Page 37 of Godslayer
By which she means, dead. “Yeah. But there’s a line, ya know? A line so bright you cannot miss it.” These words coming out of my mouth were plucked straight from the Extraction Master’s speech during extraction. “A line so bright you should not cross it. And if ever there was a line so bright that should not be crossed it’s the one where sacrificing a young woman for her spark is on the other side.”
Jasina sighs again. Her eyes slowly migrate back over to the bookcase in question. “OK. Let’s go.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I wanna see it too. I wanna see inside the tower. We can’t get in from the outside. The secret passage is the only way.”
“We can’t set the self-destruct either. Not unless we wanna hang around here for twenty-one days. That’s when it says it’ll be done. “
“Done,” she says, echoing my last word. “What’s that mean, exactly?”
I shrug. “I guess those workers are fixing things downstairs? Making it habitable again?”
Of course, I leave out the one thing we’re really thinking about. The only thing that matters. The people. I don’t think there’s gonna be a ‘Clara’ on the ninth floor of the Maiden Tower. But I need to see it for myself before we leave here because there is no reason for a city to exist without people.
Where are they? What happened to them? And if they’re truly all gone, where will they get more?
Jasina looks at the bookcase, her gaze lingering on it a moment too long before looking back at me. She sighs heavily. “OK. We agree then? We should go look?”
I hate this mood, this vibe in the room. It’s a mixture of creeping hopelessness and a sense of foreboding. She looks wasted. Like she could sleep for weeks and still need more. I don’t like it. I want to stop everything and let her rest. So I smile, trying to boost her up and keep her going. “Unless…”
Her brow crinkles up. “Unless what?”
I waggle my eyebrows at her. Kinda motioning to the couch. “We can take a little break and have a little fun. We know that couch, right?”
She spits air so hard little pieces of hair fly up around her face. “Only you, Finn Scott, could be thinking of sex at a time like this.”
I shrug up one shoulder, still grinning like an idiot. “Just one of my many talents.”
“Sorry, but I’m gonna have to say pass on the danger sex.”
“Damn,” I mutter. Chuckling at the same time. Which makes her smile. And that was the whole point of the offer. While I would not turn down sex—like probably ever. At least with her. I’m not really serious. I just want to see her smile.
Because we both feel it.
Something is happening, and we have no idea what it is, or what it means, or where it’s gonna take us—but wefeelit. We’re on a path here, and at this point, I don’t think veering onto the road less taken would even matter. We’ve set something in motion with this tower blowing stuff.
Whatever story this is, we’re part of it.
Jasina steels herself. Squaring her shoulders and tipping her chin up. Then she walks over to the door. I meet her there and we lock eyes for a moment.
She doesn’t say anything so I point to my back. “Wanna ride?”
“No,” she laughs. “Going down is easy. But… thanks for the offer.”
“It’s a standing one,” I say. “You know that, right?”
“Sure.” Then she pulls the bookcase open and walks into the darkness.
I follow her, letting the door close behind me with a quiet hiss of air. Then we look down. Because there is a lot of activity at the bottom of these stairs.
All workers. Dozens of them. They all seem to have a job to do, but it’s hard to make out what that might be, from this distance of nearly fifteen floors up.
“This is not normal,” Jasina opines.
“Maybe not. But we can’t be sure, Jasina. This is what? Our fifth tower after Tau City? There could be hundreds of theseplaces and dozens of them could look just like this. We’d never know it.”
She side-eyes me. “Nice try. But that’s not how it feels.”
