“Which was?”
She glanced back up at me as she slipped into darkness. “I was four. Dropped my mother’s only good spoon down the privy hole.”
Probably wasn’t her good spoon after that. I lowered myself down after her and pulled the grate back over the hole.
At the bottom, she stood in a cone of slatted light. She’d already pulled out her crystal; the golden-white light illuminated her pale face. She gestured left and right to the ledge and tunnel running into darkness. “Left, right?”
“I haven’t got the first fucking idea. But it’s not the crystal you’ll need—it’s Liora’s stone.”
She pulled out the stone in her other hand, flipped it and caught it. “This?” My chest compressed, and I set my hand over hers before she tossed it again. “This is?—”
“The sol key,” I said.
Her brow lowered. “This.”
I’d watched Liora as she’d handed it over. The preciousness with which she held it, the way her fingertips had lingered on its surface. “Yes. That.”
Her grip tightened on it. “It’s unremarkable.”
“I think that’s the point.”
She turned left, toward the darkness. “So we walk and wait for light.”
“That’s the long and short of it.”
She walked ahead of me, stone in hand. Her braid swung gently as she navigated the ledge. “Did you explore down here as a child?”
“All the time, once I could lift the grates.”
She glanced back. “Surely a group of you could have leveraged one of those up.”
Eury thought her childhood mirrored mine. I only said, “I suppose so.”
She didn’t speak right away; our footsteps echoed as she seemed to take this in. Finally, “You were a loner.” She half-glanced back. “Were you weird?”
I chuffed. “Probably.” Talking with her like this could almost make me forget the smells, and what we walked toward.
“I bet you liked reading.”
“You’d bet right.”
“You and Elisabet would have gotten along. The archivists’ college was about to admit her when…” She slowed, then resumed her pace. “Well, it doesn’t matter.”
Elisabet. The name was vaguely familiar.
Then the memory surfaced. Eury had told me of friends who’d died in the attack on the southern district. Elisabet was one of them.
The thought pierced me. When she’d first told me about Elisabet, the name had slid over me as easily as a breeze. Forgettable, like the face of a stranger.
That was one of her childhood friends. They had memories together, joys and moments and spats I would never know. All gone forever because of me. It probably wasn’t my magic, wasn’t my hand, but what difference did that make?
I was there. I had come to kill.
“Eury—”
“Don’t.” Her boots tapped on the stone, sharp and intent ahead of me; she didn’t look back. “Your apology won’t bring her back. It won’t change my feelings. So don’t.”
I would have rejected an apology, too. Neither of us knew what to do, it seemed, with pure, vulnerable softness.