Beautiful Darkness (Caster Chronicles 2)

“Just checking.”

Great. Not only was I talking to a cat, but now I was talking about talking to a cat. “We should get going.”

Liv took a deep breath. “Yes, about that. I’m afraid we can’t.”

“Why not?”

Liv motioned me over to where all of Aunt Prue’s maps were laid out on the smooth dirt. “You see this mark here? That’s the nearest Doorwell. It took me a while, but I’ve figured out loads of things about this map. Your aunt wasn’t kidding. She must have spent years marking it up.”

“The Doorwells are marked?”

“Looks that way on the map. See these red D’s, with the little circles around them?” They were everywhere. “And these thin red lines? I believe they’re closer to the surface. There’s a pattern. It seems the darker the color gets, the deeper underground.”

I pointed to a grid of black lines. “You’re saying these would be the deepest.”

Liv nodded. “Possibly also the Darkest. The concept of Dark and Light territories within the Underground—it’s groundbreaking, really. Certainly not widely known.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“This.” She pointed to two words scribbled across the southernmost edge of the largest page. L O C A S I L E N T I A.

I remembered the second word. It sounded like the one Lena said when she laid the Cast to keep me from telling her family she was leaving Gatlin. “You’re saying the map is too quiet?”

Liv shook her head. “This is where the map falls silent, I’m afraid. Because we’re at the end. We’ve reached the southern shore, which means we’re off the map. Terra incognita.” She shrugged. “You know what they say. Hic dracones sunt.”

“Yeah, I hear that one a lot.” I had no idea what she was talking about.

“‘Here be dragons.’ It’s what sailors used to write on maps five hundred years ago, when the map ended but the ocean didn’t.”

“I’d rather face dragons than Sarafine.” I looked at the place where Liv was tapping her finger. The web of Tunnels we had come from was as complex as any highway system. “So what now?”

“I’m out of ideas. I’ve done nothing but stare at this map since your aunt gave it to us, and I still don’t know how to get to the Great Barrier. And I don’t even know if I believe it’s a real place.” We stared at the map together. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve let you down—everyone, really.”

I traced the outline of the coast with my finger until I came to Savannah, where the Arclight had stopped working. The red mark for the Savannah Doorwell lay just beneath the first L in L O C A S I L E N T I A. As I stared at the letters and the red marks around them, the missing pattern slowly surfaced. It reminded me of the Bermuda Triangle, some kind of void where everything magically disappeared. “Loca silentia doesn’t mean ‘where the map falls silent.’ ”

“It doesn’t?”

“I think it means something more like radio silence, for a Caster anyway. Think about it. When did the Arclight stop working the first time?”

Liv thought back. “Savannah. Right after we”—she looked at me, blushing—“found everything in the attic.”

“Exactly. Once we entered the territory marked Loca silentia, the Arclight stopped guiding us. I think we’ve been in a sort of supernatural no-fly zone, like the Bermuda Triangle, since we moved south of there.”

Liv looked slowly from the map to me, working it out in her mind. When she finally spoke, she couldn’t keep the excitement out of her voice. “The seam. We’re at the seam. That’s what the Great Barrier is.”

“The seam of what?”

“The place where two universes meet.” Liv looked at the dial on her wrist. “The Arclight could’ve been on some kind of magical overload this whole time.”

I thought about Aunt Prue showing up when she did—and where she did. “I bet Aunt Prue knew we needed the maps. We had just entered the Loca silentia when she gave them to us.”

“But the map stops, and the Great Barrier isn’t on it. So how is anyone supposed to find it?” Liv sighed.

“My mom could. She knew how to find it without the star.” I wished she were here right now, even a ghostly vision of her made from smoke and graveyard dirt and chicken bones.

“Did you read that in her papers?”

“No. It was something John said to Lena.” I didn’t want to think about it, even if the information was useful. “Where are we again, according to the map?”