The tide of running, thrashing fury was on them before they could move more than a few steps. Bodies surrounded them, a sea of armor spoiling for the final fight. Rémy found herself alone, marooned as Kai was torn away from her, buffeted by the eddies of an ocean that had once been human, but was now pure rage. Thaddeus and the others were drowning somewhere ahead of her, already out of view. Rémy found herself spun this way and that, turned and tumbled until even her legendary sense of equilibrium found it hopeless to tell which way was up.
A muscled, metaled hand clamped around her throat. Choking, she was drawn against the chest of a colossus whose vengeful eyes were rimmed with pure blue. His mouth screamed at her, the noise lost in the maelstrom’s entirety. Rémy fought, gasping for breath, but he lifted her from the ground as if she were nothing more than a struggling bug.
Through the sound of dying blood rushing in her ears, Rémy became aware of something else. The blue glow had reached them too, along with a fusing, cracking sound. The bright sapphire hue washed along the passageway, coloring the stone — no, not just coloring it, changing it: turning it into pure gem. Electricity traced the air, sheer power dancing with the oxygen that she couldn’t pull into her lungs. Around them, above them, below them — all was the pale, glittering blue of sapphire, moving past where Rémy fought for life, past where the supernatural army fought a battle they were sure to win.
The hand on Rémy’s neck loosened. The rage in her attacker’s eyes turned to fear. He dropped her and she fell to her knees in the dirt, hands grasping at her neck as she struggled to gulp great drafts of air into her lungs. Looking up, Rémy watched in fascinated horror as he began to clutch at his own chest. The sapphire embedded in his skin was vibrating as it glittered with a fierce glow.
Screaming, the soldier dropped to his knees. He would have crashed into Rémy if she hadn’t scrambled backward. Around them, all the men and women of the Sapphire Cutlass were doing the same — screaming in fear and pain, writhing their armored fingers against their chests and arms — anywhere they had fastened a sapphire into their skin.
The stones were growing, transforming the human flesh around themselves from skin and fat and bone to rock-hard sapphire. Rémy saw it radiate from the tattoo, swallowing the black lines of the drawn cutlass as if it had never existed, opening up a transparency in the man’s chest that looked like a void. He kept screaming until the gem’s growth had spread to his throat, where his cry strangled and died. The last thing to go were his eyes, which looked at Rémy with a pitiful plea, as if the woman he had been trying to slaughter a second ago could somehow be his savior now. A moment later, there was nothing before her but a shape cut out of sapphire that had once been human.
Around her, the horror was being played out over and over again as the foot soldiers of the Sapphire Cutlass were turned to stone — not animated, moving stone as she had been, but dead, inert crystalline structures with no life apart from what glinted in them as light glanced from the unnatural angles of their surfaces.
Something grabbed her arm — Kai, who had battled through the dying cult members to her side. She couldn’t hear what he was shouting at her over their horrible screams, but he waved one arm and she turned her head to see the others, urging them to run. The passageway, ahead and behind them, was now made of sapphire, and the stone was continuing to spread, turning what had once been the darkness ahead of them into a tunnel of prismatic blue light. The only part that had remained untouched was the dirt path beneath their feet, a gray ribbon leading them through the vivid blue.
Rémy, still stunned, found it difficult to move. Kai wrapped his arm around her waist and staggered forward, pulling her onward despite his own injury. Thaddeus must have seen her hesitate, because he passed Dita to Desai and started back toward them.
“Come on,” he bellowed into her ear once he reached them, squeezing her arm with one hand. “We have to hurry.”
Thaddeus hooked Kai’s other arm over his shoulder and together they hoisted him up, carrying him between them.
“What’s happening?” Rémy shouted, not even sure her voice could carry to Thaddeus’s ears over the din. Is this it? she wondered. Can the Sapphire Cutlass only destroy? Will the entire world turn to stone?
Thaddeus hadn’t heard her, but he was trying to tell them something anyway.
“Don’t touch,” he yelled. “Desai says, whatever you do, don’t try to take one of the sapphires.”
For once in her life, Rémy had absolutely no interest in owning a gemstone.
