Chapter Seventeen

Above

Stone World

Leah watched as the red stone on Jasper’s back first mottled and then transformed into pink flesh. After a long moment, Jasper stopped shuddering under her soothing fingers and faced her.

Her heart clenched. An intense wave of emotion overcame her: yearning, desire, grief. Except for his golden eyes, he was the exact image of Gideon, even to the subtle red flecks in his dark hair. Straight nose, strong cheekbones, well-shaped mouth.

“Well? What do I look like?” he asked.

“You’re very handsome.” She couldn’t resist tracing the dark line of his eyebrow.

“I look human?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

Hesitantly, he touched his hair and the less craggy contours of his face and newly rounded ears. Then he stared at his hands, so much smaller than the crude mitts of his gargoyle form and lacking claws. He traced his tongue over his fangless teeth. “It feels strange.”

She laughed softly. “I’m sure it does. You’ll get used to it.”

He stood and had to make a quick clutch to save his now too-big shorts from falling off. He cinched the rope belt, then rubbed his shoulder, wincing. Leah noticed a star-shaped bruise—the remnant of the bullet’s impact. She shivered. If he’d been flesh and blood when he got hit…

A scraping noise made her turn. Forty feet away, the door to the stairwell swung open. Burt emerged, his forehead streaming sweat.

“Run!” Jasper took her hand and pulled her after him.

The Above was a huge and supposedly deadly place. If they could just hide for a little while, surely their pursuers would give up?

They ran parallel to the water trough. Up ahead, the trough punched a hole in a wall. Leah hadn’t even realized they were in a building. It was enormous, and the roof had caved in, letting in large swaths of sunlight. Also drifts of sand.

A shout from behind them made her glance back. Her steps slowed in dismay. Two more Unskilled men from the repair party had joined Burt and were now giving chase.

At least none of them had a gun.

Jasper tugged her arm, and Leah focused forward again, running as hard as she could. Her lungs soon burned, and her breathing grew labored.

Her foot slipped on a layer of sand. Jasper wrenched her upright. She kept running, but her ankle began to throb. She cried out.

Jasper swept her up in his arms but had to set her back down after only a few steps. His cheeks flushed. “Sorry. This form is weak.”

A glance back showed that Burt and one other man were gaining on them.

“Can you change back to your gargoyle form?” Leah asked, while they hobbled along together, her arm around his shoulder.

“I don’t know how!”

Burt would catch them before they made it to the place where the water trough exited, but a section of broken wall lay much closer. Leah veered left. “This way!”

They reached the rubble fifteen feet ahead of Burt. Jasper boosted Leah onto a block, then scrambled up after. Leah tried to climb higher, but the next rock moved under her foot.

Burt reached the foot of the wall. Jasper barred his way while Leah frantically sought a more solid foothold.

“I have no quarrel with you, scavenger,” Burt told Jasper. “I’m after the girl and a gargoyle.”

Jasper snarled at him, and Burt’s mouth dropped open. “Y-your eyes,” he stuttered. “How did you—?”

Under less dire circumstances, Leah would have laughed at his confusion. She gained another few feet of safety and peered over the broken wall. The dead city lay a mile to the left: a jumble of spires and broken blocks.

Sand had drifted so high, it formed a ramp up to the top of the wall. Her stomach clenched. How solid was it? What if they sank in it and were trapped or smothered?

A second Unskilled man joined Burt and started to climb.

Jasper stamped on his fingers, but his bare feet had little effect. The Unskilled yelped but hung on. With his other hand, he swiped at Jasper’s leg.

Jasper twisted free, but Burt boosted his partner, and now the man had a knee up on one of the boulders.

“Come on!” Leah called from the top of the wall.

“Go!” Jasper yelled.

So stubborn. “Not without you!”

Jasper kicked the Unskilled man in the gut, then scrambled up after her. His foot came down on the same unstable rock she had narrowly avoided. It rolled, but by then he was past and on his way to the top.

Burt cried out and fell back as more rocks and scree slid. The second man hunched on the boulder, unharmed but trapped.

Leah bared her teeth in satisfaction, but when Jasper joined her, their section started to wobble, too.

