Too hot.
Too cold.
Too much.
“Please,” she rasped out, unsure what — or who — she was asking. “Please.”
“You don’t die like this,” the woman said firmly. “Not like this.”
But Kiva didn’t believe her. Because she wanted it to end — all of it.
And when she could no longer stomach the torment, she welcomed the blissful embrace of oblivion.
When Kiva opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the snake.
The room around her was spinning, the poorly lit space full of empty pallets and threadbare blankets, a familiar acrid smell tugging at her memory.
She was in the infirmary, whispered some distant part of her mind. Zalindov’s infirmary.
A warning bleated through her, but she couldn’t summon any real concern, not with the taste of caramel coating her tongue, not when the snake opened its mouth to speak.
“Snap out of it!” the serpent hissed, shaking her roughly. It sounded a lot like the woman who had shoved water down her throat.
Kiva giggled and reached out to touch it.
Her hand was slapped away. “You need to follow me down to the tunnels, or they’re going to kill you. Are you listening? If you don’t work, you’ll be dead.”
At the snake’s urgency, Kiva sat up, her head lolling to the side. Through blurry eyes, she saw that she wore a soiled gray tunic, the smell of her own sick making her nose wrinkle.
“Gods, you have no idea what’s happening, do you?” muttered the snake. It coiled around Kiva’s back and pulled her to her feet. “They dosed you with too much angeldust on your journey here, and now you can’t function without it.” The serpent dragged her through the infirmary. “I managed to get my hands on some, enough to help you through the next few days. We have to wean you off it slowly, or your organs will shut down. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Talking snakes,” Kiva said dreamily, stumbling as she was towed out into the sunshine. She raised her hand and grinned at the rainbow colors all around her. “Pretty day.”
The snake spat a nasty word, then said through clenched teeth, “Kiva, it’s me, Cresta. Pull yourself together.”
Cresta.
Not a snake, then.
But close.
Cresta Voss. The name elicited feelings of resentment and fear in Kiva, accompanied by images of a muscular young woman with matted red hair, hazel eyes, and a serpent tattoo inked down the side of her face. She was a quarrier at Zalindov, someone Kiva had known for over five years. Someone who had openly despised Kiva for those five years. Someone who was the leader of the prison rebels, loyal to Kiva’s sister, Zuleeka Corentine, the now-queen of Evalon sitting atop a stolen throne after having taken everything from Kiva. Everything — and everyone.
“Bad snake,” Kiva mumbled, trying to free herself from Cresta’s arm. “Go ’way.”
“Stop that,” Cresta said, tightening her grip and guiding Kiva off the gravel onto the dead grass, heading toward the domed stone building at the center of the grounds. “You won’t last the day without me.”
“Will too.” Kiva stumbled again as she navigated the dried clumps underfoot, the colors continuing to swirl in her vision, bouncing off the limestone perimeter walls surrounding them in the distance. “Or won’t. Doesn’t matter.”
“Do you even hear yourself?” Cresta asked as they skirted a large crater dug out of the earth, something that snagged Kiva’s hazy attention. It took effort to summon the memory, how the watchtower had exploded and crumbled down on itself. There was nothing left of it now but the ghost of where it once stood.
“Mot.” Kiva breathed the name of the man who had destroyed it, a moment of clarity gripping her thoughts. “Where’s Mot?”
“Dead,” Cresta said flatly. “By the Warden’s own hand, right after the riot — the one you used to escape.”
Sorrow touched Kiva’s chest as she thought of the morgue worker who had cared for her and helped her survive the Trials, but she couldn’t hold on to it for long before it vanished like the wind. She shook her head, trying to clear the spinning colors, trying to remember what the snake had said. “No one escapes Zalindov.” A manic laugh slipped out. “Not even when they do.”
Cresta was kept from responding by the approach of more gray-clad prisoners moving stiffly across the dead field, their faces lined with fatigue as they too headed toward the domed building.
“You need to get it together before we reach the tunnels, or the guards will send you to the Abyss,” Cresta warned under her breath. “They might not even bother with that.”
“Don’t care,” Kiva mumbled, dragging her feet.
The quarrier’s grip turned painful as she hissed, “You once told me I was strong and powerful and I could survive anything. That I owed it to myself to find a reason to live. Now I’m telling you the same, Kiva Meridan.”
Slumping in Cresta’s hold, Kiva said, “That’s not my name.”
“It is.”
“It’s not.”
“You are who you choose to be,” Cresta declared in a hard voice. “You are what you choose to be. And right now, you need to choose to live. You can figure out the rest later.”
Even in her sorry state, the words left a mark on Kiva. The idea that anything was her choice was laughable. For ten years in Zalindov, she’d lived by the choices of others, fighting to survive, day after day. When she’d finally tasted freedom, the decisions she’d made had done nothing but lead her right back to where she’d started, after losing more than she’d ever imagined possible.
The hole in her heart gave a pang; not even the angeldust could mask it completely.
“Make no mistake, I don’t care about you,” Cresta went on mercilessly. “But you saved my life once, and because of that, I owe you a blood debt. So you’re going to survive today, and you’re going to survive tomorrow, and you’re going to keep on surviving until those gods-damned drugs are out of your system. After that, you can decide what the hell you want to do with yourself. Live or die, you’ll be out of my hands. But until then, you’ll listen to me. And I’m telling you to buck up and prepare yourself for the worst day of your life.”
Kiva was so distracted by Cresta’s speech that she hadn’t realized they’d arrived at the domed building and were lining up with the other inmates, all readying to descend the ladder shaft down into the tunnels.
Struggling to maintain a steady stream of thought, Kiva murmured, “Why are you here?”
Cresta made a frustrated sound. “I just told you.”
Kiva shook her fuzzy head. She must not have been given the same amount of angeldust that had kept her mostly unconscious for the last few weeks, the lower dosage affording her enough lucidity to ask, her words heavily slurred, “No, why aren’t you in the quarry?”
There was a moment of hesitation before Cresta answered, “Rooke changed my work allocation after the riot. He didn’t like that I’d survived for so long, so now I’m a tunneler, facing an exhausting and inevitable death.”
Six months Cresta would have. A year at the most. That was the fate of a Zalindov tunneler.