Page 53 of Flames and Blood

Crowe

The valley has one road, and I’m lying on frozen rock above it, watching the gate.

Stone posts. A steel barrier between them. A gatehouse with a light on and one man inside it, and I’ve watched him long enough to know he does his job properly. Past the gate, the road climbs through dark ground for miles, and at the top of it there’s a house with lit windows.

She’s in that house. My palms have been pulling toward it since we left the courier’s kitchen, and now that I’m lying here looking at it, the pull sits behind my ribs and doesn’t let up.

Kent is on my left with his chin on his fists. Meyer is on my right, still, watching the gatehouse, gray glinting in his stubble.

“That’s it?” Kent says. “One man and a pole?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s not it.”

“No. It isn’t.”

I get up and walk down to find the rest of it.

The pressure starts a long way out from the gate, off the road, on open ground where there’s nothing to see at all. It builds against my face and my chest with every step, and I keep walking, because I need to know what this thing does before I build a plan against it.

Then I put my hand out and touch it.

It goes through me.

The cuffs in the back of the van she was in burned my hands. This one hits my chest and comes out through my back. It’s every rune I’ve ever touched, all firing at once. My legs fold without asking me. The ground comes up hard, and then I’m lying on frozen dirt a body-length from where I was standing, with no memory of the trip.

I try to get up. My arms shake, buckle, and drop me twice before they hold.

Meyer gets a hand under my shoulder and lifts. I let him. I have never let him do that before.

“How bad?” he says.

“Bad.”

“Worse than the cuffs they had on her?”

“The cuffs took the skin off my hands. This one dropped me where I stood, and for a second or two I couldn’t move anything at all.” I get my feet under me properly. “A man could stand at that line all year with an army behind him, and it wouldn’t matter. I don’t think it ever goes down, and nothing’s strong enough to get through it.”

“Noted,” Meyer says, and steadies me one more time before he takes his hand away.

We walk back up to Kent. My hands shake the whole way there. I tell them to stop, and they keep shaking. I stop telling them.

“So we go over it,” Kent says.

“It’s not a fence. It goes up. Think about what they’re keeping in there. A prisoner with wings. If the top of that valley were open, she’d have been gone the first morning they let her out of a room. She’s still there, so the top is closed.”

“Under it, then. Dig.”

“It goes down the same way it goes up. It’s a closed shape; I could feel it beneath my feet. The only way in is through it.”

“Then we wait for it to fail. Everything fails.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s been running for years without failing. She doesn’t have years. She doesn’t even have weeks…or days.”

Kent looks at me when I say that last part, and I don’t explain it, because I can’t. I just know.

“Then how does anything get in?” he says.