Rachel Caine - Fade Out

“Ada, please.” Myrnin sounded very weak; Claire could hardly believe it was really him. “I do love you. I always have. Please stop this. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re not well. Let me help—”

He broke off with a strangled gasp. She’d hurt him, and it took a lot to hurt Myrnin.

Claire slowly climbed to her feet, put her hands on the nearest stone wall, and began to feel her way through the darkness.

“Going somewhere?” Ada’s voice asked from right behind her, as if the computer was leaning over her shoulder. Claire yelped and flailed out a hand, but there was nothing there. “I brought you here so that I can get rid of you once and for all, and you can help me make Myrnin better at the same time. Isn’t that clever of me?”

Her voice was breaking up into strange harmonics, not really a voice at all—mere noise. “How are you talking?” Claire asked. “You’re not using my phone.”

“Does it matter?”

“No,” Claire said. She sounded a lot less scared than she actually was, which she supposed was a good thing. “I’m just curious.”

“You’d be curious at your own autopsy,” Ada said, and broke into distorted laughter that reeled wildly out of control. “I’d like to see that.”

“Where’s Myrnin?”

“ Don’t you dare try to take him away from me! ” Ada shrieked. The echoes filled the cave, bounced, magnified until Claire had to clap her hands over her ears. She could feel the sound waves on her skin, like speakers booming at a rave. “He is mine; he’s always been mine; I will never give him up, never!”

“I’m not trying to take him away!” Claire shouted. “I just want to be sure he’s all right!”

The sound cut off, just like that. Even the echoes. Claire slowly lowered her hands and touched the wall again; she was afraid to try to move without keeping it under her fingers, because there was no possibility of seeing a thing. Not with human eyes.

“Claire?” Myrnin’s voice again, coming from ahead of her and to the right. He sounded weak, and concerned. “You have to get out of here. Please go away.”

“Kind of not an option,” she said. “Unless Ada wants to open me a portal . . . ?”

Ada laughed softly.

“Guess not.” Claire took a couple of more steps forward, but it took her off the angle toward Myrnin’s voice. “Myrnin, I can’t see. I’m going to try to get to you, but you have to keep talking, okay?”

“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t try to reach me. Claire, I’m asking you, please stay where you are. Get out if you can. Do not come near me. ”

She was ignoring that, mostly because the idea of staying alone in this darkness, listening to Ada do bad things to him, was worse than anything he could do to her himself. “Keep talking,” she said. She heard him take in a deep breath, then let it out. He didn’t say a word. She guessed he thought that if he didn’t encourage her, maybe she’d give up.

He should have known better.

“Stop!” Myrnin’s voice suddenly rang out of the black, urgent and sharp, and Claire paused with her right foot still raised. “Back up. Slowly. Two steps. Do it, Claire!”

She did, putting one foot carefully behind the other, and stopped. “What is it?”

“The floor isn’t stable. If you try to cross that way, it’ll break through under your weight. You must stay where you are!”

“So concerned for the new girl,” Ada’s voice said, vibrating out of the cave walls. “Never so concerned for me, were you? Even though you always knew how much I loved you. How much I wanted to be with you. I let you drink my blood, Myrnin. I let you take everything . And then you did this to me.”

“Oh, stop whining,” Myrnin snapped. “You were grateful enough to become a vampire, and it had nothing to do with your being a lovesick schoolgirl. You wanted a thousand lifetimes to explore the world, to discover, to learn. I gave you that, Ada.”

“You were supposed to take care of me.”

“According to whom?”

“According to me!” The echoes built again, bouncing wildly, and Claire crouched down in place, hands firmly over her ears again. This time, the echoes died gradually. Once it was quiet, Claire rose to her feet and started moving carefully forward at an angle to her original course, testing the floor before putting her full weight on the stone.

It felt solid.

“Claire, please stop,” Myrnin said raggedly. “You can’t see. You don’t know how dangerous this is.”

“Describe it to me. Help me! If you don’t, I’ll just keep walking.”

“That’s exactly what she wants. She wants you to try to reach me—” Myrnin broke off with a small cry of pain.

“Myrnin?” Claire forgot all about being careful, and took a step forward. Too fast. She felt the stone snap and crumble and fall away, dark on dark, and she teetered off balance over the edge of a hole that led to the center of the world, apparently. She didn’t even hear the falling rocks hit bottom.

Claire slowly shifted her weight to her back foot and stepped back to solid stone again. Her heart was pounding so hard it hurt, and she couldn’t seem to slow down her panicked breathing.

“Myrnin, you have to help me,” she said. “Tell me which way to go. We can do this.”

“Even if you reach me, it’s no help to either of us,” he said. “She has me. There’s no point in your dying, as well.”

“Just tell me how to get there.”

After a few silent seconds, Myrnin said, “Two steps to your right, then one forward.” As she accomplished that, he said, “Claire, she’s right. I did take advantage of her. She did love me. I used that to get what I wanted from her.”

“You mean, like a guy?” Claire counted steps carefully, then stopped. “Next.”

“One step forward, then one diagonally to your left. What I did was considerably worse than you think. I made her a vampire so I could have a reliable assistant, one who loved me and would never betray me. I made her a slave.”

“Next. And one thing I can tell you about Ada, she was never a slave, not to you or anybody else. And you really did love her, or you wouldn’t have kept her locket all these years.”

“Another step straight to your left, then six forward. And don’t be daft. I keep gum wrappers. It doesn’t mean I love the gum that was once in them.”

She counted. He didn’t say anything else. Once she got to the end of the directions, she said, “Next. I’m not wrong about Ada. You did love her.”

“Straight ahead, one step.”

“You’re not going to tell me I’m wrong?”

“What’s the point? Three steps to your right.”

“The point is to keep us talking so I’m not so terrified out of my mind,” she said. “What are we going to do about her?”

“Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.”

“I’m there. Next? Also, there’s got to be something. What about—” She was about to say the reset code , and he must have known it, because he let out a sharp hiss for silence. She swallowed the words.

“Focus,” Myrnin said. “Forward three small steps. Be careful not to overshoot.”

She found out why when she took the steps; her toes overhung what felt like another sinkhole.

Myrnin’s voice was close now, very close. “Next,” she said.

“This is the difficult part,” he said. “You’re going to have to jump.”

“Jump?” She wasn’t sure he was thinking straight. “I can’t jump. I can’t see!”

“You wanted to get to me, and this is what it takes. If you want to stay where you are—”

“No. Tell me.”

“Two steps to your left, and jump straight forward, hard. I’ll catch you.”