fingers glided through his and touched nothing, and she thought with a sickening fright that she was drifting away again. But he uttered a word, and she hung still.
Then their fingers met, and she had a body again, and she could feel, feel his hands cup her cheeks and his forehead press against hers. She felt it acutely when he grasped her shoulders and shook her, hard.
“Wake up,” he said. “You’re going to drown.”
She hauled herself out of the water onto hot sand.
She took a breath, and her throat burned as if she had drunk a gallon of peppercorn sauce. She whimpered and swallowed, and it felt like a fistful of rocks was trying to scrape its way down her esophagus. She curled into herself, rolled over, hauled herself to her feet, and attempted a step forward.
Something crunched under her foot. She lurched forward and tripped onto the ground. Dazed, she glanced around. Her ankle had wedged inside something. She wiggled her foot and lifted it up.
She dragged a skull out of the sand.
She had stepped inside a dead man’s jaw.
She shrieked and fell backward. Her vision pulsed black. Her eyes were open but they had shut down, refusing all sensory input. Bright flashes of light swam before her eyes. Her fingers scrabbled through the sand. It was full of hard little objects. She lifted them out and brought them to her eyes, squinting until her vision returned.
They weren’t pebbles.
Little bits of white stuck up in the sand everywhere she looked. Bones. Bones, everywhere.
She was kneeling in a massive graveyard.
She trembled so hard the sand beneath her vibrated. She doubled over onto her knees and gagged. Her stomach was so shrunken that with every dry heave, she felt as if she had been stabbed with a knife.
Get out of the target line. Was that Altan’s voice echoing in her head, or her own thoughts? The voice was harsh, commanding. She obeyed. You are visible against white sand. Take cover in the trees.
She dragged herself across the sand, heaving every time her fingers rolled over a skull. She shook with tearless sobs, too dehydrated to cry.
Go to the temple. You’ll find the way. All paths lead to the temple.
Paths? What paths? Whatever walkways had once existed had long ago been reclaimed by the island. She knelt there, staring stupidly at the foliage.
You’re not looking hard enough.
She crawled up and down the tree line on her hands and knees, trying to find any indication of something that might have been a trail. Her fingers found a flat rock, the size of her head, just visible under a veneer of grass. Then another. And another.
She hauled herself to her feet and stumbled along the path, holding the surrounding trees for support. The rocks were hard and jagged, and they cut her feet so that she left bloody footprints as she walked.
Her head swam; she had been so long without food or drink that she hardly remembered she had a body anymore. She saw, or imagined, grotesque animals, animals that should not exist. Birds with two heads. Rodents with many tails. Spiders with a thousand eyes.
She continued following the path until she felt as if she’d walked the length of the entire island. All paths lead to the temple, the ancestors had told her. But when she came to the clearing at the center, she found only ruins among the sand. She saw shattered rocks engraved in a calligraphy she could not read, a stone entrance that led nowhere.
The Federation must have torn down the temple twenty years ago. It must have been the first thing they did, after they had butchered the Speerlies. The Federation had to destroy the Speerlies’ place of worship. They had to remove their source of power, to ruin and smash it so completely so that no one on Speer could seek the Phoenix for help.
Rin ran through the ruins, searching for a door, some remnant of the holy area, but she found nothing. Nothing was there.
She sank to the ground, too numb to move. No. Not like this. Not after all she had been through. She had almost begun to cry when she felt the sand giving way under her hands. It was sliding. Falling somewhere.
She laughed suddenly. She laughed so hard that she gasped in pain. She fell over on her side and clutched her stomach, shrieking with relief.
The temple was underground.
She fashioned herself a torch from a stick of dry wood and held it before her