Chapter 6 - The Man Who Remembered

Daniel stepped toward the panel with the pistol held loosely at his side, and every footstep he took echoed in Emilia's ribs like a hammer on a bell.

She understood in that frozen moment that the man she had loved was not guessing. He had walked into this cellar knowing exactly which corner she would choose, because he had stood in it before, in a life she had never lived, and he was looking at the crooked wooden panel with the patience of someone who had already seen what lay behind it.

Kaelen released her mouth and shoved her gently deeper into the tunnel. He drew a knife from his boot and set his shoulders against the panel, and she heard him breathe out slowly, like a man preparing to pay a debt.

The blue panel burst alive in front of her eyes, brighter than it had ever been.

Warning. Rival regressor detected within forty meters. Regression count: unknown. Recommended action: flee.

Emilia swallowed hard, because the last word on that glowing screen was the one thing she could not do. If Daniel remembered the bridge, then he also remembered every secret she had ever whispered in the dark, every weakness she had trusted him with, and every habit that could be used to find her wherever she ran. Running would only make her predictable, and predictable people died.

She took Kaelen's sleeve and told him to wait, and her voice came out steadier than she expected.

Then she did something that made his eyes widen. She slid the tracker disk from her pocket, pressed her thumb to the tiny switch on its side, and flung it back through the crack in the panel with all her strength. It skittered across the cellar floor and rolled against the leg of the cot, blinking a faint green light in the lantern glow.

Daniel's head turned toward it, and for the briefest second his smile faltered.

Emilia did not wait to see what he would do. She seized Kaelen's coat and dragged him down the service tunnel at a run, her boots splashing through shallow puddles and her backpack banging against her spine. Behind them the panel burst open with a crash, and Daniel's voice rose above the siren, no longer soft and gentle but sharp with a frustration he had never allowed her to hear before.

You cannot outrun me, Em. I have lived this day nine times.

Nine, she thought, and the number struck her like a slap. Kaelen had lived seven, and Daniel had lived two more, which meant he had started earlier and perhaps learned more, and she could not afford to forget it for even one breath.

The tunnel twisted and sloped downward, and the air grew colder and damper with every step. The siren faded to a distant moan behind them, and the clicking of the Hollows grew louder, because the creatures had found the broken hatch and were pouring down the stairs into the cellar like water through a cracked dam. She heard a gunshot, then a scream, and then the rapid fire of rifles, and she knew that Daniel's guards were fighting the horde in the narrow stairwell.

The tunnel ended in a rusted iron grate that opened onto a vast stone chamber, a cistern the size of a cathedral that had once held the observatory's water supply. Black water filled the lower half of it, and a narrow ledge ran around the wall toward an arched exit on the far side. Kaelen kicked the grate open, and they scrambled onto the ledge with their shoulders pressed to the wet stone.

They were halfway across when the first shot rang out behind them.

The bullet struck the wall inches from Emilia's head, spraying her face with sharp fragments of rock. She dropped to her knees and spun around, and there at the tunnel mouth stood Daniel with his pistol raised in both hands and his jacket torn, his eyes burning with a cold and furious light that she had never seen in the man who once cried at the end of a movie.

He lowered the gun a single inch and called across the water, and his voice carried through the cistern like a bell.

He said she had always been the cleverest person he knew, and that it was a tragedy she had never learned to use her cleverness for anything but kindness. He said that the world after the sky turned red did not reward kindness, and that he had spent nine lives learning exactly what it did reward. He said that the stronghold commander had promised him a future, and that all he needed in return was the map in her head and the woman who could build a thousand more.

Emilia stood slowly and faced him across the black water. She felt Kaelen shift protectively behind her, but she lifted one hand to stop him, because there was a question burning in her throat that she needed answered more than she needed to live.

She asked Daniel if he had ever loved her at all.

For a long moment the cistern was silent except for the dripping of the ceiling and the distant clatter of gunfire. Daniel's face did something strange then, a flicker of confusion crossing it as though she had asked him a question in a language he had forgotten. He opened his mouth, and she saw him reach for the answer, and she saw with a terrible clarity that he could not find it.

Then another voice cut through the dark.

It came from behind him, soft and amused and utterly calm, and it belonged to a woman who stepped into the tunnel mouth with her rifle slung casually over her shoulder and her blond hair shining in the dim light. Joss laid her hand on Daniel's arm, and he flinched, which Emilia had never seen him do in all the years she had known him.

Joss smiled across the water at the friend she had once braided hair for, and she said that Daniel had never been the one making the plans.

Kaelen's breath caught beside Emilia, and in the chill of that vast stone chamber she heard him whisper a single stunned word that she would remember for the rest of her lives.

Nine lives, and I never once looked at her.

Joss lifted her rifle and settled the barrel against Daniel's temple with the gentle care of a mother adjusting a child's collar, and the siren on Marlow

e Hill abruptly fell silent.