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“If it improves at all, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
I started walking again, matching my stride to his, which was still a bit faster than I’d like to go in my current condition. No one here cared about my injury. No one was going to take it easy on me because of it. I was going to have to suck it up.
We walked together in silence, the only sound the crisp grinding of bones underfoot. I was reminded, for some reason, of the day my parents had sat Sunny and me down to explain that we’d be going away from home and never coming back. At the time, being seven years old, I hadn’t appreciated the immensity of what never coming back meant.
Here, in the hellish landscapes of the underworld, I was provided a perfect visual for it. This was what it meant to go away and not return. This was what eternity meant, if eternity was a place.
I thought about my parents, their faces nothing more than fuzzy sketches of what I thought they looked like, as opposed to real memories. They’d explained to me and Sunny that we were chosen and our destinies meant we were on our way to lives with greater meaning and purpose than those of other little girls.
Mostly, we’d been excited that we didn’t have to go to school the next day.
It wasn’t until later, when my mother had taken Sunny away and my father was loading me up to go to Seattle, that I really got a sense of their intention. We were off to start new lives, but those lives would not include each other.
I don’t
know what made me think of Sunny here. This place was everything she wasn’t—dark, foreboding, unwelcoming. Perhaps that was why she came to mind, because I needed to remember there were things out there beyond this, things that were warm and loving and beautiful.
All the things I hoped to see again.
“Would you be mad if I sang?” Leo asked, breaking the silence with an anachronistically cheerful tone.
“Yes.”
“Buzzkill.”
“That’s me, Tallulah Corentine, killer of dreams.” I wanted to ask if he could take this a bit more seriously, but before I could, it occurred to me that maybe he had taken it seriously, and now being playful about it was the only thing keeping him from abandoning hope and giving up.
If that’s what he needed, let the man tell bad jokes. But I’d die before I let him sing.
The road narrowed, and I glanced back behind us, astonished to see how far we’d come while I was busy dwelling on the past. The temple now appeared small and unassuming in the distance. From this vantage it didn’t give away any of the sense of menace that came from being inside it. The piles of bone had dwindled as well, showing patchy bits of brown grass in between femurs and pelvic bones. It was hard to imagine this had ever been a place where grass could grow long enough to dry up and die.
Soon the path was too small for us to walk side by side. I took the lead, wishing with all my might I had any kind of weapon with me. I hated the idea of going into a bottleneck with nothing other than fists and wits to fight my way out.
“You ever feel like you’re walking into a trap?” he asked.
“Far more often than is healthy.”
“How often are you right?”
I couldn’t help but smirk at the question. “When am I ever wrong?”
I shrugged off my jacket, the oppressive heat surrounding us finally getting to be too much to handle. My arms and neck were damp with sweat, and the small hairs at the base of my ponytail were plastered to my skin.
The clouds of flame bubbled overhead like a pot of water coming to a boil. I didn’t give them more than a passing glance, remembering what I’d seen back at the temple. I worried if I stared for too long, trying to see the people trapped inside the fire, I might lose my mind and end up joining them.
This whole world felt like one extended bad dream from which there was no waking.
We walked for over an hour, me leading him into the unknown. Eventually the pass between the cliffs became so tight my shoulders grazed the black rocks as we continued, and Leo had to turn himself sideways in order to follow me. Just when I thought it might get too squished for him to fit through, it opened up again and we were on the other side.
The black cliffs were at our back, like large feral trees we couldn’t trust. I half-expected the rocks to grow outward and push us.
On this side of the passage we were on the top of a ledge, and cascading down in front of us were millions more bones laid out along the edge of a tar-black river, looking for all the world like a beach.
I took a tentative step forward off the path, testing the bone landslide to see if it would hold my weight. If it wouldn’t carry me, there was no way Leo would manage. The bones shifted and cracked underfoot, making my balance stutter, but I was able to stay upright. My foot sank in to my ankle but stood firm after that. The bone pile must be so dense it could support being walked on.
“It’s safe. Just a little sinky,” I assured Leo.
He followed behind me and with his extra weight sank a bit deeper, the bones flowing up to his calves. But soon we were moving forward in sluggish, dragging movements, fighting the tide of death that threatened to hold us back.