He grabbed her hand. “Run!” Pell-mell, they sprinted down the dune. Jasper whooped, laughing, and a surge of reckless exhilaration made Leah grin back at him; she felt alive in a way that she hadn’t since her world shattered.

At first, the softer, more forgiving sand helped her ankle, but on the tenth stride, she suddenly sank to her mid-calf. She floundered. Jasper paused to yank her free, and his own feet started to sink.

The whole dune crumbled underneath them.

Ashes! Her heart jumped into her throat. She tried to run faster, but pain shot through her ankle. She stumbled again, falling. She tried to release Jasper’s hand, but he clung to her. Both of them fell together and rolled down the dune in a dirty, choking landslide.

At the bottom, Leah struggled to sit up. Her legs were half-buried, and her hair was full of sand. Her gaze sought Jasper and found him in a similar state, stunned but alive.

Burt and the other Unskilled man stood at the top of the wall. Burt put one foot onto the soft surface, then hesitated.

The man Jasper had kicked pointed at the sky. Abruptly, both men vanished back down the other side of the wall.

Leah blinked in confusion. And suspicion. “Why did they leave?” Had someone else circled around in front of them? Anxious, she climbed to her feet, then had to clutch Jasper to avoid putting weight on her throbbing ankle.

Jasper swore under his breath. “Look at the sky.”

Leah raised her head. The sky on Stone was neither the red of Fire nor the blue of Water World, but rather a dark, egg-yolk yellow. Only, now, a band of dirty gray filled the horizon, and she could hear a dull roaring. On Holly’s world, that noise had meant engines. Here, she feared it signified something more ominous. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. “Is that—?”

“A sandstorm? Yes.” Jasper spat to clear his mouth of sand. “We need to find shelter.”

Preferably somewhere without enemies. The city was too distant. Scanning their surroundings, Leah spotted a half-buried shed. “There’s something, but it’s at least half a mile away.” She bit her lip. She couldn’t tell if it was sufficient shelter, and her ankle still hurt. Go back and risk arrest, or go on?

Jasper ground his teeth. “If I were a gargoyle, I could take us safe Below the earth.”

“Your choice,” Leah called over the rising wind. She would only be arrested; he would be re-collared. “Go on or go back?”

“Go on.” He put his arm around her waist, supporting her as they hobbled forward.

The wind continued to rise, first gusting, then shrieking before they’d covered more than a third of the distance. Tiny particles of grit and sand stung their exposed skin and cut down on visibility. Leah pulled the neckline of her robe up over her mouth.

“What about you?” she shouted at Jasper.

He shrugged. “I’ll be fine.”

Leah studied him doubtfully. His chest was bare, his legs were uncovered from the knee down, and he was barefoot. On the other hand, he wasn’t coughing, nor did his skin look as reddened as hers. Maybe being a gargoyle gave him some protection even in human form; Gideon’s skin had always been hot no matter if he were boy or dragon.

Fifteen steps farther on, Leah halted. Her muscles tensed. “I can’t see it!” The shed had vanished behind the curtain of blowing sand.

If Jasper replied, his voice was lost on the wind, but his arm pressed into Leah’s back. She trudged forward, trusting him to guide her.

The wind howled in her ears like a demon and snatched at the hem of her robe. The material flapped around her knees. It became harder and harder to suck in a breath through the cloth filter over her face. She stopped squinting and simply closed her eyes. They would either walk into the shed or miss it and die. Her exposed wrists and hands felt lacerated.

The world narrowed to the simple effort of putting one foot in front of the other—a test of endurance that she would have failed without Jasper’s arm around her.

And then, for one step, the wind eased. Was the sandstorm lessening? But it slammed back into her at her next stride.

Jasper pulled her on, but she resisted. She backed up a step, and the wind lessened again, as if blocked by a structure. On the other side of her, Jasper likely hadn’t felt it at all. She switched direction, stepping into the soft spot in the wind and tugging Jasper with her.

Yes. The wind was blunted here.

Though they couldn’t speak, Jasper recognized it, too. Movements energetic, he strode in the new direction. Ten steps more, and their outstretched arms hit a low wall.

