Before She Ignites (Fallen Isles Trilogy #1)(33)

As quickly as the laugh happened, I stopped it. I buried it. My heart thrummed in my ears, but that was an inside-me sound. It wouldn’t break the silence. Not the way a laugh would. Besides, who laughed in prison?

A headache raged behind my eyes, and deep, aching thirst festered inside me. Hunger, too, but mostly that desperate thirst for the water in the next cell. It was there. So close. With only a wall between that cup and me.

Why hadn’t my parents freed me yet? They should have been working night and day to secure my release, and how hard could it be to convince the Luminary Council of my importance?

What if Mother and Father weren’t even trying?

What if I really was meant to stay here forever?

Give me peace, I prayed. Give me grace. And then: Save me, Darina. Save me, Damyan. Cela, cela.

But the only answer was the smothering dark.

I CLAWED AT the wall, desperate for the water on the other side.

I passed out, exhausted from my struggles.

I counted my own raspy breaths until even my numbers failed me because they, too, needed to be fed. Sometimes, I dreamed of rushing rivers. Wide rivers. With giant green plants growing on the banks and thousands of fish swimming along the current. And a chef to . . . do whatever it was that people did to prepare fish for eating.

Distantly, I was bored. Of not moving. Of not seeing. Of not hearing. Even if I’d had food or water left, I’d have devoured it all just for something to do. Sometimes, I felt like I was floating.

A day or a million years after Altan locked me in the dark, I finally heard a noise. A sharp clang of metal smacking metal.

Alertness flooded my body. I tensed, cocked my head, and listened around the thud of my own heartbeat, but the sound didn’t return.

Perhaps I’d imagined it. Mother always said what an imagination I had.

Wait. No, she didn’t say that about me. She said that about Zara, her favorite daughter. Zara with the imagination. Zara with the perfect grades. Zara who got to stay out late and could spend entire days in her nightgown if she didn’t have anything better to do.

Zara who didn’t interfere where she didn’t belong. Zara who hadn’t ended up in the Pit. Zara who was probably eating an enormous meal right now, of big, flaky cloudfish seasoned with a thousand different spices, sitting on a bed of quinoa and cheese and spinach.

She’d probably complain about it. She hated spinach. And cheese. And good things.

Right now, I hated imaginary Zara.

I’d give anything to see her again.

The clang came again. It had definitely been real.

As quietly as possible, I pushed myself onto my elbows and leaned out from under the bed. I listened hard, holding my breath so the noise of air rushing through my nose wouldn’t deafen me. But that made my heart beat louder, heavier, and my chest ached with a different kind of starvation. I dropped my mouth open and pulled a breath through a wide-open throat, but air scraped my raw and parched flesh.

Only silence waited in the darkness. Even when I squinted and tried to see through the sticky blackness, there was nothing.

A swarm of dizzying winds fluttered through my head. My throat ached from the air, and I had to drop back to the floor and breathe regularly. I closed my scratchy eyes, praying for relief. Praying for tears. Maybe if I could cry . . .

My body was too dry to cry. My body was a desert. I touched my rough, swollen tongue to my lips. Cracked. Split. Blood crusted in the creases. And when I ran my fingers across my forearm, skin hissed against skin. Skin flaked off. Muscle flaked off. My fingers dragged against bone. I was falling apart.

Clang.

My eyes flew open and in the darkness I saw a huge draconic face glaring down at me. Drakontos maior, probably, if the jaw horns were any indication. But it was hard to tell when the fourth-largest species of dragon was right above me. How did it even fit inside the cell? Or under the bed? I should have heard it coming in, but this was the quietest dragon I’d ever met.

The great golden scales burned across my vision, searing my eyes just enough to elicit a single teardrop in my right eye.

The head reared back—how it did that without bashing its skull against my bed, I couldn’t say—and inhaled with its secondary lungs.

I tried to scramble away, but I was too weak, too slow, so I saw everything:

The flare of its nostrils.

The chasm of its mouth.

The spark glands igniting at the moment it exhaled.

Blue fire unspooled from the back of the creature’s throat, turning white and red as it surged toward me. I squeezed my eyes shut and lifted my hands like I could protect my face. My knuckles scraped wood—the underside of my bed, not a dragon. There was no fire.

There was no dragon.

Just the darkness.

A faint whine escaped my parched throat as a distant part of me realized what was happening: I was hallucinating. And of course I was seeing a dragon. Dragons were the reason I was in here in the first place. Because I’d failed them.

I gathered the scattered threads of my thoughts and focused on breathing. Somewhere around fourteen or seventy, I lost count and had to start over, but even that was better than imagining dragons trying to kill me. I tried again and again, but the counting failed me every time, sometimes with sleep, sometimes with mind fog, sometimes with spikes of terror that came from the impenetrable darkness.

Then came the footsteps, a faint tap tap tap down the hall.

Finally.