Alex squinched his eyes shut. “The attack?” he said in a hollow voice.
“Yes.”
It was almost as if those words were enough to answer all the questions that were swimming around in Alex’s head, unable to form complete sentences. Everything around him made absolutely no sense’and he didn’t even want to make sense of it. Because that would mean admitting the truth of what Alex was already quite sure.
The two young men stood together on the beach with an unresponsive sister and best friend, the waves crashing on the shore as if the whole sea were at war with itself. And both quite nearly wished to be swallowed up in it rather than face the insurmountable truths before them.
Wearily they sat down and took turns filling each other in.
“Simber and I went after them, and found the boat at the island,” Alex said.
“There’s a group in Quill called the Restorers,” Sean said.
“Samheed and Lani are still . . . out there. Somewhere.”
“Your brother, Aaron, is in charge, and he’s been building his followers.”
“We had to leave them’to try and save Meg, and then’”
“Mr. Today went to his peace meeting, and the next thing we knew, Artimé was gone and the Restorers had managed to open the gate. The girrinos went down when Artimé did. The Restorers stormed us in all the confusion and our spells wouldn’t work. . . .”
“Out of nowhere the boat died, and then Simber . . .” Alex choked and couldn’t go on as he remembered the cheetah’s frozen descent, and the crash into the water. He demonstrated Simber’s ride into the water with his hand. “He’s out there. Somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.” A cough-sob escaped, and he cursed himself. If he lost it now, he’d never get through this.
It was quiet for a moment. Alex looked at Sean, and even in the small light from the sky, he could tell they needed to address one last thing.
Alex bit his lip, accidentally reopening the cut and feeling the sting. He tasted blood, and it made him queasy. “Is Mr. Today . . . gone?” He couldn’t say “dead.”
Sean looked out over the water. His jaw quivered and he broke down, shielding his face with his hand. It took him several minutes to contain himself, and then he choked out, “He has to be. For this to have happened’” Sean waved his hand around. “There’s no other explanation.” Sean couldn’t hold in his sorrow. He looked at Meghan’s pale face. “It’s all such a disaster.”
Alex was numb. “What about Ms. Morning?”
“She went with Mr. Today. And she’s not here. I suspect she’s dead too.”
The blood tasted like metal in his mouth. Alex couldn’t comprehend anything. He felt like he was going to faint. Finally he whispered, “What are we going to do?”
The Throne
High Priest Haluki checked his timepiece and looked out the window again. All was quiet. But where was Marcus? And where were the guards? He called out to his chef, who was cleaning up the kitchen, “I’m going for a walk down to the house.”
“Yes sir,” the chef said.
The high priest slipped outside as he sometimes did after dark to enjoy the coolness of the evening. If it were light out, he’d be able to see the roof of his house from here. It wasn’t far.
He hadn’t been back since his move to the palace; Marcus had always made the trip to see him, as was the mage’s preference. And while there hadn’t been any violence in Quill since he took over, he picked his way carefully down the driveway toward the palace gate, looking left and right. Everything seemed perfectly normal.
He opened the gate, nodded to the guards that stood there.
“Shall we accompany you, sir?” one said.
“No thank you, Frederick.” He didn’t want to be that kind of high priest. “I’m just going down to the house. If Marcus Today comes to call, ask him to wait inside. I won’t be long.”
“We shall do just that, sir.”
“Thank you.” The high priest continued down the slight hill for several minutes, trying not to notice the heavy stench of garbage in the air. He wished for a light breeze, and perhaps there was one, but the walls stopped it from permeating their land. He would have to fix that one of these days. Tear the walls down. Ah, but that was a job for another day, once the Wanteds had quite gotten used to manual labor.
When he reached his home, he went up the steps and pulled a small key from his pocket, unlocked the front door, and then went in.
It was dark and stuffy inside, the house having been shut up for months. It felt smaller than he remembered. He turned down the hallway to his office. All was as it had been when he left it’his desk empty, the chair just so. He reached for the closet doorknob and pulled it open to get to the tube that would take him to Marcus’s office.
Without a sound Aaron Stowe reached out, grabbed Haluki by the neck, and put him in a choke hold. Crawledge Prize captured the surprised high priest’s wrists, wrenching them behind his back and tying a long, thin rope around them, and then he did the same around his ankles. Bethesda Dia Gloria shoved a towel in Haluki’s mouth, but it wasn’t necessary. He had already passed out from Aaron’s grip.
The three hoisted his body into the closet, then nailed the doors shut.
“Well done, everyone,” Aaron said in a low voice, breathing hard. “We are working together quite well now, aren’t we?”