Page 67 of Quarter Labyrinth

I clung tight. “Never.” I looked up at the smooth lines of his face. “You and me, we won’t die here.” I spoke the words as if I could force them to be true.We were going to be okay.

Clark ran his hands through my hair once before shifting his eyes over the length of me, assessing for damage just as I’d done to him. His gaze latched onto Leif’s dagger at my waist.

I quickly faced the others. “I’ve been ahead. I know a sure path.”

Their weary faces brightened, while Harald lifted a brow. “You backtracked for us?”

“Of course,” I replied. “We are in this together.”

Now that I could get a better look at them, they were worse than I’d imagined. Gunnar’s burns were all across his right side, down his arm and leg, with much of his shirt singed off. He wore the tattered scraps proudly though, even if he looked like something dragged out of a graveyard. Aiden boasted as many burns as him, mainly on his hands and arms. The two of them must have been in beastly amounts of pain.

Astrid hadn’t gotten burned, so her skin remained smooth like polished glass stretched tight over her bones. Her collarbone stuck out below her neck, and her lips were cracked many times over. Blood, some fresh and some dried, coated them.

Tove appeared to be the only one in good shape until she shifted her weight and I noted how she nursed one leg. Both the ankle and knee were swollen.

Harald didn’t bear physical scars. But an exhaustion hung on his shoulders as heavy as any anvil. If I had to guess, I’d say he’d been carrying Tove most of the day.

Clark appeared the best out of the lot. Dark circles beneath his eyes, matted hair, flushed lips because he had a tendency to worry his teeth over them. His eyes bounced between my own and the dagger at my side.

“Come,” I said. “There’s a place we can rest for the night a few hours away.” Before Clark could get a chance to ask about the weapon, I led the group back the way I’d come.

Clark kept as he always did, a constant presence behind my shoulder that comforted me, but my emotions were shifting. I tried to read them as they passed through.

The entire time I’d traveled, I’d been eager to tell Clark all I’d learned about me, my past, and how it connected to the labyrinth. He’d know the truth of Allison, how that almost guaranteed her story about my father was true, and who my grandfather was. He’d hear about Leif and Dimitri. He’d hate them as much as I did.

But now that it came to it, the story bundled itself into my chest with no intention of leaving.

At first, I thought it to be fear. As if speaking the words out loud would make it feel real. Or that the labyrinth would be listening and the leaves would carry the story to Dimitri.

But it wasn’t that. I held the story close just like I hid who my father was all those years because it was too precious for the wrong person to know.

Somehow, telling Clark didn’t feel right yet.

It will change tonight when all the others have gone to sleep, I told myself. Then you’ll be eager to tell him everything.

But when we settled down for the night, the story had added a lock and cage around it, retreating into the depths of my soul for me to carry alone.

“Tell me of your adventures the past two days,” I said as we sat in a circle with the group.

They each gave a groan in response.

“I’d predicted this,” Harald began. “The labyrinth is becoming hungrier. Traps waited around every turn. The fire was just the beginning. I suspect without Lady Luck looking out for the group, we’d have perished by now.”

Astrid stared at Lady Luck’s tattoo with a solemn face.

Clark passed his flask to me. “At least we came across a spring to refill our supplies.”

“I filled my own shortly before finding you,” I lied. In truth, it’d been since that morning when I had water, but Clark’s voice sounded like rocks tumbling through a desert. When I turned him down, he took a swig of his flask before tucking it away.

He pulled out a slip of folded paper instead.

The crowd shifted forward as he unrolled it, but none looked confused like I was.

“What’s this?”

“A map,” Clark said. He grinned at the parchment in his hands like it were his most prized possession, while my jaw loosened. Maps were expensive. Far more money than all of us could scrounge together. But as he opened it, I realized he didn’t buy this map.

He was drawing it.

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