Glass Sword (Red Queen #2)(28)
They gleam in the sunlight, newly made. Another gift for the Scarlet Guard, another twist of even deeper roots I never knew existed.
The knowledge makes me swim faster, pushing me past Kilorn even when my muscles ache. I duck under the dock, safe at last from any eyes above, and he follows, keeping pace just behind me.
“It’s right below us.” His whispers echo oddly, reverberating off the metal dock above and the water all around. “I can just feel it with my toes.”
I almost laugh at the sight of Kilorn stretching, his brow set in concentration as he tries to brush a foot against the hidden bunker of Barracks 1. “Something funny?” he grumbles.
“You’re so useful,” I reply with a mischievous smirk. It feels good to be with him like this, sharing a secret goal again. Although this time we’re breaking into a military bunker, not someone’s half-locked house.
“Here,” he finally says, before his head disappears below the water.
He bobs back up again, arms wide to keep himself afloat. “The edge.”
Now comes the hard part. The plunge through suffocating, drowning darkness.
Kilorn reads the fear on my face plainly. “Just hold on to my leg, that’s all you have to do.”
I can barely nod. “Right.” The moon pool is on the bottom of the bunker, only twenty-five feet down. “It’s nothing at all,” Farley had said. Wel , it certainly looks like something, I think, peering at the black water below me. “Kilorn, Maven will be so disappointed if the ocean kills me before he can.”
To anyone else, the joke would be in poor taste. But Kilorn chuck-les lowly, his grin bright against the water. “Well, as much as I’d like to annoy the king,” he sighs, “let’s try and avoid drowning, shall we?”
With a wink, he dives, end over end, and I grab hold.
The salt stings my eyes, but it’s not so dark as I thought it would be. Sunlight angles through the water, breaking up the shadow cast by the dock above. And Kilorn moves us quickly, pulling us down along the side of the barracks. The water-bent sunlight dapples his bare back, spotting him like a sea creature. I focus mainly on kicking when I can and not getting caught on anything. This is not twenty-five feet, my mind grumbles when the twinge of oxygen deprivation sets in.
I exhale slowly, letting the bubbles rise past my face, up to the surface. Kilorn’s own breath streams past, the only testament to his strain.
When he finds the bottom edge, I feel his muscles tense, and his legs kick along, powering us both beneath the hidden bunker. Dimly, I wonder if the moon pool has a door, and if it’ll be closed. What a joke that would be.
Before I know what’s happening, Kilorn bursts up and through something, hauling me with him. Stuffy but blissful air hits my face and I gulp it down in deep, greedy gasps.
Already sitting on the edge of the pool, his legs dangling in the water, Kilorn grins at me. “You wouldn’t last a morning unknotting nets,” he says with a shake of the head. “That was barely a bath compared to what Old Cully used to make me do.”
“You really know how to cut me deep,” I reply dryly, hoisting myself up and into the Colonel’s chambers.
The compartment is cold, lit by low lights, and offensively well organized. Old equipment is pushed neatly against the right wall, gath-ering dust, while a desk runs the length of the left. Stacks of files and papers crowd the surface in neat rows, dominating the space. At first I don’t even see a bed, but it’s there, a narrow bunk that rolls out from beneath the desk. Clearly the Colonel doesn’t sleep much.
Kilorn was always a slave to his curiosity, and now is no different.
He drips his way over to the desk, ready to explore.
“Don’t touch anything,” I hiss at him while I wring out my sleeves and pant legs. “Get one drop on those papers and he’ll know someone was in here.”
He nods, pulling his hand back. “You should see this,” he says, his tone sharp.
I step to his side in an instant, fearing the worst. “What?”
Careful, he points a finger at the only thing decorating the walls of the compartment. A photograph, warped by age and damp, but the faces are still visible. Four figures, all blond, posing with stern but open expressions. The Colonel is there, barely recognizable without his bloody eye, one arm around a tall, well-boned woman, and his hand on a young girl’s shoulder. Both the woman and the girl wear dirt-stained clothes, farmers by the look of it, but the gold chains at their necks say differently. Silently, I remove the gold chain from my pocket, comparing the metal so fine it could be thread to the necklaces in the picture. But for the mismatched key dangling from the end, they are identical. Gently, Kilorn takes the key from my hand, puzzling over what it could mean.
The third figure explains it all. A teenager with a long, golden braid, she stands shoulder to shoulder with the Colonel and wears a smirk of satisfaction. She looks so young, so different without her short hair and scars. Farley.
“She’s his daughter,” Kilorn says aloud, too shocked for much else.
I resist the urge to touch the photograph, to make sure it’s real. The way he treated her back in the infirmary, it can’t possibly be true. But he called her Diana. He knew her real name. And they had the necklaces, one from a sister, one from a wife.
“C’mon,” I murmur, pulling him away from the picture. “It’s nothing to bother with now.”