Thaddeus saw Rémy scoop Dita into her arms. Between them, the worshippers of the Sapphire Cutlass were separating, scattering in their confusion and fear.
“Rémy,” he shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth to make himself heard over the din.
At the sound of his voice she looked up, their eyes meeting across the distance. A smile bloomed on Rémy’s face, blotting out the exhaustion that had shadowed it a moment before. They ran toward each other, ignored by the last straggling cult members that had not converged on the throne.
Rémy staggered under Dita’s weight as she reached him.
“Let me take her,” Thaddeus shouted, hefting Dita from Rémy’s arms.
“What’s happening?” she shouted back. “What’s Upala doing?”
“She has an opal,” Thaddeus told her. “She’s our last chance to stop Aruna’s transformation.”
They struggled back up the slope as Kai made his way toward them, limping badly. The fight had worsened his injury and now blood was seeping down his leg, drops of it rolling in the dust of the cavern floor as he moved. He didn’t seem to notice — his gaze was fixed on the fight below. Upala was still locked against the Sapphire Cutlass, her grip refusing to waver even as Sahoj attempted to pry her away with his bare hands and the cult members swarmed her like ants. Blue sparks were exploding in the air above the two women, fizzing and spinning as they arced away from where Upala’s brave hand ground the opal against the goddess’s sapphire skull.
The ground began to shake. For a second Thaddeus thought it was just the chaos around him, the weight of a thousand pairs of frantic feet pounding on the cavern’s floor. But then came another tremor, then another and another, each greater than the last.
“An earthquake,” Desai shouted. “It is the power being released from their struggle.”
The tremors increased. A tearing sound ripped through the cavern. Below them on the cave floor a split appeared, zigzagging through the rock, a black void opening into the ground. One by one the burning torches fizzled and spat their last, until the only light left spun from the blue trails of electricity thrown from the Sapphire Cutlass.
“We have to go,” said a voice. “This place is tearing itself apart!”
It was the raja. The jeweled man looked disheveled. He was breathing hard and his tunic had been slashed by the blade of a sword. Blood ran down his arm from a cut across his bicep. Behind him, his men were fleeing into the darkness, swallowed up by the mouth of the tunnel they had driven Thaddeus and his friends through earlier.
Another rumble of cracking rock and a split appeared in the cavern’s ceiling, sending chunks of stone plummeting down into the cavern.
“I’m not leaving without Upala!” Kai shouted over the din. “Go. Go on, all of you. Run. But I’m not leaving her.”
Rémy grabbed his arm, turning him to face her. “She wants you to leave,” she told him, voice shaking with the vibration of the earthquake. “Upala knew you would want to stay. She wanted me to tell you — she doesn’t want you to.”
Kai frowned. “I can’t just leave her. Not now. Not here — not like this.”
“She wants you to live, Kai. She’s doing this so you can live. We can’t save her. You know that. But if you live — so will she. In here. Yes?” Rémy moved one hand to place it on Kai’s chest, right over his heart.
Kai wrenched himself away as the others fled for the archway. Rémy waved Thaddeus off as he tried to pull her away.
“I will follow,” she said. “I promise. Get Dita out of here.”
“We’ve gotta go, Mr. Rec,” J yelled. “We’ve got to go now!”
Thaddeus turned and ran, cradling Dita against his chest as chunks of gray rock rained down on them. When he reached the archway, Thaddeus chanced a look back. To his relief, Rémy and Kai were following.
* * *
They staggered along the corridor, straggled out in a wide line behind the raja and Desai, Thaddeus carrying Dita with J by his side, and Rémy with her arm around the hobbling Kai. They made their way through the mountain, shuddering along with the stone itself as the earthquake went on around them. They passed room after room of antiquities that were being shaken like dust from their places.
“I tell you,” said Kai, breathless, “if I had known this place was here, they would have lost all of these years ago. What a waste.”
Rémy tugged him onward. “Don’t even think about it.”
Kai stumbled as a tremor shuddered the ground beneath their feet. He braced himself against the wall, casting a grim look at Rémy.
“Think about what?” he asked. “The fact that there’s no way we’re going to get out of here alive?”
“Don’t say that,” Rémy ordered him, forcing him onward.
“I should have stayed with her,” Kai said, his dark eyes angry, though Rémy sensed the rage was mostly aimed at himself. “We’re going to die in here anyway. I should have died with her.”
“We are not going to die,” Rémy hissed, her own anger surging as she struggled to keep them both moving forward. “And Upala wouldn’t thank you for staying.”
Kai gave a bark of laughter. “She rarely thanks anyone for anything. She doesn’t have much to be thankful for.”
“She has you,” Rémy observed.
Kai said nothing to that. Rémy twisted her aching neck to glance at him. The look on her brother’s face was closed. There was something excessively sad about it.
He loves her, Rémy thought to herself. I wonder if he ever told her so?
