head came up.

Her eyes were the worst of it. They were brown, and perfectly lucid, and they were so tired that Archie felt something in his chest give way, like a floor in an old house. She looked at the four of them, one by one, and her cracked lips parted, and she made a small sound that could have been a laugh.

"You came all this way," she whispered. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I tell them to stay out."

"Elena," Zoe began, stepping forward. "We're not—"

"They always say that."

"We just want to talk."

"Yes." Elena nodded slowly, as if Zoe had said something wise. "Yes, that's what he said. I'll just be a minute. I'm just going to talk to the other team. He's very good at talking." Her fingers tightened on her knees. "He said he'd come back before the morning shift. I've been counting the mornings."

"Who?" said Archie, though he knew.

"Luca," said Elena.

The word hit the room like a dropped plate.

…

It happened too fast to follow.

The dark behind the throne did not unfold; it exploded. One moment the woman was a thin shape in a gown, and the next she was gone, and the whole upper hall was a roaring black gale that blew the torches out of their brackets and drove the breath from Archie's body like a fist. He saw Zoe hurled sideways against a pillar. He saw Venn go down on one knee with his shield over his head, and the shield buckled, and the hawk painted on it peeled off in a sheet of flaking gold. The windows burst. Wind and glass and shadow filled the room, and in the midst of it a voice rose that was not a woman's any longer but the voice of the whole castle, of every wall, every stone, saying one word over and over and over.

"LIAR LIAR LIAR LIAR—"

"Fight back!" Jin roared. He had both daggers out and a pale light was running along the blades, and he was driving into the storm like a man wading a flood. "Archie! She's not going to stop! You can't talk to this! Fight!"

"No!"

"Archie!"

"She's a person!"

"She's killing us!"

The dark came through Archie's guard like a hand through water. It closed around his throat, around his ribs, and the cold came with it, the old cold, the cold of the radiology suite and the long white corridor, and for a second the weeping filled his head, and he understood with horrible clarity what he was hearing. It was not a monster's cry. It was the sound a child makes in a dark room when she has called and called and no one is coming.

She's been afraid for fifteen years, he thought. And so have I.

He couldn't breathe.

He got one knee under him. He saw Zoe crawling toward him across the glass with blood in her hair. He saw Jin, backed against the wall, slashing at shapes that wouldn't die; saw Venn take a blow that would have broken a horse, and roar, and rise. He saw the hall tearing itself to pieces around them.

And past the throne, past the whirling dark and the broken window, he saw the door.

It was small. It was a plain wooden door set in the stone behind the dais, quite out of place, the sort of door that might lead to a pantry. But it was glowing. It glowed faintly white around the edges, steady and cool as moonlight under a curtain, and Archie knew, the way he knew his own name, what lay on the other side of it. Not Elena. Not this place. A way out. A way forward, to whatever came next, and whatever came next could not be worse than this.

He could make it. He could. Eleven steps. He had counted them in the first lull, the way he always counted things. If he ran now, while the dark had her attention on the others, he could be through it before anyone noticed he'd gone.

And they would die.

Not all at once. Jin was fast, and Venn was strong, and Zoe had a quick eye and a bow. They might hold for a quarter hour. Perhaps longer. But the dark was only growing, and Elena was weeping inside it, and nobody was ever going to get close enough to say her name.

Or I could try.

I could stay.

He had never been brave. He knew that about himself with the cold exactness of a surveyor. He had been clever and careful and tired; he had been a man who kept a spare key under every flowerpot and told himself it was prudence. All his life he had walked toward the exit and called it good sense. He had thought, God help him, that this was what survival looked like.

Zoe's hand found his sleeve.

"Archie." She was gasping. There was glass in her hair, and the blood from her scalp had run down one side of her face, and she was looking at him, steadily, through all of it. "Whatever you're going to do. Do it. I'm here."

The wind screamed. Elena screamed, high and thin, from inside it.

Across the hall, the door glowed.

He had a second, perhaps two, and he could feel the choice in his hands like a physical weight: the safe thing and the other thing, and no one watching, and no one who would blame him either way.