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But Ruby cannot answer. She can only stare down into her palms, at the abused parchment, inked in words meant for the Queen.

Your Majesty,

I’ve left the means with which to find me…

Whatever else is written remains obscured by the object that rests upon the cursive.

A slightly bent, silver ring. A gaudy bauble of little value, except perhaps for the small onyx stone it encases. Ruby recognises it instantly.

Ryon Mesrich’s ring.

CHAPTERTHIRTEEN

“How much farther are we to walk?” a boy asks Ryon. He blinks up at him from the ground, his irritation clear at having been roused.

They all ask it. Every face that wakes and spots Ryon’s through this fucking darkness bids him to relay the very same.How much longer? Are we nearing the end? Surely, we are close?

Ryon turns his face in the vague direction of the voices and says, “Not far,” though it is a lie. Each time it is said, the lie grows heavier, more difficult to carry.

The fifth day within the Chasm looms ahead.

He raises his arms to stretch out his shoulder blades and winces. The wound in his back has closed but not healed. He feels it ache as though the knife still remains. Around Ryon, the Ledge people rise from their makeshift resting places and gather their belongings. They are not the same people who entered the Chasm days before. They are lesser. Diminished. Each wears the same weary expression of fatigue.

Humans weren’t meant for the dark, Ryon has decided.

The echo of hacking and coughing is inescapable. It grates on him. Fingernails on the inside of his skull, scratching at the same spot, over and over. He should be thankful that he has not succumbed to the same illness. But enduring the sounds of it around him feels draining enough.

Ryon bends to shake the shoulder of a late riser – an older male, covered by a threadbare blanket. “Wake up,” he says, shaking the man’s shoulder harder. “We must go,” but the man’s body simply slumps over, his face pressing against the ground. Ryon raises his torch higher, and only then does he make out the ring of darkened soil around the man, as though something had seeped from him.

“What happened?” comes a voice – one he can distinguish even in complete obscurity, if only for the thrum in his veins when he hears it. Dawsyn.

He turns to see her in the light he casts and watches her approach. He notes how grey her pallor looks, how far the dark circles beneath her eyes stretch.

“Dead,” Ryon tells her. “His throat has been sliced.”

“By his own hand, it seems.” She nods to that which Ryon had overlooked. The blood-crusted blade clutched within a stiffened fist. His torchlight glances off the rusty metal.

Dawsyn’s looks down to her own feet. “Fool,” she mutters, though her voice quavers. “Escaping the Ledge, only to lay down and die in the Chasm.” She presses the heels of her palms to her eyes, pushing against whatever thoughts plague her. It seems she is always plagued. Always pushing.

“We will find the end, malishka,” Ryon says. “Not all were equipped to see the journey through.”

The words are meant to reassure her, though Ryon himself is far from reassured. He looks at the man, sees the ring of his blood and feels disturbed.

These Ledge-dwellers, ones of hardy breeding, who forge an impossible existence against such callous land, they are not the kind prone to quitting. This man makes the second human who took a violent end by their own hand and saw it as the lesser of two evils.

Ryon squeezes his eyes closed against the image of Wes, burning amidst flames.

Dawsyn groans, swaying where she stands.

“Steady, girl,” Ryon says, placing his hand on her hip. “Are you all right?” For a moment, Ryon thinks she’ll scoff, or perhaps make some flippant remark and carry onward. Onward with the quest. Headfirst through the next obstacle, and then the next.

Instead, she teeters sideways. Her head falls heavy against his chest.

There is a remarkable sensation that fills him in these small moments – these fragments of time where she devests some invisible outer shell and entrusts herself to him. If only she were aware of his deepest desires, his most selfish wishes. That he covets her. That he would become happily entrusted to shield her for the remainder of his days and forever wonder at his good fortune. He only ever wants to bethis.Forever. He wants to be the place where she lays.

But she is a creature easily startled by hasty advances. And so, he settles for brushing the hair away from her neck and placing his hand against her skin. He draws her subtly closer, though he cannot quite stop the protective curve of his frame creating walls around her.

“What can be done?” she asks. A small surrender. One he cannot yield to – there is little to be done.