"Where's Cera?" Isabelle said, too loud. The word cracked and left a raw edge behind it. She hugged the wrapped parcel to her ribs as if something in the room had teeth. "He brought you, didn't he? He,he made you-"
Tomas snorted, a sound that wanted to be laughter and couldn't stand up on its legs. "Of course he did. That little snake's been whispering in her ear since the start. Creepy freak." His gaze slid to Cala and hardened. "And don't look so shocked. Maybe it didn't take much. Maybe she wanted this. Some people are born for kneeling. Tell them where to sit and they fold right there."
Ian moved before the next word could finish growing. His palm hit Tomas's chest and pushed him a step back from the water. "Don't."
Tomas found his balance and bared his teeth because he couldn't afford to show the tremble underneath. "What? You think I'm wrong? Look at her. Stone with eyes. She's not coming."
"You don't know her," Ian said, and his voice changed mid-sentence, the anger falling out of it like a coat dropped from the shoulder. He turned from Tomas and spoke to the girl in the water. The words came fast, not arranged, pulled straight off the bone.
"You used to pass me scraps of your lunch when I pretended I wasn't hungry. Raisins lined up like coins and you'd push one toward me with a finger until I took it. You'd squat in the dirt and tell me the rocks were leaving messages, and you'd point at a worm and swear it drew a map, and you'd drag me down into it until I almost believed the ground had a voice. You made paper dolls when everyone else wanted to pretend you were insane. You slid me drawings in class 'Operation: Make Ian Smile',and when you slipped off the crate in the picture I drew you falling twice just to make you laugh harder. When you broke in the back room and said you were afraid you'd forget, you let me hold you while you sobbed into my coat, and I told you I'd remember for both of us."
He took one step to the brim. The water lapped his boot. "I meant it. I mean it now."
The pool answered first. A ring opened out from Cala's knees and traveled slow to the stone, a shiver that remembered how to move. Cala's fingers shifted beneath the surface, a small correction, as if she were adjusting a thread.
Isabelle's breath snagged. "Cera," she said again, quieter, like the name itself might get his attention. Her eyes picked the corners of the room as if he might be tucked between two breaths. "Where is he?"
Tomas's eyes didn't leave Cala. "Hiding," he said. "Or watching. He loves to watch." His mouth twisted. "Who cares. We found her. Lets grab her and go."
Ian didn't look back. "You touch her and you'll bleed."
"We need to get the hell outa here with Cala whether she wants to or not"
Isaac hadn't spoken. He lifted the lantern until its light sheeted across the ceiling and came back in scraps off the water. His shadow lay over the surface like an oath. When he finally talked, it was low and even, as if the stone needed coaxing.
"Cala," he said. "If you want to leave, stand up." "If you don't, say so."
Her eyes slid to him and stayed. She didn't stand. She didn't speak. She only breathed. The room built a silence around that fact, brick by brick, until it had weight.
Isabelle took a step, then stopped herself, toes bumping the lip. "We can go now," she said, voice small. "We can just… go. There's a blanket in my satchel. There's bread. There's air that doesn't taste like wet iron. Please. You don't have to do-" She swallowed. "Whatever this is."
Cala's gaze passed over Isabelle like a hand pausing above a flame: not touching, taking its measure.
The air tightened. Somewhere far behind them, down through the corridor they'd fought their way through, a low pressure moved. Not a sound yet. The shape of one. A change in the air that made the lantern flame climb its glass a finger's width and hold like it was being pulled.
Isaac felt it first in the scar that pulled when he frowned. He didn't have a scar. "We should be quick," he said, to no one and everyone.
"Quick?" Tomas said. "Fine. Let's-"
The bell tolled.
Not here. Not in the chamber. Far away, where they'd left it. The sound came thick and muffled, as if forced through wet cloth, as if the corridors between had filled with syrup and the ring had to push through it. It didn't sing. It pressed. It pushed a hand through stone and set it on each of their skulls.
Pain struck like a flash of lightning laid from temple to temple. Isabelle went to her knees with a gasp she couldn't finish. Tomas flinched back from his own head, fingers digging in above his ears; his jaw clamped so hard his teeth answered with a soft creak. Ian felt the world narrow to a white seam and then split along it. Even Isaac bared his teeth as if someone had thrown a cold bridle over his face.
Then the memory came, not asked for, not theirs.
