“Most certainly, Your Excellency.”
The moment he walked away, Dancer picked up again with twirls and sashays. Larkin sensed the hot anger of the guard as he whirled back toward her, but another guard grabbed his arm. “Just leave her alone. She’ll mess with your head, that one.”
Dancer stopped mid-twirl to wink at Larkin, and Larkin couldn’t help but smile at her defiance. Pointless, perhaps, but amusing.
“You’re good,” Garran called out to Dancer. His kindness even now made Larkin’s heart ache.
“I live to entertain.” Dancer bowed in his direction, and then continued.
Larkin grew bored with watching her and rolled to her back, staring at the cracked stone ceiling. The cellblock was maddeningly quiet, filled only with an occasional groan, the shuffling of Dancer’s feet, and the chill emanating from Garran.
The silence was broken when a man several cells down loudly uttered a prayer to Ilona.
Larkin groaned; her first instinct was to tell the man to shut up.
Another woman beat her to it. “I can see all that praying is working in your favor. Ilona isn’t going to save you, old man.”
A few prisoners from the surrounding cells applauded and jeered, but their mockery was half-hearted. Larkin looked over to Dancer, who had stopped dancing and was peering at her again through the bars. She chewed her bottom lip and waited, as if expecting Larkin to offer her spiritual philosophies.
Larkin took the bait. “Don’t tell me you’re a believer.”
Dancer studied her pointed foot as she trailed it across the floor. “If she’s watching me, I’m sure she’s not all too happy. My troupe’s been telling tales of Kyran’s revenge for years now.”
“You’re from a traveling troupe?” Larkin sat up, intrigued. That explained the dancing and the theatrics. She didn’t know Empaths were allowed to be in a troupe. She thought they weren’t allowed to do anything other than farm or mine.
Dancer nodded eagerly. “How do you think I landed here? Got wrangled into it, if I do say so myself. Mum was transferred to the farm all on her own when she was pregnant with me. Died a few years ago. When you’re on your own like that, you start listening to your friends, you know?”
Friends. Larkin wanted to laugh. Once she and Garran finished up at the mines, they were expected at home. Her family members were her friends. Anyone else, like Adina and her brothers, were nothing more than a wish—a cruel reminder of friends she could have if there were more time in the day.
“Wouldn’t have done it on my own, but all that space and land gets Empaths dreaming up big ideas.” Dancer released a theatrical sigh. “I couldn’t exactly say no. There were five of us who got caught sneaking out of the farm one too many times, and the rest is history.” She dragged her toe across the dirty floor, pensive. “I think about it a lot. All that space. I dance to make this cell seem bigger than it is. If it were any smaller … hells, I’d go mad, I guess.”
So the girl wasn’t mad yet, just on the brink. In the short span of time, Dancer had already grown on her. Which was good considering how long they might be living across from each other.
“You’ll have to tell me one of your tales sometime,” Larkin said.
Dancer brightened, opening her mouth.
“Please, Ilona, not again,” someone groaned from the cell next to Dancer.
Dancer’s mouth snapped shut. She frowned sullenly.
Garran hissed Larkin’s name, distracting her.
Larkin crawled back to the edge of her cell. “I’m here.”
“There’s a farmer in the cell on the other side of me. We got to talking. Remember the people disappearing in the hills? The farmer said they’re disappearing into holes.”
“Disappearing into holes?”
“Holes in the ground. Out in the harvesting fields.”
“Sinkholes? That doesn’t make any sense, Garran.”
“His daughter…” Garran’s inhale rattled in his throat. “He heard his daughter screaming in the field and ran toward her. She was clutching onto the edge, and he had almost made it to her when she couldn’t hold on anymore.”
Holes in the earth—could that be where all the missing harvesters had gone? Had they been swallowed? Larkin had wondered if the farms had been destroyed by magic. But magic didn’t come from the ground. It came from Empaths like her.
Who could be powerful enough? Unless the magic is coming from below. From the—
No.
She batted the Reach and Otheil Kyran from her mind. They were corpses now. He was a corpse.
Garran interrupted her thoughts. “Can you imagine watching someone you love just slip away like that forever?”
“Mum and Dad and Vania are safe in the city,” she reminded him.
“They could be transferred to the farms any day. You know that.”
Garran’s hand slid beyond the bars, and Larkin reached out from her cell and took it again. She shut her eyes, picturing her mother and father near the hearth. Garran helping Vania wash up for supper. The candle on the table in her bedroom that cast shadows on her hands as she conjured the ribbon. The scent of her sister’s hair, her giggle.
Garran squeezed her hand. She knew he could sense her emotions.
Larkin had no hope to give Garran, but she could give him love. Her memories were all she had left. She dwelled within them for what must have been hours, until sleep claimed her.
* * *
Larkin jerked awake as a raw jolt ignited her spine. Shock flowed from the opposite end of the prison. She sat up, murmurings spreading like a slowly burning fire. The stone floor vibrated as prisoners surged toward the fronts of their cells.
Larkin pressed herself against the bars and caught Dancer’s wide, bleary eyes as the girl woke. “What’s going on?”
Dancer crawled toward her. “Something exciting.”
Down the corridor, a cell door creaked open.
“Please, my queen,” a woman sobbed. “I’m getting married!”
My queen? Surely Melay wouldn’t be in the prison. She had guards for her dirty work. Larkin peered through the bars in an attempt to see their newest cellmate, but it was too dark.
Gradually, the sounds of scuffling and the occasional quiet sob grew closer. People were being dragged from their cells.
“Larkin?” Garran called her name quietly.
“It’s all right, Garran.” She couldn’t remember the last time her brother had sounded so small. So terrified. “I’m here.” Maybe if she kept talking, he’d feel better, but she couldn’t think of what to say. “I’m here,” Larkin repeated. “I’m here, I’m here.”
“This block is too full.” A commanding female voice resonated from the front of the hall. “There are more than twenty prisoners waiting to be assigned.”
“The other blocks are at capacity, my—”
“When has that stopped you from making room before, Hathius?”
A cell door creaked open. Larkin strained to see between the bars and glimpsed moving shadows down the hall.
Crushing terror nearly floored her. A wet, viscous noise was followed by a thud, and panic and whimpers rushed through the cellblock. Garran cried her name again, but Larkin couldn’t coax forth a soothing remark.