Page 79 of Into Ember

Only bigger.

Much, much bigger.

His hand leaves mine. He steps back and bows his head, and I stand there in one slipper and a ruined dress, shaking, alone in the middle of all that flat pale stone.

Ezra stands at the center of the half circle. Small and gray, her hair drifting on a wind that isn’t here either.

She smiles at me, kind as anything.

“Hello, dear. I do hope you enjoyed your party.”

Chapter 32

Gunnar

Brock’s voice hits the room and I’m moving before the second word.

Northwest corner. Through the wall. I put my shoulder through three lords and a waiter and I don’t apologize to any of them, and the panel is right where he said, a seam of dark in all that gold with a strip of white dress hanging off it like a surrendered flag.

Erik is already through. Dammit. Leif hits the gap two steps ahead of me, Rayner right behind.

I catch a glimpse of Brock dropping off the fountain at a run, and then we’re inside, all five of us in a stone tunnel going down, down, and her scent is everywhere in here, fear-sharp, and my dragon and I stop having separate opinions.

We run.

We don’t make it far before I hear it behind us.

Not guards. Guards would be fine. Guards have orders and bones that break in expected ways. What’s pouring into the tunnel behind us is the ballroom — hundreds of them, the same drunk-eyed males who were tearing at her dress. They’re now following her scent down into the dark with their best shoes slapping stone. They’re not going to stop, and they are not going to slow, and if we turn to fight them… it won’t end well.

So we don’t turn. We run faster, and the sound behind us grows — boots, breath, and somewhere back there an honest-to-god lord barking like a dog.

Somebody owes me for tonight. Every second of it.

The tunnel bends. My hand drags the wall on the turn, and the wall isn’t smooth.

Grooves. Vertical, deep, cut on purpose — and my feet are slowing before my head knows why, and then my head knows why, because I know what vertical grooves in a tunnel wall are. Anyone who’s held a fortress knows. That’s a channel. Channels hold gates.

“Keep going!” I shout at the others, and I stop.

There. Above the groove, bolted into the rock, black with rust — a counterweight on a chain, and a stone slab tucked up into the ceiling, waiting, the way it’s been waiting since somebody built this tunnel and made sure it could be closed. Somebody after my own heart.

The mechanism is rusted to hell. The release lever might as well be welded.

Fine.

I grab the chain with both hands, brace a boot on the wall, and I ask my dragon for exactly one thing, and for once in his contrary life he agrees with me completely, and the strength comes up my back like a tide, and I tear the whole release assembly out of the rock.

The chain screams through the broken mechanism. And the slab comes down out of the ceiling like the end of an argument — a boom that punches my ears shut, dust rolling over me, and the tunnel behind it goes from a hundred voices to nothing.

It won’t hold forever. Rusted seat, cracked frame, and enough dragons on the far side to dig through a mountain if they stay interested.

It doesn’t need forever. It needs for now.

I run. Alone now, in the footprints of my unit, lungs burning, and the floor tilts up and the air goes cool, and ahead of me the dark opens into a mouth of moonlight, and I come up and out onto flat pale rock and stop dead next to the others, and everything in me goes very, very quiet.

Because there she is.

Fifty feet away, in the middle of a stone plain, one slipper, ruined dress, arms wrapped around herself. Alive. Whole. Shaking. Beautiful, and I have never hated a view more. She’s standing in front of a half circle of gray robes with Ezra at the center, and behind them a stone arch full of dead dark, and a rock face going up forever, and nobody in gray even turns around.