“Barbaric.”
“Says the creature who drinks blood to survive.”
Raziel considered this. “Point goes to the fae.”
“Are you two going to do this the entire way?” Nadi asked.
“Probably,” Kalo admitted.
“Almost certainly,” Raziel agreed.
“Great.” She urged herchanchaahead again. “Just wonderful.”
But despite her irritation—and it was genuine, bone-deep irritation—she couldn’t help but notice that the tension between the three of them had shifted. It was still there, still sharp and dangerous, but underneath it was something else. Something that almost resembled understanding.
Raziel was asking questions, yes. Probing at wounds she’d thought long scarred over. But he wasn’t doing it to hurt her. He was doing it because he wanted to understand. To know the person she’d been before revenge had consumed her.
And Kalo…
Kalo was answering because, despite everything, he still remembered that person. Still cared about her, even if that caring was tangled up in years of resentment and abandonment.
It was complicated.
Everything was always complicated.
The tunnels began to change as they traveled deeper into territory Nadi recognized from her childhood. The vines still grew here, but they were sparse this close to the surface—their purple glow dimmer. She could smell salt on the air, and something else—the distinctive metallic tang of the underground rivers that fed into the great underground sea.
“We’re close,” Kalo announced, his voice dropping to something more serious. “The dockyards are through the next set of caverns. But we should approach carefully. The Iltanis who remain here…they may not welcome us.”
“They’re just as likely to greet us with bullets as anything else,” Nadi sighed. “I still think this is a death wish.”
“I think we’ll be fine.” Kalo smirked and fixed a stare at Raziel. “They’re all humans.”
Raziel chuckled. “Ah. Right. Yes.”
Nadi groaned. “No, Raziel.”
“I don’t intend to kill them.” He lifted his hands in a show of harmlessness. “I will simply ensure thatwedo not come out of this riddled with bullet holes.”
Right. Sure. Everything would be fine. “I guess we have no choice.”
The final stretch of tunnel opened up before them, and Nadi caught her first glimpse in decades of the dockyards that she had not seen since she was a child. She remembered the bustling warehouses along the waterside, the constant movement of boxes in and out and in and out. The laughter as she’d chase or be chased by the other kids.
She remembered Luciento shouting at her not to get tangled up in the nets when she’d go diving for “lost treasures” off the docks. She was always inventing stories about made-up monsters or sunken ships whose fortunes had washed up where she could find them. It’d all been bunk, of course.
Except for one day, when she had seen a silver sparkling glimpse of something lying on the surface. She had been beyond giddy with elation when she’d come back up with a jeweled pocket watch.
It wasn’t until she was an adult that she realized Luciento had probably thrown it into the water just to give her something to find.
The memory slipped into her ribcage like one of her knives.
The cavern was massive—so vast that the far walls disappeared into shadow and mist. Great pillars of stone rose from the floor to the ceiling, natural formations that had been carved and shaped over centuries into something functional. Bridges and walkways connected them at various heights, forming a complex web of paths and platforms. All cobbledtogether from whatever they could find and salvage from the world above and below, like everything else the fae owned.
And below, stretching out like liquid obsidian, was the underground sea.
Ships floated at anchor—some the wooden vessels of the surface world, and the rare few were organic things grown from the same living wood as the wagons. Their hulls gleamed with bioluminescence, and their sails were woven from spider-silk and treated vine fiber. Docks jutted out into the water at irregular intervals, some crowded with activity, others standing empty and abandoned.
Time was once that there were more of the living boats than not. But now, like rot, like mold, the rusted metal and wooden structures had overtaken the fae ones.
