She pulled his arm more tightly around her, and they lay that way for a while, both drifting off toward sleep. When she was in that state between awake and unconscious, her mind floating freely, Catherine murmured, “I’ve always felt I was meant to be a traveler through our past as Seekers and into our future. I imagined I would find the Old Dread. Somehow I’d find him. I’d tell him what the Middle Dread did to that Young Dread centuries ago. I’d tell him the other things the Middle Dread has done and failed to do…And then…the Old would get rid of the Middle and he would make me a Dread. He would train me. I would be the new Young Dread. And the Young Dread would become the Middle—because I think she’s good. And we’d put things back the way they should be.”
It took some time for Archie to answer, “You want to become a strange creature that lives for hundreds of years and hands down justice?”
“They’re not strange creatures, Archie. They’re people. They don’t live for hundreds of years. They spend long stretches There, so they seem to live for hundreds of years. Their actual time awake in the world is just a normal lifetime’s worth, or close enough.”
“Hmm.”
“You are making fun of me.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, “but wouldn’t you rather just be Catherine?”
Catherine’s eyes were still closed. She could feel Archie breathing evenly. His brow was against the back of her head and his warm hand on her belly.
“Being the Young Dread was what I used to want,” she murmured. “But now I have you, and we’ll have our son. He’ll grow up in time, though, and someday, maybe a long time from now…what if we both trained with the Old Dread? What if we both became Dreads together? Maybe we could be with each other, travelers going forward through time, being just, being fair, helping. For centuries. What could be a better use of our lives…?”
She was falling asleep even as she spoke, as though the focal had taken all of her energy. She was already dreaming, seeing herself and Archie walking into that strange future together. Before she lost consciousness entirely, Archie whispered, “You’re such a romantic, Catherine. Most girls just want jewelry…”
Nott got his blindfold off by rubbing his face against the rock wall. He scraped his left cheek in the process, but that hardly warranted his notice. He was too busy staring furiously about his frozen surroundings and cursing his fellow Watchers.
They left me in my cave! Even saying the words in his head made his heart beat wildly with fear. It was what their master had always threatened them with—and many times he’d carried through on that threat. Nott knew this because sometimes their master woke a bunch of his Watchers at once and made them train together, and that didn’t always end well for the Watchers. Now it was Nott’s turn to be abandoned to die in his cave, the worst fate that could befall him.
It wasn’t a cave exactly (and he was not entirely certain why it was his cave); it was more like a tunnel through rock and ice. Most of the ice was overhead, so thick in places that it was as dark as earth, but in others it let light through, like a great, irregular sheet of glass. There was sunlight somewhere above that ice, but too far away to bring him any heat.
The floor of the cave was rock that had never been warm. It radiated waves of cold that penetrated his muscles and sank into his bones. He was relieved to see that his feet were not tied, but this probably also meant there was nowhere for him to go.
He looked up and down the tunnel. The weak light from the distant sky made it impossible to tell which direction was the way out. Wilkin and the others had brought him here blindfolded, and they’d dragged him along for quite a while. Eventually they’d turned him around and around, then shoved him against the wall and pelted him with pebbles as they ran off. The pebbles had ricocheted everywhere, creating echoes that obscured which way the other Watchers had gone.
Nott chose a direction at random and stumbled into motion, his hands still tied behind his back. His fingers were numb—they’d gone numb even before the others had left. He’d have to cut through the ropes on his wrists