Page 49 of The Deadliest Candidate (The Last Grand Archivist #1)

Chapter forty-nine

The Promise

Fern hurtled through the darkness and crashed into the water.

The impact shook her bones, the shock of the cold wrenched the breath from her lungs. She struggled, kicking desperately to make her way back to the surface. She broke through with a gasp and was immediately pulled back under. A forceful current dragged her down, and she fought with all her might against it.

She reached the surface and broke it once more, gulping air in. Her arms beat ceaselessly to keep her afloat, her every muscle fighting the water. She stared around wildly, her hair a cold wet mask over her eyes and cheeks, searching desperately for some light, some purchase, anything.

Two dim lamps, set into iron grids at each end of the pool, glowed faintly. Emmeline was close by, her pale face catching the feeble light. She hung over a pipe, her arm stretched out, her mouth open in yells Fern could not hear over the roar of the water, the splashing of her thrashing limbs .

Fern nodded anyway, blinking the water out of her eyes. She swam, still clutching her dagger. The pain of her injured arm and burnt hands was crushed in the teeth of her terror. She could not drown, not here, not like this. She would not allow herself to die. Fighting with all her might, she heaved through the water, crawling towards Emmeline.

Their hands met, grasped, slipped.

Fern was dragged under with a helpless scream. She kicked and beat the water with her arms, shoving herself back up with a desperate push. She thought of letting go of Oscar’s dagger, but she could not bring herself to. She threw out her free arm.

It found Emmeline’s, her fingers wrapped around clammy skin.

Emmeline pulled with a yell, and Fern slammed against the pipe chest-first. She held on tight, heaving herself up so that she was resting on the metal. She squeezed her eyes closed and took deep, shaky breaths.

The shock receded, and in its place the cold and the pain hit Fern like a battering ram to the gut.

She hissed air in through chattering teeth, forcing herself to be calm. Panic would kill her faster than the water or the pain would. She breathed into the fear and through it, forcing it back. Fear was a luxury she could not afford right now.

She wiped her face with shaky movements, sniffing away the water in her nose. She opened her eyes and turned towards Emmeline, shakily slipping her dagger back into its sheath at her waist.

The young woman was staring at her with huge, terrified eyes. Her skin was marbled, her lips bluish. Her hair clung to her head and body like red seaweed. She was shaking violently, her teeth chattering.

Fern wrapped her arm around Emmeline’s trembling shoulders, pulling her closer. She had little body heat to share, but she could offer comfort if nothing else. A desperate need clawed at Fern to comfort Emmeline, to help her, to save her. How much did this urge come from the alchemist’s fear-drowned eyes and shaking shoulders, and how much came from shivering orphans and a frightened historian?

“Are you alright?” Fern asked. A useless question—of course she wasn’t.

Emmeline nodded, but her eyes were brimming with tears.

“My brother, my brother,” she said. “Is he coming?”

“I came alone,” said Fern, wondering if that had been her greatest mistake yet. “How long have you been here, Emmeline?”

“I don’t know anymore,” she said weakly. “It’s so dark in here.”

Fern rubbed Emmeline’s arm through the sodden silk of her sleeve. She had probably been here for days, clinging to that pipe. It was a wonder she had lasted this long.

“Do you know how you got here?”

Emmeline shook her head. “N-no. I-my key wasn’t working, I couldn’t get into my apartment. I left my brother’s side only for a moment, but I-I couldn’t get in.”

Fern’s heart sank; the same thing that had happened to Josefa.

“I was on my way back to Teddy to ask him for help.” Emmeline’s eyes were wild and full of tears. “Then the lights went out. Something hit me hard. I fell. I don’t remember anything else. My brother, my brother, he must be—”

“Do you think you know who hit you?” Fern asked.

Emmeline shook her head again. “I woke up as I hit the water, all I could do was try not to drown. They never came back, I’ve been alone. In the dark, alone, alone, without Teddy, because of what I did, a common life for a divine life, as below, so above. I tried to call for help, but nobody came. Until you. I thought Teddy would come, but it’s you .”

The words flowed from Emmeline’s mouth unchecked, making little sense to Fern, barely audible over the churning roar of the sewers. Fern took Emmeline’s hand and squeezed her fingers.

“Listen to me. We need to make our way back to Edmund, he’s looking for you. But to do that, we need to find a way out.”

Tears ran freely down Emmeline’s face. Her discoloured lips trembled. “There’s no way out. The walls are too slippery to climb, and there are no ladders. My alchemy is useless, all my powers, everything I earned, everything I bled for, Teddy’s blood, it’s all for nothing. We’re trapped.”

