bitten but of burning, searing, so that I groaned rather than screaming, and instinctively bodychecked it into the wall, hearing it squeal and pop, thin fluid running onto my shirt, into the bite wound, down my arm.
“Nicky!”
Her voice rose over the screaming. A perfect descant. Her mom’s church choir, when we were kids, the rows of grumbling kids in white skirts and black pants, everyone in white and black, a black bow at their throat, clipped on, not tied, so they wouldn’t have their air restricted, and John with the descants in the back row, you only needed three of them to be heard over the—
“Nick, goddammit! Please!”
I turned, barely able to hear over the roar in my shoulder, hit something at shin-height, and fell through a membrane of pink light, into the clean embrace of sand.
MY EARS WERE ringing. I slowly returned from half a blackout, the ringing receding, to see Johnny framed in rosy light, sobbing and dabbing at my arm with a shirt—one of hers, from her open bag on the floor. The flashlight lay next to it, lens cracked but still shining.
I fumbled for the shirt, trying to get her to stop. “...Ow…”
“Shush!”
“What are you crying for?” I said cautiously, pulling the t-shirt out of her hand and pressing it hard to the bite. I was sitting on spotless white sand, not like the sand outside. Like playground sand, the kind you could buy bags of in Home Depot. “Should I be crying too? Are we in the right place?”
“Yes...”
“The tomb? The king’s tomb?” I squinted, seeing dozens of tall, stone boxes, glittering in the flashlight’s circle. The statues encircling them were smooth black stone, ornamented with gold, their heads disappearing into a dome so high I couldn’t see the top of it. Beyond the light, the door closing back into stone, the frustrated growling and screaming so high it stung the ears. Then the stone closed completely and we were left in blessed silence. I wondered if she was crying simply out of relief. I knew how she felt.
“Hey,” I said. “John?”
“What?” she said, face still in her hands.
“If the world makes it, where do you want to go?” I said. “To visit, I mean. Not for work.”
A long pause, emphasized rather than broken by her muffled sobs. “...Petra,” she said. “I always wanted to go there. Touch the pink stones. And the Giant’s Causeway.”
“Where’s that?”
“Ireland. It’s these tall basalt columns all together, like—”
“Why do both of your places have to do with rocks?”
“Well where would you go then?” she said, drying her face on her t-shirt, leaving translucent smears of blood and tears and snot.
“New Zealand,” I said. “I want to meet a hobbit. Antarctica, so I can meet penguins, which are the hobbits of the bird world. And the Exclusion Zone.”
“Me too. Like it’s gonna be worse than here.”
“Yeah, at least you can wear badges that say when you’ve got too much radiation,” I said. “You should’ve invented a badge that showed when we were getting exposed to too much magic.”
“I will if we get back.”
“When,” I said. “Come on. Up.”
She walked off slowly, bag bumping at her side, flashlight held high. After a minute I got up and followed her, not wanting to be so close to the door. Who knew if those fuckers could open it again somehow? We were stuck in this dome, like a spider under a cup, skittering around, waiting to see daylight again. I swallowed hard. Best not to think about it.
There was no mistaking the king’s tomb—it towered above the others, wild with shards of gems and gilt, and the baked glass stuff that Johnny had told me was called faience, as colourful as a painting. We approached it reverently, churchlike, shining the light low rather than high. Ancient plants crumbled as they felt our breath, dried rather than rotten. The reddish dust of petals, the golden dust of pollen. Someone had laid flowers on the king’s tomb.
There. I had been expecting it for so long that when we finally found the first skeleton, I exhaled sharply in relief. The bones had crumbled so dramatically that it was more of an outline, though some of the bigger bones remained—pelvis, skull, part of a femur. Teeth scattered like pearls. All were surrounded in a soft, bluish-pink glow, showing the remnants of a dark blue gown, jewelry—earrings, necklace, bracelets—shining in the dimness. Even a few scraps of dark hair remained on the sand. It was sitting up, leaning