Page 22 of These Divided Shores
Milo lunged. Lu’s body threw her backward, a stunted cry ripping her throat raw—
The hallway blurred. She had eaten bits of Ben’s food but hadn’t drunk any of the water with the antidote for whatever magic was down here. She felt the effects of that magic now, a wistful wave that yanked her out of this prison—and into her family’s apartment at the castle.
White light from the sun over Lake Regolith highlighted the tears on her father’s cheeks.“I’m sorry—you didn’t need to find out—it shouldn’t have happened at all!”
Kari was in front of him, sobbing.“She trusted you! You destroyed everything—”
The prison’s hall descended around Lu. She teetered, but her parents weren’t here.
Milo was an arm’s length from her. Heat palpitated off him, the air thick with his body odor and acrid hair grease. He had been this close before, holding a knife to her skin as soldiers dosed her with Lazonade to immobilize her.
Lu’s strength unraveled. She fumbled, caught herself, ran.
“She trusted you!”Kari screamed.“You’ve been lying to us! You’ve destroyed everything, and now—and now—”
The memory, what was it? Lu couldn’t recall her parents arguing like this—
Milo stalked her; his lantern light wavered on the stones.Lu glanced back as she took a turn and smacked into a wall. Hadn’t she come this way? It was a dead end now.
She spun around. No,no. Milo had moved the walls, with levers and knobs hidden in the stones. He was corralling her wherever he wanted her to go.
Her resolve was gone. Her determination, obliterated.
Lu hammered her fists on the wall. She had feared this moment every day since the revolution’s end; she had lain in the darkness of her bedroom and imagined Milo in the shadows, and she had wept that not only would it happen again, but that she deserved it.
She had killed people. She had killed peoplefor Argrid. Tom had made her betray her own country.
Fingers coiled into Lu’s shoulder. A trilling echo rebounded as Milo yanked her away, her stone-warped screaming coming from a dream, from the past, from the moments she had bitten it down for fear of what it would do to her.
Elazar knew that hurting Gunnar would wear Ben into submission. He had tried, with Tom, to break Lu. But this. Milo. His arms around her as he dragged her up the hall—
Milo was her undoing.
6
THE PRISON TRANSPORTsailed through starkly different scenery than the mangrove trees and slimy darkness of Backswamp that Ben had seen from the deck of theAstuto. Now the jungle pressed against the river in walls of emerald vines and thick tree trunks, gold and teal macaws launching into the sky amid flurries of leaves. The water ran a brilliant, piercing blue that rivaled the sky. Each gust of a breeze brought fresh perfumes of greenery and salt.
When Elazar had moved Ben, Gunnar, and Lu from the ship to the Port Camden prison, he had done so at night, locking them in a covered wagon. Ben’s first true visit to Grace Loray would have awed him if he wasn’t looking at it from a cage.
The steamboat turned down a narrower river, and after chugging along to the squawks of distant birds and thegust of a strong wind, a village appeared.
The jungle wove through every part of the village, mating with it in dances of lacy moss and curtains, branches and wood. Buildings, the doors accessible by rope bridges, teetered on stilts where the river died in a mud pit. Two docks shot into the river.
The defensors tethered the prison transport between bobbing, dented steamboats. The only other activity was on the opposite dock, crowded with boats flying the Argridian flag. One boat lurched under defensors struggling to force manacled villagers belowdecks.
Ben’s heart heaved. What was Elazar doing?
The buildings and rope bridges surrounded a platform of wood planks on stilts. Stalls sat at the edges, framing people who stood shoulder to shoulder in silence. Argridian defensors guarded the bridges and balconies.
Ben swallowed hard as defensors forced him and Gunnar off the boat, trailing Lu’s father into the village. The thumping of their boots on the walkway echoed like thunder and drew the crowd’s curious eyes.
The silence grew more potent. Lungs sucked in gasps.
Ben and Gunnar were prodded into the square, their boots at the edge of the wooden platform. Defensors stood on either side of them, pistols held in silver threats, while Andreu disappeared into the crowd.
Jakes linked one hand around Ben’s forearm as though he might run. Gunnar was on Ben’s other side, and when heswayed in the oppressive heat of the island, Ben jerked out of Jakes’s hold to steady Gunnar with a hand on the small of his back.
“Careful,” Ben whispered. “Eye of the Sun warriors probably don’t fare well in water.”
