Page 201 of Mud

Gone, disappeared into the ice I sat on.

Taland flinched. “I didn’tsavehim. I merely gave him time to figure out how to survive,” he said, and he sounded angry.

Neither of us were shaking from the cold just now.

More than that, I found myself wanting to smile. I found myself wanting to get up and dance because Taland would never do what he did, and he hadn’t done what he did at all.

He had put an unbreakable curse on a seventeen-year-old kid, a curse that lasted over a year, that could have killed him but hadn’t. A curse that would tire him, would cause him a lot of pain as it came and went, but like he said—it was a contagious disease.

“You saved that boy,” I insisted. Because nobody in that prison was going to go close to him now. None of the mass murderers, rapists, the worst of the worst of society, were going to go anywhere near that boy.

“They would have broken him the first day. They’d have done unspeakable things,” said Taland. “He had nobody on the inside.”

This time, I did smile, though not voluntarily.

I did smile. “He had you.”

Taland looked up at me then, eyes wide, dark. So easy to see the man he was in that video. So easy to forget that I knew what hid underneath, even if I liked to tell myself that I didn’t. That we’d both been lying to one another. That what we had hadn’t been real.

But it had. Because I’d lied, but I’d also felt every single thing with him in the deepest part of my soul. Every laugh, every touch, every kiss, every word I’d ever whispered to him in the short time we were together, it had all been real for me.

And for him.

“Don’t go thinking I’m a good guy, sweetness,” said Taland, shaking his head at my smile. “I’m not. I’ve killed. I will continue to kill. There’s nothing good about me.”

“Except a teenage boy in a prison full of monsters who gets to sleep at night and be at peace—at least when he’s not in excruciating pain.Thatmight be a good thing about you.” And I loved how hard he was trying to deny it—to himself, not me. I loved the struggle because I knew he’d lose.

He smiled bitterly when he did. “What does it say about your precious IDD to put a seventeen-year-old in a prison with the world’s most dangerous men?”

The smile vanished from my face.

“You were a teenager, too.” My voice was barely there. The shame, the guilt—my goddess, how was I still alive?

Taland had been eighteen when they put him in, too. When I served him to Hill and the IDD.

Fuck, my chest was so tight…

“I was perfectly prepared for the Tomb. I was in no danger,” he said, but was he actually telling the truth?

No idea, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything else because he knew as well as I did that they were all monsters, too. The people in charge, including my grandmother.Monsters.

And I was completely at their mercy.

He inspired me, Taland. Always had. Only he could think up ways to look bad while doing something asgoodas saving a kid’s life, and that little story got to my head fast. I realized just how much it had been eating at me to think that Taland really was that monster who would torture a poor kid just for kicks.

Taland wasnotthe man to sit by and watch while his brothers tortured me, either, and I was sure there was more to that story, a lot more. But right now there simply was no time to get to the bottom of it.

I should have known about the kid, though. I should have seen beyond, but right now I was glad that I hadn’t. Right now, I’d needed to hear that story, to make sense of it, to see it for what it was. I needed that boost of energy it gave me to look deeper intothisthing, too. This challenge.

After all, I’d gotten through most of these games without magic simply because I’d been forced to search forother optionsthat didn’t involve it. Everyone here, every Iridian who played this game thought in terms of magic because they had it, and they were used to relying on it their whole lives—as was I. Magic was the first and last answer to everything for me as well, until I turned Mud and was thrust into this game.

Without it, I’d learned to look deeper, to find other ways to complete these challenges.

Without it, I could save the vulcera, too, as well as Taland’s eagle if I really tried.

And I would.

Not five minutes after our conversation was over, we noticed a few players running toward the roc statue that was a replica of what the Valley of the Roc used to be. They were all rushing toward it, some with their animals in their arms, some without.

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