Page 77 of Into Ember

The fountain.

I put a boot on its rim and a hand on the ridiculous gold fish spouting water at nothing. I climb, and the ballroom opens up underneath me.

The center is a churn of dark formal wear pressing inward on a point I can’t see, my men cutting toward it from three sides, too slow, all of us too slow.

The edges are still.

That’s what I see from up here that I couldn’t see from inside. The doors. The windows. The route. Every gray robe and false steward and planted aide standing exactly where they stood an hour ago, hands folded, faces calm, watching a queen be torn at by a mob — and not one of them has moved. Not toward her. Not away. Nothing in their bodies but patience.

You cannot fake that stillness. Panic shows — in hands, in weight, in the small parts of a face. A thousand people are drowning in instinct in front of them, and the men at the doors have the heart rate of an afternoon shift.

Because nothing is going wrong.

This is the plan, working. The room was the weapon, her fear was the trigger, and the frenzy is cover — thick enough to hide anything, and every calm man at every exit was told exactly this would happen and told to stand down while it did.

They knew. All of it, the flowers, the dress, the entrance alone — they built the fire and sold us tickets.

I stop looking at the whirlpool and sweep the walls instead, fast, corner to corner, the way you look for what a room doesn’t want you to see —

There.

Far corner, behind the columns, where no door has any business being. A panel of gilded wall standing open on the dark, a gray-sleeved figure hauling something white, a flash of her — her hair, her hand clawing at his — and then the dark takes them both, and the panel is just a shadow among shadows, and a long torn strip of white dress hangs off its corner, swaying.

That’s all they needed.

I turn toward my men and I put everything I have into my voice.

“NORTHWEST CORNER — SHE’S THROUGH THE WALL!”

Chapter 31

Elara

The dark doesn’t end.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about being dragged through a wall. You think there’ll be a room on the other side. A corridor, a closet, something with edges. There’s just dark, and stone under my slippers, and his hand crushing mine, and the sound of two people breathing where nobody should be.

“Wait—” My voice bounces off walls I can’t see. “Wait, please, stop—”

He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t slow down. He walks fast and pulls me after him like luggage, and I stumble on the uneven floor and he just hauls me back up by the arm without breaking stride, fingers digging in above my elbow, and I leave one of my slippers behind somewhere in the black and the stone comes up cold through my stocking with every second step.

My eyes keep trying to adjust and there’s nothing to adjust to. Maybe walls. Maybe not. A ceiling I can feel more than see, low, pressing. The tunnel bends and bends again and goes on, longer than any building could hold, longer than makes sense, and somewhere in the last minute I understood that we’re not in the castle anymore. We’re under it. We’re under everything.

Nobody knows where I am.

My chest does something high and fluttery that isn’t helping, and for the first time since Chicago there’s no weight riding in my hair, no small scaled someone tucked against my neck, because Gerald is still under the couch in a room and I might never see him again. I left him there, just left him.

I can’t breathe right.

I need to think.

I need to be a person who thinks.

Questions. I’m a journalist. I ask questions for a living. People answer questions. That’s the whole system.

“Where are you taking me?”

Nothing. Boots on stone. The grip tightens just a fraction.