Kai looked up and met her eye. He opened his mouth to say something, but whatever the words were, they were lost in the catastrophic rumble of another huge tremor. The force was enough to jolt them apart — Rémy lost her grip on Kai’s arm and fell back against the rough rock wall of the corridor hard enough to knock the back of her head against the stone. She slipped to the floor, jarring her tailbone as she blinked, trying to clear the sudden blur in her vision. Kai ended up on his knees, his sharp cry echoing along the passageway as the impact tore at his already-injured leg. Blood spattered from the wound and Rémy saw him clamp one hand over it in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
Another huge tremor immediately followed, shaking Rémy like a dog until her teeth rattled against each other. Ahead of them, Thaddeus was struggling to keep his balance while he held on to Dita, shielding her head with his hands as he tried to brace himself against the shuddering, shaking wall. J had fallen at his feet and was on all fours, trying to get back up. Rémy did the same, but every time she made it to her feet, another seismic wave sent her off kilter again. Kai had curled into a fetal position, one arm trying to protect his head from reverberating off the rock floor, while the other clamped uselessly against his wound.
Rémy shut her eyes. The noise was deafening, as if they were standing inside the barrel of a cannon at the second that its fuse connected with the gunpowder. It rolled around and around, combining with the shaking of the mountain until Rémy no longer had any idea whether she was on her feet or on her back.
Then: nothing.
The quake stopped. In the space of a whip-crack, the world went so still and so dark that Rémy thought she must be dead — dead and floating in the void between whatever comes between now and after.
Seconds that felt like hours stretched into the void as Rémy’s hearing slowly returned. At first she thought she was surrounded by silence, but then she realized she could hear breathing — and not only her own.
“R-Rémy? Are you there? Are you all right?”
Thaddeus’s voice floated to her out of the darkness. The sound of it flooded her with relief.
“I’m here.” Rémy realized she was lying on her side, her cheek against the dirt floor. There was dust in her nose and her cheekbone throbbed with a dull ache — she must have cracked it against the rock as she fell. Coughing, she slowly sat upright, testing her body as she would if she had fallen from the wire. “I’m not hurt.”
Beside her there was the sound of fabric scuffing against stone, then a groan that resolved itself into a cough.
“Kai?”
“I’m all right,” he said.
There was more sound of movement as they all began to pull themselves upright.
“J?” asked a faint voice.
“Dita!” there came the sound of a match being struck, and flame flared in the darkness, illuminating J’s eager face. It lasted a few seconds before dying. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” said the little girl, her voice barely above a whisper. “What — what happened? I — I cannot remember …”
“Don’t you worry none about that for now,” J soothed. There was the sound of tearing fabric, and then of another match being struck. The flame flared again as Rémy got to her feet, her eyes searching for Thaddeus. The light lasted longer this time — J had torn a strip from his shirt, setting fire to it.
Rémy reached Thaddeus as he got to his feet. She pulled him to her, and he tucked her head under his chin.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“No, just winded. Desai,” Thaddeus asked, raising his voice and turning slightly to look at the older man, “is it over?”
Desai was looking past them with a frown, down the dark passageway through which they had fled. “Possibly. I suggest we keep moving, just in case.”
“I agree,” said the raja. “We should not wait around to find out.”
“Well,” Kai said, dragging himself to his feet though his leg was still bleeding. “The quake seems to be done with. I’m going back. Upala might still be alive.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Rémy, pushing herself out of Thaddeus’s arms to turn to her brother. “You can’t, Kai. Even if the Sapphire Cutlass is dead, not all of her followers will be.”
Her brother gave her a steady look. “Then I’ll take them on. Now that the ground’s stopped shaking, it’ll be easier. Besides, with their goddess gone, they will be leaderless.”
“There’s still Sahoj,” said Thaddeus.
Kai made a disdainful sound in his throat. “That fat old man? He’s nothing but flesh and blood. I’m not afraid of him.” He pulled his sword free from its scabbard and turned, bracing himself uncertainly against the wall.
“Do not be so sure that the Sapphire Cutlass has been defeated,” Desai said softly, his gaze still fixed over Kai’s shoulders.
The pirate turned. “What? What are you saying?”
“That we really should go,” the old man said softly. “Before we find out that Upala and her opal were not as strong as we hoped.”
Kai’s face convulsed at that. He gripped the hilt of his drawn sword so tightly that his knuckle glowed white against its golden tint. “With those words you prove what a fool you are, old man,” said the pirate through gritted teeth. “Upala’s spirit is stronger than that of any goddess.”
Desai lifted his hands in appeasement. “I meant no disrespect. Upala has proven herself to be of brave heart and noble mind. No fault lies at her feet. I merely meant —”
A noise swelled out of the darkness, a cacophony of sound rolling along the tunnel toward them like a tidal wave. It was a piercing scream, made not just of one voice, but of many — a war cry, high and grating, full of abject fury and bile.
J pulled Dita against his side, wrapping his arms around her as a look of fear spread across his face. “What the bleedin’ ’eck is that? Sounds like a ton of pigs havin’ their necks cut wiv a razor blade.”
A light appeared at the end of the tunnel, a blue glow that grew even as they watched it. Black shadows flickered at its heart, drawing closer and closer by the second as the light swelled ever brighter. By the time that any of them realized what they were seeing, the tide was almost upon them.
“We have failed!” Desai cried as the shadows solidified into the forms of the Sapphire Cutlass’s foot soldiers, howling their insane fury as they charged. “Run. RUN!”