The other thing that I remember, though, is that if you leave that box nailed shut for too long, it can become dangerously unstable.
I had Miri and Saelis to help me vent that pressure, to hold me when I cried for her, to listen while I talked about her. But Nimh only has me, and nobody can hold her when she weeps.
She lied to me about who she thinks I am, about the destiny she thinks brought me here. Perhaps she lied about believing there might be a way for me to get home. But she didn’t stab a guy in cold blood, so of my two choices, she’s the goddess I’m sticking with.
Nimh interrupts my thoughts. “This must be the way out.”
We’ve reached a T-intersection, a solid door straight ahead of us, a much larger, much wider hallway running away to our left and right. The ceiling is high, and it leaves me feeling uncomfortably exposed. The older part of the tunnels must have reached a section that’s more regularly used, because the walls are lined with lamps, their light dimmed, perhaps to save fuel during the night. Would I be able to see a threat before it was on us?
Nimh extinguishes her own light and grabs at the door’s handle. She yanks it, then stops short. She tries to turn it again, and again, then kicks it, wincing at the impact. “Gods,” she mutters. “Not now, not now.”
“Locked?” I ask quietly, and she nods, a quick, tight movement.
She drops to a crouch, pulling a small leather kit from her belt of tools and pouches. When she unrolls it, I recognize with a jolt of surprise: lock-picking tools. It was a hobby of Saelis’s for a little while, adopted to help me get down into one of the oldest sections of the engines beneath the city. Most things worth protecting are behind electronic locks at home, only accessible after a microneedle samples the user’s blood—but nobody ever bothered to install DNA locks in the old, dusty engine room corridors. I wonder where Nimh wanted to go, that the doors were locked even to a goddess.
I keep watch, leaning my back against the wall, my skin prickling. We’re hopelessly unprotected here. And what’s happening several levels above us? What has Inshara made of her rival’s disappearance? How many others has she killed?
A sound somewhere in the dark of the tunnel yanks me out of my thoughts. I drop to a crouch, and as I move, I catch a glint—a flash of eerie greenish gold in the gloom.
Then with a skittering of claws against stone, the cat is scurrying toward us, his ears laid back, the closest I’ve seen him come to undignified haste.
I let out a slow breath of relief as he brushes past me to press in against Nimh’s legs, but the sound he makes isn’t a purr—it’s another growl.
The realization clicks into place as I lift my gaze again. There was something about that scurry that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I know what it meant. He was running away from something. Something out there in the dark.
I could have sworn there were more lights before—that the lamps stretched farther away along the hall than they do now.
A trickle of ice runs down my spine. There were more lights. I’m sure of it.
“Nimh,” I whisper urgently, swinging back to look to the left once more. As I watch, the farthest lamp goes out, plunging another section of the corridor into darkness.
And then another, and the dark creeps closer still. I look back over my shoulder and catch a lamp behind me extinguishing itself.
One by one they’re going out, the dark—and whatever it hides—closing in.
Nimh mutters something I don’t catch, though I know from her tone it’s a curse, and stashes her tools back in her belt, rising to stand beside me.
“Should we go back to the archives?” I whisper, my heart thumping.
She shakes her head a fraction. “There is no other way out of the temple that will not be observed,” she murmurs. “It must be this door, it is our only way to the city. And if we tried to double back, they would catch us before we reached Matias.”
Then a voice rings out from the black, unfamiliar and harsh. “How did you scurry down into your burrows so fast, little povvies? You scamper much more quickly than we thought.”
Cultists.
My breath’s coming quick and shallow now, and I’m running a desperate mental inventory, trying to think what I could use for a weapon. I can’t believe I didn’t ask Matias for one. But then, I’ve never needed a weapon in my life. Not until I fell out of my world and into this one.
Nimh’s voice is very quiet. “North, stay close to the door.”
“What?”
“Don’t move.” Her tone is intent, her face blank, her hands reaching into the pockets attached to her belt.
So I press myself in against the cool stone wall by the door. This is a nightmare, I tell myself. I’m going to wake up in my own bed at home. Then I’m going to be a model son for the rest of my life.
Nimh raises both her hands, palms up, in a strange, ceremonial kind of movement like the ones I saw during the ritual earlier today. Greenish-blue light blazes from both of them—bright as day, nothing like the gentle glow I saw before—illuminating the hallway, revealing the black-clad figures sneaking up on us from both directions. I can only see Nimh by squinting, and like them, I’m frozen in place.
“Come no farther,” she says, her voice ringing with absolute authority, as a deep rumble sounds within the walls.
“Come with us,” calls one of the cultists. “She might let you live.”
The rumble grows to a volume no one can ignore. The floor shakes beneath us, sending shocks through my body. Dust rains down from the ceiling. A shudder goes through the walls and the dust forms swirls and patterns on the floor. The paving stones below it upend themselves, buckling and breaking apart.
The cultists cry out in surprise. With a deafening crash, a slab of stone falls from the ceiling to my right, smashing into the ground between Nimh and our pursuers. It shatters on impact. An instant later another crashes down on our left, sending up swirling clouds of dust.
Nimh is utterly wild, an invisible wind rising from the ground to toss her robes and hair about. She’s terrifying but composed. She looks like a predator—the cat a small, fierce hunter beside her—and everyone else in the hallway is prey.
I throw my arms over my head, shielding myself from flying debris as boulders begin to fall, piling up between us and the cultists on both sides. Nimh’s whispering now, the hiss of it somehow cutting through the noise around us. She raises her hands as if commanding the ceiling to fall.
The air is heavy, roaring in my ears as if an impossible storm is brewing. The ceiling shudders, then splits with a great crack. Nimh lifts her hands higher, above her head, then throws them down toward the floor. With a boom like a strike of lightning, the whole ceiling comes crashing down.
It forms a wall—sealing us off from the cultists on both sides—making us safe.
She sags back against the stone behind her. The blue strobe fades. The only light is the one dim lamp nearest us.
I’m still pinned against the wall—disbelieving, awestruck, and terrified. “H-how did … ?”
Without moving, Nimh speaks quietly, her voice aching with exhaustion. “We should go. Before they remember there is a door into this section from the outside.”
I finally manage to move, stepping across a pile of rubble. “It’s still locked,” I point out, feeling a little like someone telling a master artist that one of the trees in her painting could use a couple more leaves.