Chaos (Lanie Bross) - Lanie Bross Page 0,14

but light.

Miranda wasted no time.

She followed the poison to her freedom.

All night, Luc followed the Figments across a landscape of rock and red sand, fighting back exhaustion, shivering in his jacket now that the suns had gone down. It was pitch-black—there was no moon in the Land of the Two Suns—and he had to follow the Figments by their whispers as they instructed him to turn left, go forward, watch your step.

It wasn’t until dawn that the Figments stopped. They had stopped, seemingly, in the middle of a desert, with nothing but red sand for miles in any direction. Several dozen feet away Luc saw a small pool—a puddle really—of silvery water. At first he took it for a mirage, a shimmering trick of the suns. But as he approached, the liquid rose into the air, until he could see himself reflected in the surface like a huge mirror.

He looked to the Figments, but they remained where they were. This was it. He was on his own again. Before he could change his mind, Luc took a deep breath and stepped through the mirror.

Even though he had braced himself for it, the swirling winds and howling noise of the Crossroad knocked him off his feet, and he was falling, once again, into darkness.

Stay calm. He gripped the archer in his hand. He thought the name: Tess, Tess, Tess.

As abruptly as ever, the ground appeared. He landed on his feet, but the momentum of his fall propelled him forward, straight into a collapsed lamppost. He banged his shins against hard metal and tumbled to the broken pavement. His palms skidded across the ground, and he felt the bite of tiny pebbles in his skin.

“Shit.” Only after he spoke out loud did Luc realize how quiet it was. His voice echoed faintly. He picked himself up, wincing, wiping his palms on his jeans. The archer had fallen from his grip and lay sideways in the dirt.

For one dizzying second, he thought he’d somehow landed back in San Francisco after the earthquake. The blue sky, the wispy clouds, the high, round sun, and the lampposts and billboards—it looked like his world, but a world destroyed by some awful event. Piles of rubble, half-collapsed buildings, overturned cars coated with white dust—the destruction stretched as far as he could see.

The impression that he was back on Earth passed quickly. The streets were wrong, and the buildings, too.

And the people. There were no people. He felt it, as though the air itself were lonely.

“Hello?” Luc called out. Nothing. Just a light breeze that sent dust skittering across the street.

In front of him loomed a vast building with an ornately carved facade. Like everything else in this world, it was stained with age and seemed in danger of collapsing. The whole world felt abandoned. Why had the archer led him here?

Tess. She must be here somewhere.

Luc picked up the archer and tucked it back into his pocket. He climbed the splintered stone steps and pushed open a door hanging loosely on its hinges. Inside, it was very dark and smelled like mildew and old paper. He was in a long hallway; he kept his hands on the walls and felt plaster flake away beneath his fingers.

The darkness lessened as he made his way down the hallway, which ended abruptly in a vast room, at least four stories high and as long as a city block. Several crumbling stone staircases spiraled up the walls like ancient serpents, and behind the coiling staircases were hundreds and hundreds of shelves with thousands and thousands of books. No wonder he’d smelled paper. Luc had never seen so many books in one place before. Not even the San Francisco Public Library came close.

The place was abandoned. That was obvious. Portions of the ceiling had crumbled at some point, littering the floor with debris. Trees grew up from between long cracks in the floor, and the largest one, which stood in the middle of the room, stretched all the way to the open air. A weak stream of gray sunlight filtered into the room from the hole in the ceiling.

Then Luc noticed ornate, heavy-looking candelabra lining the walls, their tiny flames dancing and winking at him. Who had lit them? Who kept them burning?

Tess?

“Hello?” Luc called out.

This time, there was no echo, only a whispery sound, like pages of a book blowing in the breeze.

“Is anyone here?”

When no one answered, he moved cautiously around the room, peering into dark alcoves and stepping over