The Starless Sea

He avoids the parts of the floor that are still diligently repairing themselves, keeping to the edge of the Heart, not looking back, not looking down, only looking ahead at the broken door that leads to the elevator.

Mirabel stands in the middle of the antechamber, shaking out her tangled hair, the pinks returning to more vibrant hues. She’s wiped most of the dust from her face and changed into the same fuzzy sweater she was wearing the first time Zachary met her dressed as herself.

“He blessed you, didn’t he?” she asks.

“Yes,” Zachary answers. He can still feel the buzzing against his skin.

“That should help,” Mirabel says. “We’re going to need all the help we can get.”

“What happened?” Zachary asks, looking around at the chaos. The glowing amber walls are cracked, some of them shattered completely. The elevator is smoking.

Mirabel looks down at the rubble and pushes something with the toe of her boot. The dice at her feet roll but do not settle. They fall into a crack in the floor and disappear.

“Allegra got desperate enough to try to close the door from the other side,” she explains. “Do you like this place, Ezra?”

“Yes,” Zachary answers, confused, but even as he says the word he realizes he does not mean this place now the way it is with its empty halls and broken universe. He means the place it was before, when it was alive. He means a crowded ballroom. A multitude of seekers looking for things they do not have names for and finding them in stories written and unwritten and in each other.

“Not as much as Allegra does,” Mirabel says. “My mother vanished from this place when I was five and after she disappeared Allegra raised me. She taught me to paint. She left when I was fourteen and commenced her attempts to seal all of this away. When I started painting doors hoping to let someone, anyone in again she tried to have me killed, many times, because she saw me as a danger.”

She pauses and Zachary doesn’t know what to say. His head is still reeling with too many stories and too many complicated feelings.

There is a moment here. A moment when Zachary could say that he’s sorry because he is, but the sentiment feels too small, or he could take her hand and say nothing and let the gesture speak for him but her hand is too far away.

So Zachary does nothing and then the moment is gone.

“We have to go now, we have things to do,” Mirabel says. “What is it your mom calls points like these? Moments with meaning? I met her once, she gave me coffee.”

“You what?” Zachary asks but Mirabel doesn’t answer, she walks to the elevator. The doors part for her. The elevator sits several inches below the floor and moves an inch lower as Mirabel steps into it.

“You did say you trusted me, Ezra,” she says, watching him hesitate.

“I did,” Zachary admits as he steps carefully into the elevator next to her, the floor unsteady beneath his feet, the sword heavy in his hand. The buzzing feeling has ceased. He feels oddly calm. He can handle being a sidekick for whatever comes next. “Where are we going, Max?” he asks.

“We’re going down,” Mirabel says. She takes a step back and then lifts her boot and kicks the side of the elevator, hard.

The elevator shakes and sinks a few more inches and then the calm drops out of Zachary’s stomach as they abruptly plummet downward.

DORIAN SINKS INTO a sea of honey, a slow-moving current pulling him downward. It is too thick to swim through, pulling at his clothes and weighing him down. Drowning him in sweetness.

This is not even in the top one hundred ways he expected to die. Not even close.

He cannot see the surface but he reaches out, stretching his fingers as far in the direction he believes is up as he can manage but he cannot feel if there is air around them, if he is anywhere near the surface.

What a stupid, poetic way to die, he thinks, and then someone grabs ahold of his hand.

He is pulled from the sea and over something that feels like a wall, and someone settles him onto a smooth, hard surface that does not feel steady.

Dorian tries to articulate his gratitude but he opens his mouth and chokes on sticky sweetness.

“Stay down,” a voice says near his ear, the words muffled and far away. He still can’t open his eyes but the owner of the voice pushes him down, his back against a wall. Every breath is a sugary gasp and the surface he is on is moving. The sounds beyond his clogged ears are irregular and screeching. Something hits his shoulder, grasping and clawlike. He covers his head with his arms but that makes it too difficult to breathe. He wipes at his face and removes some but not all of the honey and his breath loosens. There is something above him, hovering.

The surface he sits on tilts suddenly and he slips sideways. When it settles the screeching noise has subsided. Dorian coughs and someone puts a piece of cloth in his hand. He wipes his face with it, enough to open his eyes and start to put together what, exactly, he is looking at.

He is on a boat. A ship. No, a boat. A boat with aspirations of being a ship, with dozens of tiny lanterns strung along its multitude of dark sails. Maybe it is a proper ship. Someone is helping him remove his honey-soaked coat.

“They’re gone for now, but they’ll be back,” a voice says, clearer now. Dorian turns to get a better look at his rescuer as she shakes his star-buttoned coat over the rail of the ship, letting the drops of honey return to the sea.

Her hair is a complicated tangle of dark waves and braids tied back in a scrap of red silk. Her skin is light brown with a distinctive pattern of freckles over the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are dark and ringed with lines of black and shimmering gold that look more war paint than makeup. She wears strips of brown leather tied like a vest over what might once have been a sweater but it is now more a looping neckline and cuffs strung together by loose stitches and stray yarn, leaving most of her shoulders and the tops of her arms exposed, a large scar visible as it curves around her left tricep. Beneath the vest her skirt is voluminous and tied up in fluffy loops like a parachute, pale and almost colorless, a cloud over her dark boots.