Relief shuddered through her. Now, if they could just find the door! She risked peering through one slitted eye, but it didn’t help. Jasper released her, and they moved in different directions, feeling along the wall like blind men. Oddly, it seemed to be made of metal and glass, not stone. She scratched her fingers along the windows but couldn’t find any catch.

Nor could she find a door. Telling herself there must be a way in somewhere, Leah eased around the corner and back out into the howling wind.

She flinched as sand flayed her raw shins. The layer of cloth she’d used to protect her nose and mouth pulled away, and she inhaled sand, coughed on grit. She sank to her knees and retracted her head into the robe, forming a small tent around herself.

Maybe she’d just stay here and become her own miniature sand dune.

Jasper touched her shoulder. “Leah!”

Reluctantly, she poked the top of her head out. Through a veil of tears, she saw that Jasper had opened a door.

Drifted sand kept it from opening more than a foot, but she squeezed her body inside. She had to duck down because the ceiling was quite low. She took one step, then fell to her knees in the narrow space, coughing and hacking, eyes running with tears, trying to flush out the grit.

Moments later, Jasper staggered inside and slammed the door shut. He collapsed onto a cloth-covered chair. He seemed more exhausted than hurt.

Leah scrubbed at her eyes, but her hands were filthy, and it didn’t help much. When her vision finally cleared, she saw a cramped little room with three rows of high-backed benches.

It sparked her memories of Holly’s world. They weren’t in a shed but rather an abandoned vehicle. A van, perhaps, or this world’s equivalent. With a jolt, she realized that the only reason they’d been able to get the door open was because the vehicle rested a foot off the ground. A regular door would have been buried in two feet of sand. She shuddered at the thought of finding shelter but dying while trying to dig a way in.

The wind howled anew. The sandstorm drew a curtain across the sun, creating a dim, cave-like interior. The van protected them from the vicious onslaught, but grains of sand still leaked in along the cracks.

“We’ll need to open the door every so often,” Jasper said.

“Why?”

“If we let the drift outside get too high, we won’t be able to get the door open again when the storm stops,” Jasper said grimly.

And when would that be? Both Dorotea and Elect Harmon had been convinced that exile Above was tantamount to death. But Burt had mentioned scavengers… The Unskilled boy had said regular storms only lasted a few hours, but monster storms could last a week. They had no food or water.

She desperately wanted to rinse the grit out of her mouth. What she wouldn’t give for a delivery of a cold bottle of water from Holly! No chance of an ice mirror here. She shivered.

“You’re cold,” Jasper said. “Here, sit by me.”

She scooted closer to him, and he put his arm around her. He was warm, though not as toasty as Gideon’s furnace heart. Leah let her head rest against his shoulder. Her throat ached. Tears slid from her eyes. She kept silent, but one of her teardrops must have fallen on Jasper because he shifted. “Don’t cry. We’ll make it through the storm.”

But the storm wasn’t why she was crying at all. Her heart keened, full of grief. Gideon, why did you have to die and leave me all alone?

Jasper kissed the top of her head. Then he kissed her forehead, her cheek…her lips. He paused and looked into her eyes, then kissed her again, more firmly. And she let him, because it felt good, and she was so tired of being sad, and Jasper might not be Gideon, but he was the next best thing, and he was right there.

She touched his face, so like Gideon’s, his mirror image’s, then wound her arms around his neck and opened her mouth under his.

After all, she was alone, and it wasn’t like he was in love with Dorotea. They weren’t hurting anyone…

Except she was wearing Dorotea’s body. The thought seeped in like black poison, ruining her fantasy. Leah didn’t belong on Stone. Dorotea did. Dorotea belonged with Jasper, even if she was too stupid to know it.

Leah drew back a little but couldn’t bring herself to leave Jasper’s embrace. Emotion clogged her chest.

“The wind’s dying,” Jasper murmured.

She listened and discovered he was right. The sky had brightened, too, enough that she could see her reflection in his luminous golden eyes. Jasper stared at her as if she were everything wonderful, as if he loved her.

But her heart belonged to Gideon.

Without letting herself think about it, or even pause to extract promises, she Called her otherself. If she didn’t do this now, she might never have the courage again. Dorotea, take your body back.

Her reflection melted into the more haggard face of her own body.

A push followed, and she fell forward—

She landed with a thump back in her own body in the Mirrorhall.