reach the end of the path, the high walls form a circle around a well. The girl in white hops up on the edge.
“Oh, hell no.” My first reaction is to take a step back. Really, truly, the bravest thing I’ve ever done. “Don’t you people have clean and sunny passageways? Something with palm trees and girls who don’t look like Jack Skellington? It’s the goddamn rabbit down the goddamn well.”
She looks down the well, then back up at us. Her white dress hangs on her bony shoulders like on a coat hanger. Her lips are blue. If this is how the oracle keeps her, then the oracle is not someone I’m dying to meet.
“Why won’t you speak?” I ask.
She taps her stick-skinny fingers on her throat. She gives me a smile that makes me cold all over before taking one step forward and vanishing down the black hole. I move to follow her. Kurt smacks a hand on my chest. “I’ll go first.”
“No, your part is done. Go back to the others.” When I say it, the path behind us shifts. The brick walls close in on themselves. When I look up, the sky is a dark speck at the end of a narrow tunnel. “Or not.”
For the first time since I’ve met him, Kurt seems unsure of himself. It’s in the way he presses against the walls closing in on us. “If this is a trick, I should go first.”
I wave my weapon in the air. “Hi, supernatural dagger here? We don’t know how deep this goes. How will you signal me? I’m the king’s champion. I should be the one to go first.”
He grumbles and tightens the leather strap around his waist. “And the king named me your guardian. Let me dive first. If only to preserve the customs you are so haphazardly breaking.”
I gesture at the well. “Lead me to my premature death.”
And he does.
Down the well.
The blackness swallows him in a second. I look up to the bit of sky above, the hovering clouds. I tap my forehead the way Kurt does, just in case. I take a step and let the mouth of the well swallow me whole.
•••
This one time, the team got the inspiration to go skinny-dipping on Valentine’s Day. It was freshman year and pretty much the coldest winter I can remember. Your nose would turn red and runny the second you stepped out into the street.
I wasn’t sure the guys would go for it. The cold doesn’t exactly do the most flattering thing to us, but I reminded them that the girls would want to huddle up when they got cold. They called me crazy but did it anyway. Before I jumped, I didn’t feel cold. Even standing on the pier in my boxers, peeling off my socks, I wasn’t shaking like the others. The shock of the dive took my breath away for a second. I think I even liked it because I lasted the longest and the guys were pissed at me for showing off.
They wouldn’t call me a show-off now.
Here in the well, the freezing water wraps around me even before I hit the water. I tense my body as narrowly as I can, just like passing through a tube at a water park, switching the slippery plastic for brick. I am colder than cold. Colder than getting locked in the school’s refrigerator as a prank. So cold my gills won’t open and I choke when I inhale.
When I shut my eyes, I see a woman’s face. The memory pushes its way so deep inside me that it feels real. She’s golden against the sun. I’m a child in her arms. She brushes my hair away from my face and stares with violet eyes. I can feel her warm breath, smell sea and lilacs, and even though I know this memory isn’t mine, it shakes the cold away. I can breathe and see again.
The rough brick passage is gone, replaced by thousands of soft and slick tiny tentacles. They tickle my face, grab at my hair. Their suction cups suck hard on my skin, leaving slimy white circles. I’m breathing hard.
Then the foreign memory of the woman is back. Not like the last vision. This one comes from a different mind. Her hair is pulled to the side and this time she’s under me. I love her. The kind of love that makes the heart clench like a fist, that makes you want to part seas, stay above