I couldn't say how Behold Her found us, nor did I have time to reflect on it when she did. We’d been careful not to leave any traces near the exposed stairwell that served as our entrance to the underground, Shifting long before approaching it. She'd tracked us down anyway. And rather than raging and trying to dig us out as I thought she might, she instead tried to gas us like bunnies in a burrow.

  Herald and Instinct together woke me. My sister was shaking me best she could, and the jostling brought me to enough awareness to hear Instinct shouting, almost pleading, “Wake up, Ghost! Wake up or we all die!”

  Her tone more than her words tore me back to full alertness. “What’s happening?” I groaned as the pain along my side made itself known after an all too short reprieve.

  “The entrance! Look!”

  If I’d heard Instinct say that as a voice in my head, the way she said that, fearful and uncertain, would have been terrible on its own. Hearing it out loud, with Herald’s face matching the tone, made me sick with worry. And doing as she’d said and looking toward the entrance from which we’d come showed that they were both entirely justified.

  There was no light in that chamber. At midday a soft glow leaked in, barely enough to outline the portal, but at night the darkness was abyssal. Perfect, in other words, for our shadow sight. I couldn’t see any color like that, nor could Herald for that matter, but I didn’t need to. I saw shapes with predatory clarity, and what I saw at that entrance was a cloud, quickly spreading to fill the chamber. The chamber, which had only one way in or out that we could use.

  We were trapped.

  I’d only had a second to realize all this, barely long enough to whisper, “Behold Her!” when Herald said, “Down! We must go down!”

  My head snapped toward her. “Are you crazy! We’ll be trapped! And the magic—”

  “We’re already trapped!” she cried, looking at the mist with one of the most fear-stricken expressions I’d ever seen on her. “The chamber is not all that large, but the stairwell is deep, yes?”

  “It is, but… Herald, the magic there was so strong that I could feel it killing me! Eroding my goddamn soul! No!” I roared the last word, doing something I’d sworn, to her and to myself, that I’d avoid if at all possible. In a single syllable I commanded her to drop the idea, and to my shame the effect was instant.

  Herald shut down. From being afraid yet determined, she went to being afraid, lost, and expectant, looking to me for a solution. And the sight and the shame it woke in me broke my heart.

  Hate yourself later! Conscience snapped at me. You need a solution! Something to buy time at least. What about that tunnel toward the palace?

  A dead end! I replied.

  Maybe, but it has gates on this side, doesn’t it? Damn near air-tight. If you can close those—

  “Herald! Into the tunnel toward the palace!” I said, half herding, half shoving her in that direction. We were on the centerline of the chamber, between the entrance we’d used and the palace tunnel, and the mist was closing fast. As it came it enveloped the bodies still littering the floor, and while I couldn’t see what it did to them I could well imagine it. A soft pattering sound echoed around the chamber, filling it, as ancient textile and mummified skin and flesh withered to dust, leaving the bones to clatter to the stone.

  Herald obeyed instantly. Moving mechanically she rushed into the tunnel, putting distance between herself and the mist. I followed. I grabbed one of the two open halves of the gate and pushed it closed with desperate strength. Then I did the same to the other side, leaving only a foot or so open before Shifting and slipping through the crack. I grabbed the edge of the door with both hands from inside and heaved back as hard as I could, releasing my grip as soon as I felt the door move.

  The door’s momentum kept it swinging. Not enough. It stopped with an inch left, which was nowhere near enough to repeat the trick.

  “You need more run-up,” Herald said. She no longer sounded afraid; instead, her voice was flat, devoid of emotion.

  I barely noticed at that moment. I shoved the door open about two feet, then tried again, heaving until I was dangerously close to crushing my own fingers.

  This time the gate swung shut, the two halves sealing flush against each other.

  I breathed out. Now, only time would tell if I’d saved us, or if I’d just picked us a smaller tomb.

  Whether because the door gate was too tightly sealed, or because it never reached that deep into the chamber, Behold Her’s killing mist never reached us. If the former, I had no idea how much oxygen we might have; if the very air began killing us, we’d just have to push the gate open again and hope for the best. Maybe try getting through the mist Shifted, praying that it wouldn’t affect us. Maybe we’d be lucky. I doubted it, but maybe.

  Herald didn’t speak to me. She sat on the floor, her back against one wall and staring at the other. She didn’t talk about what to do now, or how Behold Her might have found us. She didn’t seek or offer any comfort. She just sat in silence, staring.

  I knew that she was punishing me in the only way available to her. If she could, she would have been furious with me for commanding her the way I had. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t feel anything outright negative toward me. And she was intelligent enough to know that, so she felt nothing toward me at all. She was cold and silent, and spoke only when spoken to.

  Like a good servant, her silence seemed to say.

  I lay on the floor, huddled as tightly as I could against the left wall so that my wounded right side wouldn’t press into the stone. I felt vaguely guilty about that. I deserved to hurt. I’d broken the most important promise I’d ever made, and even if it was for a good reason I’d still hurt Herald’s trust terribly.

