Page 51 of Katya and the Young God

The child shakes her head, the tangle of her hair swinging in front of her face.

“That’s good,” Katya says, and her hands are shaking. “We’re gonna get you out.”

The child’s eyes slide off of her, fall on the body of Charlotte. “I didn’t mean to,” she says, to his friend, and her voice is high, reedy. “I thought she wouldn’t run away.”

Katya doesn’t really want to deal with the ramifications of that, so she just nods. “Well, let’s not touch anyone else, okay?” Pieter’s hand is still on her shoulder, protective, and the child reaches up and grabs it for reassurance. “Besides him, he seems okay.”

“He’s mostly dead anyways,” the child says, which is ominous as fuck, so Katya slides right by that.

“Okay, we’re gonna focus on getting out of this,” Katya stands back up, and she’s terrified, so terrified she almost wants to run away, cry, leave the Demigod to deal with this.

But the child looks up at her, brown eyes unblinking with something resembling trust, and Katya can’t.

Below, down the steps, Feketer’s still standing, his shoulders squared, and the Magician still has his knife out.

“No one is going to harm her,” she says, deliberately stepping away from the altar— from the goddamn child coffin—and down the steps, slinging her bag on her back.

She doesn’t look down at Rory’s body as she does so. The Vampire had been kind.

The remaining caver makes a noise, an ungodly, rage-filled noise, and cradles the body of his friend closer.

And a small part of Katya unfreezes, unwinds into an ache at the sound. “We should go,” she says to him, as tender as she can. “We can’t carry her out, we should start on our way back.” The remaining caver doesn't look at her, and it frays at Katya’s patience. “We should leave, we should divide her bag up so we can carry it out, and we need to get out of this room.”

“And what, let you and the Demigod control that thing?” The Magician says, gesturing with the copper knife. “Let you two walk out of here with whatever the fuck she is and walk into the sunset?”

A quick glance up to Pieter shows that he very much wants to leave, wants to get out, but his hand is still protective on the girl’s shoulder.

“We need to focus on the rest of us getting out alive,” Pieter says, and his voice is rough, rougher that she would have thought. “I don’t care what happens later, we need to get out.”

There’s a pause, there’s a beat, and then the Magician clicks his knife shut, but she can see the wheels turning behind his eyes.

Feketer slowly, ever so slowly, makes a show of putting on an extra layer of sleeves, of fitting on his gloves, and it’s really not the most stupid of actions, so Katya shoves her hands into her climbing gloves, tucks her long sleeve shirt into them.

She looks, again, to Pieter, who’s as shell-shocked as she is, still delicately holding the little girl’s hand, and he meets her eyes imploringly.

She doesn’t know what to do, what to say, so she just nods at him, then holds her own gloved hand towards the child.

Who reaches for her in an instant, her small hand closing over her gloves with an urgency that says a lot more about her mental state than Katya has any clue how to process. She’s all but drowning in Katya’s extra shirt, but the look she shoots up to Katya is adoring.

And Katya waits a split second, waits to see if she’s going to die from the grip, and when she doesn’t, she just pulls the girl along, away from the box and away from the death in the room.

“Come on, let's get out of here.”

* * *

They endup taking most of Charlotte’s clothing, fitting the child with her extra shirts and gloves, fitting clothing over almost every part of her body except for her face.

Everyone gives her a wide berth, but she keeps her hand either in Katya’s gloved hand, or her fist knotted up in Pieter’s climbing jacket. She doesn’t speak, but her eyes are wide, watching everyone.

They leave the crypt room as soon as they can, leading her down the pathway hewn out of bones as soon as they can.

* * *

They pause for the night,already eyes gritty, before the room with the spikes, and the small child’s eyes are wide, staring out at the entrance to the cavern.

The moment Katya unrolls her sleeping pad, the girl sits down next to her, leaning against the rock wall, hugging her knees to her chest.

Throwing a look to where Feketer and the Magician make their bed down the hallway, obviously avoiding them, Katya folds up her extra, non-blood-stained towel, for the girl to sit on, as some sort of meager cushion.

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