Chapter 46: The Pathfinder
Chapter 46: The Pathfinder
The hall wouldn’t let them walk straight through.
Ethan stood at the edge of the shelter, looking out at the stretch of black stone floor spanning all the way to the gate. To ordinary eyes, it was flat, empty, featureless. To his eye, it was a net.
Energy lines ran beneath the stone, weaving into one another into a dense pattern. Some lines were white, faint and still. Some were red, pulsing slowly like blood vessels. And scattered among them were small points of light, each one a switch waiting for a foot to step on it.
He counted more than two hundred points within his sight.
"What’s wrong?" Damien stepped up beside him.
"No one steps past this line," Ethan said, pointing down at a natural crack in the floor. "Until I go first."
Corin looked at the empty stretch of floor and frowned. "I don’t see anything."
"I know."
Ethan stepped out.
His first step came down on a patch of stone that looked no different from its surroundings.
His second step veered a handspan to the left, avoiding a point of light only he could see.
His third step stopped halfway. He lowered his foot very slowly, testing, then pulled it back, choosing a different spot half a step away.
Behind him, eight people stood still, watching him move like a blind man walking on ice, except he wasn’t blind at all, and every step was precise to an unsettling degree.
At the ninth step, Ethan stopped completely.
He crouched, picked up a shard of rubble, then threw it forward, onto a patch of floor that looked entirely ordinary.
The shard hit the ground.
A pillar of white fire erupted from the floor, three meters high, shrieking like metal being torn. It burned for exactly two seconds then went out, leaving a black scorch mark on the black stone.
No one said anything.
Corin slowly lowered the gun he had still been loosely holding.
Ethan didn’t turn around. He only kept walking, circling around the spot that had just spewed fire, finding a new path through the net that only he could see.
They walked in single file, planting their feet exactly in the footprints Ethan left behind.
That was the rule he set, and no one argued. Damien walked right behind him, Mira in his arms. Nadia next, then Corin, then the rest. Laira walked last, covering the rear.
After a stretch, a young Silver-tier named Feld began to lose patience.
He was the youngest in the team, barely into his twenties, and over the past two days he had heard far too much about how dangerous Ethan Ashford was. In his head, planting his feet in the footprints of a wanted man was absurd.
"We’re trusting the words of someone the Council ordered us to deal with," Feld said, loud enough for everyone to hear. "How do you know he isn’t leading us into a trap?"
No one answered.
Feld glanced to the side and saw a stretch of floor that looked shorter, straighter than the winding path Ethan was leading. He stepped out of line.
"Feld." Ethan didn’t turn his head. His voice was flat. "Right foot. Step back."
Feld had already put half his foot down.
He froze.
"You—"
"Step back. Now."
Something in his voice made Feld obey before he could think. He pulled his foot back and retreated into line.
Ethan picked up another shard and threw it at the exact spot where Feld had been about to step.
The stone there didn’t spew fire.
It collapsed.
An entire slab of stone, as wide as three people, caved into the darkness below, without making a sound of hitting bottom. Feld looked at the pitch-black pit where he had nearly stood, and every drop of blood drained from his face.
Ethan kept walking.
Feld didn’t say another word for the rest of the way.
Half the hall passed in silence.
Ethan led them through an area where the pillars grew denser, and the energy lines beneath the floor grew more tangled too. Here he slowed down, in some spots standing still for a full minute just to read the pattern beneath his feet before choosing his next step.
Damien watched him the whole way. Not watching a target. Watching a person.
He saw sweat running down Ethan’s temples. Saw him occasionally raise a hand to rub his left eye, where that red light still smoldered. Saw him place each step with a concentration that kept his whole body taut as a bowstring.
This person was carrying the lives of nine people on his shoulders, and he was doing it for people who just yesterday had still been pointing guns at him.
"You’re tired," Damien said quietly, when they stopped at a safe patch for Ethan to rest his eye. "That eye drains you."
Ethan didn’t deny it.
"Rest a bit. We’re not in a hurry."
"We are in a hurry." Ethan looked toward Mira in his arms. Her face had gone whiter than before. "She can’t wait."
Damien looked down at his niece, then looked back at Ethan.
He said nothing more. He only took note.
The hardest part lay three-quarters of the way through.
Ethan stopped for a long time before a narrow stretch of floor, flanked on both sides by two deep, sucking chasms. The only safe path ran down the middle, exactly one foot wide, and wound through a forest of light points so dense there was almost no gap.
He stood there, reading.
One minute. Two minutes.
"Can it be crossed?" Corin asked, his voice tight.
"Yes." Ethan didn’t take his eyes off the floor. "But only one person at a time. And you have to move to the rhythm I tap."
He turned back to look at them.
"I’ll cross first, then stand on the other side tapping a rhythm on the floor. You listen to the taps and step. One tap, one step. No faster, no slower. Anyone off the rhythm, I won’t be able to save in time."
