Everbound: An Everneath Novel (12 page)

A faint smile touched his lips. “No more than hell is. But to get there we go …” He tilted his head toward the floor. “Ready?”

“Ready.”
I’m coming, Jack
.

The walls of his condo began to swirl right before my eyes; and just before everything went dark, Cole said, “The touchdown might be a little rougher than last time since we’re aiming for outside the Commons.”

I was in the washing machine again, but this time Cole’s hand kept me oriented.

It was a hard landing. I ended up facedown, and as I gasped for breath, I inhaled whatever it was I was lying in and immediately choked. I coughed into my hand and saw dust land there.

Cole was next to me, breathing hard. “You okay, Nik?”

I nodded. He helped me up to a sitting position, and I got my first look at our surroundings. My mouth dropped open.

We were on hard ground—covered in a light-brown dust—that seemed to stretch infinitely in all directions. The entire place had that too-white look, as if it were part of a filmstrip that had been overdeveloped. I turned in a complete circle, but the landscape never changed. The sky above shone blue, but again there was no source of light. No sun. The air even shimmered in the distance, as if heat were rising from the ground and distorting the image.

Max stood up and brushed himself off and then pulled a small metal object out of his pocket. He held it flat in his hand.

“So, it looks like Ouros is that way.” He pointed behind me, and I turned, squinting at the horizon. Now that I focused on that point, I could see a faint gray line, and I wondered if it could be the wall that surrounded the Common.

“Which means that Limneo is that way.” Maxwell pointed in the exact opposite direction.

“Limneo?” I said.

Max ignored me, but Cole answered. “Another Common. It’s the Greek word for
lake
.”

Max consulted the metal object in his hand again. “So we’re in between Ouros and Limneo. Which means that the void is out there.” He faced toward Limneo and pointed left. “And the High Court and the other three rings are that way.” He jerked his head to the right.

I searched the horizon. The only things I could make out were the faint gray lines in the directions of Ouros and Limneo. Could the Everneath be that big? So big that I couldn’t see the perimeter of the next ring?

I was about to ask Cole, but he spoke first. “We need Nikki’s tether so we know which way to go.” He was looking in the direction of the void as if he was planning on my tether pointing that way.

I’d forgotten all about the tether. I looked down at my chest, right where Cole said it was supposedly connected. “Should we be seeing it right now?” I said.

“We have to draw it out of you. Right now your energy will leak out at random times, probably when you least expect it, like your broken heart at the Ouros square. You have to learn to control it, focus on your connection with Jack. Once you do, it should take the form of a line to Jack. Maybe a rope, or an arrow.”

“How?”

He put his hands on my shoulders and urged me to sit on the ground. “Close your eyes.”

I obeyed.

“Now, share a memory about Jack.”

I opened my eyes as my heart sped up. “A memory?” My dangerous territory. If it was hard to talk about him to my dad or Jules, it would be nearly impossible to talk about him with Cole. “Um, see, I have this dam.…” My hands made a frantic circular motion in front of my chest, as if that should explain it all.

He raised an eyebrow. “A dam?”

“Yeah, it’s …” I didn’t want to say
around my heart
, because it sounded so stupid now that I was putting it into words. How could I explain that for so long I’d fortified the dam because it was the only way I’d known how to keep all the pieces of me together? But that didn’t matter. We were here for Jack. “Never mind.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “No, I want to hear about the dam.”

“Drop it.” I closed my eyes again. “What should I think about?”

“Well, we’re trying to reach your connection to him. So maybe you could tell me exactly what it is that draws you to him.”

His voice sounded strained, and I wondered how difficult this was for Cole. If his feelings for me were real, it couldn’t have been easy. But how genuine were those feelings? I still didn’t know.

But he was here with me, wasn’t he?

“His smile,” I said.

Cole was quiet for a moment. “Uh, we’re going to need a little bit more than that, Nik.”

I opened my eyes. “It’s been a while since I’ve talked about him.” I felt the dam in my chest bursting at the edges. I wasn’t sure I was ready to cut it loose.

“You have to. We need your tether.”

