Page 28 of Not Today, Satan
I don’t look at his offered wrist. If I see what I did to him, I’ll retch.
It’s not like I care about hurting a human. I’m just disgusted with myself. The fact that I can still hear his painful screams ringing in my ears means nothing.
He squeezes my shoulder. “Hey, it’s okay. I’m a little more charbroiled than I’m used to, but I’ll be fine.”
I lift my head so that my hood falls from my face and meet his eyes. There’s no resentment there. No fear. I almost turned him into barbeque, and he’s not afraid. I scrunch my brows together. He reallyisdamaged.
“Thanks,” I mutter, shuffling my foot against the gravel under us. I reach into my bag and produce the two knives I took off the souldier. “Here, you’ll need these.”
He squints at the blades. “I thought you said we can’t kill them?”
“We can’t. But they’ll slow down if we wound them.” He takes the knives and slides them into his belt before picking up the baton he’d spewed onto the ground when I broiled his skin.
We shuffle through the cave in silence.
I peek around my hood at him every so often. His face is pinched, like he’s lost in thought. A chill settles over me. It’s strange when the human who never shuts up doesn’t speak a word. It makes it impossible to read him.
“Damn,” Nathan Reynolds breathes when we finally step out the other end of the cave. “It’s huge.”
My heartbeat quickens. We’re higher than we were when we’d entered, the ascent so gradual I barely noticed.
Lapis sprawls out below us, all rocky ledges and bridges, each lot separated by granite peaks that stretch to the sky. Pools of black dot the walls like a painting—caves like the one we just traversed weaving in and out of the rock.
Long staircases lead into and around them. There’s no rhyme or reason to their pattern. They’re a puzzle meant to confuse anyone who attempts to leave. Just as mystifying are the peaks themselves. They don’t connect on every level. In order to reach some of them, we’ll need to travel down and back up again.
When Father designed this place, he made it challenging so no one would bother to break out. Of course, he’d never counted on me. I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge.
Below, the remaining lots in this city rest on high cliffs, connected to one another by wooden bridges. The tides are stronger here, water lashing the stone in white bursts. Torches of crimson flames pepper the land and sea, small bursts of light in a pit of darkness.
Even from this height, it’s impossible to see the end of the city. It stretches beyond the horizon, a sea of reds and grays.
“What all’s down there?” Nathan Reynolds steps closer to the ledge and peers below.
I stand beside him and follow his gaze, hugging my cloak around me. “Shadelings.”
“I heard Domino say that word back there,” he says. “What does it mean?”
“Sinners. Like you.” I point to a boat docking at one of the lots below. The souls pour out of the ship like water from a glass. They move as one, snaking over the bridge and into their lot. Although it’s impossible to make out their expressions from up here, defeat hunches their shoulders and curls their heads to their chests. Despair hangs in the air like thick clouds, and I turn from the scene so as not to choke on it. “They aren’t fully human anymore. They’ve been stripped down to their souls. They’re shades of what they used to be. So we call them shadelings.”
“I suppose it makes it easier to think of them as anything but people.”
His words pierce my spine, and shivers roll through me. I can’t read him at all, but he sees through me like a pane of glass. I pull my cloak tighter and start down an embankment.
“Exactly. Now, come on. We have to keep moving.”
I breathe easier the deeper we descend into Lapis. If we can maintain this pace, we may put enough distance between us and the souldiers that they won’t be able to catch us.
“How far do we have to go?” he asks after we’ve made it a few miles in blissful silence.
I sigh, circling around a boulder blocking my path. “It’s a long journey. Weeks, at least. Months, if you mean Earth time. Time moves differently down here.”
“I’ve noticed. Hanging off that wall felt like a thousand years.”
My back is to him so I can’t see his expression, but his voice is pinched with pain.
My memory flashes to finding him in chains in Lot Thirteen, bleeding from too many wounds to count. Even though his cuts are now faded pink scars etching his skin, an ache creeps up my throat when I think about him like that.
“They mess with time in the lots to make your punishment drag on,” I say. “I’d prefer to avoid the lots altogether for that and other reasons, but I’m not sure we’ll have a choice if we want to remain undetected.”
