Every instinct was telling me to run away, but I couldn’t move. My lungs tightened at her words, and for a moment it felt as if I had been the one crushed by the car. I was trapped and fighting for breath.
I tried to expand my lungs, but it was as if someone were pouring liquid cement down my throat, and my chest was turning to stone.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Mom,” I whispered.
The queen laughed.
I opened my eyes and narrowed them at her. The queen was lying. She couldn’t possibly know what had happened.
“My mom didn’t suffocate,” I said, breathless. “Why would you say that?”
“Yes, she did. But you don’t remember. You’ve blocked it. Let me help you unblock it.”
Suddenly, another image appeared in my head. A doctor coming to talk to us in the hallway of the antiseptic hospital wing. He’d said her ribs were crushed, and she died because she couldn’t breathe.
“I’m so happy you believe me now,” the queen said. “Because I have something special for the girl who made me think Nathanial was still alive.”
She closed her eyes, and at that moment a glass wall appeared on every side of me. She’d conjured up a giant glass box. I felt cool liquid at my feet and looked down to find that water was filling the glass. I pounded on the walls and the ceiling, so hard that my knuckles split and blood smeared on the glass. But it didn’t crack. I put my hands on one wall and my feet on the opposite one and tried to use the force of opposition to break through. But it didn’t work. The water had reached my chest and was rising rapidly.
Within twenty seconds of facing the queen, I was trapped in a box full of water with a locked lid.
As the water crept up my face, I gulped in one last breath of air. My last breath of life. Glimpses of people flashed through my mind. Tommy. My dad. Jules. Jack. I had failed them all.
I could see the queen through the distorted view from underwater and through the glass. I tried to pound on the glass, but it didn’t even make a sound. I pressed my lips together, trying to make the seal watertight. If it was Everneath water, I didn’t want to drink it and forget I was fighting for my life.
Jack thrashed against the bars of the cage, pushing and pulling. The bars didn’t budge.
This was it. I was going to die in the worst possible way, with Jack in sight but just out of reach.
He was always in sight but just out of reach.
Instinctively, I rose to the top of the water, to where there was maybe half an inch of air, but I couldn’t orient my face close enough to get a clear breath. I would need a snorkel.
Or a straw! I thought back to my training session with Cole and focused all my energy. A faint white line appeared in the water in front of my face. The longer it floated there, the more it transformed into a solid thing.
My plastic straw. I grabbed it and blew the last of my air through the straw to clear it of water and then held it against the top of the lid and sucked in a giant breath.
I got one more breath in before the queen realized her mistake and filled the rest of the space with water.
But I’d bought myself another twenty seconds.
Twenty seconds to do what?
I could see Jack in the cage. He’d stopped thrashing, and now he just had his hand raised, palm outward toward me. I put my hand on my lips and then laid it flat against the glass pane.
I didn’t want to drown. But at any moment I wouldn’t be able to fight the urge to suck in a giant lungful of water.
I closed my eyes and thought about my mom. Maybe I would find out exactly what it felt like to be deprived of air, just as she had been. Maybe I would see her soon.
Suddenly I felt a knock on the glass. I saw Cole’s face, sick with panic. He held a large club in his hand, and the queen was hunched over behind him.
Cole pointed two fingers at his eyes. Watch me, he mouthed.
He pointed to the queen and then used his index finger to draw a heart on the glass. Then he held up a paper with a drawing on it. A wreath with two swords crossing in the middle.
He was describing the shape of the queen’s Surface heart, the one I’d seen when I’d faced her before. The one I’d seen when she fought the queen before her. I remembered how when I’d thought of Cole’s heart, it had come flying to me.
I was out of time and out of breath. I closed my eyes and pictured the queen’s heart.
Suddenly, I heard a tap on the glass. Her heart, a metal version of the wreath symbol, had landed flat against the glass. I focused even more on the heart, and tiny little fracture hairs broke out from the point where the heart made contact. And then came the sound of glass shattering.
Water poured out of the splintered glass box, and I poured out too, the queen’s heart in my hand. I’d been strong enough to conjure her actual heart and send it through the glass.
The queen lunged for me, but it was too late. I’d broken her Surface heart. She paused midstride, then fell to the ground in a slump. Her translucent skin became wrinkled before my eyes; her hair turned from bright blond to gray, then to white.
And then she turned to dust and blew away in a soft breeze I didn’t even realize was there.
Everything she had conjured—the glass box, the cage, everything—disappeared. And Jack, Cole, and I were left breathing hard through bits of dust that used to be the queen.
THIRTY-SIX
NOW
The Everneath. The vault.
The ground beneath my feet rumbled, causing me to lose my balance. I fell to the dirt as the rumbling turned into swaying. Jack pulled me up. “Run!”
The walls lurched back and forth. Granite-like boulders from the highest wall began to fall to the ground. The Everneath was deteriorating around us, and there was no place we would be safe.
Actually, there was one place.
“Go to the lake!” I screamed. The lake was where the Tunnels were hidden—maybe the Tunnels would be the only place we could find refuge. We ran along the wall until we found a hole large enough for us to squeeze through. I could see the lake up ahead.
“Are you sure?” Jack said.
I forgot he had no idea why we were about to jump into the lake.
“The lake is the entrance to the Tunnels!” I said.
He didn’t even hesitate. He just followed me and Cole.
I paused for a split second, remembering the last time I’d jumped into this same lake. I’d held Cole’s hand. We’d counted down together and jumped together.
