Before I could say another word, the mine—that vast, barren tomb in which we had all forgotten we were buried alive—answered for me. A blast rocked the ground. Dust rained down. The world blurred.
And I clung—like the last time, like the first—to all his weight, to all his heat, to the miraculous unbroken circle of his arms on my waist.
Closed my eyes and fell.
24
HIM
I’d been nearly buried alive once before. Four years old, baby limbs twisted back against their range of motion and jammed in a locked wooden trunk half my size. Fingers raking off bloody shards of wood, screams buried in my throat, gasping for just one last chance to breathe. It lasted barely a minute, probably, but felt like hours.
And I was there again. In the darkness, in the void. Dying, helpless, breathless, voiceless in a tiny box.
Until, from beside me, a light.
When the box had popped open again and the sunlight came pouring in and the sparrows started chirping, when I was weeping and gulping air and giving thanks for the piece of shit life I’d been so generously given back, the first thing I glimpsed was Master Jhemp, two years older, eating a chocolate bar with his mouth open, crumbs gathering in the corners of his pale, doughy lips and tumbling down onto the lush, manicured lawn.
O jee, I was just kidding. What, did you really think you were gonna die? It’s true what Papa said. Slaves really arepathetic cowards. Wouldn’t last a day without us around telling you what to do.
But when the light came this time, it wasn’t Master Jhemp’s voice I heard.
“Are you okay?”
What?
“Remember when I asked you what a miracle was, Lou?” I murmured weakly. “Well now, finally, I know the answer.”
“What?” She coughed, her lungs rattling with a sickening hollowness.
“A miracle is having reached twenty years old, having made it out of every hellhole they ever tried to toss me in, and havingyouhere, askingthat. Here I am, a bloody, broken-limbed, mutilated slave slowly suffocating to death at the bottom of a mine, and I’mstillthe luckiest son of a bitch in the goddamn world.”
Her fingers curled lightly around my wrist, where they held on and didn’t let go.
As I spoke, I slowly realized I wasn’t suffocating. That Icouldbreathe. Weweren’tburied alive. There was still air and—though the electricity was out, the fluorescent glow gone—distantly, more light. We were still in the slave barracks, and the building was even still partially standing.
Forcing words out was painful, through gritted teeth, ignoring the hot streaks of pain, sharp and dull then sharp again, shooting through every nerve. Dust swirled as my lashes struggled to open under layers of toxic detritus. Head pounding, limbs once again twisted at bad angles under a stack of rock and plaster and metal and barbed wire. Sizable but not so large I couldn’t throw it off.
Good. Because for more than a few reasons, wereallyneeded to throw it off.
Louisa lay curled up under me, mostly in shadow, hair dressed in a thick coating of snowy, undoubtedly highly toxicdust. Her fingers seemed impossibly small and delicate, and now she turned to nuzzle me, one hand on the flashlight, the fingernails of the other digging further into my skin through the ragged fabric of my shirt. It killed me that I couldn’t really hold her. When we’d fallen—after she’d saved me, speaking of miracles—the only thing I could do was lightly drape my arms around her. Now I couldn’t even dothat. And God, she deserved so muchmorethan that. “You deserve to be out of this nightmare I sucked you into,” I murmured into her ear, “and to rest, to sleep. To be safe. And I’ll give you that if it kills me, which it very well might.”
It alreadywas.
“Lou.” Had she heard anything I’d just said?
She stirred and tried to raise herself up, but her wet cough interrupted the effort. The heat from her burning lungs seemed to radiate out at me.
My own chest tightened, the realization of the cause hitting me like yet another blow. No wonder I’d felt nauseated, dizzy, hallucinatory. And every second we stayed here, it would get worse.
And I needed to tell her. But I also had to get her out of here, so not yet. I didn’t know all of her anxiety triggers, but now wasnotthe time to start compiling a list.
I glanced up in a panic as another beam of light flickered over the rubble. Whose? A whistle sounded, the same one from just before the explosion, and beside me, Louisa stirred again, kicking weakly at a piece of rubble pinning down her leg.
Through a hole in the debris, I could make out Max scrambling toward us, furiously throwing aside everything in his path. About time. But he clearly couldn’t see us—in fact, he was already heading off in another direction.
I opened my mouth, but only a raspy croak emerged. I tried again, desperately. “Max.”
“Max!” Louisa’s voice was more robust.
