Author: Jodi Meadows

Heart still aching, I dragged my sleeping bag away from his, crawled inside, and stared into the darkness until morning.

When the sun rose, we left the cave and headed north.

To where dragons lived.

15

SOLITUDE

THERE WAS NO music for a long time. Not from Sam or the sylph, and not from the woods that shielded us from the bitter wind. The farther we traveled, the closer and taller the trees seemed, as if they held secrets between their branches and guarded them fiercely. With few small mammals in the underbrush and even fewer birds calling in the trees, the world began to look very lonely.

My boots crunched paths on the ice-crusted ground. The crackle was sharp and startling, but the others never glanced back.

Our progress was abysmal. After two and a half weeks, we were barely halfway to our destination, though we’d had to pause for a few days after eating something that shouldn’t have been eaten. Still, we should have been farther.

It was the most miserable time of my life, relieved only by evening SED calls with Sarit.

Outside the tent, I listened to Sarit tell me about the curfews and who’d been imprisoned for resisting Deborl or expressing concern about newsouls.

“It was Emil this time,” she said.

“The Soul Teller from Anid’s birth?”

“Yes.” She sighed, and it sounded like she was trying not to cry. “Everyone is so afraid here. With the earthquakes and storms, people are terrified.”

I knew. She said the same thing every day.

“Armande said to tell you hello, and that he hopes you’re eating enough. He keeps saying he should have gone with you to make sure you’re properly fed.”

“I wish you were both here.” Except I didn’t want them to be angry with me, too. I hadn’t told Sarit the secret I’d revealed, only that they knew something and it had changed everything. She did know where we were heading, though.

“How are things going with you?”

“Sam still mostly talks to Whit.”

“And Stef?”

“Still upset with me.” I closed my eyes as snow began to fall. “They aren’t mean to me. They don’t ignore me. But they’re all different toward me.”

“Are you being different toward them, now that they know?”

I shrugged, even though she couldn’t see it.

“I’ll take your silence as a yes.” Sarit sighed. “You can’t expect things not to change. Give them time to adjust.”

“You’re right.”

“Of course I am.”

“But Sam—”

“You know what you’re asking of him. It’s probably taking everything he’s got just to keep functioning. You remember how he was after the market attack last year. This is worse than that.” Her voice crackled as the SED signal grew weaker. “I know this must be hard, especially after the way Li treated you, but they don’t mean the silence the same way she did. Why don’t you try talking to them?”

“About what? The longer we go like this, the more awkward it gets.”

“Music? Food? How much you hate the cold? I don’t know, Ana. They’re just as miserable as you are. Don’t wait for them to be friendly with you first. But if you won’t take action, I can’t help you.” Something crashed in the background, and she swore. “Sorry, Ana. Armande needs me. Earthquake.” She clicked off before I could say good-bye.

I sat outside, watching snow gather on my mittens and SED.

Our goal wasn’t the dragons’ land, exactly. The library had information on dragons and their habitat, of course, so we knew roughly where they lived, but I didn’t need to go quite that far north.

In his previous lifetime, Sam had come across an immense white wall, like Heart’s city wall. There, dragons had discovered him and killed him.

That was my goal, because we knew dragons patrolled that area, and there was built-in shelter on one side. At first, I’d been afraid I would have to ask Sam to remember details about his trip north, or that I’d have to see if he’d recorded any details in a diary—and if that diary had been scanned into the library’s digital archives—but the sylph ended up saving me again.

They knew where the other prisons were.

Of course they knew.

So the sylph led us north, through the forest of elms and pines and spruces, and though Cris assured us we were getting closer, it seemed we’d be “almost there” forever.

We’d been in the wilderness so long, Heart, Janan, and everything we were working toward seemed like another life.

“This is it,” Stef said, walking up ahead with Whit. “This is the edge.”

Whit checked the sky, all clouds and coming darkness. “Then we’ll stop here for the night. Looks like it’s about to get harder to travel.”

Sam came up behind me, glancing at me from the corner of his eye. “The edge of what?” He spoke to Whit only, but Stef answered.

“Weren’t you paying attention this morning?” She rolled her eyes. “Our SEDs are about to be disconnected from the others. We’re too far out of Range.”

Sam shook his head. “But they work farther south. And east and west.”

Whit dropped his backpack and began unpacking the tent. “That’s because people go those ways sometimes. They explore. There’s food. Other things we can actually use.”

“There are towers scattered across the continent,” Stef said, “maintained by drones. They’re what connect your SED to others when you’re outside of Range. But up here, there’s only forest and dragons. No one comes here.” Her gaze darted toward me. “Except us, unfortunately.”

She could hold a grudge for a long time.

“So no more calls or messages. Not after tonight.” Whit frowned as he and Stef began putting together the tent.

No more Sarit was what it really meant.

“I’ll gather dinner.” At my words, the others only nodded.

