Chapter 48: Chapter 48

I haven’t eaten anything but bread—stolen from broken bakeries before we vanished below again. The rest... has been blood.

My hands shake as another wave rises.

I vomit again. This time the taste burns in my nose. Acid. Rot.

The red in my eyes dims.

The warmth leaves me.

The threads are gone.

Only darkness remains.

The flickering lamp behind me casts long shadows—but the heat, the clarity—it’s gone.

My fingers twitch next to an unconscious blue.

I throw up again—violently—as if I’m pulling out a lung. But I lift the revolver with both hands, even as my body convulses.

Somewhere in the dark, they scream.

I don’t drink this time. I don’t consume their blood. I could. I should. It’s made me stronger before. Given me powers I still can’t understand.

A green is in these tunnels.

“Fast—we need to leave!” I scream. The command rolls out of me with weight.

Jimmy grabs my arm. Gene catches up beside me.

She’s still holding Christopher. Her sobs echo down the walls. She’s pressing his face to hers, as if he could still be brought back.

She can make the ground slicker than ice—that blueblood trait in her—it’s saved us before.

But now, she just sits. Holding her brother. Rocking gently.

“Come!” Jimmy shouts. But it’s not me calling her.

I won’t drag her away from the only person she had left.

I vomit again. Less blood. More bile. My stomach’s empty now.

“There is a green,” I say. My voice flat. Cold. “Make this terrain as slippery as you can. If you don’t want your brother’s death to be in vain.”

But I know she hears me.

Caroline—loudest of us. Strongest in heart.

But she’ll buy us time.

I would’ve done the same. I wanted to. But I can’t. Not yet.

I won’t let my brother’s death mean nothing.

Not one more breath in a blue chest while Ren lies in the earth.

I loosen my grip on Jimmy and Gene, walking ahead of them now. Alone.

Everything is dark. The ground beneath my feet slick with blood and shit, rat bones and rot. Barely a meter wide. Claustrophobic. But it’s all we have.

The threads are gone. My strength, fading.

My eyes are no longer red.

Only my breath keeps me moving. Shallow. Hollow.

I walk forward. Slowly. Toward Cham.

His face lights up—briefly—before twisting into horror.

The kind that doesn’t echo—it stays.

And we all know—we all know—that scream.

It is the scream of someone who has seen death, not just as concept, but as fact.

It is the scream of my brother.

The first of five hundred eighty-one.

The last breath before silence.

The silence that always comes after someone truly dies.

The shrilling silence after death. It’s louder than the shots. A sound that drills into the eardrums and sinks deeper, into the marrow, the bones. It wraps itself around the spine and squeezes, silent but deafening, raw and merciless. It’s the kind of silence that makes your blood feel heavier in your veins, the kind that makes your heartbeat the only sound left in the world.

I can hear it now—my heart—thudding faster and faster. With every beat, my lungs drag in air, shallow and useless. It’s as if my body is desperately trying to cage my soul, to hold it in with nothing but blood and brittle bones. Pain crawls across my skin like tiny needles, pricking from the inside out. Sweat clings to my temples and drips from my jaw, lost to the rot-soaked ground.

His eyes are wide, trembling. Eyes that don’t belong here—too young, too innocent. He’s not meant for this world, not for this kind of death. I should never have brought him. It was selfish. But after I saw him trailing behind that shabby man, the one who looked at him like a possession, like a toy—I couldn’t let it happen. I couldn’t ignore it. Not when his eyes reminded me of Ren’s.