Call and Tamara stayed dead silent as they passed by a room with its door slightly ajar, but Call couldn’t help peeking inside. For a moment, he thought he was looking at mannequins, some standing upright and others leaning against the walls, but then he realized two things — one, that their eyes were all closed, which would have been very strange for mannequins, and two, that their chests rose and fell as they breathed.
Call froze, terrified. What was he looking at? What were they?
Tamara turned and gave him a questioning look. He gestured toward the room and saw the look of horror cross her face as she followed his gesture. Her hand flew to her mouth. Then, slowly, she inched away from the door, signaling for Call to do the same.
“Chaos-ridden,” she whispered to him when they were far enough away that she’d stopped shaking.
Call wasn’t sure how she could tell without seeing their eyes, but decided he didn’t want to know badly enough to ask. He was already so freaked out that he felt as though any movement was going to make him jump out of his skin. The last thing he needed was more terrifying information.
If the Chaos-ridden were here, it meant this had to be some outpost of the Enemy. All those stories that Call had heard, the ones that had seemed to be about something that happened long ago, the ones he hadn’t worried about, now flooded his head.
The Enemy had taken Aaron. Because Aaron was a Makar. They’d been idiots to let him go outside the Magisterium alone. Of course the Enemy would have found out about him and would want him destroyed. He was probably going to kill Aaron, if he hadn’t already. Call’s mouth felt as dry as paper and he struggled to concentrate on their surroundings through his panic.
The corridor’s ceiling was getting higher as they made their way farther into the building. Along the walls, the blackened wood became regular wood paneling, with a strange wallpaper above it — a pattern of vines that, if he looked carefully at, Call swore he could see insects moving inside. Shuddering, he tried to ignore everything but being quiet as he kept going.
They passed several closed rooms before Havoc went up to a set of double doors and whined, then turned back to Call and Tamara expectantly.
“Shhh,” Call told him softly and the wolf quieted, pawing once at the floor.
The doors were huge, made of a dark, solid wood that bore a pattern of scorch marks, as if they had been licked by fire. Tamara put her hand on the knob, turned it, and peeked inside. Then she eased it closed and spun back to Call with wide eyes. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her look so stunned, even by the Chaos-ridden.
“Aaron,” she whispered, but she didn’t look elated like he would have expected, didn’t look happy at all. She looked like she was going to throw up.
Call pushed past her to look.
“Call —” Tamara hissed warningly. “Don’t — there’s someone else there.”
But Call was already leaning in, his eye pressed to the crack in the door.
The room on the other side was huge, soaring up to massive, broad rafters that crisscrossed the ceiling. The walls were lined with empty cages, stacked on top of one another like crates. Cages made of iron. Their narrow bars were stained with something dark.
From one of the rafters dangled Aaron. His uniform was torn and his face scratched and bloody, but he looked mostly unharmed. He was hanging upside down, a heavy chain attached to a manacle on one of his ankles, rising to a pulley bolted to the celing. He was struggling weakly, sending the chains swinging from side to side.
Standing just below Aaron was a boy — small, skinny, and familiar — looking up and grinning a nasty grin.
Call felt his stomach drop. It was Drew looking up at Aaron in his chains and grinning. He had a length of chain wrapped around one wrist. He was using it to lower Aaron toward a massive glass container filled with a roiling, roaring darkness. As Call stared at the darkness, it seemed to shift and change shape. An orange eye peered out from the shadows, shot through with pulsing green veins.
“You know what’s in the container, don’t you, Aaron?” said Drew, his features twisted up into a sadistic smile. “It’s a friend of yours. A chaos elemental. And it wants to suck you dry.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TAMARA, WHO HAD bent down beside Call, made a choked sound.
“Drew,” Aaron panted, in obvious pain. He reached out for the manacle around his ankle, then fell back as the chaos elemental lifted a shadowy tentacle. It took clearer form as the tentacle drew closer to Aaron, until it was almost solid, brushing his skin. He jerked and cried out in agony. “Drew, let me go —”
“What, you can’t get yourself free, Makar?” Drew sneered, jerking on the chain so that Aaron rose a few feet out of reach of the chaos elemental. “I thought you were supposed to be powerful. Special. But you’re not really special, are you? Not special at all.”
“I never said I was,” said Aaron in a choked voice.
“Do you know what it was like to have to pretend I was bad at magic? That I was a fool? To listen to Master Lemuel bemoan choosing me? I was better trained than all of you, but I couldn’t show it or Lemuel would have guessed who’d really trained me. I had to listen to the Masters tell their stupid version of history and pretend I agreed, even though I knew that if it hadn’t been for the mages and the Assembly, the Enemy would have given us the means to live forever. Do you know what it was like to learn that the Makar was some stupid kid from nowhere who would never do anything about his powers except what the mages told him to do?”
“So you’re going to kill me,” Aaron said. “Because of all that? Because I’m a Makar?”
Drew just laughed. Call turned away and saw that Tamara was shaking, her fingers wound tightly together. “We have to get in there,” he whispered to her. “We have to do something.”
She rose to her feet, her wristband glittering in the shadows. “The rafters. If we climb up there, we can haul Aaron out of the range of that thing.”
Panic flooded him. Because the plan was a good one, but when he imagined the climb and trying to balance his weight as he inched across the beam, he knew he couldn’t do it. He’d slip. He’d fall. During the whole painful journey through the forest with his legs stiff and aching, he’d told himself that he was going to help save Aaron. Now, when he was right in front of Aaron — Aaron in danger, Aaron needing saving — he was useless. The crush of despair was so awful that he considered not saying anything, just trying to climb and hoping for the best.
But remembering the fear on Celia’s face when she surfaced from the river, only to see Call lose control of the log and send it hurling toward her, decided him. If he made things worse by pretending he could help, he was only putting Aaron in more danger.
“I can’t,” Call said.
“What?” Tamara asked, then glanced at his leg and looked embarrassed. “Oh. Right. Well, just stay here with Havoc. I’ll be right back. It’s probably better with one person anyway. Sneakier.”
At least he’d managed to seem capable for a while, Call thought. At least Tamara thought of him as a person who could do things and was surprised when he couldn’t. It was cold comfort, but it was something.
Then, suddenly, Call realized what he could do. “I’ll distract him.”