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“I don’t know what that is, but yes, it holds music. I’ve got a few thousand songs on here.”
“Thousand?” Nesta whirled as Bryce jumped from the last stone onto the bank, pebbles skittering from beneath her sneakers. “In that tiny thing? You recorded it all?”
“No—there’s a whole industry of people whose job it is to record it, and again, I don’t know how it works.” Finding her footing, Bryce followed Azriel, now a hulking shadow silhouetted against the larger dark.
Nesta fell into step beside her. “And it’s a way of talking mind-to-mind with other people.”
“Sort of. It can connect to other people’s phones, and your voices are linked in real time …”
“And let me guess: you don’t know exactly how it works.”
Bryce snorted. “Pathetic, but true. We take our tech and don’t ask what the Hel makes it operate. I couldn’t even tell you how the flashlight in the phone works.” To demonstrate, she hit the button and the cave illuminated, the battle scenes and suffering on the walls around them even more stark. Azriel hissed from up ahead, whirling their way with his eyes shielded, and Bryce quickly turned it off.
Nesta smirked. “I’m surprised it can’t cook you food and change your clothes, too.”
“Give it a few years, and maybe it will.”
“But you have magic to do these things?”
Bryce shrugged. “Yeah. Magic and tech kind of overlap in my world. But for those of us without much in the way of the former, tech really helps fill the gap.”
“And that weaponry you showed us,” Azriel said quietly, pausing his steps to let them catch up. “Those … guns.”
“That’s tech,” Bryce said, “not magic. But some Vanir have found ways to combine magic and machine to deadly effect.”
Their silence was heavy.
“We’re here,” Azriel said, motioning to the darkness ahead. The reason, it turned out, that he had halted.
A massive metal wall now blocked their way, thirty feet high and thirty feet wide at least, with a colossal eight-pointed star in its center.
The carvings continued straight up to it: battle and suffering, two females running on either side of the passage, as if running for this very wall … Indeed, around the star, an archway had been etched. Like this was the destination all along.
Bryce glanced back at Nesta. “Is this where you saw my star?”
Nesta slowly shook her head, eyeing the wall, the embossed star, the cave that surrounded them. “I don’t know where this place is. What it is.”
“Only one way to find out,” Bryce said with a bravado she didn’t feel, and approached the wall. Azriel, a live wire beside her, approached as well, a hand already on Truth-Teller.
The lowest spike of the star extended down, right in front of Bryce. So she laid a hand on the metal and pushed. It didn’t budge.
Nesta stalked to Bryce’s side, tapping a hand on the metal. A dull thud reverberated against the cave walls. “Did you really think it’d move?”
Bryce grimaced. “It was worth a shot.”
Nesta opened her mouth to say something—to make fun of Bryce, probably—but was silenced by groaning metal. She staggered back a step. Azriel threw an arm in front of her, blue light wreathing his scarred hand.
Leaving Bryce alone before the door.
But she couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted. Couldn’t take her eyes away from the shifting wall.
The spikes of the star began to expand and contract, as if it were breathing. Metal clicked behind it, like gears shifting. Locks opening.
And in the lowest spike of the star, a triangle of a door slid open.
17
Only dry, ancient darkness waited beyond the star door. No sound or hint of life. Just more darkness. Older, somehow, than the tunnel behind them. Heavier. More watchful.
