Elves Invasion

25

“So how did the wild Woven start reproducing?” Ava asked gently.

“It was almost two hundred years ago. An accident—”

“Really?” Ava took a deep breath. “What if it wasn’t?”

His eyes looked inward, and Ava could feel the skin on the back of his neck begin to crawl. “There are so many vats,” he said, starting to think the unthinkable.

“Enough to flood the continent with wild Woven,” she said. “And if you make it so they can reproduce, you’d only need to use the vats once.”

Ava ran a finger through the film of ancient dust that lay on the otherwise-pristine vats. The questions that she’d been asking for months and the answers she’d been given that didn’t sit right with her started to come together into one terrible truth.

“What if the wild Woven were designed to reproduce like crazy, designed to be poisonous so humans couldn’t survive by eating them, designed to attack humans even if they weren’t provoked? There are too many things about them that don’t make sense, too many rules, unless you start thinking that they weren’t an accident.” She tapped the side of the vat. “These certainly weren’t made on accident.”

Windyard sat down hard on the dusty ground. He was looking into the empty palms of his hands, but he wasn’t seeing anything. Ava sat down next to him and leaned her back against the steel. She could feel a thousand thoughts running through his head, like clouds racing across a wind-blown sky, and she waited. The thought clouds in his mind turned dark and crackled with lightning. Finally, he looked up at her.

“We need to find out why. I need to know what happened, not just guess,” he said. “Ivan knows. That’s why he sent us down here.” He laughed bitterly. “A parting gift before we walked out the door.”

Ava nodded. She could feel a yawning pain building in him at the thought of all the people he’d lost to the Woven. Of the childhood that was stolen from him by violence and hunger. She wrapped her arms around him and let him squeeze her tightly to the ache in his chest. No matter how many times Ava tried to push him out, Windyard managed to dig down deeper into her. He was fitted inside her so tightly now that no blame or bitterness between them could keep her from wanting to protect him from this terrible lie he’d lived with all his life.

Ava. Come quick. You have to see this.

Windyard and Ava jumped to their feet, both of them feeling the urgency in Tristan’s call in mindspeak, and hurried in his direction. Ava noticed that the floor had begun to slope upward, when she slipped on something. Windyard’s hand shot out and steadied her before she fell to her knees. She looked down.

“What is that?” she asked. She and Windyard inspected the coating on the floor. Windyard crouched down and touched the slippery substance, rubbing fingers and thumb together.

“I think it’s wax,” he said.

They kept moving forward and noticed that the wax also covered a pillar they passed. The rows of womb combs and vats ended, and the coating grew thicker until their feet were sinking into it.

“I see the rest of the coven’s tracks,” Windyard said. They continued on, careful of their footing, as they went down a series of ever-shrinking tunnels.

The passageway continued to narrow until they were walking down a thin tube. Hexagons rose out of the surface. Ava could smell something sweet in the air. She saw Windyard breathe it in.

“Honey,” he said. He looked around. “We’re in an old honeycomb.”

They reached a bottleneck and had to squeeze through. The cavern they entered was stuffy, and it smelled of musk and honey. Ava saw her coven’s backs. They were facing something. She felt their shock as they parted and let her through.

Sunk deep into the wax was a giant throne. On the throne, propped up by many velvet pillows, reclined the satin-clad torso of a woman. Trailing off to the side where her legs should have been was a pale, distended abdomen that ballooned up and out of the throne room into titanic proportions. Atop the human torso were the ovoid head and bulbous eyes of an insect, and around the Queen’s neck hung a golden willstone.

Carrick couldn’t see Ava and her coven leave—they were moving much too fast for his eyes to follow—but he could feel that one moment there were people in Ava’s suite of rooms, and the next it was empty.

He cursed silently to himself. Lillian could have used those speaking stones to send him enough power to follow them had he thought to ask, but he’d been banking on Ava’s coven staying one more night. They’d cased the city all day, and then there was that long silence this evening—which he was sure was them plotting to make a break for it—but Carrick had his little brother pegged as too cautious to leave right away with no supplies and no horses. Someone else must be calling the shots. Maybe even Ava herself. She was rash enough.

Didn’t matter. They had vanished and now Carrick had no excuse to give Lillian. Mala didn’t concern him. She wanted Ava gone one way or another, so she wouldn’t care much that they had fled the city. Mala had served her purpose by giving him enough cover to get him out of his plush jail cell. Lillian, however, would demand to know where Ava went. He was supposed to be watching her and filling in the gaps of information that Ava wasn’t sharing with Lillian in mindspeak, like the existence of the speaking stones and Grace’s fixation on solving the riddle of the two Lillians. Ava had been very forthcoming with Lillian, but that didn’t mean she was sharing everything, and Lillian wanted to know everything about Bower City before she attacked.

Carrick scanned the smooth floor. He didn’t think he’d be able to track Ava and her coven across marble, but he had to at least try. Still angry with himself for his miscalculation, he started down the main stair and through the foyer. Something told him that the coven had headed toward the government buildings. Maybe it was Ava’s power he was sensing, or his brother’s ever-lingering sadness, but he followed his hunch all the way to a door into nothing.