Page 36 of Boundless

I was prepared for all of it, prepared to send everything to hell the moment I felt threatened, but…

“This way. It’s not a long walk,” Arez said, pointing her thumb back deeper into that narrow makeshift road between the trees. And without waiting for a reply, she turned around and walked ahead, her every step precise.

Betty and I looked at one another for a moment. Focused on our ears, our eyes.

There was nobody here that we could see, and all we heard was owls hooting in the distance.

We followed.

It tookus close to twenty minutes to reach the other end of the forest, and even though every little noise made me jump, and my mind was still a mess of made-up scenarios about who could attack me at any given second, nothing happened. The forest was quiet. The golem led us without ever even turning back to look at us, and in the end, we arrived in a closed off area with aNo Entrysign mounted on an almost completely ruined fence.

Behind the fence was the entrance of a tunnel, and it was so dark we didn’t even see it until Arez took us to the other side and continued ahead. Betty grabbed my hand. The sky was almost completely blue with the morning sun, but I still instinctively brought the fae light burning over our heads closer. Not that it made a difference though. The entrance of the tunnel still looked like a monster about to eat us raw. It reminded me of that tree in the Quiet back in Verenthia.

“Are you sure about this, Pink?” Betty called as we went ahead, but the golem didn’t look concerned in the least.

“Of course, I am. I practically live here sometimes. Just keep moving.” She pulled out a flashlight from the pocket of her jacket, then began to whistle a familiar tune.

The tunnel was much smaller than it looked from the outside, possibly the size of the one Rune and I had gone through to get to the Seelie Court from Blackwater before I even healed Lyall. There were no moving plant roots here, though, and Arez’s flashlight together with the fae light that followed my every move chased all the darkness away.

There were discarded cables and tools and pieces of wood, but we only walked for about thirty feet before the golem turned, shone her flashlight up her face, and said, “We’re here.”

She looked terrifying just now, with the light in her eyes, and she knew it. That’s why when Betty screamed a little, she chuckled in delight.

“Sorry, sorry. I’ve just always wanted to do that. Sorry,” Arez muttered, then turned around and just moved into the wall on her side really fast and disappeared from our sight completely.

Instinct took over and I rushed forward, my mind already in chaos because I thoughtthiswas where they came out, whoevertheywere, and surrounded me. Attacked me. Possiblykilledme.

Except Arez had apparently slipped into a hole in the wall I hadn’t seen from the distance, and it led into what looked like a…train station.

I paused, and so did all the thoughts in my head. All the panic.

“What the hell?” I whispered because the hole in the muddy wall was big enough to fit me if I bent over a little—but that wasn’t what shocked me. It wasn’t even the small space, not even forty feet wide before the ceiling collapsed and closed it in, or the ruined railway, or the hole in the ground underneath it.

It was the light that was coming from it that I was having trouble making sense of.

It was bright, its color a silvery white, buzzing with energy. It wasn’t the only source of light, though—there were lanterns mounted everywhere on the walls, all linked to the same wire.

“Welcome. Make yourselves at home,” said Arez, rubbing off imaginary dust from her hands as she looked around the small space, almost like she wasproudof it. Which made no sense to me, either.

But she wasn’t kidding when she said she practically lived here. There were clothes folded in cardboard boxes, and anotherwas full of wires and cables and things I didn’t even know how to name, two laptops on the long table, bright pink pillows, and a big white sheet was mounted on the only wall that was intact in the entire space—for movies,she told Betty when she caught her looking. Old soda cans and water bottles and paper bags from all over were in the corners, and both ends of the room were closed in by rubble. The ceiling had collapsed on either side, together with a piece of ground underneath the railway just in the middle.

The light still buzzed. The floor was set in old white tiles, half broken, like they, too, might collapse any second as I went closer to see the light better, but I didn’t stop. While Arez told Betty all about how she’d connected to electricity and how she’d apparently collapsed the left side of the ceiling herself, I went as close as I could to the railway and looked down.

My gut turned. My magic reacted so violently, so suddenly that I thought for a second it mightpushme right through the metal somehow and throw me into that hole. Into that light that was indeed moving like a fucking river, except it was made out of ribbons of light, not water.

Ribbons—like Rune’s shadows, and the ones that marked my skin. These were made of bright iridescent light, and they were movingcontinuously, though I had no clue whether they went back or forth, or somehow both ways at the same time.

“Nilah.”

A miracle I didn’t jump headfirst into the railway. Maybe I would have if Betty, who’d spoken from right behind me, hadn’t grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to face her.

“What the hell are you looking at? C’mon, she’s got potato chips and water. Want some?” And she waved for me to follow her toward the left of the room, where there was a mattress on the floor and a plastic bag was open to reveal several bags of chips and two big bottles of water.

My ears whistled as I watched Arez take the edge of a piece of pink fabric from one side of the hole through which we’d come and hook it to the nail on the other side. Closing us in, as if she thought someone might come through and find us here. If they did, a piece of fabric wasn’t going to stop them, but I didn’t comment.

“It’s an abandoned train tunnel that does not exist on any map I’ve seen so far, official and unofficial. None of the townspeople know about it—I even sent emails to journalists to ask. It’s like this place never even existed. Not sure where the tunnel led before it collapsed, but this side was a dead end before I blew it up with some dynamite to close it down. There were rats and animals hiding there all the time and it was annoying as hell,” she said as she came to me, and I was just now noticing howfastshe really spoke. “You feel it, right? It’s right there, underneath this entire place. Right there.” And she raised on her tiptoes next to me, trying to see the hole below the railway better, which surprised me.

“I see it,” I told her and was mesmerized by the moving lights all over again.