Blue took great pains to make her voice normal. “Why would it show us that? If it wasn’t real, why would Cabeswater show us something so horrible?”
“This isn’t Cabeswater anymore,” Ronan replied. “This is underneath. The lake belongs to something else.”
They both cast their eyes left and right, looking for some way to cross. But there was nothing in this barren, apocalyptic landscape except for them and the great beast, as still as a cave formation.
“I’m going to look again,” Blue said finally. “I want to see if I can see how deep it really is.”
Ronan did not tell her no, but he did not come with her, either. She walked to the edge, trying not to tremble at the thought of seeing her mother again, or something worse. Leaning, she scooped up another loose stone, and when she got to the edge, she dropped it in immediately, not waiting for a reflection to rise.
The stone vanished on the point of hitting the surface of the water.
Again, there wasn’t so much as a ripple.
And now, undisturbed, the water began once more to form a vision for her, letting it float up from the depth.
As the horror rose, Blue suddenly remembered Gwenllian’s lesson of the mirrors.
Mirror magic is nothing to mirrors.
If the dead lake had shown her Maura and shown Ronan his father, then it was not creating anything — it was using thoughts of theirs and mirroring them back.
It was just a massive scrying bowl.
She began to build up the blocks inside her, just like when she’d cut off Noah and Adam. As the dead corpse face slowly rose toward her, she ignored it and continued.
She was a mirror.
Her gaze focused on the water once more. There was no corpse. There was no face. There was no reflection at all, just as there had been no reflection in Neeve’s mirrors. There was just the still glass surface of the water, and then, if she squinted past the reflection of the roof, the silty, uneven surface of the bottom of the lake.
It was only a few inches deep. One or two. A faultless illusion.
She touched her lip — this reminded her of Gansey, and she stopped.
“I’m going to walk across it,” she said.
Ronan laughed in an unfunny way. “Right, but seriously.”
“Seriously,” Blue told him. Then, hurriedly, “Not you, though. I don’t think you can touch the water. You’d dissolve like that stone.”
“And you won’t?”
She looked at the water. It was unbelievable, really, that she was trusting a crazy person’s wisdom. “I don’t think so. Because of the way I am.”
“Assuming that’s even true,” Ronan said, “you’d go on by yourself?”
“Don’t leave this shore,” Blue said. “Well, not forever. But — promise me you’ll stay a reasonable amount of time. I’ll just see what it looks like on the other side.”
“Assuming you don’t disappear, you mean.”
He wasn’t improving her already tested courage. “Ronan, stop.”
He leveled a heavy gaze at her, the sort he normally used to bend Noah to his will.
“If she’s over there …” Blue began.
“Yeah, I know,” he snarled. “Fine. Wait.”
Ducking his head, he pulled off his ghost light and hung it over her shoulder.
She didn’t bother to say, But you’ll be waiting in darkness. Nor did she say, If I vanish immediately into the lake, you’ll have to find your way out of here sightless. Because he’d already known both these things when he’d given it to her.
Instead she said, “You know, you’re not such a shithead.”
“No,” Ronan replied, “really I am.”
Turning to the water, she allowed herself the brief gift of closing her eyes and shaking her head a little with the fear and awfulness of what she was about to do.
Then she stepped in.
The lake was wet, which shocked her.
Somehow she had believed that if the corpse was false, perhaps the water was, too. But it turned out that at least two inches of it was very real, and squishing coldly into her soles.
She had not disappeared.
She turned to find Ronan crouched down a few feet up onto dry land, arms wrapped around his knees, already waiting for the darkness to take him. When he met her eyes, he gave her an unsmiling salute before she turned back around.
Gingerly, she picked her way across the lake, her eyes on the true bottom of it and on the ceiling and on the walls — she did not trust anything in this place, especially as dread began to blossom in her, more and more.
She didn’t like to think of leaving Ronan back there in the darkness.
But she kept going, alone, and when she thought that she could not take the blackness in her heart anymore, she came to the edge of the lake and to the tunnel that came after.
She stepped onto the rock, and for just a second, she stood there and tried to let her fear drip off her.
Why do I have to be alone for this?
She recognized the unfairness of this. Then she readjusted the ghost light and kept going.
Blue knew she was going the right way, because she began to feel the subtle tug of the third sleeper. It was like Adam had said — it was a voice in your head that sounded a lot like yours if you weren’t paying attention.
But Blue was paying attention.
It was not far to the chamber he’d described. She crept through the dark hole, feeling a voice inside her say come closer closer closer when the real voice inside her was saying I wish I could run away.
And there it was, as he’d described. A small, scooped-out chamber, low enough that she had to crouch to enter. She didn’t care for the crouching; it made her feel uncomfortably vulnerable.
It is a lot like kneeling.
But it wasn’t the real voice in her head that thought this; it was the third sleeper’s mimicked one.
She wished so much for the presence of the boys, or Calla, or her mother, or — she had so many people that she took for granted, all the time. She had never needed to be truly afraid before. There had always been another hand to catch her, or at least to hold hers as they fell together.
Blue crawled into the chamber. Ronan’s ghost light illuminated the space. She flinched when she realized how close she was to a kneeling man. He was inches away, willow-limbed and somehow familiar, completely unmoving.
Not sleeping, like a dream creature, nor dead, like the valley of bones. But fixed, gazing, intent, upon a dull red door with an oily black handle.
Open
Blue pulled her eyes away from it.
I am a mirror, she thought. Take a look at yourself while I look around in here.
She moved around the motionless man, trying to steel her heart for what she was going to see. Trying to guard against that worst of things, that insidious hope, worse than the third sleeper’s whispers in her head.
But it didn’t help. Because on the other side of the man was Maura Sargent.
She was still, her hands stuffed in her armpits, but she was alive.
Alive, alive, alive, and Blue’s mother, and she loved her, and she had found her.
Blue didn’t care if Maura could feel it or not — she scrambled over and threw her arms ferociously around her mother’s neck. It felt so very comfortingly like her mother, because it was her mother.