“Claire, please stop,” Myrnin said raggedly. “You can’t see. You don’t know how dangerous this is.”

“Describe it to me. Help me! If you don’t, I’ll just keep walking.”

“That’s exactly what she wants. She wants you to try to reach me—” Myrnin broke off with a small cry of pain.

“Myrnin?” Claire forgot all about being careful, and took a step forward. Too fast. She felt the stone snap and crumble and fall away, dark on dark, and she teetered off balance over the edge of a hole that led to the center of the world, apparently. She didn’t even hear the falling rocks hit bottom.

Claire slowly shifted her weight to her back foot and stepped back to solid stone again. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt, and she couldn’t seem to slow down her panicked breathing.

“Myrnin, you have to help me,” she said. “Tell me which way to go. We can do this.”

“Even if you reach me, it’s no help to either of us,” he said. “She has me. There’s no point in your dying, as well.”

“Just tell me how to get there.”

After a few silent seconds, Myrnin said, “Two steps to your right, then one forward.” As she accomplished that, he said, “Claire, she’s right. I did take advantage of her. She did love me. I used that to get what I wanted from her.”

“You mean, like a guy?” Claire counted steps carefully, then stopped. “Next.”

“One step forward, then one diagonally to your left. What I did was considerably worse than you think. I made her a vampire so I could have a reliable assistant, one who loved me and would never betray me. I made her a slave.”

“Next. And one thing I can tell you about Ada, she was never a slave, not to you or anybody else. And you really did love her, or you wouldn’t have kept her locket all these years.”

“Another step straight to your left, then six forward. And don’t be daft. I keep gum wrappers. It doesn’t mean I love the gum that was once in them.”

She counted. He didn’t say anything else. Once she got to the end of the directions, she said, “Next. I’m not wrong about Ada. You did love her.”

“Straight ahead, one step.”

“You’re not going to tell me I’m wrong?”

“What’s the point? Three steps to your right.”

“The point is to keep us talking so I’m not so terrified out of my mind,” she said. “What are we going to do about her?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.”

“I’m there. Next? Also, there’s got to be something. What about—” She was about to say the reset code, and he must have known it, because he let out a sharp hiss for silence. She swallowed the words.