A room they'd never stood in. Candles weeping tallow. The smell of hot rope and old wool. Elders faceless with the way panic remembers. Leor kneeling. Not a boy, not quite a man. Head bent, hands on his thighs as if bracing to be struck. He lifted his face and it had the thin light of someone who had already walked away from himself.
Ian heard a voice and knew it was Leor's even though the sound came broken, as if the bell had chewed it before it let it through. The words tore and reformed; what survived landed like nails hammered through the sentence.
-take… me… instead-
Isabelle made a noise that wasn't a word. Blood opened sudden at one nostril and ran a clean line to her lip. She wiped it and came away red, staring at her hand like it belonged to someone else. Tomas's eyes shone with a shine that wasn't tears, not yet; his mouth moved and didn't finish the shape of a curse. Ian's stomach clenched and tried to heave, bile surging up raw and bitter. Nothing came. He swallowed it back, choking on spit and sour air, throat working against a sickness that refused to finish."
The pressure eased. The memory stayed. The water, which had been listless around their ankles, shuddered. A sigh traveled through it from the direction of the corridor, a shallow swell and draw as if a huge thing had exhaled in a room far away and the stone had passed the breath along.
"What did we see," Isabelle whispered, but she was already shaking her head like she didn't want to hear the answers. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and left a smear.
"Rust and rot," Tomas insisted. "Gets in your nose, makes you dizzy. You see things, you hear things. Don't mean they're real."
Ian stared at Cala. "He bargained," he said, and his voice had the fragile steadiness of a thing balanced on a knife. "He said he'd go in her place."
"No," Tomas said. "You don't know what you saw."
"I know his voice."
The room rearranged its quiet.
The second toll came closer.
The walls took it. The stone caught the ring and didn't let it go. Mortar dust sifted in a slow veil and the hair on Ian's arms stood as if the sound were weather and the barometric pressure had dropped all at once. The ache in their heads sharpened to a point in each ear; Isabelle clutched both sides of her skull as if a hand were inside it, pushing. Tomas swore and bit down on his own palm because his jaw wouldn't unclench. Isaac tilted the lantern to keep the flame away from the draft and felt the handle jump against his skin as the metal thrummed.
Images punched through the pain like pictures slammed against glass.
Cala, smaller by years, in a hall that remembered too much salt and iron. Her fists in the back of a shirt,Leor's. She was making sound without air, open-mouthed, trying to pull him backward by the fabric as two men in grey held him by both arms. He didn't fight because he'd made a promise to himself and promises take both hands to hold. He bent his head down to say something to her and the bell chewed the words so only the shape came through. But the shape said, I will.
The angle changed because this was how memory fails: now Tomas stood at the edge of the frame. Head bowed. Mouth moving without sound. Not to Cala. Not to Leor. To the line of grey standing opposite. The way a boy talks when he's too old to cry out and too young to be heard.
Isabelle's nose bled harder; she tasted iron and nearly gagged on it, though there wasn't enough blood to suffocate anyone. She coughed and the cough hurt her head like glass thrown down a well. Tomas barked something like a laugh and turned it into a curse before it could admit what it was. "That's not me," he said to the air, to the wall, to the lantern. "I wasn't there."
Ian's eyes were wet and he didn't bother to hide it. "You were."
The pressure let go again. The dust settled in a thin new layer on Isaacs's shoulder; he brushed it and left a clean fingerprint on the coat. The water crept higher without splashing itself; it was at their shins now. It had learned how to move quietly.
Isabelle shifted to stand and her boot slipped. The stone underfoot had gone slick with the way old rooms grow skin. Her knee hit water and the cold went through her so cleanly she couldn't find her breath for a count. Something closed around her calf just above the boot. Fingers. No, not fingers. The idea of fingers. Tight and certain. She kicked and it was gone. The pain it left was not a bruise but the memory of one. She sucked air through her teeth and scrambled upright, parcel half dunked, wrapping gone wicking dark up her sleeve.
"Something—" she said, and stopped because saying the rest would make it true. Her hands were shaking and the parcel shook with them. "It pulled."
Tomas didn't look at her. "It didn't," he said. "Don't make it worse."
Isaac's eyes flicked to her leg, then back to Cala. "Stay close to the wall," he said, and took a step that put himself between the pool and the rest without advertising the fact.
The chamber breathed with them. The fifth presence they'd felt along the corridor did not step; it settled. Not a body. A reservation—space held open the way a chair keeps the dent of someone who's just stood.