Sylph flashed off into the woods while I dropped my backpack and dug through it for the canvas sack we used to carry dead animals.

Sam pulled water bottles and a smaller sack from his backpack, and Cris headed toward him. They usually filled up water together, and returned with what looked like clumps of dead grass, but actually tasted okay after being boiled and mixed with whatever kind of meat we got that night. Human or sylph, Cris was still the best at finding edible plants. I wished he’d go with me, though.

In the woods, sylph darted around, quickly burning squirrels, rabbits, and doves. I dropped the creatures into my sack one by one, and by the time I returned to the others, the tent was up and Sam and Cris were boiling water for dinner.

“Here you go.” I placed the sack of animals by the pot, hoping. Waiting.

“Thanks.” Sam didn’t look up. “Stef’s cooking.”

“Okay.” That was good, actually. Stef was a much better cook than the rest of us. But that wasn’t what I’d been hoping to get from him. Maybe a smile. Or a complaint about the weather. I wished I could tell how much of his misery was aimed at me, and how much was everything piling on top of our search for dragons.

Sarit told me to try. I gathered my nerves. “Sam, I know I didn’t tell you about the exchange, but I had a good reason—”

He shook his head. “I’m not ready to talk about that yet. I just can’t.”

The rejection stung. I turned away.

While the others took care of dinner, I retreated into the tent, pulling out my notebooks and the temple book. I’d discovered all sorts of interesting things over the last few weeks, but nothing the others would care about right now, so I kept them to myself.

I huddled in my corner of the tent and turned on the lantern, temple books spread around me. My notebook was almost full with all the translations and facts I’d collected.

I’d only been working a little while when Cris came into the tent and sidled up to me. -Anything new?- His presence made my corner of the tent wonderfully warm.

“I think I’m getting to a part that explains how the temple key works.”

He nodded, just a flicker of shadow.

“When Meuric had me trapped in the temple, I pressed a lot of the engravings on the key.”

-Hmm.-

I spent a few more minutes double-checking my translations before I went on. “All this would have been nice to know before I went in there. Okay, the symbols all do different things inside the temple. Horizontal lines make floors, and vertical lines make walls.”

-The square creates doors.-

I nodded. “Inside or out, depending on whether you slide the one half inside the other. I was really lucky, making that happen before Templedark. If I hadn’t done it before the poison took effect . . .”

-You would have escaped when the light came on again.-

But Sam, Stef, and so many others would be dead now.

Cris hummed soothingly. A tendril of darkness slipped around my wrist, over my hand, and between my fingers.

I closed my eyes and tried to pretend like shadows were enough. Like Sarit’s voice on the SED was enough. But inside me, a hollow grew larger.

I tapped my pencil on my notebook where I’d drawn the silver box, and each of the symbols etched into the metal. “You’d think I would have guessed, having nearly been killed in one, but the circle creates pits inside the temple. The depth depends on how long you press the button, I think. It’s hard to tell.”

-And the diamond?-

“Turns things on their side. Or upside down.” When Meuric had trapped me inside the temple, I’d witnessed everything flip over. There’d been a pit in the center of the room, and suddenly it had been crawling up the wall and over the ceiling like a spider. When I’d pushed Meuric beneath it, he’d fallen upward. “There are instructions for combining buttons to make stairs and things, but it’s a little confusing.”

-The temple is confusing.-

I leaned closer to him. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I wish we’d found another way.”

Roses bloomed in the shadows. -I’d do it again.-

My heart ached, and when I closed my eyes, all I could see was the knife in Cris’s hands, the blade looking as though it had been dipped in gold as he plunged it into his chest. All I could see was him sacrificing himself to save Stef and me. And now he was this. A shadow. A soul without substance.

Voices sounded, and footsteps thumped the ground. When the others walked in, Cris jerked away.

I dropped my face back to my studies, flipping through the books to scan for anything related to dragons. After I’d read through the library archives on my SED, I’d started on the temple books. Maybe they’d be able to tell me something we didn’t already know about dragons. And if we were to meet dragons, I needed to know everything. So far, the most interesting thing I’d found was an ancient animosity between dragons and phoenixes. But that didn’t help me, really.

“What I want,” I muttered to Cris, “is to know more about the dragons’ weapon.” The books contained frustratingly little on the topic.

-I wish we’d been able to help more with possibilities for those symbols.- Cris sighed. -Let’s go over the alternate translations tonight. Maybe we’ll discover something new.-

I smiled at Cris, at his hope, but it was unlikely we’d have any revelations tonight. We’d already been over the passage a hundred thousand times.

They fight with the weapon that destroys all.

Or maybe They love the instrument of consuming.

Or even They fear the tool that builds and destroys.

Or none of those. With so many symbols possessing multiple meanings, it was impossible for me to guess what these symbols meant in this context.

“Three more earthquakes today,” Stef said as she lit another lantern, pushing back the coming night. “And another hydrothermal eruption near Templedark Memorial.”