Page 13 of The Stone Survival
My feet hit the ground just as one of the tracker guardians emerges from a narrow aperture in the rock face.
“We found a network of tunnels,” he calls out.
I jog to catch up to him, then follow him into the dark space that is barely wide enough to accommodate me. A wave of claustrophobia washes over me and passes.
The air smells fresh, a sign that there is water nearby somewhere. We go deeper, our eyes adjusting to the gloom until the tunnel widens and opens into a chamber lit weakly by the glow sticks the two guardians waiting for us are holding up. There are three tunnels leading off from this chamber.
“This place is uncharted,” one of them says. “If we’re going to search it, then we need to take one route at a time and?—”
A figure emerges from the tunnel to our right, and my heart leaps into my mouth so that when I speak, my tone is hushed. “Levi…”
He stops and stares at us with a face smeared with dirt, then breaks out in a grin. “Thank fuck you found us.”
Sharniza and Curi slip into the room behind him, clothes caked with blood but alive. Adaline follows close behind with Derek looming at her back. If he’s here, then…Yes, Cameron is with him.
The vise holding my lungs hostage lets up. “You made it. You all?—”
I freeze as a sixth figure enters the room, my pulse stuttering at the sight of him.
Serath straightens his epic gargoyle form and meets my gaze. “It’s good to see you again, Orix.”
CHAPTER 7
CAMERON
“This is fucking ridiculous,” Curi snapped, raking a hand through his hair. He’d tugged off the band holding it captive, and it tumbled about his shoulders in angry waves. “How many times are we going to have to tell our story?”
“Until they believe us,” Levi said from his perch on the edge of one of two armchairs occupying our temporary holding room. “It’s a common tactic to separate us and interrogate us to look for holes in our story.”
“There won’t be any holes,” Sharniza said. “We all experienced the same shit.”
Yeah, we were aware that we were probably being listened to, if not watched. They’d put us in the same room for a reason. A whitewashed room with no windows, shitty tube lighting, and not enough seats so we were taking it in turns to park our asses.
Serath hadn’t said much since we’d been transported through a port to a nondescript building and into this room.
So far, we’d each been shuffled from here to a magnolia interview room and back again. Each time two goyles, whom none of us had met before, questioned us, while Orix sat in a corner and listened. I was pretty sure the mirror in that room was two-way glass. Certain that higher-ups were watching us.
Adaline had been the first to be taken off to be interviewed, and although she’d returned when they’d come to take Levi, she’d been cleared once Sharniza had been interviewed. They’d come for me next, and I’d told them our story in my words, about the graynite attack and about Romi being one of them. I’d explained how Serath had attacked me but how, in that moment, our bond had snapped into place and helped him fight the thing inside him. I’d recounted the arrival of more graynites hell-bent on attacking the first batch, and how it had allowed us to escape. They didn’t know about the faction. There was no way of telling them that without revealinghowwe’d found out about them.
Since then, we’d all been interviewed. Twice. All except Serath. They hadn’t spoken to him at all yet. And he, in turn, had barely spoken to us.
Outwardly calm but coiled like a spring, his tension communicated itself through our bond. He’d been through too much. He needed the ordeal to be over.
I covered Serath’s hand and squeezed. “You okay?”
He smiled tightly. “I’m fine. Just a little claustrophobic.”
Because he was trapped again. This was bullshit. I was done. I crossed the room and hammered on the door with my fist. “Hey! Hey, let us out!”
A smooth voice I recognized as Ulrickson’s filled the room. “You will sit down, Miss Basque. We’re not finished with our inquiries.”
His pompous-asshole tone provoked the anger raging through my veins. It flared lava-like before cooling to ice so that when I spoke, my tone was cold and clipped.
“Youmay not be done, butweare. We almost died fighting graynites that should have had no way of knowing where we were. If you want to question anyone, it should be yourselves. Who knew the location of the elite trial? Who had access?Hmmm? Or is this your attempt to buy yourself time to cover your tracks?” Silence, deep and stunned, greeted my accusation, and I couldn’t deny the flicker of satisfaction that gave me. “We’re done. Let us out so we can go home. Now.”
“Serath Halle still needs to be questioned,” another voice said, one I didn’t recognize.
“Fine, then question him. But you can do it here, with us all present. You’re not taking him out of our sight.”
