But no, he wouldn’t do that. Not anymore.
And she wouldn’t let him. Because she’d take him first.
Jagged, onyx terrain rises out of nowhere, surging toward her—or waiting for her to land. Just before she smacks into the ground, her eyes flap open.
Wonder coughs. She gapes at a torn ceiling, her arms and limbs akimbo, her body distorted upon a knoll of paper and vellum. Tilting her head produces a throbbing skull and shrieking joints. When she sucks in air, stardust slips down her throat, melting away the dryness.
Wonder contemplates the rafters. And she remembers.
The lava rock arrow. The astral sphere. The Hollow Chamber.
It had caved in. They had fallen.
“Malice,” she croaks in panic.
A set of knuckles strokes her temple, then the blade of a fingernail gently outlines her cheekbone. Twisting her head, she blinks as a face shivers into view.
Those intelligent cinder eyes and deceptive golden waves. That wiry, foul mouth.
Malice stares down at her, his eyes scrambled with worry. “Shh. I’m here, Wildflower.”
Wonder leaps to a sitting position, hurling her arms around him. His bare arms envelop her, holding on while she shakes. Pulling back, she inspects the gashes and bruises splotched across his body, but he’s in one piece.
Wiggling her fingers and toes verifies she’s also intact, albeit bloody. Not far off, quartz and hickory weapons lay scattered, cracked in parts but repairable.
That’s when it hits her, dread and grief slamming into her chest. “No,” she cries out, staggering to her feet.
What she sees wipes thought and speech from her soul. Her mouth parts, and her eyes mist at the sight.
Malice rises as well. Together, they gawk at the haphazard levels and sloped walkways, at the green glaze of stardust and the debris of parchment. It’s a wasteland of legends. Stashed between the outdated and prohibited, they had hidden themselves, waiting to be found.
Now there is only ruin, detritus of paper and ink. Bits of the central sphere rest in various areas, each flickering with wane lights like hearts fighting to beat. Amidst the destruction, pieces of the globe struggle to survive.
Wonder’s hand shoots to her mouth, her shoulders lurching on a single sob. The Hollow Chamber is a sunken ship, a fallen city of knowledge.
It’s the end.
But where is Harmony?
Where are the keepers? Where are Hope and Joy?
Wonder longs to holler, to call out for her mentor, if not by voice then via the stars. But she has no vocal cords, and she has no power. Those privileges have vanished beneath the carnage, because it’s too much, so much.
Her knees buckle. She lands on the ground, pages fluttering around her. She scavenges, plucking leaflets and scraps like flowers, trying to reassemble them, to rebind them into hardbacks. Her movements increase, hectic and rushed, picking through the mess. She has to fix this, she needs to fix this, she will fix this.
Malice speaks to her, but she shakes her head. She can put everything back together. She can do this.
Squatting, he takes her hands, balling them with his own. “Look at me.”
He knows this crazed feeling, and she has wielded arrows against this crazed feeling. Wonder slumps, the salvaged items tumbling from her hands. She hunches over and begins to rock back and forth, strapping her arms around her knees.
No, it cannot be. Not this place.
If she weeps, it will be true.
Malice hunkers behind her, wrapping her into himself. His forehead presses to her nape, his muscles convulsing. And together, they keep rocking.
In her peripheral vision, a rosemary-tinted dot hops across the ruins. Wonder glances up, sweeping the hair from her face. She traces the illumination, the path of which leads to a surviving book spread atop a pile, its contents displayed.
It’s the same book that they’d discovered hours ago, the one that had initiated the others to ignite, to trigger the trap. It’s one of the books that had gotten displaced when she and Malice made love against the shelves.
It pulses, invoking a familiar spark of sensations inside her. “Malice.”
She doesn’t have to say more. He follows her gaze.
Salvaging and then harnessing her weapons, she crawls toward the book, and the moment she sets her fingers on it, another glow pops out of the rubble, coming from farther away. It’s the trap, still active.
Or is it something else?
Wonder stumbles to her feet. The same process repeats, with her and Malice attending to the sequence of books, hobbling over chunks of wood and iron and glass and paper. When they come to the spot that had once been the restricted section, they encounter the same final book, tattered but still bound like the others.
It gleams as if having anticipated them. And of all candidates, Wonder and Malice shouldn’t have underestimated the star-granted power of these books. Yes, they had formed a trap at the hands of the Fate Court.
But that’s not all.
“It is a trail,” Wonder breathes.
She glances at Malice, who shrugs. “What the hell do we have left to lose?”
She picks up the brittle yet bright tome. The text sparkles, random passages and sentences highlighting, becoming more saturated than the rest, standing out to reveal…a legend.
Wonder scans the contents, with Malice reading over her shoulder. Their heads bank upward at the same time, reaching the same conclusion. A flicker of hope sprouts in her womb, because this is it.
“This is…,” she begins.
“…the way to win,” he finishes.
It’s the answer they have been looking for. The solution to their expedition, the way to balance fate and free will. And the answer is so obvious, so simple that her mouth lifts into a teary grin despite the desolation.
Malice’s lips crook, mirroring her smile. His eyes drift past her as the sound of rubble shifting draws his attention. Wonder stiffens, sensing the aura of disillusion just as Malice detects the aura of rage.
Horror floods his gaze. He seizes Wonder’s waist and spins her around, the rotation cut off by a clean whoosh of air.
Malice jerks hard into her. His body snaps, caving like a bowstring. He stares at Wonder, his nails digging into her hips as if she’s the only thing holding him upright.
Confused, Wonder searches his dazed features. One of her palms rests on his lower spine, where thick fluid leaks over her knuckles. It’s a slow-drip—from the arrowhead lancing clear into his back, a shot meant for her.
Its tip protrudes from Malice’s chest, right through his heart.
25
The weapon is made of lava rock, ejected from the longbow of a superior: a shot that can pierce.
Poppy red coats the arrowhead, ravines drizzling like paint down Malice’s torso and puddling where Wonder’s navel presses against his. From there, the fluid weeps through her blouse and pants, spreading into wide blooms.
The projectile vanishes at last, reappearing clean in its ruler’s quiver. At which point, three entities drop to the ground.
The first is the lava archery, the longbow sliding from the ruler’s hands, his slanted brows flattening in shock, because it isn’t every day that a superior fatally wounds an inferior, be the victim an exile, or a rebel, or an archer. In fact, it’s never happened during the reign of this Court.
The Hollow Chamber is a ruin, and anarchy abounds, and so the god had sought retribution. Yet his face goes slack, horrified by his own fury. It’s one thing to fire in defense of oneself, of the Peaks, of their world. It’s another to strike an unarmed archer in the back, a young one who’s less than two-hundred years old.