Page 44 of Fractured
My eyes closed, I breathed deeply, and I recited the words in my mind again. “The breath she took after the last breath unraveled more than her own thread—that makes absolutely no sense. One doesn’t take more breaths after the last one. You don’t breathe when you’re fucking dead. You don’t?—”
A ringing in my ears just then, and it wasn’t even the lynx talking this time. It was my voice in my own head that demanded I stop.
“You don’t breathe when you’re dead. You don’t takeanotherbreath after the last.” I read the sentence again, twice, just to make sure I’d read it right. I had.
“No, you do not,” Vair said, and he was already by the table, looking up at me, waiting.
“What if…what if she was alive?” I wondered. “What if she…I don’t know,survived,like you said, but in the literal sense or something? Is that possible?”
“Her body was buried. All the land saw it,” said Vair.
“I saw a dead body once. It wasn’t real at all.” And the image of Lyall with that knife sticking out of his chest was right there in the center of my mind. “Iwas a dying bodyonce, to everyone watching.” Yet I had never died. I’d never bled. I’d never been stabbed through the heart by Rune.
“Illusion?” Vair said in wonder.
“Possible. The prophecy foresaw her death, but you said it yourself that she planned to survive it.”
“Yes—but I don’t remember how.”
I nodded, read the passage again. “It’s very clear here that she was still aliveaftershe took her last breath, however the fuck that works, but she was alive to breathe one more time. She was supposed to die, but maybe she didn’t.”
Silence in the room. Vair was as motionless as the table in front of me. I couldn’t bring myself to move at all for a good moment, either, my mind working, my eyes closed.
Then he said, “You cannot stop a prophecy. Ithasto be fulfilled. The prophecy foresaw her death.”
“But she didn’t die if she took another breathafterthe fact—that’s not how death works.”
“The prophecy?—”
“Yes, I know the prophecy said she had to die, but she didn’t, according to this.” That’s the only way I could understand it, the only way this passage made even a little bit of sense.
“It was her fate,” the lynx said, his voice—myvoice—breathless. “Thatwas her fate.”
“Yeah, well, according to this book, she didn’t give a damn about it.” I shook my head with a sigh. “If that was her fate, she must’ve… I don’t know,cheatedit somehow.”
Something inside me clicked—somethingcold.Something so familiar now that it scared me simply because I recognized it.
I looked up at the room, at the fire burningon those torches, the ceiling, the windows on the edges that still refused to show me whether it was day or night outside…
“Is that whyI’mhere then, Vair? Because the Ice Queen cheated her fate?”
My voice echoed a dozen times, like the room was saying the same thing back to me.
And with the last echo came a groan from the very walls, then a click.
Before my eyes, the doors on the walls across from me pushed themselves open.
thirteen
There was nobody there—andI wasn’t sure how I knew this. There was nobody there but the set of doors on the left of the room were open. They’d pushed themselves open halfway and revealed to me only darkness beyond, nothing else.
I’d stood up without realizing it. I’d stopped touching the book, and the English words had turned to those symbols again, but that was okay. I’d already memorized their message, and it seemed I’d learned what I needed to learn from it.
The Ice Queen might have cheated her fate, the fulfillment of the prophecy—and I’d found the first piece of whatever puzzle this place wanted me to solve.
I was free to leave the room.
Suddenly, it didn’t seem so impossible anymore. Suddenly, getting out of this palace and running back to the real world, to Rune, didn’t seem like a dream that was never going to come true. As I followed Vair toward the doors with my heart in my throat, Ibelievedthat I was going tomake it as if Rune himself was standing beside me and whispering the words in my ear.