Cala lifted her gaze a degree and looked past them to the dark where the corridor waited. The ribbon in her hair slouched another inch.
"Cala," Ian said softly, and the name came out too loud anyway. "Please."
She watched him as if he were a picture finished and hung and now she was deciding where to place it.
The third toll arrived in the water.
No sound. Only motion. The surface went taut, then dimpled as if a finger had touched it. Concentric rings pushed out and met the stone and came back as if the walls had exhaled them. The returning waves crossed the outgoing and made a net that caught all four of them by the legs. The pain came with it, not in the ears now but in the sinuses, the sockets, the soft places behind the cheekbones. It felt like the inside of the head swelling, like something inside had been told to grow too fast for the skull to hold it.
Ian's vision flashed to white and resolved into a corridor that was not this one. A door with a bar across it. A voice behind it saying his name wrong, as if tasting it. Cera's face, younger by a year but already wearing that calm like a priest.He took Cala's hand with the care of someone picking up a bowl full to the lip. He leaned down to her ear and the words slid into the crack the bell had made.
It won't hurt if you help it.
Tomas doubled over; a thread of red ran from his left nostril and a darker one from his right ear, a pin's worth that felt like a flood to him. He clapped his palm to the ear and found damp and made a strangled noise in his throat, half disgust and half proof. The shard of memory the bell forced into him was small and it cut anyway: himself again, not at the edge of the room this time but inside it, standing too close to an elder for any boy to stand. His mouth shaping, I will keep her safe. I will keep her from remembering. The promise tasted like old coins.
Isabelle saw nothing clean. The pictures came in scraps and left fingerprints. Leor's sleeve gripped in a girl's fists that were not hers. A priest's ring scraping the back of a bowed head. A rope swaying without a bell to carry it. The pain stuck behind her eyes and made tears run without permission; they burned, which felt wrong for normal tears, and she wiped them hard and left streaks.
Isaac saw the shape of a rite the way a hunter sees the shape of a track and knows the animal even if he has not yet seen the animal itself. There was a bowl. There were ash lines on stone in a geometry that made the back of his tongue taste sour. There was a child-shaped space with no child in it and every adult in the room had agreed not to look at the fact of that absence. He tightened his fingers on the lantern handle until the tendons stood out like ropes and told his body this was the present, this flame, this weight, this breath, this room.
The water rose.
It didn't surge. It climbed, patient. It slid up shins and learned knees and found thighs. The cold got deeper as it rose. It swallowed the sound of their steps and traded it back as something else, a soft slap like a hand patting a table far away. The lantern light went shorter; the flame burned smaller as if the air had thinned.
"Cala," Ian said again, because saying her name felt like throwing a rope. "Look at me."
She did, and in that look he couldn't find hatred or fear. He found patience. The kind you use on a fever that will break when it decides to and not before.
"Say something," Tomas rasped, as if noise could keep his skull from cracking. "If you're going to drown, at least—"
"Shut up," Ian said, and the words came out without heat. His hand lifted a little from his side as if to reach and he forced it down because the water made distance a lie and he could not tell if his arm would be long enough after all. "Please," he said to her, and the please was new, a thing he had not let himself carry until now. "Please come away."
Cala's lips parted. The smallest breath left them. She glanced past Ian's shoulder to a place just behind him and smiled, not with her mouth but with the soft skin beside her eye. Like someone had told her a secret he could not hear.
The water touched Isaac's belt. He lifted the lantern higher and the shadow of his arm leaned long across the wall and broke into pieces where the surface chopped it.His arm shook once, sudden, violent, as though the flame itself had grown heavy. The lantern swung wild and the chamber lurched with it—shadows slashed across the water like blades.
"Isaac-" Ian started, panic rising.
But Isaac caught it with both hands, knuckles white, dragging the lantern back to center. His breath tore out of him in one ragged gasp, too loud, too human. He pressed the hot glass tight to his chest as if daring it to burn him, his lips moving around words no one else could hear. A prayer, a command, maybe a plea.
"We're leaving," he said. Not to Cala. To the room. To the possibility of doing anything else. He had learned how to speak to places like this as if they were proud animals—short commands, no plea tucked under them.
Isabelle stumbled and went under and came up choking. She grabbed the wall and felt something grab back. Not stone. It left her skin unmarred and her breath smaller. "It wants us to fight," she said suddenly, wild-eyed. "It wants us to split. Don't." She didn't know who she was telling. Maybe herself.
