Page 74 of Destroyer

“Shut up, Arch,” muttered Gwyneth, sipping her coffee.

Ru glanced at Fen, her attention inevitably drawn to him in moments of uncertainty. He sat slightly hunched, elbows braced on the tabletop, chin planted firmly on his clasped hands. His lips, always so expressive, had tightened in a tense line. His eyes shone darkly in the lamplight as he regarded the Children.

He turned then, noticing Ru’s gaze on him. His expression softened subtly, but the frown remained. He raised one eyebrow, ever so slightly.

“What’s the experiment?” Ru asked. She braced herself for something irritatingly dull, something that would fit what she knew of the Children.

Ranto stepped forward, robe swishing on the stone floor, nodding as Inda had done. “We would like you to speak to it.”

The room was silent for a moment.

“Sorry, what?” said Gwyneth.

“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but it’s arock,” Archie deadpanned.

Fen’s other eyebrow rose to meet the first. He blinked at Ru, his intense stare sending a message she didn’t understand.

“…Why?” asked Ru, tongue leaden. She was frozen to the spot, her blood seeming to curdle in her veins. Did they know? Had they guessed, extrapolated somehow the existence of an invisible thread, a connection that stretched between Ru and the artifact? Or was it a sick coincidence, a demand for the one thing Ru knew she could carry out successfully if she tried?

“We’d like to know,” said Nell, stepping forward to join Ranto and Inda, “whether it is reactive to human speech.”

“It’s clearly not,” said Fen, his voice a warning. “We’ve been talking around it all week. It remains dormant.”

Inda, Ranto, and Nell all turned as one to regard Fen with emotionless stares.

“No one has spoken directly to it,” said Inda. “With purpose. That is what we would like to see.”

Archie snorted loudly. “Surely you can’t suppose that will accomplish anything.”

Gwyneth shot him a look. “It might if it’s a magic object.”

“Exactly our thoughts,” said Inda. “Miss Delara, you may now proceed with the experiment.”

Ru stared, disbelieving. She hung in stasis, refusing to accept her surroundings, the Children, or the request.

They wanted her to do this, right now, at this moment? Reach out to the artifact, speak to it, in the hopes that it would respond? As if it was so easy, so simple. None of them knew. None of themcouldknow. And logically, Fen was right — the artifact had been in the presence of voices, laughter, and arguments, since the moment it was unearthed at the Shattered City. If it was going to respond to human voices, it would have done so.

But Ru had never spoken aloud to it. She had not once reached out across that connection with intention, never tried to speak to it, whether silently or aloud. In her rational mind, she knew it would make no difference. Why should it? Yet in her heart of hearts, in the deepest part of her, she was afraid.

Some part of her believed that this might, against all logic and evidence proving otherwise, induce a reaction from the artifact.

“I’ll do it,” she announced.

The words rolled off her tongue like venom spit from a snake. Sudden, dire. She couldn’t do this. Couldn’t subject her friends to even the smallest possibility of danger, couldn’t risk the Tower… but even as these thoughts crawled through her head, pulling at her will with blazing fingers, she pushed back. Because the artifact was there, waiting, their connection taut like a coiled spring, a feedback loop of understanding, of anticipation.

And as she wrestled with herself, her friends watching, the artifact’s effect on her grew. Its presence, at first simply waiting, became insistent. Forceful, confusing, a cloud of hazy emotion, as it had felt in the Shattered City.

Ru couldn’t understand, not really, why sheshouldn’tspeak to it.

Her friends understood the danger. Surely they would be safe. She wouldn’t touch it, not like at the dig site. It was her skin on the stone that had caused the small destruction. Not her voice. She licked her dry lips, unsteady on her feet. The pulse of the artifact was strong, eager, that finger once again hooked against her consciousness, urging her.

And what if this small action, a simple question posed to the artifact, was all that she’d been waiting for? Proof of magic?

The artifact seemed to purr in response, an excited thrum against the base of her skull.

“I’ll do it,” she said again in the shocked silence, the wordless nods of the Children.

“Spectacular waste of time if you ask me,” said Archie, speaking, at last, to cut through the tension in the air.

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