Page 6 of The Infinite Glade (The Maze Cutter #3)

CHAPTER THREE

Thru the Brush

T he Goddess followed the piggish sounds of squealing terror.

Not always the smartest thing to do.

She felt far more uncertainty than she’d let on, even to herself.

Could it be memories from Crank Palace, bubbling up to the surface of her mind?

Were the sounds in fact joining her in this dense reality?

The horrific sights of war had shaken her beliefs, momentarily.

She’d almost gone mad before the children found her.

But they heard the hog squeal, too . She focused on what she knew to be true and recited the digits.

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 . . .

Her feet sank into the wet, soft dirt of the inland, a mess not meant for a God. Never in her memory had her feet both burned with pain while feeling so completely frozen. Flaring Discipline be damned she grew so tired of these contradictions. She needed a steady truth. The Principles. The digits.

21, 34, 55, 89 . . .

Although war’s flames filled the sky above her with smoke, she felt the red blanket of the aurora creeping in.

The Pilgrims would never trust the sky above them again.

They’d never believe her now that the aurora had lost its mystery and danger.

And so be it, they might as well be dead.

Those who denied the Evolution, who feared the future, weren’t deserving of its gifts.

In a way, the war was a blessing.

Purging Alaska of those who doubted her and the righteous Evolution.

Her feet took her further inland and she moved quickly around bushes of wild rose hips tangled and overtaking what had once been a clearing for fishermen.

With every step, she recited the digits.

The Goddess couldn’t help but laugh to herself, just a little.

The army could take away anything on the surface of Alaska that they wanted to.

They could even damage the reputation of the aurora in the sky for those Pilgrims who lived to remember it as a precursor to war rather than Evolution .

. . but that army could never, ever, touch the Maze below her feet.

No. The Maze would remain sacred.

And she would rebuild her city underground.

Yes. What was old would be new again.

She stepped over swampy puddles and entered a field of thick brush where she saw the gleam of metal.

A crashed Berg, all hulking metal and angles and joints.

She crept closer to its heavy mass, looked through a dusty window.

What she saw inside didn’t surprise her, but it amused her in the darkest fashion.

The Evolution had brought Sadina and the Cure to her, and here she stood watching Mikhail thrash like a trapped rat.

Ah, Mikhail. Strapped inside the Berg. Squealing like the mad animal he had always been.

She almost laughed at the absurdity of the sound.

“SQUUUUEEEE . . .” Mikhail’s body flailed and thrashed. Alexandra moved closer to see the extent of damage the incompetent fool had done to himself this time. Where was he hurt, besides the depths of his mind? She knocked on the glass of the Berg three times.

Mikhail’s eyes remained closed, squeezed shut in what looked to be utter agony.

But she saw no blood on his face or broken bones jutting from his skin.

She opened the door to the Berg and lifted the bottom of her Pilgrim’s cloak as she stepped inside.

“Mikhail.” A putrid smell assaulted her nostrils.

“Mikhail!” She slapped him hard across the face; his eyes opened—wide, searching, terrified.

Stuck inside the Berg and stuck inside his own mind, his pupils were dilated. Unfocused. Mad.

“Dorogaya.” He whispered nonsense.

Alexandra finally recognized the smell. Turmeric and urine.

She looked down at Mikhail’s lap and he had indeed pissed himself.

“You’ve done well, Mikhail.” She said it with the usual sarcasm reserved for the inferior mind.

He never understood the simple confines of speech after The Gone.

Simple words, idioms, figures of speech passed through him without sense or meaning.

Mikhail sputtered out more words as he wiggled back and forth, his right arm still blindly searching for the latch of the belt to release his body. “I did it. It took decades, but I did it.”

Alexandra could easily have leaned over and clicked it open, but she didn’t. No. She wouldn’t. Not until he explained more about what he did or didn’t do.

“You did it,” she repeated. Nicholas had taught her long ago that the best way to get someone else to admit everything they’d never planned on telling you was to repeat their last three words.

Mikhail’s past-the-Gone mind was far too simple to understand such manipulation.