"Stay to the right," Isaac said. "There's a seam in the stone. Floor rises about a foot." He didn't know that; he said it, and the world made it true so long as he kept the voice he was using. His palm found a line in the stone that could have been a seam or the place where time had leaned harder. He put Ian's wrist to it and felt the boy lock on like someone catching a railing in the dark.
The bell pressed again, not a toll now but a long, low hum, as if the far chamber had drawn a breath and refused to let it go. The pain in their heads didn't spike this time; it thickened. It filled the small spaces between thought and word until each sentence had to push through something syrupy to reach the mouth. The memory it carried wasn't a picture. It was an agreement, written in a voice that sounded like a priest's and a child's at the same time.
It only takes if you want it.
The water climbed to ribs. The cold found the place under the breastbone where breath begins and crowded it. Tomas's hands, empty of curses, found the parcel in Isabelle's grip and for a second he lifted it like he might throw it just to throw something, and she jerked it back with a snarl that surprised both of them. "Don't," she said, and her eyes told him what it meant to her to be the one still holding anything in this room.
Ian took a breath so deep his chest ached and he let it out like a man going under to dive. He waded the space between and stopped where the water told him to. "Cala," he said one more time, and this time he didn't offer anything. Not a plan. Not a promise. Just her name. The only thing that hadn't been stolen from him yet.
She tilted her head as if he'd asked a question he hadn't figured out how to form. The ribbon slipped another inch and held against her ear.
Behind them, buried in corridor and distance, a rope somewhere swung and touched wood and the small sound of it made the hair on all their arms rise because small sounds are how disasters announce themselves when they don't have to hurry.
The water reached throats.
Isabelle's breath climbed high and stayed there, choppy and thin. Tomas's insistence collapsed into something uglier: fear spoken too late. He looked at Cala as if she might decide his life mattered as much as hers. Isaac's arm shook for the first time and he told it to stop and it listened a little and then listened less. The lantern made a thin noise as the flame licked at the last clean air at the top of the glass.
Cala did not move.
The chamber's silence buckled, and the flashbacks did not wait their turn. They came like someone throwing a handful of nails into a fan.
Leor again, kneeling—then gone and the room carried on without his absence, everyone agreeing not to notice the hole. A priest's fingers on a child's chin, turning the face up so the eyes met his—Cera's calm set like plaster, the kind of calm that's practiced, the kind that says, choose it and it won't hurt. Tomas at a door frame pressed flat to its edge as if that made him not there, whispering a promise that wasn't for the person who needed it. A bowl. Ash. A bell rope that trembled because someone far away had decided it should.
Pain bloomed behind noses and eyes. Isabelle's blood ran again and she wiped and couldn't keep up. Tom as hissed between his teeth and tasted iron and shame and couldn't tell which was which. Ian's vision doubled and then narrowed to Cala's face and held there like a hand. Isaac's jaw set so hard he thought for a bright ridiculous second that he might crack a molar on his own stubbornness.
"Did you see—" Ian began.
"I didn't," Tomas said.
Isabelle looked at him and didn't make it into words; it was there in her stare anyway. You did. You were there.
"Not now," Isaac said, not turning. "You hold or you drown."
The water's surface brushed mouths. The lantern kissed the pool and screamed a small sound as the glass took the chill. Isaac lifted it higher until his arm was a bar and his shoulder burned in small, familiar ways that belonged to work, not terror. He could use pain like that; it fit the hand.
Cala watched them as if this had all been necessary to learn one thing about them that could not be learned any other way. She blinked once, slow, the way a person blinks when they are thinking about whether to stand.
The bell let go.
All at once the pressure, the sound, the ache. The water didn't fall. Their bodies did. Knees buckled. Throats refused. The mind that keeps the list of what to do next,kick, breath, count, climb, falterd.
Ian thought her name and didn't make it to the mouth. Isabelle's fingers tore at Isaac's sleeve and found it and then didn't know what to do with it. Tomas made a sound like a boy falling from a tree. Isaac told his hand: keep the flame out of the water. For one foolish victorious second, the flame obeyed.
The black came up.
The last thing any of them saw was Cala, waist-deep still, as if the flood respected a line around her and would not cross it. Her ribbon slid the last inch and hung on her shoulder like a spent word. She might have smiled. Or the ripple might have drawn a line across her face that made it look like one. The room closed its throat and swallowed.
Silence rang.
Then there was nothing, and in that nothing silence bore the bell, each toll marking the dark as though it were eternity itself.