  The silence stretched on, cold and uncomfortable, Herald refusing to speak and me unable to until the one person I never would have expected broke it.

  This isn’t what I meant when I said to hate yourself later, Conscience grumbled. Bloody ridiculous. Then she basically shouldered me aside, with me too surprised to even resist. And then, for the first time in months, Conscience spoke.

  “Herald, girl, listen,” she said, and the voice that came out was just… mine. The one I heard in my human memories. Barely any hiss at all, no smoke, just the voice I’d had all my adult human life. “Draka knows that she messed up with the way she talked to you, and she’s sorry, yeah?”

  The words and the tone were enough for Herald to finally look at me for the first time since she’d sat down, her eyebrows rising slightly as she listened.

  “Thing is, she thinks that she’s fucked up so bad that she can’t think of what to say to make it better,” Conscience continued. She spoke quickly, like she feared she might not get another chance if she stopped. “As if ‘I’m sorry’ wouldn’t be a damn good start. You know what she’s like. She’s feeling so fucking guilty about what she’s done to you in the first place; which, you know, fair enough. She should. But she genuinely wishes that she didn’t have any kind of power over you, yeah, and she hates herself for having used it to overrule your free will, even if it was to save your life. But here’s the other thing, yeah? I know that you know all this. And I know that you’d’ve already forgiven her if you weren’t so fucking stressed out about your family and your own little pets—and Jesus Christ, Herald, can you fucking cool it with enslaving people? Maybe think an extra time before killing people, too? Sorry, different subject. My point was, you know how she feels. And you know that you’ll forgive her soon enough. So can you, if you want to I mean, this is emphatically not an order, please just fucking tell her that you’re going to forgive her? Because right now she can’t imagine that you ever will, and it’s messing her up.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Then she withdrew. With immense relief she told me, God, one more second and I might’ve spewed. Everything about that body is just wrong! And the fucking pain! Then after a pause she added, Sorry, I know you’re pretty attached to it. And I know you have to deal with that pain all the time, so… yeah.

  Before I could answer her, Herald broke out of her surprised stupor. “Was that her? Conscience, I mean,” she asked.

  “Yeah, it was,” I replied quickly. Eagerly, almost, with how glad I was just to have her look at me and speak to me again.

  “I do not know that I have ever heard that voice before,” she said with a touch of wonder. “It was… human. I did not know you—your body, I mean—could speak like that.”

  “Me neither,” I admitted. “I don’t know how she did it.”

  In my mind, I got the sensation of a shrug, followed by an abashed, I just talked.

  “She is right, you know,” Herald said. Not conciliatory; she was still a bit cold, both in her voice and her eyes. But what she said was so much more important than how she said it. “I will forgive you. Soon, I would expect. Even if you had no power over me at all, I am sure that I would. But, sister, you frightened and frustrated me. I am supposed to advise you, to help you consider solutions. And I am not so arrogant as to assume that my idea was the best, but to silence me the way you did—by the fact that I can even speak of this in a critical way, you understand how important this is, yes?”

  “I do,” I admitted, hanging my head. “I was terrified for you. I didn’t have time to convince you just how sure I was that going down those stairs would kill you, literally scour the soul from your body. But that’s no excuse. I still shouldn’t have commanded you the way I did.”

  “You really should not. I might have had relevant arguments, and now I expect we will never know. I can hardly even think of the subject anymore! How can I help you if I cannot even consider all the alternatives?”

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered into the floor. “I never wanted to do that. I never want to do it again. And I promise that I’ll try not to, but it’s clear that I can’t promise that I won’t.”

  Herald sighed, and her voice warmed by a degree as she knelt before me and took my snout in her hands. “I know. And I know that if it happens again, you will feel as awful as you do now. And I will forgive you, because I know that you would only ever do it out of love. But, Draka. Dear sister. It hurts and confuses me when you do it, and it hurts further to see your anguish afterward. I beg you: try harder.”

  “I will,” I whispered, and now it was I who could barely look at her.

  “How long do we wait?”

  Herald looked forlornly at the closed gate before answering my question. “I do not know. Before, Behold Her’s mist cleared quite quickly. But that was outside, with the breeze coming off the sea. In here, who knows?”

  “We can’t stay in here forever, though. I honestly don’t know how long you can survive in here, and I’m not bloody well finding out.”

  “Three days without water. That is what I heard,” she said. “Surely the mist must dissipate before then?”

  “I’m more worried about air,” I replied. “I can’t feel any kind of draft from between the doors on either end. I don’t think there’s any air coming in at all.”

  Herald’s face scrunched up slightly. “I do not understand. There is air in here already.”

  “Sure, but the oxygen is going to run out, and it’s going to fill up with carbon dioxide.” I paused, considering the words that had just come out of my mouth. “Sorry, no Karakani words for those. Oxygen is the part of the air that you need to live, and carbon dioxide is what it gets turned into, which you breathe out. Sort of, anyway. Good air, bad air.”

