Kate Brian: Endless

But the more I got to know Joaquin, the more I respected him. He truly cared about his charges, about his friends, and about this place. And when things had started to go sideways, he’d basically become my personal bodyguard. And over the past few days, since we’d found out Tristan was the big bad around here, we bonded even more. No one wanted to find Tristan more than we did. Joaquin had been his best friend. I’d been Tristan’s girlfriend. (Would-be-ex-girlfriend the second I saw him again.) We needed to find him. We needed to ask him that one burning question: Why?

It was what kept us going—the hope that we would one day get the answers we were looking for: why he had done what he’d done, how he could betray everyone he claimed to care about, and, most important, how to free my dad and Aaron and Jennifer and those other poor souls. What I didn’t know was what we were going to do with Tristan and Nadia—another Lifer who’d disappeared with Tristan—once we’d found them. My brain didn’t even want to go there.

“I think it’s down there,” Joaquin said, squinting downward, tiny droplets clinging to the ends of his thick eyelashes. “I noticed the pathway the other day. It’s kind of like a series of steps cut into the rock.”

I didn’t see anything, but I shrugged. “You lead the way.”

Together we started slowly and carefully down the side of the drop-off. My foot slipped on the very first step, and Joaquin’s grip on me tightened. We both froze.

“You good?” Joaquin asked.

I nodded mutely.

“Okay. Stay behind me and be careful.”

He didn’t have to ask me twice.

We descended the steep stairway in silence, and I focused on the sound of my own breathing, the plop of raindrops on my hood, the crashing of the waves far below, and the cautious positioning of my feet. But I couldn’t help thinking of the look on Tristan’s face the day we’d found the bag of tainted coins in his room. The realization in his gorgeous blue eyes that he’d been caught.

I wasn’t stupid. I knew what I’d seen. Tristan was guilty. I just wished my heart would catch up with my brain and start believing it.

After what seemed like a lifetime, Joaquin jumped the last couple of feet to a foot-wide stretch of broken shells and sand that ran along the foot of the rocks. I leaped down after him, lifted my head, and saw it—the wide-open mouth of a cave.

“Score,” Joaquin said.

Every inch of my skin flushed with heat, making me itch beneath my vinyl jacket. Tristan was in there. Maybe with Nadia, maybe not. Either way, we were about to get some answers.

And I was going to see him again.

I narrowed my eyes and clenched my teeth. Stupid heart.

Through the fog and the rain, I noticed a pile of something white and gray near the mouth of the cave. As we edged closer, I saw the blood. The glassy eyes, the twisted necks, the torn and shredded feathers. Dead seagulls. Dozens of them. Broken, deformed, and staring. Flies buzzed around their misshapen heads, and as I watched, one of them landed hungrily on the dome of a wide, glassy eye. Within seconds a swarm of them had engulfed the seagull’s skull.

Then the wind shifted and the stench hit me like a brick in the face. I turned my nose away and covered my mouth with a hand.

“Just keep walking,” Joaquin said, quickening his steps.

We passed by the carcasses and into the coverage of the cave. The sand near the opening was thick and sloppy, and my sneakers let out a sucking sound every time I lifted a foot. I nudged my hood from my head, relieved to be out of the rain even as my breath quickened. I could already smell the pungent scent of a recent fire.

Joaquin and I locked eyes. He tugged his flashlight from his jacket pocket but didn’t turn it on, and he raised one finger to his mouth. I nodded. Moving in sync, we tiptoed forward. Joaquin paused for a moment at a corner and peeked around it. He visibly relaxed and flicked on his light.

“They’re not here.”

Deflated, I stepped out into an open area of the cave, the ceiling only five inches from the crown of my head. It was a wide space, and as Joaquin flashed his light to and fro, something caught my eye against the far wall.

“There!”

I grabbed his shoulder and pointed. Joaquin swung the beam back around, and it caught on something—a blue-and-white blanket. We raced for it. I got there first and dropped to my knees. The sand in this part of the cave was cold but dry. I whipped the blanket aside and stopped breathing. Underneath it was a crowbar, a first aid kit, and a hammer, with a few balled-up, bloody bandages tossed alongside. There were also two small piles of folded clothes—his and hers—several granola bars still in their wrappers, and three full bottles of water.

“So they were here,” I whispered, irritated at the flash of jealousy I felt at the sight of Tristan’s clothes folded next to Nadia’s in such a cozy-couple way. Outside, thunder rumbled, but it was muted by the miles of rock over our heads.

“What were they doing with a crowbar?” Joaquin asked, crouching. He tentatively picked up one of the bandages by the clean end. “And whose blood is this?”

I shivered. “I don’t want to know.”

Joaquin dropped the scrap back into the sand and stood up, dusting off his hands. He was tense. I grabbed the light and flashed it along the floor, finding the remnants of their fire. It was still smoldering. Joaquin cursed under his breath.

“We just missed them,” he said. “They were right here.”

“Well, this is good, right? They can’t have gotten far.” I shoved myself up, the adrenaline pumping. “We can track them.”

“How?” Joaquin demanded, whirling on me. “It’s not like they’re leaving footprints out there! The rain’ll make sure of that!”

“You don’t have to yell at me,” I shot back. “What do you want to do? Just stand here? Let them get away?”

I turned toward the mouth of the cave, and Joaquin followed, his flashlight beam dancing ahead of us.

“You’re about to go out on a wild-goose chase,” Joaquin muttered. “And it’s going to start getting dark.”

“This whole thing is a wild-goose chase!” I cried, throwing my arms wide. “But this is the best lead we’ve had in three days. We can’t just go home.”

Joaquin grabbed my arm, turning me roughly toward him as I tried to lift my hood.

“But how are you even going to—”

His question was cut off by the distant clanging of a bell. It sounded like one of those old church bells they used to ring at the chapel near my house in Princeton whenever someone got married. Except this wasn’t a merry, celebratory song. It was a frantic, uneven plea. Joaquin went white.

“What is that?” I asked.

“The bell.” He turned away, facing south toward town, which wasn’t visible from the foot of this cliff.

“Yes, I know it’s a bell,” I said. “What does it mean?”

“It means there’s an emergency.” He scrambled back toward the rocky stairway, past the pile of seagull carcasses, and over the broken shells.

“What kind of emergency?” I asked, sliding and slipping after him.

He paused with one foot on the third step, stretching his long legs as far as they would go, and looked back over his shoulder. I’d never seen him so terrified.

“I don’t know,” he said. “That bell hasn’t been rung since Jessica got those innocent people damned to the Shadowlands, Rory. It hasn’t been rung in a hundred years.”

The rain stung my face as we sprinted toward town, my feet slipping on fallen leaves, my lungs burning from the effort. My nostrils prickled with the ominous scent of dank, billowing smoke. Over the constant thrum of the rain and whooshing of the wind, I caught an errant scream, echoed by a dozen more. Joaquin’s eyes were wild as they met mine, and we ran even harder.