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Unfortunately for him, I was mostly fine, except for my lungs and eyeballs burning from the two thousand years of dust. And they burned so, so very badly. I felt like I had almost been crushed. I felt like I was definitely going to be looking a little bruised for a few days, but for what had happened, I had come out unscathed. “I’m okay.”
One of them hauled me up to my feet and then picked me up into their arms. I was okay with this; my eyes were watering like crazy, and every sinus I had was now clogged with dust.
“Thank you,” I wheezed.
“You’re not gonna thank me when I get you home. You almost got us flattened. Not to mention—” I heard Murtagh seethe.
“I thought you guys didn’t get killed that easily,” I said, listening to his tone despite that I was still rubbing my hands over my eyes. He had been scared; I could hear his voice rattle.
“You can get killed, Zazie. You have human in you; that makes you much more vulnerable, in ways we can’t foresee, ways we don’t know,” I almost felt him jerk my whole body with upset. “We can’t replace you. And if we can’t trust you to stay safe…” He sighed, not finishing that sentence, which was great, because if he stopped talking, then I felt like I didn’t have to defend myself. Defending myself was becoming very annoying when I was going blind. “And honestly, Caspian and I do need air, so getting trapped under a few feet of debris would probably do the job.”
“Let’s just get her back to our hotel,” Caspian growled from somewhere near us.
It was a very long walk back home, obviously, because it had been a long, hard walk to get there. Murtagh seemed up for it; he didn’t even readjust my weight in his arms with discomfort the whole way.
It was quiet, but that was fine with me, because I still had dirt in my ears, too. Or maybe they’d just gone deaf after all the noise during the collapse. It was hard to say.
“My phone’s broken,” Caspian finally growled.
“Who would you even be calling right now?” Murtagh sighed.
“Lots of people, actually. First Miles, since he’ll be worried after we went down into an underground palace about five hours ago with no word since. It’s the middle of the night, and he’s probably pacing around.”
“How’d he know we were going inside?” Murtagh asked.
“I told him before we did. Mostly in case the whole thing collapsed, and we actually got trapped. You know, like what very nearly happened,” Caspian replied tersely.
“Yeah?” He was quiet for a moment. “I should probably buy a cellphone,” he sighed.
“Yes. You should,” agreed Caspian. “It’s good to keep in constant contact, Murtagh. Especially when you’re with our mate, who apparently has the self-discipline of a two-year-old and is likely to get in trouble for it.”
“I have…” I stopped talking there, because my record with self-discipline was very, very bad. Even according to Zach, and previously my grandmother, it was definitely my greatest weakness. I made a weird sound as I chewed down the words. “I’ll work on it.”
“I would if I were you,” Caspian replied firmly.
I quieted for the extra hour it took to finally walk into our villa, where Miles launched into a tirade, one which was surprisingly full of expletives. “What the fuck happened to you? Couldn’t you have called? I almost had the fucking consulate on the phone, and then I was like, is that even who I should call? Who should I call? More than a text next time with proper directions, please, before you almost kill yourself in some hole out in an unknown city?”
“The good news is we have the diamond,” Murtagh muttered. He set me on my ass and I heard the sink turn on. He leaned me backwards, and I could tell I was lying on a counter of some kind because he said, “Put your head back.”
I did.
He very carefully washed my face and eyes. It was a long time before I was able to see again. My eyes were traumatized.
Miles was giving us shit from somewhere over my head. “Did you roll in dust or something? Oh, Christ! Look at her eyes!”
“Don’t worry, Miles,” Murtagh grumbled as he continued to wash out my eyes. The dust seemed to have settled thickly into places that I didn’t even know that dust could get into. “That’s what it looks like when she’s in a gem fit because she has probably too many karats on her,” he grumbled. “Zazie, take off the bracelet.”
“I don’t really… want to?” I said after a long silence, my voice full of apology. I was going to take off my bracelet and take the Byzantian ring off my finger. I had no business walking around with what was probably a hundred million dollars worth of gems on me.
But it felt so good. I was certain that if I wasn’t wearing it, I’d actually feel like a complete asshole for putting it on in the beginning. Right now, the gems were my friends, like little birds on a princess’s finger in a Disney movie. They had almost made the mountain of shit I had gotten into my eyeballs and lungs tolerable.
Murtagh, with a sort of firm response, grabbed my wrist, pulled the bracelet right off with a very rough tug, and put it somewhere away from me.
“Murtagh, geez!” My voice was whiney, probably unbearably so, but I wasn’t emotionally prepared for that to go. It almost felt like I’d just been pantsed.
Pain was suddenly flowing into my eyeballs. My body thrashed.
“Fuck this!” I said, moving my hands to my eyes and then immediately regretting it, because they were so dirty that as soon as they hit the water, I just got fresh mud in my eyes. “Owww!”