“But what if I don’t have one?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

I closed my eyes, forcing a fresh teardrop to roll down my cheek. I pictured Jack on my driveway, shooting hoops with Will. The image came easily; they’d done it so many times. “Jack could palm a basketball with one hand. His hands were dry and always covered in calluses.” I wiped at the tear on my face. “But when he held my hand, he was so gentle, as if I were extremely breakable.” I paused.

“Keep going, Nik. You’re getting it.”

The dam around my heart started to crack. “At my mom’s funeral, he didn’t really say anything, but he stayed by my side throughout the entire day. And I could feel him there. Even when I wasn’t facing him, I knew he was there. And when they lowered her casket into the ground …” I took in a shaky breath, and it was as if everything around me—Cole, Max, the Everneath—drowned out. “He held me up. Literally. He stopped me from climbing in with her. I know it sounds crazy, but I
was
crazy. I thought I would only ever be happy again if I were with her, and I didn’t understand why that wouldn’t work.”

The dam burst, and everything I’d been holding in, all my feelings about Jack that I’d been scared to remember, exploded out. Muffled sounds reached me, but I didn’t listen. I just kept talking faster and faster, the words pouring through the shattered barriers. “Jack put his arms around me and pulled me back from the hole, and we weren’t even together then. He picked me up, and my feet were no longer touching the ground, and I knew I was safe. He saw every side of me—the good and the bad—and he never went away. My dad pulled away, and my brother was too young to really understand what was going on; but Jack, he was my constant. He was my lodestar. He was my fixed point in space. And now …”

I felt my face crumble.

The muffled voices were yelling now, and someone was shaking me by the shoulders. I tried to swat whoever it was away, but then I remembered Cole. Max. The Everneath.

I opened my eyes, and their voices came back into focus. “Stop, Nik!” Cole was yelling.

“What? Didn’t it work?” I said.

Frowning, he gestured around him. “Take a look for yourself.”

On either side of us, shooting high into the sky, were red-rock walls. The path we were on webbed out into at least ten different directions, many disappearing behind sharp hairpin turns in the canyon walls. Several natural arches formed in the walls, especially near the top where a blue sky shone through.

I touched the rock wall next to me, its surface rough beneath my fingers. A sprinkle of red sand fell to the ground as I drew my hand across.

Something here was so familiar.

“What. The.
Hell
.” It was Max’s voice, and he sounded freaked. The sound echoed, reverberating between the two canyon walls.

Max and Cole turned in circles, open-mouthed.

Max spoke again. “What the hell, Cole? You said it was supposed to look like a rope. What the
hell is this
?” He turned his head and caught sight of red sand on the shoulder of his shirt, and he frantically brushed it off as if it were poisonous.

His frenetic actions caused Cole to whip around in the other direction, as if someone were about to ambush us.

I looked at the sand on my fingertips. It was red like the film on Max’s shoulder, and right then I knew. “It’s the Fiery Furnace.”

They just looked at me as if I’d said “It’s a puppy driving a tractor.”

“I mean, I know it can’t be real, but it looks like a place in Arches National Park called the Fiery Furnace. Look,” I said, pointing to the largest arch in the rock at the top of one of the walls. It was very distinctive, with a post down the middle making it look like two large eyes. “That’s Skull Arch.”

Cole stepped toward me and grabbed my arm. “You know this place?”

I nodded. “I hiked it once.”

“By yourself?”

“No. Nobody would ever hike the Fiery Furnace without a guide. It’s like a maze. Narrow sandstone canyons. Dead ends. I came with my school.” The memory was fresh in my mind, because I had just been looking at the framed picture from our trip there. It was the place where Jack brushed my hair from my eyes. I paused, watching Cole’s face grow tenser by the second. But I was having the opposite reaction. From the moment I let my feelings go, every part of me, including the inside of my head, felt lighter. “We had a guide. But why would the Fiery Furnace be here? We’re still in the Everneath, aren’t we?”

Cole pressed his lips together in a tight line and looked at Max. “This is coming from her.”

“From me?” I shook my head. “That’s impossible.”

“No. It’s entirely possible from someone who survived the Feed.”

Cole had always said that the fact that I hadn’t aged during the hundred-year Feed meant that I was different. Strong somehow. Strong enough to take down a queen, he had told me. But how was the ability to project an image like the Fiery Furnace any sort of unique gift?

Cole frowned. “We have a problem.”

