“Dorian,” he says. It feels truer than any other name he’s used. He’s starting to like it.
Eleanor looks at him and nods, then she turns back to Allegra.
Allegra’s eyes are closed. A long gash of a wound covers part of her head, cutting across her neck, though there isn’t much blood. Most of her body is covered in honey, sticking to the silk, her fur coat lost somewhere in the sea. It strikes Dorian how lucky he was to survive the fall. He wonders if he believes in luck. The neck of Allegra’s blouse has come undone enough that Dorian looks for the sword tattooed on her chest, but there is no sword. There is only a delicate scar in the shape of a bee.
Eleanor kisses Allegra on the forehead and then pulls the silk cloth up to cover her face.
She stands and looks at Dorian.
“I can take you there, if that’s where you’re going,” Eleanor says, pointing at him. “I know where it is.”
“Take me where?” Dorian asks.
“The place on your back.”
Dorian puts a hand up to his shoulder, touching the topmost edge of the very elaborate, very real tattoo that covers his back. The branches of a tree, the canopy of a forest of cherry blossoms, star-sparkling with lanterns and lights though all of that is background for the centerpiece: a tree stump covered in books dripping with honey under a beehive with an owl sitting atop it, wearing a crown.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS is dancing. The ballroom is crowded, the music too loud, but there is an ease here, a constant perfect movement. His dance partners keep changing, all of them masked.
Everything is shimmering and gold and beautiful.
“Ezra,” he hears Mirabel’s voice, too soft and distant with her face so close. “Ezra come back to me,” she says.
He doesn’t want to go back. The party just started. The secrets are here. The answers are here. He will understand everything after one more dance, please, one more.
A gust of wind separates him from his current partner and he cannot grab ahold of another. Gold-covered fingers slip through his. The music falters.
The party fades, blown away with a breath, and in front of his eyes Mirabel comes into almost-focus, her face inches from his. He blinks at her, trying to remember where they are but then he realizes he has absolutely no idea where they are right now.
“What happened?” Zachary asks. The world is blurry and spinning, as though he is still dancing though he can tell now that in reality he is lying on a hard floor.
“You were unconscious,” Mirabel says. “It was probably the impact, knocking the wind out of you. We didn’t have the most graceful of landings.” She indicates a pile of metal nearby. The remains of the elevator. “Here,” she adds, “I took these off for ease of respiratory assistance but they did remain intact.”
She hands him his eyeglasses.
Zachary sits up and puts them on.
The elevator has collapsed in such a way that Zachary is astonished that they—well, that he—survived the fall. Maybe the Keeper’s blessing helped and the gods were looking out, because there is no elevator shaft above it, only a large open cavern.
Mirabel helps Zachary get to his feet.
They are in a courtyard surrounded by six large freestanding stone arches, most of them broken but the ones still standing have symbols carved into their keystones. Zachary can only make out a key and a crown but he can guess the rest. Beyond the arches is a ruin that was once a city.
The only word that comes to mind as Zachary looks at the structures surrounding them is ancient but it is a nonspecific ancient, like an architectural fever dream in stone and ivory and gold. Columns and obelisks and pagoda-like roofs. Everything shimmers, as though the whole city and the cavern that contains it has been covered in a layer of crystal. Mosaics stretch across walls and are laid into the ground beneath his feet, though most of the ground is covered in books. Piles of them, heaped and strewn over the space, abandoned by whoever had once been here to read them.
The cavern is massive, enclosing the city easily. On the far walls there are cliffs, carved with stairways and roads and towers lit up like lighthouses. Though they are only isolated beacons, everything glows. It all feels too big to be underground. Too vast and too complex and too forgotten.
A fire burns next to the elevator in a structure that looks like a fountain but is flowing with flame, dripping bowls of it draped like crystals over a chandelier, though only some of them are lit. There are similar fountains around the courtyard but the rest are dark.
Zachary picks up a book and it is solid and heavy in his hands, its pages sealed together with something sticky that turns out to be honey.
“Lost cities of honey and bone,” he remarks.
“Technically it’s a Harbor, though most Harbors are city-like,” Mirabel clarifies as Zachary returns the unreadable tome to its resting spot. “I remember this courtyard, it was the Heart of this Harbor. They would hang lanterns from the arches during the parties.”
“You remember this?” Zachary asks, looking out over the empty city. No one has been in this place for a very long time.
“I remembered a thousand lifetimes before I could talk,” Mirabel says. “Some have faded with time and most of them seem more like half-forgotten dreams but I recognize places I’ve been before when I’m in them. I suppose it’s like being haunted by your own ghost.”