Séverin felt Hypnos, Laila, and Enrique drawing closer. Enrique sucked in his breath.

“You found it,” he said softly. “But how do we get it open?”

Séverin frowned, staring at the statue. “In the image, the siren’s mouth dropped open … triggering the entrance.”

He reached out, tracing the exquisitely carved feathers that sprouted along the siren’s cheekbones and melted into her hair. Her mouth had been shaped into a pursed, angry line. Her eyes were closed shut.

Séverin paused. Lightly, he touched the statue’s eyelids.

“A siren sings to lure in sailors … but to do that … they must spot you in the water,” he said.

“So?” asked Enrique.

“This statue’s eyes are closed … which means she cannot see us,” said Séverin. “Not yet.”

He pressed his fingers into the statue’s eyelids. The stone gave way, a lost mechanism creaking loudly as the rocky eyelids pulled back.

“What is that?” asked Hypnos, stumbling backwards.

Beneath them, the ground quivered. Séverin flung out his arms, steadying himself. Laila stumbled, and he caught her around the waist, clasping her to him just as milky, quartz stones rolled into the siren’s eye hollows.

“Everyone hold tight to one another—” Séverin started to say, but his words were drowned out as the siren’s jaw unhinged with a sound like growling thunder. The earth around them lurched and fell away, and Séverin barely had time to reach for Enrique’s hand before a clammy darkness swallowed them whole.

25

ZOFIA

Zofia could not comprehend the space around her all at once. Instead, it came in blips of awareness:

The descent—so long she had counted all the way up to seventeen—and the thud. In the end, she did not fall, but stumble, as if she had missed the last step on a staircase.

Something cold touched her toe. Her shoes squelched. A sharp rock had torn a hole through the leather. Beneath her boots, Zofia could faintly make out the damp silt ground, the kind that belonged to the shores of a lake.

Her ears buzzed. She blinked and blinked, but she could not see anything beyond a circle of light, the circumference of which was hardly more than three meters. Its source came from hundreds of meters above them, which Zofia recognized as the opening from which they had fallen. To cross that much space and feel it as nothing more than a stumble indicated they had fallen through several Tezcats to arrive here.

But what was here?

Zofia could hear her friends calling and shuffling around her, but she tuned them out. One thing at a time, she told herself. She had to parse this sense by sense … starting with sight.

Cloying darkness pressed all around them. Zofia felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. Dimly, she heard her mother’s voice.

Be a light, Zosia.

With trembling hands, Zofia tore off one of her pendants and reached for a match. Even before she could see what lay before her, she did not like what she smelled. The cave was earthen and sweet, but musty. Like summer ponds full of sickly green water and buzzing flies. A faint, coppery note lingered beneath it all. It reminded her of blood. A damp chill settled into her clothes.