A Breeding Darkness (Complete)

(16)

"I know the mountain was north," Joon said. "There was still light when I left."

The elation of only a few seconds ago began to fade. "You only know north? You can't remember the exact way you came?"

Joon shook his head. "Sorry. I was still that creature, and my brain was not working in the same way."

Lucy ran a hand through her curls, the future of a long search stretching out again before her. "If we only have the direction, then we have no way of getting there. We don't have the stars or the sun." She gestured up at the sky, which was just one swath of black that blended with all the spaces outside of their small circle of light.

"What do you use back home to navigate?" Joon asked. "I mean, what do you use now that the darkness has come?"

Lucy shrugged, trying to remember what the carriage drivers did. It was mostly luck, to get anywhere without becoming horribly lost, but she did remember something, always tucked away on the footboard where the carriage drivers could see it in the light of their lantern. "A compass. Sometimes people use a compass."

"I don't suppose you have one in your bag?"

Lucy shook her head.

Joon exhaled. "If only we could get one. That would certainly help us get to the mountain."

Lucy blinked in surprise as reality suddenly shifted in front of her. It happened as casually as breathing, yet it was not something that her brain could even keep up with. One moment Joon's hand was empty, and the next his fingers curled around the glittering obsidian case of a compass. She hadn't seen it appear, yet she knew it hadn't been there even a handful of seconds ago. It was almost as if she was forgetting that he had held it all the time. It made Lucy's head swim as she tried to puzzle it out.

"How did you do that?" she asked, rushing forward to grab his hand and examine the compass. Joon looked down at his fist, his eyes going wide as he saw the compass in his grasp.

"I have no idea," he whispered, relinquishing the compass to Lucy and pulling away his hand as if he had been burned.

She took the compass and turned it over and over. It looked like a Finding, yet she had never been able to summon one at will like that.

"First you enter Zerkalo without being a Dreamwalker," Lucy said, meeting his gaze. "And now you're summoning items out of thin air."

Joon's mouth pressed into a thin line and he looked away. "Let's just find north and start moving," he said.

Lucy held out the compass in her lantern light and flipped open the case to see the face. The bearing was a ruby in such a brilliant red that it looked like a glittering drop of blood in the middle of the compass. The arrow spun out from there, looking like a shard from the moon. It glowed, soft and diffused, and seemed to have no definite outline. The rest of the compass was the inky obsidian, as cold as a mountaintop.

"North should be that way," Joon said, pointing just behind them and to the left.

Lucy picked up her lantern and attached it to her belt while Joon led the way north. As she walked behind him, the compass pressing into the skin of her palm, she remembered the music box she had used to save Joon. She didn't know what the black ooze it spilled out had done to the Denizens, but it was not something that a Finding would be able to do before the darkness. Her eyes landed on the glowing ruby bearing of the compass, and she remembered Koshmar's warning about the corruption.

Her fingers curled around the edges, and she lowered the compass to her side. This wasn't a Finding. It was something Joon had made. The corruption probably hadn't touched it. That's what Lucy repeated to herself as they walked deeper into the forest and the darkness.