“Bring the rest of the tunnel down. We need to get as far from here as we possibly can.”

Mal.

Was he here? Buried beneath the rubble? I could not let them leave him. I forced my lips to form his name.

“Mal.” Could they even hear me? My voice sounded muffled and wrong to my ears.

“She’s hurting. Should we put her under?” Tamar asked.

“I don’t want to risk her heart stopping again,” replied Tolya.

“Mal,” I repeated.

“Leave the passage to the convent open,” Tamar said to someone. “Hopefully, he’ll think we went out there.”

The convent. Sankta Lizabeta. The gardens next to the Gritzki mansion. I couldn’t order my thoughts. I tried to speak Mal’s name again, but I couldn’t make my mouth work. The pain was crowding in on me. What if I’d lost him? If I’d had the strength, I would have screamed. I would have railed. Instead, I sank into darkness.

* * *

WHEN I CAME TO, the world was swaying beneath me. I remembered waking aboard the whaler, and for a terrifying moment, I thought I might be on a ship. I opened my eyes, saw earth and rock high above me. We were moving through a massive cavern. I was on my back on some kind of litter, borne between the shoulders of two men.

It was a struggle to stay conscious. I’d spent most of my life feeling sick and weak, but I’d never known fatigue like this. I was a husk, hollowed out, scraped clean. If any breeze could have reached us so far below the earth, I would have blown away to nothing.

Though every bone and muscle in my body shrieked in protest, I managed to turn my head.

Mal was there, lying on another litter, carried along just a few feet beside me. He was watching me, as if he’d been waiting for me to wake. He reached out.

I found some reservoir of strength and stretched my hand over the litter’s edge. When our fingers met, I heard a sob and realized I was crying. I wept with relief that I would not have to live with the burden of his death. But lodged in my gratitude, I felt a bright thorn of resentment. I wept with rage that I would have to live at all.

* * *

WE TRAVELED FOR MILES, through passages so tight that they had to lower my litter to the ground and slide me along the rock, through tunnels high and wide enough for ten haycarts. I don’t know how long we went on that way. There were no nights and days belowground.

Mal recovered before I did and limped along beside the litter. He’d been injured when the tunnel collapsed, but the Grisha had restored him. What I had endured, what I had embraced, they had no power to heal.

At some point, we stopped at a cave dripping with rows of stalactites. I’d heard one of my carriers call it the Worm’s Mouth. When they set me down, Mal was there, and with his help, I managed to get into a sitting position, propped against the cave wall. Even that effort left me dizzy, and when he dabbed his sleeve to my nose, I saw that I was bleeding.