Why aren’t you dead?
Naranpa froze. That wasn’t Mama.
A feeling, like someone digging through her mind and picking through memories the way she rifled through papers in the tower library. Someone looking for something. Something inside her head.
How did you do it, Sun Priest? Did you read the stars to thwart your fate? Why were you not on Sun Rock when the crow god came?
Fury flooded her mind. Not her own but from someone enraged at her defiance.
The grip around her throat tightened. She tried to scream again, and this time blood poured from her mouth. It dripped down her chin, across her chest. It spread like a living thing, covering her body in a sticky rust-colored blanket. Her resistance crumbled at the horror of it.
Another voice bubbled up. Sorcery? How?
The voice was different. Older, masculine. She recognized it immediately. It was Kiutue, her old mentor. She knew it couldn’t be him, that whatever was digging through her mind was not real. But she felt his presence nonetheless, his shock and disappointment at her heresy. She bent under the burden. The blood oozed down her naked torso, past her thighs, over knees and calves and feet.
Yet another voice slithered into her ear. Oh, Nara. You should have died that day.
Iktan? Her mouth worked around the name, her lips remembering its sweetness, even now. Iktan’s voice was so real it made her weak with want. She knew xe was as seductive as the serpent whose clan xe had been born to, and as treacherous. And yet she desired.
But do not worry. There is a remedy to every problem.
Look! You’re bleeding already.
She looked down. The blood now covered her entire body as if someone had painted it on.
Painted it on.
Her mind shuddered.
A dream. This was all a dream. Her mother had never asked her about what she had learned as a dedicant in the tower, Kiutue had never scolded her for heresy, and Iktan… oh, the ache in her heart at xir betrayal felt the most real of it all, but even that was wrong. Iktan had torn the tower apart to try to save her in the end. Heat flared in her chest, a mini-sun ablaze. It was enough to illuminate the cracks in her tangled nightmare. She grasped the edges of the dream and heaved. Reality rushed in, filling her all at once. She remembered the apprentices painting her body in the witch’s blood, the salt burning her mouth. The bridge, her wild leap, being dragged from the river by—
“Zataya!” she cried.
“Who?” a man in a white jaguar skin asked.
The dream broke.
She reared up from the place where she lay. Her head slammed into a ceiling inches above her. Fabric bound her arms to her side, covered her face, and she sucked it in, choking. Thick clots of earth broke free and cascaded down from the roof. She rolled instinctively, flailing as she tried to free herself from the blanket and avoid the small avalanche she had loosed.
And then she was falling. A short drop, but she could not brace herself, and the ground was hard. It knocked the little air she had from her lungs with the force of a fist. She lay for a moment, stunned. Pain radiated across her back, and she labored to breathe through the cloth. She frantically worked her arms free, finally tearing the blanket from her face. She gulped air as her eyes adjusted to the anemic light in the room. It shone from the dwindling remnants of a small resin candle in a lantern just past her feet. She could see she was underground… in a tomb.
Adrenaline shot through her body, her mind bubbling in panic. Think, Nara! She chided herself. There is air here, and light. And no matter where this is, you are very much alive. That small sliver of logic calmed her panic. She blinked dirt from her eyes and forced herself to think through what had happened and where she could possibly be.
She could see she was, in fact, in a tomb, but she did not allow the terror of it to swallow her mind. She rolled to her hands and knees and crawled to the lantern. Next to it was a clay bowl full of water and a modest meal—corn, a handful of pi?ons, and roasted cacao laid out on an oversized leaf.
She recognized the food. It was a spirit meal, something Dry Earth relatives left for the deceased to feed them on their journey to the ancestors, for while the Sky Made burned their dead with star maps in their hands, the Dry Earth buried theirs in the endless catacombs deep below the Maw. She laughed, and the sound that came from her mouth was a dry cackle that echoed deranged in her ears.
She ate the spirit meal, even the dry, rubbery leaf. Perhaps it was sacrilegious, but she was the one it was meant for, after all, and she was starving. She wasn’t sure how long she had been in this place, but the gnawing pit in her stomach told her that her last meal had been long ago. After she was sated, or at least had had enough to clear her mind and soothe her parched throat, she sat back to assess her situation.
“Where are you, Nara?” she said aloud. There was an exit to her right, a gaping mouth of a hole that she would have to crawl through to leave. The thought of dragging herself into the dark sent a shudder down her spine, but what choice did she have? Did it matter that she could not see the path forward when her only other option was to stay and perish? She could wait for someone to come back and find her, but how long would that be? Hours? Weeks? Never? Once before, she had put her faith in rescue, and no one had come. She would not make that mistake again.
She looked around the room for anything else she might use. There was the ever-diminishing light of the lantern, the blanket she had been wrapped in, and the now-empty water bowl. Very little to free her from this hell. But there was nothing to be done about it, and nothing else to do, so she gathered her meager items and crawled on her hands and knees into the darkness.
Her journey was awkward. She wore the blanket as a dress, tucked under one arm and knotted on the opposite shoulder. She slipped the bowl into a makeshift pouch at her shoulder, and she used one hand to hold the lantern. Her progress was slow but always forward. Once she passed a deep black hole of darkness on her left, the sudden lack of a wall enough to make her yelp in fear. She shone her lantern into the gaping mouth of earth. Light bounced off bare dirt walls, illuminating nothing but more dirt. She kept going.
She stopped once and fell into an exhausted sleep. She woke, forgetting where she was, her resin light extinguished. The dark was heavy around her, palpable.
“Help me!” she cried, to whom or what she had no idea. But to her surprise, something answered her.
Her chest burned, and a strange glow emanated from her palms. Her eyes brightened with their own light. At first, she did not believe it. It was, after all, impossible. But she was alive, and that was impossible, too. Bewildered but too grateful to question this blessing, she lifted a hand. The glow illuminated the path in front of her for a dozen paces. It was not much, but it was good enough.
She crawled.
Time stretched beneath the earth, long and endless, fifteen minutes indistinguishable from fifteen hours. Once she hit a dead end, and terror clutched at her throat, but a hand against the blockage proved the wall to be soft, and she used the old water bowl as a shovel and dug it out enough to squeeze through.
Her knees were rubbed raw, her palms scraped and began to bleed. The food she had eaten had long ago passed through her body, and her belly was taut with hunger yet again. She was exhausted, and hopelessness threatened to bury her, as sure as the earth around her. But she kept going, warmed by the unnatural heat in her chest and hands. She would not die here and prove right that voice in her dream. She would not.