Fern looked around. Emmeline was right: there were no ladders, and the pit was deep. The pipes jutting out from the walls were too far apart from one another, making them impossible to climb. And the walls were too steep, slick with slippery lichen.

There would be no climbing out .

Fern turned her gaze downwards. The water gushing down from the pipes gathered in the pit, roiling and swirling, but the water level wasn’t moving up.

Fern’s mind scrambled through the incantations she knew, through all the reading she’d done recently. She rifled through the Elemency books she’d read and glanced down.

“What about the water? Elemency?”

“Even if we had enough power between us,” Emmeline said through chattering teeth, “what could we do? We can’t get rid of the water, or we’d die if we fell.”

“Maybe we could raise it?”

“We’d need to draw it from somewhere.”

Fern looked around at the pipes, gushing darkly. The water was coming from the sewer system, but it was being simultaneously drained, keeping the pool level. Fern looked down into the churning water.

“This is the sewer of Carthane,” she said, almost to herself. “The water must be going somewhere .”

“It is,” Emmeline said shakily.

She indicated one end of the pit, where the pitch-black water frothed murkily as it gathered into a whirlpool.

“There,” said Emmeline. Her voice was a rasp. “The end.”

Fern stared at the whirlpool of water, the speed at which it whirled in on itself. Her insides clenched with terror.

“Not the end,” she bit out. “The egress.”

Emmeline’s eyes widened. “How? It’s completely submerged. There’s no way out, no way out, no way back to him . There’s only water. ”

“Carthane is on the edge of the cliffs; the sewer system must lead out to sea.”

Emmeline let out an exhausted, terrified breath. “And if you’re wrong?”

Then it’ll be one final mistake to set into my crown of errors , thought Fern. But she answered, “What choice do we have?”

It was the truth. If they stayed here, they would die one way or another. Starvation, exhaustion, dehydration, hypothermia. One of those was bound to triumph. Nobody would come for them. Even if Sarlet and her Sentinels were looking, they would not know to search the undercroft, for candidates were not supposed to venture that deep.

Most likely, Emmeline and Fern would be left here until they got too tired to hold on to the pipe. They would slip into the water and drown. Emmeline first, then Fern.

Nobody was coming for them. Fern had come all on her own, without telling a soul. Fern, it would seem, might have made her final error after all. In a way, she had chosen this fate.

If she was to die, the blame would partly be hers.

She could see how frightened Emmeline was; Fern was frightened, too. A terrible, deathly fear that gripped her heart with claws of steel. But time was short—she must make a decision.

“I’m going to go,” she said. “If I—” She interrupted herself. “I’m going to make it, and I’m going to get Teddy, and we’re going to come back for you.”

Emmeline threw her arms around Fern, clutching her, her entire body racked with tremors .

“ Please don’t leave me alone,” she whimpered, voice breaking. “I beg you, don’t leave me alone. She’ll come for me. She’ll make me pay for what I did.”

“Who?” said Fern.

“I don’t want to die alone. I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it.”

The alchemist clung to Fern like a frightened child, shaking with sobs. Her long hair clung onto Fern’s cheeks and lips like cold seaweed. Her arms had the brittleness of seashells. Fern, wrapped into that febrile, desperate embrace, realised almost distantly that Emmeline had probably never been alone in her life. She’d always had Edmund right there at her side.

“Emmeline, listen to me.”

Ignoring her own terror, her own despair, Fern took Emmeline’s face in her hand, smoothing back the sodden hair, wiping the hot tears away.

“If I stay here, we’ll both die. This is our only chance. I’ll come back for you. I swear it on everything I hold dear. I’ll bring Edmund, he’s been worried sick about you. He loves you and misses you, he just needs to find out where you are. Don’t you want me to go get him?”

Emmeline nodded frantically, swallowing back her sobs.

“I’m coming back,” said Fern firmly. “Alright? All you need to do is wait for me. Can you do that?”

Emmeline nodded again. Fern imitated the gesture. “Good. Alright, it’s time for you to let go of me.”

She took Emmeline’s arm and pulled it gently away from her. Emmeline let go, her chin trembling. She was trying to hold back her sobs, trying to mask her sorrow and fear. It made Fern’s guts twist painfully to see the alchemist so transformed, so broken.

“I’m afraid too, Emmeline,” she said quietly. “But all will be well. I promise you.”

And with a great gulp of breath, she pushed away from the pipe and fell into the whirlpool.

Letting go was the hardest part.

After that, everything happened too quickly for fear.