The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,86
close my eyes, and clamber into the hole in the wall. It’s to the sound of Matias letting out a long, weary sigh that I let myself vanish into the darkness.
TWENTY
NORTH
As the panel closes behind us, we’re left in the dark. “I’m stopping,” I warn Nimh softly, just in case she keeps moving and accidentally comes into contact. “Can you make a light?”
She doesn’t reply, but a moment later a soft green glow appears, and when I look back there’s a light nestled in the palm of her hand. It illuminates her face, streaked with black and gray tear tracks where the kohl around her eyes has run, and the light casts long, thin shadows ahead of us. With her free hand Nimh reaches up for her crown, then freezes when she realizes she isn’t wearing it. Her eyes widen as they snap to meet mine.
“You left it back in the bathing chamber,” I murmur.
She swallows. “Inshara will find it.”
I ought to tell her it doesn’t matter, that if this cult leader wants to pretend she’s this land’s savior, it doesn’t change who Nimh is. But I know the importance of symbols—I know how I would feel if I saw the gleaming, platinum crown of my ancestors on anyone’s head but my grandfather’s.
Nimh clears her throat as if banishing her fear and grief, pushing her shoulders back. “We should go.”
We make our way along the dusty corridor, ignoring the passageways to the right and the left as Matias told us to. This place isn’t completely disused—the uneven pavers beneath our feet are clear of dust—but cobwebs hang across the hallway every so often.
We walk in silence, Nimh moving ahead of me. She’s got my jacket pulled tight around her shoulders, looking strangely ordinary despite the ethereal light. She could be any girl in Alciel, borrowing a boy’s jacket on a chilly evening. The tunnel curves sharply to the right, and I catch a glimpse of her profile.
Her eyes are partly hidden by the hair that falls around her face, but her expression looks as though she wouldn’t flinch if the roof fell down around her. I know this look—I saw it on my grandfather’s face, and my mothers’ faces, when my grandmother died. I’m pretty sure I wore it myself. It’s the look of someone who has crammed every part of their emotional response to a situation down into a tiny box and nailed the lid shut so they can carry out their duty.
The other thing that I remember, though, is that if you leave that box nailed shut for too long, it can become dangerously unstable.
I had Miri and Saelis to help me vent that pressure, to hold me when I cried for her, to listen while I talked about her. But Nimh only has me, and nobody can hold her when she weeps.
She lied to me about who she thinks I am, about the destiny she thinks brought me here. Perhaps she lied about believing there might be a way for me to get home. But she didn’t stab a guy in cold blood, so of my two choices, she’s the goddess I’m sticking with.
Nimh interrupts my thoughts. “This must be the way out.”
We’ve reached a T-intersection, a solid door straight ahead of us, a much larger, much wider hallway running away to our left and right. The ceiling is high, and it leaves me feeling uncomfortably exposed. The older part of the tunnels must have reached a section that’s more regularly used, because the walls are lined with lamps, their light dimmed, perhaps to save fuel during the night. Would I be able to see a threat before it was on us?
Nimh extinguishes her own light and grabs at the door’s handle. She yanks it, then stops short. She tries to turn it again, and again, then kicks it, wincing at the impact. “Gods,” she mutters. “Not now, not now.”
“Locked?” I ask quietly, and she nods, a quick, tight movement.
She drops to a crouch, pulling a small leather kit from her belt of tools and pouches. When she unrolls it, I recognize with a jolt of surprise: lock-picking tools. It was a hobby of Saelis’s for a little while, adopted to help me get down into one of the oldest sections of the engines beneath the city. Most things worth protecting are behind electronic locks at home, only accessible after a microneedle samples the user’s blood—but nobody ever bothered to install DNA locks in the old, dusty