Here we were again. Full circle. And for a split second I looked into Cole’s eyes. He stared back at me with the depth of that memory behind his eyes, and then I knew. I knew he was remembering that same moment. He was reliving it, just as I was.
His memory was back.
I didn’t have time to dwell on the revelation, or wonder if he was on our side anymore. Besides, the Everneath was in ruins. There was nothing really left to rule. We jumped into the lake just as the nearest wall of the High Court crumbled and fell to the ground.
“Dive,” I shouted to Jack as I braced myself for the impact of the water at the end of the long fall.
The impact didn’t hurt as much this time, probably because I hadn’t done a total belly flop. We swam to shore in the pitch-black and waited.
The rumbling went on forever, as if the ground had swallowed something it didn’t like, and its intestines were twisting and turning, trying to rid itself of the object.
Cole flicked on his lighter, illuminating the giant cavern sheltering the lake we’d just jumped into. Rocks and dirt fell to the ground all around us.
A particularly large jolt sent shock waves through the cavern. We heard a giant crack coming from above.
“Nik!” Cole shouted. He dived toward me and tackled me to the ground just as a boulder the size of my bedroom fell from the ceiling.
He’d landed on top of me. I breathed hard, knowing he’d just saved my life. Again. “Thank you.”
Jack ripped Cole off me. “We have to get out of here! It’s not safe.”
Cole grabbed our hands and zapped us back up to the High Court just as the last rumbles faded away.
At least it was supposed to be the High Court. But the entire thing was decimated. The flames of the inner ring of the labyrinth had been doused, leaving a circle of scarred ground behind. As far as I could see, everything had been flattened. There was no labyrinth left.
In the middle of what used to be the High Court stood a pole, with a single flag swaying in the wind. A green flag.
“It’s the same green as your eyes,” Jack said to me. He raised a hand to touch my cheek, but just before he made contact, his hand became blurry around the edges. I blinked, trying to clear away the film from my eyes, but it wasn’t a film. The blurrier his hand became, the more I could see through it.
I looked up at his face.
“Jack!” I said. His face was doing the same thing. I could see the landscape behind him through his translucent skin. I reached out for him, but I only touched air. I panicked, grasping and straining to make contact.
“It’s okay,” Cole said. “I expected that. There’s no energy left here to keep humans. He’ll be waiting for you back on the Surface.”
I released a breath of relief and then shook my head and looked around me.
“Where are the other Everlivings?” I said.
Cole frowned, somehow exhibiting a look of both extreme grief and extreme relief. “We destroyed their hearts. They’re probably back on the Surface by now.”
“Why is there anything left? Shouldn’t it all be gone?”
Cole came up beside me. “There are still two hearts left to destroy.” He pulled out his guitar pick and my compass. The one he had stolen that night from my bedroom. The one he swore he couldn’t find.
A flash of anger rose in my chest. “Where did you—”
“I always had it, Nik. Ever since we went back to look for it at my condo. I found it in a guitar case, and I took it, even though at the time I didn’t really understand what I was doing.”
“What about the compass that the queen had?”
“That was just another compass I’d found in the vault. Apparently compasses are common objects for hearts to be turned into.”
Cole had my heart. He’d had it the entire time. There had been no reason for me to come down and kill the queen, because she never held my compass. It was always in Cole’s possession.
“Why?” I said. “Why didn’t you tell me?” And then I realized why. My breathing became frantic. My earlier suspicions were right. Cole had regained his memory. “You lied to me. You wanted me to take over the throne. You wanted me to feel like I had to kill the queen.”
“No,” Cole said. Then the carefully crafted blank facade of his face cracked, and with a deep frown he revealed a rueful expresson. “But for a moment, after my full memory returned, I wondered what I really wanted.”
I crumpled to the ground. “Did I just do what you’ve wanted me to do all along?”
Cole sank to the ground beside me. “My memory started to return right after the Feast. After I saw the band get murdered before my eyes. I didn’t get my full memory back, though, until we’d broken into the vault of hearts. When the queen showed up, I grabbed the closest compass I could find. There were literally like twenty compasses to choose from.” He looked down. “I also remembered getting tortured by the queen. Remembered when she leaned over me with her hot poker; the token hanging around her neck fell out of her dress. I saw what her heart looked like.”
“Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
He looked up and gave me an impish grin. “Forgive me, Nik. For a weak moment I remembered what I used to want. And I wasn’t ready to give it up.” He reached toward my hand and closed my fingers around my compass. “But look. Now your heart is in your own hands. And you can do what you want.” He paused. “And just so you know your options, you’re in charge here now. The Everneath, the little part that’s left of the Everneath, will obey your every whim if you want this life. You are the queen.”
I looked all around at the rubble and the desolation. There wasn’t another Everliving in sight. There were no structures. No labyrinth. No High Court. But even if there had been . . .
“No,” I said. “I don’t want this.”
Cole nodded. “I know. Then are you ready to break your heart?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “You know, if I had known how this was all going to end . . .”
He frowned and closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them again, I would’ve sworn they were watering. He blinked and cleared the tears away. “Nik, think about it. You’ve always known how this was going to end.”
He touched my face lightly. I didn’t stop him.
It was just me, and Cole, and the tiny patch of land we were on, and each of our hearts in our hands.
He held his pick, ready to snap it in between his forefinger and thumb. I held my compass. It had a cover, like a pocket watch. I bent it backward at the hinges.