They ran, dodging transforming and transformed cult members, trying not to touch the human statues that littered their path. Rémy saw one such statue topple against another pure sapphire form as it fell, shattering into a cascade of smaller jewels. Kai, answering some kind of reflex, tried to bend to pick one up, but Rémy and Thaddeus stopped him.
Ahead of them, Rémy saw the raja do the same. He paused for a moment, as if mesmerized, before snatching up handfuls of sapphire. Desai realized what he was doing and tried to yell a warning, but it was too late.
The raja started to scream. He opened his palm and tried to shake the jewels from his hand, but they had already fused with his skin. They burrowed like insects into his very being, and in a second his veins were flooding with a blue light that tore through his body like fire. His hand became sapphire. The once-proud raja held it out to them as they passed, as if somehow one of them could do something to help him. The jewel spread up his arm to his shoulder, exploded into his chest, then rose up his neck to his gaping, screaming mouth. He fell silent, enveloped in stone.
The sound of the terror receded as they left those horrors behind them. The sapphire was still spreading — the rooms through which Upala and Rémy had crept with wonder were all now a uniform blue, simple and cold in its purity. They stumbled out of the entrance to the mountain and saw that both the statues and the carvings were all also transformed.
Rémy was relieved to see, though, that the sapphire had apparently reached the extent of its growth. The creepers that grew in elaborate tangles over the surface of the mountain temple were still alive, and still wore the green and tan hues of their true selves. The jungle outside was still there as well — brighter, lighter and greener, somehow, than it had been when they had first began their sojourn inside the mountain.
The group stumbled out into the open and collapsed a few paces away from the temple’s entrance. Kai grunted with pain as he hit the ground. They all sprawled out on the warm earth, exhausted and gasping for breath.
“What in the name of blazes were that?” J rasped, Dita’s hand clutched tightly in his. “I thought we were done for, good and proper!”
Desai began to laugh, a deep, rumbling sound that Rémy realized she’d never heard before.
“What’s so funny?” J asked, irritated as he sat up.
The older man sat up, too, and reached out to clap J on the back. “My dear, dear J — I thought we were done for, too. I thought the Sapphire Cutlass had won.” He looked over to Kai with a smile. “But it seems that Kai was right. I underestimated Upala’s strength.”
“You mean, what happened just then, that was the opal working?” Thaddeus asked, looking up at the pure sapphire of the mountain.
Desai followed his gaze. “I think it was more than that. My guess is that the power of the Sapphire Cutlass was actually too great for the opal to contain. The energy released — the power it tried to drain from her — had to be absorbed by something else. So the mountain took it back. The mountain reclaimed its power, and in doing so, finally regained what had been stolen from it, so many years ago.”
“So that’s it?” Kai asked. “It’s all over?”
Desai nodded, his exhaustion beginning to show on his face. “That would be my hope, yes.”
“You can’t be sure?”
The older man lifted his palms in a humble shrug. “One can never be sure.”
Silence fell around them as they all contemplated Desai’s words. In it, somewhere in the depths of the jungle valley, a bird sang a happy song.
“Listen to that,” said Thaddeus, raising his head and shutting his eyes under the sun’s golden rays. “There were no birds here before we went in to the mountain. The valley seems different. It feels different. More … alive, somehow.”
“Well,” said Desai, “nature has a way of reasserting herself over man’s folly.”
“Can I go back in?” Kai asked. “I need … I need to find Upala.”
Rémy felt her heart twinge in sympathy. She laid a hand on his arm. “Kai … I don’t think there is any hope that she —”
“I know,” Kai cut her off gruffly, looking at his feet. “She’s dead. I know that. But … I feel like I have to see her. I have to … pay my last respects.”
Rémy looked at Desai, who seemed troubled. “Would it be safe?” she asked. “The earthquake has gone. There doesn’t seem to be any more … transformations happening. Is it over?”
Desai paused before answering. “I think it would be prudent to wait. I really have no way of knowing what is happening inside the mountain. Wait, Kai, until the morning. Until you have rested and I have seen to the wound in your leg. I think … that Upala can wait for you.”
Kai nodded. Rémy watched her brother’s face for a moment, until she saw that his eyes were filling with tears. Then she turned away.
