第12章 The Hollow Room

The room had not been touched in ten years. Maya knew this because the dust told her. It lay over everything in a soft gray film, undisturbed, unbroken, the way dust only settles in a place no one has entered and no wind has reached. Her footsteps left clean marks behind her, the first footprints in a decade. The air was cold and still, and it smelled faintly of something that made her chest ache. Lavender. Her mother had smelled of lavender. She had not known she remembered that until this moment. The room was a study, smaller than she had imagined. A desk stood against the far wall, and on it lay a journal, closed, with a ribbon still marking a page. Shelves lined the walls, crammed with books in no order she could read, their spines worn by hands that had held them often. A window showed nothing but the academy's permanent dusk, and the glass was dark, and when she looked at it she saw only her own reflection, and behind it, the room. And there was the mirror. It stood in the corner, taller than she was, draped in a cloth that had once been white. The dust lay thick on the cloth, but Maya did not need to touch it to know what she would find underneath. Her shadow had gone still and straight, the way a pointer goes still when it finds its mark. It had known this room. It had been made here. She crossed to the desk. Her fingers closed around the journal, and she opened it to the ribbon. The pages were covered in her mother's handwriting, small and neat and quick, and the last entry was dated the night Mei Chen had gone down into the Deep Shadow. "Everything is in place," Maya read. "The seal is woven. The Hollow is patient, but it is not clever, and patience without cleverness can be outwaited. If I am wrong, if the seal fails, there is one thing left. Seraphina knows what it is. So will my daughter, when she is old enough to hear it. I am not afraid. That is the strange part. I am not afraid, because I have already seen her face, and it is worth all of this." Maya's hands were shaking. She read the entry again, then a third time, before she noticed the ink. The last line of the entry was not the same color as the rest. It was darker, fresher, and it had been written slowly, one careful letter at a time, long after the first words had dried. "Turn the mirror, Maya. I have been waiting." The cloth came away in her hands. The mirror was not a mirror at all. It was a sheet of shadow, dark and deep and alive, and when she looked into it, her reflection was not her reflection. It was her mother. Mei Chen looked back at her from the glass, ten years younger than the story said she should be, and very tired, and very much alive. Her hair was the same black as Maya's, her eyes the same shape, and she was smiling the way a person smiles when hope has finally come true. "You're beautiful," her mother said. Her voice came out of the mirror like water coming out of a stone, slow and clear. "I only ever saw you as a child. I have been imagining you grown for ten years, and I was wrong every time. You are better than I imagined." Maya could not speak. Her throat had closed around everything she had planned to say in the years she had dreamed of this, and none of it would come. "Listen to me," Mei said. "I do not have long. This message has been waiting here for you, and it can only speak once." Her face grew serious, and the tiredness underneath it showed through. "I did not abandon you. I want you to know that first, before anything else. Your father told you I died, and the academy told everyone I died, and it was the only lie we could agree on. I went down into the Deep Shadow to hold a door shut. The door is a seal, and behind it is something the academy made, and then could not control. The Hollow. Do you know what that is?" "No," Maya whispered. "Then you know everything I need to tell you," Mei said. "It is hunger. It is what is left of a thing that ate its way through the oldest shadows of this world until the Curators, who were young then and foolish now, decided to feed it instead of fight it. They bound it beneath the school because the school sits on a vein of shadow that runs deeper than any other. They meant to draw on its power. They did not understand that a thing which eats is never satisfied with being fed. It wants the hand." "Then the seal. The one you made." "The seal is the only thing between the Hollow and everything above us." Mei's reflection flickered, and for a moment Maya saw past her, into the dark of the mirror, where something vast moved slowly, like a whale turning in deep water. "It is anchored in me. I am the door, Maya. I have been the door for ten years. And the door is wearing thin." "What do I do?" Maya's voice cracked. "How do I help you? Tell me." "You cannot open the door," her mother said. "Not yet. That is the one thing you must not do, no matter what anyone tells you, no matter how much you want to save me. The seal only opens from inside, and it is keyed to my blood, and that means it is keyed to yours. Warden Voss knows this. He will ask you to open it. He will tell you it is the only way to free me. He is lying. He wants the Hollow for himself, and he will feed you to it to get it." Maya thought of the summons, of the Turning of the Veil, of the kind-eyed man who had smiled at her from across the great hall. "He is already coming for me," she said. "He has always been coming for you." Mei's hand rose in the mirror, and for a moment it seemed almost to press against the glass, and Maya pressed her own hand to the shadow, palm to palm, the way she had pressed it against the car window the last time she had seen her mother, a lifetime ago. "Take the journal. Take it and the mirror. They are yours now. And when the time comes, remember this. The seal was made by one person, alone, in the dark. It does not have to be remade that way. It can be remade by many hands, together, in the light. That is the secret I learned too late." "Will I see you again?" Mei Chen's smile was the saddest, bravest thing Maya had ever seen. "You already have." The mirror went dark. The shadow drained out of the glass until it was only a mirror again, and Maya's reflection stared back at her, young and frightened, holding her mother's journal against her chest like a shield. From somewhere in the corridor behind her, she heard footsteps. Many of them. Coming closer. She moved. She did not stop moving until she was back in her own tower room with the door barred and the journal hidden under her mattress, and her shadow, which had not left her side, lay across the floor like a guard who had finally come home. ---