else depended. Before her drop he had said that he loved her, that he wanted to build a future with her. He brought that sense of calm with him, that sense of security that she had somehow thought was throttling her only to miss it from the moment they parted. How was he here? And why was her joy at his arrival tempered by shades of regret she could neither name nor explain. She answered his grin with a smile of her own. “Let’s go.”
“I didn’t come in this way, but it looks as safe as any.” Quell took the lead, spear levelled before him. “There are signs on the floor to show—”
“I know.”
He glanced back at her, flashing that smile she’d known all her life, white teeth pinked with blood from her punches. “Of course you do. Sorry.”
Within a hundred yards they reached a turning into the cavern that Yaz had seen from the corridor windows. Quell breathed a sigh of relief and stepped out, waving her to join him. The water from Quell and the starlight reaching down through the square holes above combined to squeeze a last turn of speed from her and she shuffled forward almost at a jog. She could smell the ice, scent her freedom from the long dry nightmare of the Missing’s city.
“Come on.” Quell bent low and hurried across the chamber toward the ramp of broken stone that would take them to the edge of the more distant hole.
Yaz followed, her mind crowding with the questions to be asked. How could Quell have possibly found her in such a maze of rooms? How did he even get below the ice?
The silence seemed larger in the vaulted space, their footsteps an intrusion. They passed beneath the larger, inaccessible hole, both of them bathed in starlight, and skirted the pit before approaching the slope. One last scramble and they would be free of this place.
When the hunter rose from the slope ahead of them, shouldering aside small boulders, debris streaming from its black carapace, Yaz stumbled to a halt, choking down a sob at the unfairness of it all. This one looked a lot smaller than the hunter that had left the city, but its armoured body was still as large as three men. It moved cautiously over the uneven gradient on half a dozen many-jointed legs. Something about it reminded Yaz of the crabs that Clan Zennik take from the Infrequent Sea, the serrated pincers on its two reaching arms perhaps. The thing glowed from within, red light escaping the chinks in its armour and illuminating the base of each leg where it joined the body. The crash of tumbling rocks and the clatter of metal on metal sounded shockingly loud after so long in the city’s endless peace.
Quell looked tiny standing between Yaz and the hunter, his bone spear clutched in both hands, but he stood there unflinching even so. Yaz moved to join him, empty-handed, she couldn’t run, not again, and not without Quell. She hoped the end would be quick.
Yaz had covered half the ground between her and Quell before something caught her foot and she went sprawling. She twisted to free herself and saw with horror another, far larger, hunter rising from the pit, a nightmare of waving arms reaching out over a behemoth’s body of black iron plates and other makeshift armour. A fierce red light lanced through every gap. A metal tentacle had snared her leg from her foot most of the way to her knee. The appendage was disturbingly reminiscent of the right arm that Erris had built himself, but dark and pitted with corruption.
“Get off me!” Yaz caught up a loose stone and hammered at the coils about her leg.
The hunter jerked her across the rock toward the pit it was still rising from. A scream tore its way from Yaz’s lungs as she slid toward the edge of the hole, where huge claws now gouged the stone, seeking purchase. She braced her feet against the nearest claws, determined not to go over without a fight. These hunters weren’t like the soldier that the city had sent chasing her through walls, firing its spikes. She had only glimpsed that one before it destroyed Erris but it was not like