* * *
They collected wood for a fire as the shadows lengthened in the valley, turning the sky overhead from azure to indigo before eventually fading into darkness completely. Thaddeus helped J and Rémy gather the wood, reflecting silently on the events of the past few days. The valley’s natural life was, as Desai had said, reasserting itself. Night creatures crept around them, skittering in the undergrowth, which itself seemed lighter somehow. Of the mist that had concealed their attackers, there was no sign.
Thaddeus watched Rémy. They hadn’t spoken much yet, besides holding each other close in a brief reassurance that they were indeed both still whole. There had been a moment there, when he’d left her on top of Dita’s cage surrounded by hundreds of murderous acolytes, that Thaddeus had really thought he might never see her again. He wondered what it meant that he’d left anyway. Kai had wanted to stay with Upala, even though he knew it would have been hopeless.
Thaddeus hadn’t wanted to leave Rémy there. Of course he hadn’t. It was just that they had spent so long weathering such dangers together that he knew how she would have reacted if he hadn’t gone to help Desai instead of staying with her. She wouldn’t have thanked him for it. She probably would have resorted to one of the old insults she used to use back before they were together, in London, and called him stupid. It wasn’t that Rémy didn’t need protecting. Everyone needed protecting in one way or another. It was just that she wouldn’t allow it. And he loved her. What was love if it wasn’t accepting what the person you loved wanted, even if it wasn’t what you would choose for yourself?
They built the fire and lit it, settling around it quietly as it crackled and sparked in the dark. Thaddeus found himself staring quietly at the flames, sitting with his elbows on his knees as Desai fixed up Kai’s leg with Rémy’s help.
“Penny for them?” she asked, coming to sit beside him a few minutes later, close enough to lean her head against his tired shoulder.
Thaddeus turned and kissed the top of her head. “Just … taking it all in, I suppose. What happened back there … it could easily have been the end of the world, which is just … staggering, really.”
Rémy pressed herself closer to him and he sat back, wrapping one arm around her shoulders to pull her against his chest.
“We couldn’t have done it without Upala and Kai,” she said, quiet enough that her voice would not carry over the flames. “He is so upset, Thaddeus. He’s trying to hide it, but … I think he’s heartbroken.”
Thaddeus buried his nose in her hair and looked over the flames to her twin. Kai held his bandaged leg stiffly out in front of him, staring into the middle distance as if he didn’t see any of it at all. There but for the grace of God go I, Thaddeus thought to himself. If I lost Rémy now … He pushed the thought away and shut his eyes for a moment, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing as they sat twined together, almost as close as it was possible for two humans to be. It seemed impossible to imagine that they didn’t belong exactly as they were now.
“He’s determined to go back into the mountain,” Rémy continued quietly, oblivious to Thaddeus’s train of thought.
“I suppose there’s nothing we can do to stop him,” Thaddeus murmured.
“No, there isn’t. So I am going to go too.”
Thaddeus felt a sick twist of worry knot itself into his stomach. “Rémy, no — we don’t know what you’ll find in there. We don’t know for sure if its safe. We don’t even know —”
She pulled gently out of his arms and straightened up to face him. “Thaddeus, I can’t let him go alone. He is my brother — my true twin. I’ve only known him a few days. I can’t leave him to do something like this alone now. Especially not when it’s my fault that —”
Thaddeus moved to cup her face in both his hands. “It’s not your fault.”
“If I hadn’t gone to find them — if I hadn’t convinced them to help us, then …”
“It is not your fault, Rémy Brunel. I won’t allow you to think that. It’s Sahoj’s fault, it’s the raja’s fault, it’s Aruna’s fault … I don’t know, it’s that legendary Portuguese man who lived hundreds of years ago’s fault. But it is not yours, no matter what you might think.”
Rémy’s lips curved in a watery smile. “You are too nice to me, Englishman.”
Thaddeus kissed her gently, warmly. “You deserve it.” He pulled her to him again, settling her head against his chest. “You’re still going to go, though, aren’t you?”
Rémy tightened her arms around him. “I have to. Does that make you hate me?”
Thaddeus laughed quietly. “Of course I don’t hate you. I love you, Rémy Brunel. I always will, no matter what crazy, harebrained situations you drag me into. Don’t you know that by now?”