No one objected. Two days ago, they would have laughed in his face. Now, they nodded.
Ethan crossed first.
He walked along the strip of stone one foot wide, between two black chasms, through the forest of switches, slow and precise, as if each step had been calculated before he lifted his foot. Reaching the other side, he knelt and began tapping his hand on the floor.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
One by one, they crossed to the rhythm.
Damien crossed with Mira in his arms, and Ethan changed the rhythm for him, slower, to compensate for the weight and balance of a man carrying another person. Nadia crossed, her eyes squeezed shut, relying only on the sound. Corin crossed. Feld crossed, his face still pale, but planting each step precisely to the rhythm of the man he had wanted to shoot yesterday.
The last was Laira.
She didn’t need the rhythm. Her wings, though one was torn, still lifted her to glide across the stretch of floor without touching the ground.
But when she landed beside Ethan, she placed a hand on his shoulder, and only then did he realize his own hand was trembling from the strain.
"Rest," she said, for his ears only. "I’ll keep watch here."
He shook his head. But he let her hand stay on his shoulder a while longer.
The colossal gate was now right in front of them.
But Ethan didn’t lead them toward it.
He stopped before a small branching passage on the side of the hall, a low corridor the others had walked right past without noticing, because to ordinary eyes it was just a streak of darkness between two pillars.
Ethan’s eye saw differently. From within that corridor radiated a light he had begun to grow familiar with: the same red as the stream of energy in the crystals, the same red as the veins running beneath his skin.
"The exit gate is over there," Damien said, pointing toward the large gate. "Why are we stopping here?"
"Because there’s something in here." Ethan looked into the darkness of the corridor. "Something my eye reacts to."
Corin frowned. "We don’t have time to wander off. That girl—"
"I know." Ethan kept looking into the corridor. "But if I’m guessing right, the thing in there could help us get out of here faster. And it might help her."
That was half the truth.
The other half he didn’t say: the eye on his forehead was pulling him toward that corridor, not through reason, but through something deeper, like a compass needle swinging toward north.
Damien looked at him for a long time.
Then he made a decision no one two days ago could have imagined. He handed Mira to Nadia, put a hand on his pair of Gauntlets, and stepped up to stand beside Ethan.
"Then I’ll go with you," he said. "Corin, stay and guard the others. If we don’t come back within an hour, get everyone out through the large gate."
Ethan glanced at him. "You trust me that much?"
"No." Damien checked his Gauntlets again, the golden sheen flashing in the darkness. "But I trust standing right behind you. If you’re going to pull something, I’ll be the first to know."
The corner of Ethan’s mouth stirred faintly. Almost a smile.
"Fair."
Laira stepped up, placing herself between the two men.
"I go first," she said. Not a suggestion.
Ethan didn’t argue. Of the three, she was the strongest, and a dragon’s hunting instinct was still sharper than any device.
The three of them stepped into the corridor.
The darkness swallowed them. The lamplight behind, where Corin and the others waited, faded then vanished completely after a bend.
The corridor led downward. The farther they went, the thicker the air became, and the clearer the red light only Ethan could see. The carvings on the walls began to change. They were no longer meaningless symbols. His eye could read them, one fragment at a time, though not enough to piece into full sentences.
...divided... so that no one... could swallow it whole...
...hid this shard... where the Void does not look...
...the one who bears the Eye will come... and choose...
Ethan stopped.
"Choose what?" he whispered, not realizing he had said it aloud.
Laira turned back. "What did you say?"
"Nothing." But his heart was beating faster.
The corridor opened up.
The three of them stepped into a round chamber, much smaller than the hall, but with a ceiling still soaring high. At the very center of the chamber, on a black stone pedestal, was an object.
It wasn’t large. Only about the length of a person’s forearm.
It was a piece of metal, silver-gray, its surface covered in veins exactly like the veins running beneath Ethan’s skin. It didn’t glow. It made no sound. But the moment Ethan stepped into the chamber, the eye on his forehead flared so violently he had to brace himself against the wall.
And in his head, the whisper from the large gate returned.
This time, he heard it more clearly.
It was still calling that name. The name that wasn’t "Ethan." The name his eye recognized, and he didn’t.
Damien looked at the piece of metal on the pedestal, then looked at Ethan bracing himself against the wall, drenched in sweat.
"What is that?" he asked.
Ethan looked at the piece of metal. Looked at the veins on it, matching perfectly with the veins on his own body.
And somehow, though no one had told him, he knew the answer.
"A shard of something," he said quietly. "Something that was torn into many pieces, a very long time ago."
He let go of the wall and took a step toward the stone pedestal.
At the utmost far heights of the universe, a colossal pupil opened, and for the first time, it looked straight into this chamber beneath the ground.
It had found where the shard of metal was hidden.
But it had come too late.
Ethan’s scar-covered right hand had already touched the silver-gray shard of metal on the stone pedestal.