I thought back to that moment when I jumped in. What was I thinking? “You could’ve given me a warning before Max kicked me.”
“There was no time. Once you were immersed there was no bringing you back. You would have drowned from the inside out. You swallowed the blood. You were about to be swallowed by guilt.”
I thought about it. How I’d drunk the blood. How I pictured myself disappearing in it. “If I drowned here, would I be dead?”
He frowned. “This isn’t a dream, Nik. You’re you here. If you die here, you’re dead.”
I took a deep breath. “So explain to me the kicking part again?”
“Kicking you out was the only way to save our place here, because we aren’t allowed to land anywhere in the maze or in the bull’s-eye. I can’t go to the Surface with you because then we would have had to start all over at the beginning again. After you were clear of the lake, I had to try to locate you by making jumps to the Surface and following my connection to you. Max and Ashe had to stay here, grounding my connection to them so I could find my way back. But if my whole body had gone to the Surface, I wouldn’t have been able to find Max again. It was a very delicate balancing act, and I would hope you’d appreciate the effort.” He seemed to be growing impatient trying to explain it.
“I do, I do. But if you have the ability to reach to the Surface, why don’t you just grab people? Yank them down and force them to become sacrifices?”
“Nik, don’t you know anything about the Everneath? They have to be willing. The Forfeits, the sacrifices, even you just now when you grabbed my hand. They all have to be willing. Can we walk faster, please?”
“One more question. Why did Max, and not you, kick me?”
He blushed. “It should be obvious.”
Obvious? “It’s not obvious.”
He looked away, toward the waterfall wall. “I would prefer not to be the one who has to kick you in the stomach.”
I stopped in my tracks. “Seriously? You Feed off of me for an entire century, take away any future I could possibly have, but you draw the line at a little aggravated assault?”
The words had poured out before I realized how they would sound. But then again, it was true, wasn’t it?
He frowned. “Nik, when are you going to realize that I never hurt you? I never will hurt you. I only did what you asked.”
“You ‘never hurt me’?” I said, incredulous. Anger started to boil inside my chest, and it felt larger and more defined here, maybe because every emotion felt bigger in the Everneath. It was magnified; I knew this. But I couldn’t stop myself. “You took away everything!”
His eyes were fierce. “Don’t fool yourself. Yes, I wanted you to become an Everliving, but I left the choice up to you.”
I scoffed. “I know it was my choice. But I didn’t know what I was choosing. And you knew what it would do to me.”
He grabbed my arm and yanked me back. His eyes searched my face. “Whatever you think of me, I was honest with you. Just because you want to live the mortal life doesn’t mean that my path is any less moral.”
“You feed off of people,” I said.
“But it’s their choice.”
“You sacrifice humans.”
“But it’s their choice.”
His face was so close to mine. His cheeks were bright with rushing blood underneath his skin. He was close enough that I imagined I could feel his connection to me. Feel the pull that was holding him fast to me. And for the first time, I realized that, for him, that connection would never break. Because I felt it.
I looked deep into his eyes. “If you tell yourself a lie enough times—that it’s okay to steal other people’s energy to stay alive—it becomes the truth. Even for you. They’re only willing because they’re weak. You’re preying on the weak.”
We stood face-to-face for a few tense moments. His dark eyes were tight, the circles under them more pronounced. “That’s quite an indictment of the person you’re trusting with your life right now.”
My lower lip trembled. “I know.” And I knew my culpability too. But I wasn’t about to admit it.
He took a step forward, as if he wanted to grasp me, but he was trying to hold back. Was he worried he would hurt me? A large drop of water fell onto his cheek, and he flinched.
A few more drops fell hard on my head. Tilting my head back, I looked into the sky. It was clear blue. But the walls of the maze were suddenly bulging.
Cole brought a finger to my cheek and then examined the drop of water with a curious expression. Right then, the rocks beneath our feet began to shake. Cole’s eyes went wide. The walls swelled, expanding into the pathway.
Max appeared from around the corner, sprinting.
“Run!” Max yelled.
The sound of thunder crashed around our ears, and then the first waves of rapids erupted from behind him. Instantly, the white foam from the churning water exploded up the maze walls. It was an ocean, crashing toward us.
“Nik!” Cole grabbed my hand, and we were running. Full sprint. No time to care if we were heading in the right direction. We caught up with Ashe and pushed him forward. He stumbled.
“Go! Go!” Cole shouted, shoving him from behind. Ashe scrambled up. The path darted left. Then right. I was following behind Cole when he came to a screeching halt. I crashed into his back.
“Why’d you stop?!” I shouted, but then I saw the reason. My mouth fell open.
A giant waterfall blocked the pathway. It was a dead end.
We were trapped. We turned around. Max appeared. He caught sight of the dead end.
“Shit!” Max said.
The enormous white wall of water burst into view, a bullet train of power aimed directly at us.
“Cole!” I yelped.
Cole pulled me in front of him and wrapped both arms around me, putting his back toward the dead end. He didn’t have to explain. He was putting a cushion of space between me and the impact of whatever lay behind the wall.
“Deep breath!” Cole shouted in my ear.
I had a moment when the faces of my brother and my father flashed through my head. Then a wall crashed into my back.
It threw us into the dead end. The jolt snapped my neck forward. There had to be something solid behind the dead-end waterfall.
Cole took the brunt of the impact. The water kept coming; the rapids closed over our heads, forcing us farther from the ground but not high enough to get our heads above the surface. My shoulder hit something jagged, and I opened my mouth to scream; but a gush of water rushed in and down my throat.
