“Is that your parents’ home?” Farin asks, and I swallow, wiping the tears from my eyes.
Beside me, Farin gently traces the rolling hills of my parents’ property, even down to a makeshift catapult in the yard.
“I thought you didn’t remember them,” he says.
I swallow. “I don’t. But the house I remember.”
“So what now?”
I bite my lip. “I think it needs to be activated with blood.”
Farin goes to prick his finger with his dagger, but I grab his wrist to stop him.
“My blood. I’m the one whose soul’s been here so long, it’s interwoven with the Fabric, remember?”
Farin wrinkles his brow, but he places his dagger in my hand all the same.
I press it to the tip of my finger. A sharp pain, then blood buds on my swelling skin. When I glide it across the spider silk, a shiver rattles my entire body at the sensation.
Farin interlocks his fingers with mine, the tiny wound still throbbing.
Nothing happens.
The earth rumbles.
But it’s not from the silk. Not from the eyelet.
In the distance, something explodes.
The ground lurches, sending Farin and me flying forward. Spider silk gags me as we’re thrown through the portrait I wove.
Pain cracks through my nose as my face hits the stone wall.
My hand came loose from Farin’s in the commotion, and I reach for him, still disoriented from when my head collided with the wall. When my vision finally clears, and I turn around, I find him standing back, staring at the torn spider silk canvas.
I rip the sticky substance from my face, wiping it on my pants.
Farin’s expression is blank, his face white.
The earth trembles again.
“It didn’t work,” Farin says, no intonation in his voice.
My stomach flips. “I don’t understand. I was sure it would have done something. Maybe it needed more blood. More time. I can make it again.”
I spin around, frantically grabbing at loose threads of silk, but they’re even more damaged than before, and few of them are long enough to tie together.
There’s nothing I can do.
My hands are shaking, sweating. I’m not sure what happens now, if I die here.
I’ve never died before.
Never had to.
Farin turns to me, slowly, the way his expression warps telling me he’s thinking the same thing.
I don’t know what happens to him either, if he dies here.
I’m betting it’s nothing good.
My stomach twists.
“We’re stuck then,” he says, his gaze somewhat distant, like he had a whole life planned out for himself, one that’s just been torn from him.
“There’s a chance a ship will come by,” I say, though even as I say it, there’s nothing convincing infusing my tone.
The ground rumbles, as if to contradict me.
We’re underground. In a cavern at the base of a canyon. And if that volcano just spouted lava, it won’t be long before it starts pooling into the canyon, slipping through the caverns, petrifying everything in its path.
Farin and I are going to die here, and I don’t know what that means.
He blinks a few times, like he’s trying to clear away a mist that’s fogged his expression.
“Farin?” I ask.
I instantly wish I hadn’t.
