“You!”
Just like that, he snapped to attention. And Seraphina learned a new thing about the bone. Speech was part of it, but also eye contact. She shouldn’t have been able to use it at all, but she guessed the atlas vertebra of Saint Vivia implanted in her socket made it possible. Its power was to make one see in the dark. Even though the extent to which Seraphina could see in her condition was debatable, the principle was there and it worked.
She straightened her back and held the soldier’s gaze in her shadowy line of sight.
“I hear there’s a whole company out there,” she said. “Do you have a surgeon?”
“There is a ghoul,” he said. His voice lacked the annoyance from before.
“A ghoul.” Seraphina exhaled sharply through her nose. “A naturalist you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Bring him to me.”
“Yes.”
He walked past her without another word, and Seraphina stepped aside to let him pass. She listened to his footsteps fade up the stairs as she rubbed her palms on her cloak. Were her hands ever going to be clean again? She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand and felt her skin crusty. She must’ve been a vision. The soldier hadn’t acted too surprised considering, but these days, blood was a frequent sight. He must’ve been convinced it was hers.
Seraphina spat on the floor. He’d intended to take her to Captain Mayer. That reminded her she could still taste him on her tongue. Now, where was she going? Downward. There was something calling to her. She didn’t know what. She started descending the stairs again, her brain working on catching a loose thread. It was at the back of her mind, floating, like something just learned and forgotten. A thought not entirely formed, a piece of information she’d tucked away earlier to examine later, and later had come; it was now.
The deepest level of the dungeons opened into a large corridor with cells lining both sides. Seraphina slowed her pace, advancing carefully, counting the open maws left by shattered doors, calculating the dimensions of the cells and the thickness of the walls separating them.
Each cell was wide and deep, large enough for a man to pace in every direction without touching a wall, and the walls between them were at least two feet thick. The corridor itself was broad enough for three men to walk abreast. Fragments of charred wood and twisted iron hinges littered the ground, and she understood that whoever had been kept down here had been sealed away in total darkness, unable to see or hear each other. This wasn’t like the prison in Ingolstadt, where the doors had bars and the window showed a sliver of sky.
“When you say you were isolated, lived in a room and never got out…”
“It was home. They treated me well.”
The memory stopped Seraphina in her tracks. She pressed her hand to her stomach and whimpered, as if an invisible force had slammed into her. It felt like a lifetime ago.
Huddled in a cell, her back to his, spines pressed together, the rumble of his baritone seeping into her marrow.
She’d left him. She’d promised him and herself that nothing would change. No matter what, she’d always choose him, and then she’d fled. At the worst moment of all, too, when he’d maimed himself for her, to return what was hers, when he was sobbing on the floor, bleeding, when he needed her more than ever.
It wasn’t his fault that he’d been made from others. That people had been killed to give him specific body parts that held the memory of desired skills and talents. He hadn’t asked to be created, infused with life, locked in a dungeon, thrown into the world… He hadn’t asked to meet her, fall for her, cling to her –“You are my anchor.”– eviscerate men for her. Be her eyes, have her eyes… Touch her with her dead lover’s hands.
These things – he hadn’t done. They’d been done to him.
And she’d left him.
Seraphina dug her nails into the soft flesh of her stomach and screamed into the hollow corridor. The sound bounced off the walls and rolled up the stairs to the above levels, multiplied by every empty cell it filled.
She had to set this right. She’d run, and she didn’t know why, but it didn’t matter now, because she was going back to him. He was there, waiting, she had to hurry…
Seraphina turned on her heel and lunged forward, barely managing a few steps before tripping on a piece of wood. She yelped as she extended her arms to brace herself and collapsedatop a half-charred board that creaked under her weight and broke in two. Her cloak billowed around her, and the hard edges of Matteo’s journal dug into her ribs. She tried to push herself up and felt something metallic under her palms. It was a plaque.
With her fingers, she traced the letters etched into it: CONSTRUCT TWELVE.
Seraphina hung her head, so low that her lips almost touched the words, her breath steaming the cold metal. This was why she’d come here. She’d run because at that moment, her body had vibrated with two impulses: fight or flee. There was no one to fight – maybe only herself – so she’d fled. Toward him, still. Even as she was running away from Rune, she was still running toward him. She’d come here, to the place where he’d been kept for two years, the first two years of his life. He’d spent them alone, in the dark, staring at three walls and a solid door.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered against his name.
She crawled over the door, finding what was left of its hinges, trying to determine which cell it had come from. On her hands and knees, she moved to the left, her palms turning black with soot, a splinter lodging into her thumb. She clawed at the doorframe and pulled herself to her feet, then stepped into the enclosed space.
It was larger than the prison cell she’d shared with Rune, but no less claustrophobic. The relic showed her a narrow cot, of which only the metal frame was left, a toppled table, half-burned, and a chair in pieces. She advanced toward the center of the room and imagined what it must’ve been like to be him, just awoken, existing for the first time – not born, she wouldn’t call it that – with no one there to explain who he was and what world he’d been brought into.
Seraphina crouched low and ran her fingers over the fallen table. She considered setting it back straight but felt like it would’ve been too invasive a gesture. Her fingernail caught ona drop of hardened wax. So, he hadn’t been kept in complete darkness, he’d been given candles. What had the Blasphemer made Rune do by candlelight?