I kicked and waved my arms against the current, the force from millions of gallons pouring on top of me.
My lungs burned with the lack of oxygen. I saw a slice of light coming from what had to be the surface, and I kicked and kicked toward it.
Finally I broke the surface, only to discover that the flood had pushed us to the top of the dead-end wall. As I gasped in my first breath of air, we were thrown over the apex and surging toward the ground in a waterfall of flailing limbs and debris.
I landed on the ground, feet first, and then crumpled. The impact shook my bones. It probably would have shattered them if it hadn’t been for the couple of feet of water that had accumulated at the bottom before we went over.
The current from the rushing water dragged me a few yards before it became too shallow. The sound of crashing waves subsided, and the sound of wind rushing through a canyon took its place.
I gulped in a few deep breaths until my brain stopped bouncing around in my head.
The tidal wave was gone, and the rest of the water turned into little streams, trickling down any declines it could find. A strong wind created ripples in the water, and then, before my eyes, the water dried up.
Someone coughed a few feet away. It was Max, sitting on the ground, his head between his knees as if he was trying to catch his breath. Ashe was in a similar state. Cole was flat on his back.
There was no rise and fall of his chest.
“Cole!” I shouted. I scrambled over to where he lay. Max weakly tried to follow me. Ashe couldn’t move.
I shook Cole’s shoulders. “Can you hear me? Cole?”
I lightly slapped his face, but there was no response. Mining the deep caverns of my mind for the CPR class I’d taken as a freshman, I put my ear next to his mouth.
“No breaths,” I said.
I took my finger and traced his rib until it met his sternum, put the heel of my hand against it, and interlocked my fingers together.
“One … two … three …” I started compressions. Was I supposed to do five or fifteen? I split the difference and stopped at ten. Then I tilted Cole’s head back and plugged his nose. I covered his mouth with mine, and breathed. Twice.
Please, Cole. Breathe. If I lost Cole, I lost Jack.
I repeated the whole thing three times before he finally coughed.
“Cole!” Placing my hands behind his back, I helped him turn over so he could cough up the water.
Color rose to his cheeks again.
He opened his eyes to find me staring down at him. He mustered up a faint, lopsided grin and said, “Was it good for you too?”
We’d been drenched in the Everneath waters. I kept waiting for the emotional roller coaster that should’ve come from being covered in it, but it never happened. Maybe that was because, by the time Cole started to breathe again, all of the water had dried up. Even my hair was dry. Back on the Surface, it would take twenty minutes to dry my hair, but right now I couldn’t have squeezed a drop from it.
The wind here was fierce, and that’s when it hit me.
“The Ring of Wind!” I said.
We were here. One ring down. Two to go. One ring closer to Jack.
Cole coughed and nodded. The walls were no longer made up of water. They looked like minitornadoes made up of swirling dust and flying debris.
I blinked several times, trying to clear the thin film of dust that suddenly coated everything.
“How did that happen?” I asked.
Cole turned to Ashe, who was staring at the wind wall we’d just come flying over. A light mist hovered in the air at the top.
“It was a flash flood,” Ashe said. “Probably from your fight.”
I thought back to our tense words. Cole had told me the water was attracted to certain emotions. Maybe our anger had consolidated all around us, baiting the water, igniting a fire underneath it until it boiled over.
I was about to share my theory with Cole, but I caught a glimpse of his back. His T-shirt hung in tatters, and the skin beneath looked like raw meat.
“Your back,” I said.
Cole turned his head and glanced behind him. “Yeah. It’ll be fine. Apparently there were a few rocks behind the waterfall. I’m more worried about how to get your projection back, because right now it’s gone.”
I looked down. He was right; my tether had disappeared. “The water wiped it out.”
Cole brought his knees to his chest and propped his arms on top. Some of the gashes on his back opened wider, but he didn’t seem to notice. He was still recovering his breath.
I looked around for anything that could soothe the scrapes, but there was nothing but dust. Grabbing the bottom of my T-shirt, I tried to rip off a piece, but it wouldn’t budge. Wasn’t that how they did it in the movies? Someone was bleeding, and the other person would just tear their shirt in a perfectly straight line?
Bunching a section of my shirt in my hand, I stretched the material away from my stomach.
“What are you doing?” Cole said.
“Something incredibly heroic,” I said. I pressed the cloth against his wounds. Gingerly I tried to close the larger gashes, replacing some of the hanging skin and carefully cleaning out the dirt.
Not that long ago I had tended to the wound on his hand because I didn’t want him to give up. But things were different now. I knew he wouldn’t give up, and I tended to his scrapes simply because he was hurting. This small change in my motivation reflected a bigger change in my relationship with Cole. Shades of trust existed where they weren’t before.
Ashe came over to us. “We’re in the Ring of Wind now. Take heed. The wind has a way of tossing our brains, just like the water did our emotions. It’s the most devious of the rings. Nikki, do you have your token?”
I held it out to show it to him.
“You have to be constantly aware, and remind yourself often of Jack.”
I nodded, squeezing the paper in my fist. I’d held on to it during the flood.
“Good. While you’re playing nurse to Cole, tell us another story about Jack. We need to get your tether back.”
I’d told so many stories, and I was so tired. But then I remembered Jack, and where he was right now, and my cheeks went hot with shame. How could I complain? “What should I talk about?”
Cole looked at me with a suddenly hopeful face. “Was there ever a time when he didn’t resemble a white knight? That’d be great right about now.”
A memory instantly popped into my mind, and my face must’ve shown it, because Cole pressed. “It won’t make a difference if it’s an unpleasant memory. It’s all part of your connection to him.”