Thisbe grimaced and closed her eyes. Every movement elicited waves of pain, and at the moment she didn’t really care where they were. Time would only make their injuries hurt more as their muscles stiffened up. “Being unconscious when we fell probably saved us,” she remarked after a while. “We weren’t tensed up for an impact. But these injuries are going to take some time to heal. I’m worried we’ll starve to death before anything else takes us out. Hopefully, our rescue team will be here soon. They should have been tailing us from a safe distance. Maybe they’ll be able to tell us where we are.”

Fifer shifted uneasily. She hadn’t had a chance to tell Thisbe that she’d ordered Florence not to come after them. She had a lot she wanted to talk to Thisbe about, but it would land better once Thisbe was feeling less pain. “Let’s allow the medicine to work,” she said, “and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

They rested quietly for some time in the stairwell, waiting for the magical herbs to take the pain and swelling down a bit and begin the healing process. After a while Thisbe opened her eyes. She was feeling a little better, and now that the mental fuzziness was wearing off, she had a burning question for Fifer. “Did you speak to me in my mind back when we first got abducted?”

“You heard it?” said Fifer, lifting her head. “Good! You did it to me first.”

“I did? How?”

“I have no idea, but something clicked between us when we were walking along the shore. I felt it. It was electric.”

“I felt that too,” said Thisbe. “What do you think it means?”

“Other than we have some mysterious new telepathic ability, I don’t know. I’m thinking it’s similar to how Alex and Aaron used to be able to feel each other’s pain.”

“They couldn’t actually speak to each other, though, like we did. That’s pretty amazing. We’ll have to try again once we can concentrate.” She looked at Fifer’s wrist. “Your swelling is coming down.”

“It feels better. How about your ankle?”

“No longer excruciating. I’m not sure I’ll be walking anytime soon, though.”

“I should go in search of water and food before it gets dark,” said Fifer. She winced, not wanting to move, but she was desperate to know if the Revinir was lurking about. Why had she dropped them here like this? Was it a mistake? Had her limbs just grown too tired to hold on?

“We can survive on the water we have until the others get here,” said Thisbe, who also didn’t want to move. “Is this place totally abandoned? Did the Revinir dump us here for a reason, or did something else happen? If she did, why?”