“No shit,” Max said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“When I asked you to let your feelings for Jack loose, I wasn’t quite prepared for just how much you had stored up behind the floodgates. And it’s a problem, because this much energy will attract attention we don’t want.”

I was about to ask what sort of attention when I saw someone. Just a flash of brown hair as someone disappeared around a bend in the rock. But a flash was all I needed to know who it was.

Jack
. “Jack!” I screamed. It felt like forever since I’d seen him. “Jack!” I shouted again, sprinting in the direction he’d gone.

Faint voices called to me from behind, but I couldn’t understand what they were saying. It was as if there were cotton balls in my ears. As I ran, I glanced up at the sky to let the sun warm my face.

But there was no sun. Not anywhere.

I stopped running. My own shadow stretched before me, taller than me. The sun was coming from behind. But when I whipped around, it wasn’t there.

Why was I looking for the sun? There was something else I should look for first. Wasn’t there?

I put my head in my hands and rubbed my scalp, frantically trying to remember what I’d been running to but my head felt like a leaking balloon. Everything was slipping out.

Turning in hectic circles, I started to pant until I caught sight of a face. Big brown eyes. Floppy hair. Wide grin. I knew this face. It was Jack’s face.

“Jack!” I shouted, and took off running again. I stumbled around a sharp turn and scrambled up a large boulder that blocked the path, and when I reached the top, I saw him. Lying on the ground.

I sprang off the rock and landed next to his head. I knelt to the ground and put my hands on his cheeks. “Jack,” I said, my voice barely reaching my ears.

“Nik!” It was a voice from the top of a boulder. Not Jack’s.

“Shhhh!” I put up my hand, waving off whoever was there. “It’s Jack! I found him.”

“No, Nik. You didn’t.”

Was Cole blind? “What do you mean? He’s right here!”

“Look at yourself. You’re on the ground.”

“I’m on the ground because Jack’s on the ground,” I answered forcefully. Then I had to think about it. Jack was on the ground.

I grabbed on to Jack’s cheek and came up with a handful of red dirt.

“What the … ?” I relaxed my clenched fist, and dirt seeped through my fingers. I looked back at the ground, and there was Jack’s face still, only this time he was maybe twelve years old, and he was playing in a baseball game.

It was as if I were watching home videos of Jack projected onto the dirt.

“What is this?” I held out the clump of dirt to Cole. “What’s happening?”

Cole crouched down in front of me and closed his hands around mine.

Max appeared at the top of the boulder. “We’re so screwed.”

The Everneath. The Ring of Earth
.

C
ole put his hand under my chin and forced my gaze away from the images and movies of Jack that plastered every surface around us. “Nik, you’re in the Everneath. You’re projecting this scene onto the Everneath. It’s not real. I told you how your feelings—your memories, emotions—affect your surroundings here. You’re making this.”

I looked back down at the movie of Jack. Now he was smiling toward the camera, holding a stick with a marshmallow on the end of it. The marshmallow was on fire, and he blew on it. I hated burned marshmallows.

How could I be making this? I tried to sort out what was happening, but it was as if my brain wasn’t working at full power. I knew everything here was wrong—a different version of the Fiery Furnace, the moving pictures of Jack—but I couldn’t make it right inside my head.

“Can you see him too?” I asked.

Cole nodded. “Yes, but I shouldn’t be able to. You’ve got some strong memories. Usually the human projections look like … an aura, almost, around the person. I knew yours would be stronger because you survived the Feed, but I thought that meant you would project a more focused object, like a rope. You, however, are projecting an entire national park.”

Max kicked the dirt. “We should leave.”

“If we leave now and then come back, we’ll be in the same predicament,” Cole growled, but I could see he was just as frustrated.

“Why is it so dangerous?”

“Because there are Everlivings out here called Wanderers, and they are starving for energy, and they can sniff it out, and all of this”—he threw his arm around—“is basically a flashing neon sign that says
EAT AT JOE’S
.” His voice grew. “And unlike normal humans, your subconscious projection is tangible, and
concrete
, and also happens to resemble a
maze
!” He jumped up and pounded his fist into the rock wall with a frustrated grunt. His voice echoed, bouncing from wall to wall. It lasted longer than seemed possible, his anger reverberating all around us.