Even Nicholas—who taught her that very trick—was too simple to know when she practiced it on him.

It had been the only way she could safely have a conversation with him.

The only way she knew how to keep him from reading her own mind—to repeat what he wanted to hear.

“I did it,” Mikhail said again. “The Golden Room of Grief held me as I told the Remnant Nation how to build their army and how to weaken ours.” He laughed, his eyes now closed.

“I stood in the middle of blood-red walls and with a hooded cloak and told them all your secrets. All it took to take the Godhead down.” He laughed again with those eyes squeezed shut.

“Nicholas’ plan was never going to stop. You were never going to stop . . .”

It took all of Alexandra’s energy to not react. Scream. Kill him right there.

Mikhail was a damn fool.

She slowly inhaled a deep breath, reciting the digits in backward order. Starting with the largest in her mind and counting down. Mikhail was just stupid enough to tell her more if she asked. “Never going to stop?” she repeated. He was right about that. No one could stop her.

No one and nothing could stop the Evolution.

“The lies would never stop . . .” Mikhail murmured and his voice faded. She slapped him back to consciousness. “Lies!” he shouted.

Mikhail’s life was the lie. Nicholas should have never brought him back from The Gone.

“You never stopped being weak,” Alexandra seethed through her teeth. “You never understood what was needed for humanity to rise with the winds.” She leaned in close and whispered her breath against his cheek. “So weak the very air around you threatened to bring you down.”

She slapped him again, hard, stinging her own hand. His eyes shot open and saw her for just a moment before they closed again. Stupid, muttering fool. She looked around the Berg. How inept did Mikhail have to be to land it so poorly? Nicholas would shake his head in shame —if he had a head to roll.

“To take you down,” Mikhail muttered, his eyes fluttering. St. Petersburg burned in the distance; the land would be scarred for eternity. She winced, but knew well enough not to scream out all the obscenities she wanted to hurl at Mikhail—the islanders might hear and would surely come running.

The space between Alexandra’s eyebrows burned. She pinched it. It took all she had to hold back a deep, visceral string of words. She instead whispered to him, quiet and calm.

“Dear Mikhail, you have not taken me down.” Her mind’s eye blossomed red with anger, her vision static again, but her words floated with incredible force, as if someone else had taken over her body.

She held this man hostage with her hatred.

The red aurora completely blanketed her mind.

“I am standing here. And I am alive. The city and the people will suffer, but the Evolution will live on forever. You are a failure.” She couldn’t help but smile, feeling a bit mad herself—but the Cure waited for her along the coast. She would travel to the Villa, and all of this would be but a blip in history.

A small, meaningless, bump in the road to Evolution.

Those who don’t evolve, die.

“No . . .” Mikhail groaned.

“Yes. You couldn’t do what you needed to, so you trained an entire army to kill me—but they are failures, too.

” For just a moment, she was flattered for what Mikhail had gone through, sneaking off every other month for years to gather an army.

She felt certain his absences and the Hollowings were intertwined.

That he initiated the Hollowings to kill others in order to satiate his own need for madness, just enough to focus on his main task at hand.

And what an opulent plan it was. What an absurd waste of time to train hundreds of soldiers to rise up and kill her, while he couldn’t find his way out of a crashed Berg.

The Evolution took care of itself, as it always did.

Flaring justice. Flaring justice.

“It wasn’t you . . .” Mikhail’s head dropped to his shoulder. Confusion. Madness.

She slapped him awake again. “Speak!”

Mikhail coughed. “It’s not just about you.

Your ego . . .” He choked out a laugh. “Your ego is as big as your vision, if you think this war is just about you!” He coughed again.

“The Godhead is everything your ideas touched. Every place you put your plan into motion. It’s all been a lie.

Everything’s a lie that had to be destroyed so the truth .

. . the truth could evolve back to it’s original form . . .”

Alexandra’s stomach burned. The truth. Mikhail didn’t know his ass from an eyelash.

“What do you know about the truth?” she asked, remembering all the ways Mikhail’s nightmares had become his reality.

All the nightmare images of fire and war that he’d discussed with Nicholas.

He had created the very thing he feared most.