Chapter 1: The Oubliette
The wet air slides down my throat. A swallowed stone.
It pushes back out of my lungs in a slow, steady beat. A low hum shakes the birdcage of my ribs. The hum is my anchor in this black ocean.
I have lived inside this dark for six months.
I know the dark the way other girls know their bedrooms. I know the three cracks in the far wall where a cold finger of air slides through in the middle of the night. I know the slow drip above my left shoulder. The faster drip behind me. The slanted drip near the door that hits a puddle shaped like a tooth. I know the corner where the slime is thinnest and the stone is almost dry, and I go there when I am too tired to keep my cheek off the floor. I know the hour of the day by the footsteps above me. The morning boots. The shift change. The drunk ones who come back late. The dog that scrapes its nails on the stone above cell ten.
I know my cell.
I do not know my face.
My thumb rubs against my first finger. One. My middle finger. Two. My ring finger. Three. My pinky. Four. Left hand, right hand. Ten fingers. I stretch my tired legs against the slimy floor stones. One, two, three... ten toes wiggling in the freezing wet. The floor is a glacier. Six months without food is an empty canyon deep inside my belly. A pit with no bottom, just my own echo going down.
I am still the same Mary.
Maeve. Millie. Micah. Mateo.
People need me.
I say each name the way I always say them. One breath per name. Maeve is my sister. The oldest after me. Twelve years old. She bites her bottom lip when she is thinking. Millie is next, nine, and she sings under her breath when she is scared so you do not know she is scared. Micah is seven and has the smallest ears I have ever seen on a boy. Mateo is five and still climbs into my bed when it storms, and his feet are always cold.
Were always cold.
I do not know what they are now. I do not know if they still sleep in the same room. I do not know if Maeve has had to learn to cook. I do not know if Millie still sings.
I rub my fingers again. One. Two. Three. Four. Ten fingers.
People need me. People still need me. Somewhere, four people still need me, even if they think I am dead. That is how it has to be.
Something changes.
I feel it before I hear it. A squeeze in the air, as if the whole dungeon has taken a very small breath and held it. My sensitive ears pop like soap bubbles. The drip, drip, drip of water from the ceiling stops all at once. All three of them. The fast one, the slow one, and the slanted one. They do not slow down. They stop. A whole song cut off in the middle.
The ground shakes under my hands.
It is not the shake of boots overhead. It is not the shake of a heavy door. It is a shake from inside the stone. The smell of old iron, the smell I have breathed every second of every day for six months, drops away so fast my lungs forget how to work. For one heartbeat the air is empty. A clean nothing. It almost makes me cry.
Then a sharp ringing fills my ears. Deep and high at the same time. It drowns out the loud hiss of ice turning to steam in the pitch black. Around my ankles, the freezing slime on the stones is sizzling. The water is boiling in the grooves of the floor.
The heat is a heavy blanket shoved against my skin. A thief, stealing my air. I am choking.
Then the smell hits me.
It is a boulder on my chest.
It is a crying sadness for a warm fireplace I have never sat beside. It is a weeping for a beautiful castle I have never walked inside. It is a heart-break for a home that never even existed. It is a grief for a song I have never been sung. A grief for a soft blanket I have never pulled up under my chin. A grief for a voice calling me in for dinner from a garden I have never played in.
Saudade.
Then, behind the ghost of that broken heart, comes the real, physical scent. The weight of a lightning storm. The dust of two dry stones cracking together. The choke of a hungry volcano. The dry dirt smell of a road a thousand miles from any road I know.
The heat is a roaring oven. A body stands in the dark, inches from my face.
Such a fragile, broken little mouse.
The deep voice does not hit my ears. It slithers behind my eyes, skipping them entirely. The feeling is a yank of my clothes off my body. A mean, blushing nakedness.
The hurricane of my thoughts, the fear, the careful counting of my fingers, the desperate grip on my siblings’ names, is spilled like a bucket of water on the dirty floor. It is spilled for this monster to read. My grief for a castle I have never walked into. My count of ten toes. Mateo’s cold feet. Maeve biting her lip. The bit where I said were always cold instead of are. The small hungry pit at the bottom of my belly. All of it. Out on the stone. Wet and shining for him to see.
I have been so careful to keep my thoughts to myself in this dark. A prisoner has nothing left but her thoughts. And this thing in the room has just reached in and taken them like apples from a bowl.
My brain sprints in a million directions while my heart beats so fast it might crack through my ribs because this fiery thing is going to burn me alive and my siblings will never ever know what happened to me in this horrible place and they will grow old not knowing if I ran away or fell in a river or forgot their faces on purpose! The crazy thoughts swirl and try to line up into a neat row in my head. I am trapped.
My mouth opens before the panic settles.
“Get out.”
A low, rumbling laugh shakes the stone under my freezing knees. The heat flares hotter. The fire likes being told no. The fire likes it a lot.
You called me, little mouse.
The words slide behind my eyes again.
A drop of your blood fell on the binding stone. You are mine to grant.
Called. I did not call anything. I have not called anything in six months. I have whispered my siblings’ names under my tongue and I have begged a God I am not sure I believe in for one full bowl of soup and I have cursed the guard who spits through my bars. I have not called. I have not . . .
A drop of blood.
Yesterday. The day before? Time is a thick soup in this dark. I bit my cheek too hard when the food slot opened and I thought, for a stupid second, that it was finally real food. The rust came up in my mouth, and I spat it out onto the stone because I did not want the taste, and the spit landed somewhere to my left, and . . .
A stone. A stone with a groove in it. I remember feeling the groove last week and thinking it looked like a letter, if letters could be felt.
A binding stone.
The whole stack of understanding lands on me at once and I cannot lift it off.
“Are not.”
I am Alhambra. The Unbound. The Smokeless Fire.
The push-back bubbles up through my fear. A fountain of sour lemonade. The brat inside me, the one who has been locked in the back room for six months, presses her face to the door. My brain screams at my mouth to stay shut. My brain screams at my tongue to lie down and be quiet. My brain screams at the brat that she is going to get us killed.
The silly words are already falling out into the dark.
“Oh. El Hammer?”
The word hangs in the air between us.
The second it leaves my mouth I know it is wrong. It is so wrong. It is a name pulled out of my little brother’s picture book, the one with the carpenter mouse who hits his own thumb. It is a name I gave to a broken spoon once when Millie was four and crying. It is not a name you give to a god of fire.
Silence drops over the cell. A blanket of quiet. My heartbeat is a marching drum against my ears. I bite the soft inside of my cheek until the rust of blood floods my tongue again. Regret is acid in my throat.
Excuse me?
The whisper in my head fills with cutting knives.
The heat steps closer. The volcano smell is a backpack of heavy stones on my tired shoulders. I can feel him in front of me without seeing him. The air itself has a shape now, and the shape is huge, and the shape is bent down, and the shape is close enough that I can feel its slow breath on my hair.
The brat behind the door has already gone quiet. She has remembered who she is. She is four inches tall and made of chicken bones. The brat is crying now.
My thumb finds my pinky. One. The number is all I have.
“Nothing.”
