* * *

THE PAIR OF them moved on with greater caution, every shadowed tunnel and dim-lit chamber seeming full of threat now. A spear could come winging out of the darkness at any moment. Yaz tried not to imagine Quell transfixed as Jerrig had been but the image kept returning.

Chamber after silent chamber wore at Yaz’s alertness. When the ice groaned and creaked she would start and turn, nerves jangling. They picked paths through more groves of fungi, including some where Yaz remembered harvesters had been at work.

In two places they smelled smoke, which was odd as Yaz had seen no fire at all since coming beneath the ice.

“Where is everyone?” The whisper escaped her. It must have been one of the Tainted who killed Jerrig. Had they mounted an attack and driven the Broken back to some defensive line?

Quell opened his mouth to reply but a distant scream preempted him. He exchanged glances with Yaz and led off in the direction of the cry. Sound carried strangely in the chambers and tunnels beneath the ice and the scream was not repeated. Soon Yaz found herself lost, or more lost than she had been before.

“Did you see the black ice?” she asked. “When you were searching for me.” On the return from the city Yaz had found a route that avoided the taint Arka had led them through, but she wondered now if the blackness might be spreading elsewhere, fingering into the Broken’s territory like frost reaching across still water, drawing the Tainted with it, perhaps Hetta with them, the heads of Yaz’s friends swinging from her belt, their blood on her sharpened teeth.

“I saw black ice, grey ice, red, green, all the shades of the icebow. But I couldn’t go in. There is no light in those places.”

Yaz blinked but didn’t question the truth of the statement. The taint didn’t spread where there were stars, so beyond the fringes there would be no light to see it by. “We should go back. I can find the way to the settlement from where we found Jerrig.”

Quell shook his head. “I know how to reach your friends from here. I spent a lot of days scouting this place, looking for you.” He led on.

Yaz followed, her brow furrowed. Days? It was easy to lose track of time so far from the sun . . . but days? Unconsciously her fingers returned to the needle at her collar, physical proof of what she would otherwise consider a fever dream. Had Elias and Seus stolen days from her while they fought their secret battle?

* * *

“WHAT HAPPENED HERE?” The chamber before them lay strewn with broken ice, much of it glowing with stardust.

Yaz looked up at the ceiling, no longer smooth but pitted and cratered, crisscrossed with ridges hanging like shattered teeth. “Ice-work.”

Quell led the way around the edge of the cavern, the dimness and soft glow confusing to the eye. Frost hung in the still air. This wasn’t mining. There had been fighting here. An ice-worker had brought the ceiling down. Maybe Tarko had done it, or Thurin, or others among the Broken.

Yaz placed her feet as carefully as she could but still the broken ice announced her, crunch, crunch, crunch. Everything else remained silent. The glaciers held their tongue. No screams. Just Yaz and Quell, their slow advance betrayed with each step.

“Wait . . .”

Quell stopped and turned his head slowly to look back at her, a question in his eyes.

Yaz held herself motionless, listening hard. She was sure she had heard something, an echo almost, like the soft crunch of a footstep that was not her own and not Quell’s. She reached out with her mind to the tiny stars in the ice heaped all around her, its glow so faint it lit her to the knee and no further. Quell they lit only to the ankles.

Though they were like dust, each star was a perfect sphere and sang its own song, dipping only now and then into the register in which her brain could detect it. Their heartbeats were a faint whining. Yaz spoke to them and with one voice they answered, their glow elevating to a fiercer light that lit the chamber, throwing strange diffuse shadows in all directions.

In one spot the shadows held on, a mist of darkness shifting reluctantly before the light that should have dispelled them. Quell turned and in the same motion drew back his spear arm for the throw.

“No!” A voice from the thinning shadow.

Yaz threw herself to the side and brought Quell down into the crushed ice, throwing glowing crystals into the air. Both of them rose together, spitting the stuff from their lips.

A small figure stood where Quell would have thrown his spear. Darkness still clung to her but was streaming away as they watched. “Yaz! Where have you been?”

And in the next moment as Yaz got to her feet little Maya rushed to hug her, the last of the shadows trailing from her long brown hair.

19

   YAZ LET THE girl hug her until the questions each had for the other forced some space between them.

“Where have you been?” Maya got in before Yaz.

“In the city. I . . . fell . . . I had to come back up before I could escape. It took hours.”

“Hours?” Maya tilted her head and studied Yaz’s face. “You’ve been gone three days.”

Yaz turned to look at Quell. He shrugged. “I would have said a week, but I lost count of time. I ran out of food. I ended up eating those . . . things . . . off the ground.” He made a disgusted face.

“How—” But Erris had said something about time running differently in the void. “What’s happening? We found Jerrig dead. Are the Tainted attacking?”

“Jerrig?” Maya’s face crumpled. She looked down to hide her tears. “He was only good.”

“Who did it?” Yaz asked. “Maya, we need to know!”

Maya looked up, her eyes drawn to Quell as if noticing him for the first time. “Who’s he?”

“That’s Quell. He’s a friend.” Yaz waved Maya’s attention back to her. “What is go—”

“How is it doing that?” Maya’s mouth stayed open, her eyes tracking the dim blue glow of the eyeball-sized star as it continued its slow upward spiral around Yaz’s shoulders.

“It just does. They do that.” Yaz snatched the star from the air and tucked it into a pocket. “What is going on?”

“It’s Pome,” Maya said. “He’s killed Tarko and he’s trying to take over.”

Yaz tried to say something but found her mouth too dry. Eular had said she was like the stone he’d told her to drop into the pool. One touch and the whole body of water had begun to freeze before her eyes, ice spreading out in all directions from the point of contact. An agent of change. The blind man had called her that. She had dropped into the Broken’s world and now everything was changing around her whether she wanted it to or not. “Is Thurin safe? Are the others safe?”