  “The air can go bad just from me breathing it?” she asked, a trace of anxiety slipping into her voice.

  “Yeah. And with me here… I mean, I’m pretty big. I probably need loads more oxygen than you.”

  “Oh,” she said, her voice very small. “I suddenly feel a much greater urge to get out of here. Can we, um… can we try the gate?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said gently. She was starting to look really worried. “But you need to let me know if you start feeling sleepy, all right?”

  That was the wrong thing to say. Instead of reassuring her, Herald started using contractions, a clear sign that she was seriously on edge. “Why? Why do you need to know that? It’s the middle of the night! I woke up in the middle of the night, Draka! I’m sleepy already!”

  “All right! Nah, yeah, that makes sense,” I replied, trying to backpedal my request. This was clearly not the time. “Nothing important, anyway. Forget about it. I’m bigger anyway, so I’d feel it first, and I’m not sleepy at all.”

  I was pretty damned sure that wasn’t how oxygen starvation worked, but at that point I was willing to tell some little white lies if it helped calm her down. If anything, I was equally sure that getting agitated used more oxygen than just sitting calmly.

  Herald didn’t want to calm down. On the bright side she didn’t just panic uselessly. Instead she went to problem solving mode. “What about if we Shift?” she suggested, her words coming out quick and tight. “We don’t really have bodies then, do we? At least not you. I can touch things, but you can’t. Do we even breathe when we’re Shifted?”

  “I don’t actually know,” I admitted, thinking hard as I spoke. Was there something to that? I couldn’t smell anything. I’d made it through the sewers without being any worse for wear, and I couldn’t imagine there was much oxygen down there. “You know I don’t think that I do. Couldn’t say for you, though, but if I Shift, that should cut how much oxygen we’re using by… I don’t even know how much, but you can’t weigh more than a tenth of what I do. Probably less.”

  “Could we try that?” she asked with an anxious eagerness. “This place, it… it suddenly feels a lot smaller. Like it’s pressing in on me. I hate to ask, but could you—”

  I finished Shifting before she finished the sentence.

  She heaved a relieved sigh. “Thank you. Gods and Mercies, I’ve never been one to detest small spaces, but after what you told me… I would ask if it is true, but I am sure you would never tell me something like that unless you were certain.”

  I bobbed my shapeless head, knowing that she could see me. I really couldn’t say how large of a volume of air she needed per hour, nor did I know if I used any oxygen in my shadow form. What I did might have been absolutely pointless, either because we had so much oxygen that it wouldn’t be a problem before thirst did, or because it was already too late. But it calmed Herald, and that made it worth it.

  Herald settled down against the wall again. Soon she drifted off to a restless sleep, despite what I’d said about feeling sleepy. I didn’t wake her. I’d just keep an eye on her. I was pretty sure that you used less oxygen while asleep, anyway.

  While I did that I felt for Mak and Tammy. They were still where I’d left them, or near enough that I couldn’t tell any difference. No surprise there. Can you check on the others? I asked Conscience. I want to make sure Herald’s breathing doesn’t change.

  You know, I’m pretty sure I, we, whatever, covered this in one of the biology modules in year eleven. Damned if I can remember how much oxygen you need to live, though.

  Yeah, I know, I replied testily. If you knew, then I’d know. Now, please, can you check on them? Mak must be beside herself.

  Yeah, no worries. I’ll be right back. And for the record, I’m sure there’s plenty of air in this tunnel. She’ll be fine. You’ll both be.

  Thanks. I hope you’re right. Her attempt to reassure me was pretty damn transparent, saying that she was sure right after admitting that she had no idea, but I appreciated the effort.

  With that, the sense of her presence all but vanished. I wondered over her choice of words. You’ll both be. Not we all, but you both. As though she either didn’t think that herself and Instinct would be affected, or simply didn’t care.

  She’d told me outright that there were parts of her missing, which had presumably gone into me. According to her, she had no real ambition anymore, except when it came to keeping me honest and— perhaps not keeping me human, but keeping me from becoming a monster. Did that mean that she didn’t have any survival instinct of her own? Did she not care about her own future at all?

  Instinct did. What had she lost instead?

  My musings were interrupted by Conscience’s return. Mak is indeed beside herself, she reported. They’re getting ready to move, despite the time. They’ve found one of those broken magical gates, and it’s not the one connecting to this tunnel but they’re pretty sure they need to get through it to get to here. They were going to do that tomorrow, but I guess they’ll get to it now instead, with you so close and with what you’ve felt tonight. Hell, what you’re still feeling.

  It’s hard to be calm right now, I snapped, then immediately felt bad about it. Sorry. Thanks for checking.

  Yeah, no dramas, Ghostie. I know these past days have been hard on you. As long as it stays in your head, we’re good.

  and get 8 chapters early of both Draka and , as well as anything else I’m trying out.

  Join us if you want to chat with other readers, or just hang out!