The moment ended; they were moving again. There wasn’t time to dwell on whether they had, or hadn’t, just mended something broken between them. And if Croe were honest with herself (which she’d been working on – honesty) healing the relationship hadn’t really been her objective. She’d accepted that Sperantia was unlikely to ever trust her; it was enough that she was back when Mallos needed her, that she protected the children. Croe was so accustomed to being maligned that it no longer stung.
But later, when things had calmed down, she would think: what did she want, if she were permitted to want? And like before, when she’d met Aura for the first time, she’d be met with a nothingness, an empty space with a whiff of fear. It was unsafe to want acceptance from people. It was a dangerous gamble, to care what people thought. It was even more risky than what she had with Mallos, which was tempered at least with lust, a thing she could pay for with her body. Friendship required a foreign currency.
In the meantime, there was the safety of this emergency. Croe moved steadily through the crowd, taking in the upper walls and ceilings. There was plenty to look at: a confluence of architectural and aesthetic influences, ornamentation on every lintel and beam. Hunting for a needle in this haystack was a kind of meditation, and Croe found herself falling into the rhythm of it, her mind still and quiet as it sifted all the information she was gathering. She was thus occupied when she spotted Sperantia out of the corner of her eye, looking like a cat under the thrall of a laser pointer. Her brow tensed. The stillness and quiet of her mind was replaced with the hum of expectation – hope tempered with fear.
She didn’t dare reach out to Sperantia telepathically, afraid of what she’d see.
They wove between bodies; a cat on a mission and her slow-stepping, human-sized shadow. Croe regulated her breathing with an effort. The sunshine, the glittering water, the air heavy with roses and sweat and the familiar worn-leather smell of her jacket, were all in terrible opposition to the feelings roiling inside of her. They were close, they were close, but had they arrived in time? It was the first time she’d thought of it, and she wished she hadn’t.
Then they were staring at a door, standing side-by-side. Croe tried the handle, then turned a quick circle, squinting. A tourist in the crowd began to shriek, then laugh. He climbed up on one of the fountains with a too-loud “whoop,” drawing the attention of the few security personnel, and the eyes of everyone else. Croe averted her own eyes, releasing him, and kicked the door open, wood splintering a bit around the latch. Picking it would have been subtler, but breaking in was faster; she closed it hurriedly behind them, once they were both inside.
The room itself was nondescript, positively spartan in comparison to the opulence they’d just explored. There was no furniture. The stone walls were clean but unadorned, the wooden beams were bare. Except…
”Nakht” she read aloud, indicating the scribble of ancient language with a thrust of her chin. Croe moved to the wall beneath it, feeling for some anomaly in the stone, but found nothing. The rest of the room was equally unyielding to the increasing urgency of her fingertips. She returned to the beam scowling, and threw out a hand to scorch it into a meaningless smudge…but instead of burning, it merely absorbed the magic, gleaming blue before the floor began to slide and scrape, sending the rescue party scrambling to the perimeter of the room. There, in the middle of nothing, the stones gave way to a spiral stair, twisting down into darkness.
Croe did not hesitate. She was tearing down that stairwell before the steps had fully formed. Her feet slipped and slid; she did not care. The darkness was absolute, and even with her magic she could barely pierce it. They stairs went on, and on…then they abruptly stopped, and Croe skidded down into a pool of something, falling to one knee before she gained her footing. Nausea struck her like a slap. “What the fuck!?” she growled at the darkness, fire flaring around her wrists. But it was dimmed, flickering – the viscous water lapping at her knees gleamed an oily green, and stank, like a pond left to fester in pollution.
”What fresh hell is this?” she snarled, even as she waded out into it, enduring the feeling of it crawling over her skin with a clenched jaw. Something was not right about it, even beyond the color and the smell – Croe could feel it sapping her, like a living, starving thing. Her own fire burned her. ”Mallos!” she called in a quavering voice, water sloshing with every step. An answering moan had her changing course, stumbling through the putrid lake as fast as her steps would allow. ”Mallos!!”
Like an actual goddamn miracle, the shape of him emerged in the gloom. Croe splashed toward him in a frantic rush, sank to her knees before him. Her fire winked out as she grabbed hold of his face, her breath tumbling out in something between his name and a sob. She kissed him, emphatically. Then her hands searched him, from neck to ankle, settling finally on the manacles at his wrists and following their chains back to the wall.
Fire blazed as she grabbed hold of them, drawing from the only magic in her extensive arsenal that could do an ounce of good. The flames licked up her forearms, leaving streaks of red, casting the rigid lines of her face in dramatic planes of orange and black. Slowly, slowly, the metal dripped and hissed into the water below.
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