Page 102 of The Deadliest Candidate

Emmeline shook her head again. “I woke up as I hit the water, all I could do was try not to drown. They never came back, I’ve been alone. In the dark, alone, alone, without Teddy, because of what I did, a common life for a divine life, as below, so above. I tried to call for help, but nobody came. Until you. I thought Teddy would come, but it’syou.”

The words flowed from Emmeline’s mouth unchecked, making little sense to Fern, barely audible over the churning roar of the sewers. Fern took Emmeline’s hand and squeezed her fingers.

“Listen to me. We need to make our way back to Edmund, he’s looking for you. But to do that, we need to find a way out.”

Tears ran freely down Emmeline’s face. Her discoloured lips trembled. “There’s no way out. The walls are too slippery to climb, and there are no ladders. My alchemy is useless, all my powers, everything I earned, everything I bled for, Teddy’s blood, it’s all for nothing. We’re trapped.”

Fern looked around. Emmeline was right: there were no ladders, and the pit was deep. The pipes jutting out from the walls were too far apart from one another, making them impossible to climb. And the walls were too steep, slick with slippery lichen.

There would be no climbing out.

Fern turned her gaze downwards. The water gushing down from the pipes gathered in the pit, roiling and swirling, but the water level wasn’t moving up.

Fern’s mind scrambled through the incantations she knew, through all the reading she’d done recently. She rifled through the Elemency books she’d read and glanced down.

“What about the water? Elemency?”

“Even if we had enough power between us,” Emmeline said through chattering teeth, “what could we do? We can’t get rid of the water, or we’d die if we fell.”

“Maybe we could raise it?”

“We’d need to draw it from somewhere.”

Fern looked around at the pipes, gushing darkly. The water was coming from the sewer system, but it was being simultaneously drained, keeping the pool level. Fern looked down into the churning water.

“This is the sewer of Carthane,” she said, almost to herself. “The water must be goingsomewhere.”

“It is,” Emmeline said shakily.

She indicated one end of the pit, where the pitch-black water frothed murkily as it gathered into a whirlpool.

“There,” said Emmeline. Her voice was a rasp. “The end.”

Fern stared at the whirlpool of water, the speed at which it whirled in on itself. Her insides clenched with terror.

“Not the end,” she bit out. “The egress.”

Emmeline’s eyes widened. “How? It’s completely submerged. There’s no way out, no way out, no way back tohim. There’s only water.”

“Carthane is on the edge of the cliffs; the sewer system must lead out to sea.”

Emmeline let out an exhausted, terrified breath. “And if you’re wrong?”

Then it’ll be one final mistake to set into my crown of errors, thought Fern. But she answered, “What choice do we have?”

It was the truth. If they stayed here, they would die one way or another. Starvation, exhaustion, dehydration, hypothermia. One of those was bound to triumph. Nobody would come for them. Even if Sarlet and her Sentinels were looking, they would not know to search the undercroft, for candidates were not supposed to venture that deep.

Most likely, Emmeline and Fern would be left here until they got too tired to hold on to the pipe. They would slip into the water and drown. Emmeline first, then Fern.

Nobody was coming for them. Fern had come all on her own, without telling a soul. Fern, it would seem, might have made her final error after all. In a way, she had chosen this fate.

If she was to die, the blame would partly be hers.

She could see how frightened Emmeline was; Fern was frightened, too. A terrible, deathly fear that gripped her heart with claws of steel. But time was short—she must make a decision.

“I’m going to go,” she said. “If I—” She interrupted herself. “I’m going to make it, and I’m going to get Teddy, and we’re going to come back for you.”

Emmeline threw her arms around Fern, clutching her, her entire body racked with tremors.

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