Chapter 8: The Second Moon
The second moon rose over Veylorien exactly nine days after the first, and by then Mira had learned enough about the Threshold's strange sky to know that its moons did not behave like the one back home, three of them chasing each other in a slow, deliberate spiral instead of one steady orbit, each rise shaving another visible sliver off the time they had left.
She had also learned, in those nine days, that the amber shard from her trial could be used again, carefully, to walk the corridors without the Threshold testing every step, so long as she and Priya stayed close enough together to count, in the Ledger's strange arithmetic, as one linked presence instead of two uncertain ones.
That was how they found the second clue, tucked into an overlooked page of the Hollow Archive that Old Maren had somehow never mentioned, a page describing a method for unmaking a linked wish the old way, without Corvain's bargain and without a year of anyone's memory. It required both wishers to return, together, to the exact place the original wish was spoken, and speak its honest opposite out loud, with the same real feeling that had opened the door in the first place.
"Which means going home," Priya said, reading over Mira's shoulder for the third time as though the words might change if she stared hard enough. "Physically. Through the door, back into your aunt's shop."
"There's a certain poetry to it," Mira said, trying to sound braver about it than she felt. "We broke the rule at that door. Feels right that we'd have to go back and unbreak it there too."
"I liked you better when your plans didn't come with poetry attached," Priya said. "Poetry usually means something's about to go wrong."
"Everything has been going wrong since roughly nine o'clock last Tuesday. I don't think poetry is going to make a noticeable difference either way."
"Comforting," Priya said, borrowing Mira's own least favorite word from earlier in the night, and Mira couldn't help the small, tired laugh that escaped her despite everything.
"Can the door even open both ways," Mira asked, looking to Kade.
"It can," he said slowly, "but only during the second moon's rise, when the seal between worlds is thinnest. If we miss the window, we wait for the third moon, and the third moon is the deadline itself. There won't be time to try twice."
"Then we don't miss it," Mira said, with more confidence than she entirely felt.
The trouble arrived, as trouble in Veylorien tended to, exactly when they least needed it. They were three corridors from the amber door, the second moon's light already spilling silver blue through every high window they passed, when the ground began to hum in that particular way Mira had come to associate with Threshold testing, except this time it did not stop at a mild tremor. The floor split wide open beneath Priya's feet before either Mira or Kade could reach her, and she vanished from sight with a short, sharp cry that turned Mira's blood to ice.
"Priya!" Mira dropped to her knees at the edge of the new chasm, peering down into a darkness that swallowed the light entirely.
"I'm alive," Priya's voice floated up, shaky but intact, from somewhere not too far below. "I'm on a ledge, I think, there's a ledge, but I don't see a way back up and there is something down here breathing that I would very much like to not meet in person."
Kade was already moving, unwinding a length of warden's rope from beneath his coat that Mira hadn't even known he carried, tying one end around a stone pillar with quick, practiced hands.
"The Threshold isn't trying to hurt her," he said, more to himself than to Mira, working fast. "It's trying to separate you. It's still testing the link between your wishes, and it's decided the fastest way to test it is to see whether you'll choose to save her or keep moving toward the door before the moon sets."
"That's not a choice," Mira snapped, already grabbing the rope. "There was never going to be a version of tonight where I left her down there."
"I know," Kade said, and there was something fierce and proud in the way he said it that Mira did not have time to examine properly, not with the moon already climbing and her best friend trapped in the dark below them.
Getting Priya out took longer than any of them could afford, ten minutes of careful maneuvering, of Kade bracing the rope against his own weight while Mira talked Priya through finding footholds in stone that kept shifting exactly enough to be unhelpful, ten minutes during which the second moon rose steadily higher, its silver blue light narrowing toward whatever window of opportunity they had left.
By the time Priya's hand finally closed over the chasm's edge and Mira hauled her the rest of the way up, both girls scraped and breathless, the moon had climbed nearly to its peak.
"How much time," Mira gasped, not even bothering to stand yet.
Kade's face, checking the sky through the nearest high window, told her the answer before he said it out loud.
"Not enough to reach the door and speak the wish properly," he said. "Not walking. We'd arrive just as the window closes."
"Then we don't walk," Mira said, forcing herself upright, pulling Priya with her. "Is there anything faster in this entire cursed hallway system?"
Kade hesitated for exactly one second, which was, Mira was learning, precisely how long he hesitated before making a decision he knew would cost him something.
Priya, still catching her breath from the chasm, looked between the two of them with the particular expression of someone watching a conversation she was choosing, for once, not to comment on out loud.
"There's a warden's path," Kade said. "A shortcut only wardens are supposed to use, straight through the Threshold's oldest corridor instead of around it. It's faster. It's also the same corridor that took the largest piece of my memory the last time I used it carelessly, years ago. It doesn't ask for a toll every time, only when it decides you're not moving with true purpose. I don't know which version of the path we'll get tonight."
"You don't have to do this," Mira said, catching his arm before he could start down the narrow corridor. "There has to be another way that doesn't risk what's already left of you."
"There isn't time to look for another way, Mira. That's rather the point of a warden's shortcut. It exists for exactly this kind of moment, when there's nothing left to spend but the thing you were hoping to protect." His voice gentled, just slightly, at the look on her face. "I've walked this path before and come out the other side mostly intact. The odds are better than you think."
"Mostly intact is not the same as intact."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't. But it's the best odds either of us has got tonight, and I would rather spend them trying to get you and Priya home than save them for a version of tonight where I stood still and did nothing."
"Kade," Mira said, quiet and steady, "I am not letting you pay for this."
"You're not letting me do anything," he said, already turning down the narrower corridor branching off to their left, silver light bleeding faintly from its walls. "I'm choosing it. There's a difference, and I'd like you to remember I made it freely, whatever happens next."
Priya, still catching her breath, grabbed Mira's hand as they ran after him, both of them saying nothing, because there was nothing left to say that would slow the moon's climb or lessen whatever the warden's path was about to ask of the person who had already given it more than enough.
The corridor's walls narrowed as they ran, silver light pulsing faster and faster in time with something that felt, unmistakably, like a heartbeat, and just as the amber door came into view at last, glowing at the corridor's end, Kade staggered, one hand flying to his temple as though something had reached into his skull and pulled.
"Kade!" Mira caught his arm before he could fall.
"I'm fine," he said, though his voice had gone strange, distant, and when he looked at her, for one terrible heartbeat, his eyes held no recognition at all. Then it cleared, sharp and present again, and he shook his head hard, as though physically dislodging whatever fog had settled there. "I'm fine. We don't have time. Run."
They reached the amber door with the second moon hanging directly overhead, its light pooling silver blue across the fist shaped handle, and Mira did not let herself look too closely at the new, unfamiliar blankness she thought she'd glimpsed behind Kade's eyes, because there was no time left to be afraid of anything except the door closing before she got the chance to say the words that might finally set all three of them free.