Tears streamed in hot splashes down his cheeks. If he could just break free of the epicentre, he bore a chance of escaping the basilica before smoke stole the remainder of his breath. Bodies crushed in on all sides, so tightly he couldn’t discern where he ended, and they began, turning his torso into nothing but fire and fading air.
‘Move,’ Jude shouted. Desperation clawed his voice to shreds. ‘Move!’
No one looked at him, even as he sank back beneath the surface of panicked acolytes. His fingers slid off clothing and limbs as he fell. The fear dissolved into engulfing agony, boiling like sulphur beneath his skin. There had been many times Jude had thought he was dying, but he’d never believed it with such certainty before.
This was how it would end.
The Abbey’s devotion had bred greed, and greed, where piety failed, had produced a violent focus on nothing but their self-interest. As Jude crumbled beneath the unseeing force of hundreds of acolytes, pilgrims, and elders, he realized Ezra was wrong. It wasn’t the collective that would kill him – it was the individual. Each person had chosen to pull him from the altar and crush him beneath their feet. Each of them, in their own mind, had decided not to look down and offer a hand up.
And that selfishness would be the thing that damned him.
His head landed heavily upon the stone.
Pain sliced across his forehead, banding from ear to ear. He didn’t flinch as he floated along a plane where nothing – not pain, not fear, not hope – could touch him. Pressure built behind his eyes and against the roof of his mouth. Air filled his lungs in an acrid rush of smoke.
High above, the ceiling swirled. The crowd was gone.
A strange static chipped at his consciousness.
Jude closed his eyes.
Memories spilled out in an uncontrollable rush, like water in a basin, like flame into air. Jude cried out, banding his hands over his ears to keep his brain inside his body.
It didn’t help.Nothinghelped.
His life flashed before his eyes in a series of rapidly clearing images.
Jude, kneeling at Ezra’s feet while his mentor sawed a length of twine across his palms until his blood stained the floor. Jude running, laughing, tilting his head back to face the sky as a hand landed on his shoulder, making him look back. A boy, familiar…Felix.
His friend. Oh, how he loved him.
Another face, a flash of blond curls—
Jude clawed at his face as the memories shifted forward onto the next.
A stifled bout of girlish laughter cut through the darkness. A door opened, and her face shone between the gap. Maeve, her long hair in twin braids, smiling at him with a space where one of her front teeth ought to be. Later, years maybe, he placed a cup of steaming chocolate in front of her while she sat, twisting her fingers and wiping tears off her face. She took a drink and smiled at him, a sunrise breaking through the storm.
Jude wasn’t alone.
He’dneverbeen alone.
Ezra had stolen every happy memory. He’d stripped him ofhis friends and deprived him of any hand that had ever dared reach through the darkness to pull him to his feet.
The memories continued to come in neat bursts, one on top of the other. Pounding,pressinginto his head like they were sewing themselves directly onto his brain with a molten needle.
As quickly as it had arrived, the pain ebbed away.
Jude sat up. Blinked against the sudden brightness.
He was kneeling, surrounded by others in similar positions. With the pain gone, he felt like a stone plucked from river water. Everything rough had been sloughed away, leaving him polished and clean. It didn’t hurt to think, and, for once, he felt the truth of what it meant to have a mind entirely his own.
Slowly, he got to his feet. His legs trembled under him. Tears welled on his lash line as he scanned the room. Looking, with increasing desperation, forher.
And there—
Her head was bowed, and face turned away, but Jude knew her. He’d have recognized her anywhere. Soon, she’d turn and meet his eyes, finding him amidst the melee of pilgrims pushing to their feet and stumbling towards the exit.
She’d come for him.
