3MA

3MA | Chapter 9

9
HOME

There is nothing left for me to do but run.

And so I do. I run without thinking, without caring, without stopping. It feels good to relinquish all responsibility to my feet; to allow them to carry me any place they desire; over the Pendragon Bridge, through the maze of empty neon-lit streets of downtown Camelot.

Away from the bar full of terrified people.

Away from Sheamus whose voice I can still hear shouting behind me to never return.

Away from Mag's painting of my father, with its sad, bloodshot eyes.

Away from everything.

It isn't until I reach the grand, landscaped entrance of Guinevere Park, flanked on both sides by massive white marble sculptures of King Arthur and his wife, the park's namesake, Queen Guinevere, that I realize my feet aren't taking me away from anything. They're carrying me toward somewhere.

Toward someone.

Through a thick blanket of low hanging fog, the towering crystalline hulk of the King's Spire rises high above Camelot's surrounding skyscrapers. Its jagged crystal turret glows a different color every night. Tonight it's crimson red, like the bloody tip of a sword piercing through the center of the city. I squint at the very top where a massive clock face tells me it's well after one in the morning.

Meet me tomorrow at eleven in Guinevere Park by the Amphitheater.

I rush across the street, hurrying through the park's entrance, hoping it isn't too late. But even as I sprint down the lamppost-lined path into the shadowed heart of the park, a part of me secretly hopes that Amaris isn't there.

Because I remember the way she looked at me the night before outside the arena, when for a second her face changed as her eyes slid over me. She saw something. Something powerful enough to shake her to her core.

The question that brings droplets of sweat across the back of my neck is: am I ready to look inside myself and see the same thing?

My worries are instantly brushed aside by the tangy scent of fresh cut grass, the bitter sweet aroma of wild roses, the solemn cooing of dreaming pigeons.

Guinevere Park always has a strange effect on me. As if, just like the brambles and the stone sculptures and the rolling fields, that I'm just another thing that has and always will belong to it.

The park is laid out in a massive circle. On the subway maps I used to study as a kid, it's impossible to miss; a lush green dot floating in a sea of concrete and steel. The distance from one side to the other spans at least three miles. I know from personal experience that if you don't know where you're going, you can easily lose your way within its countless fields of overgrown hedges and thick, wild forests that lack even the slightest indication of a sign.

Fortunately, Amaris chose to meet at the Amphitheater, which even the most clueless tourist could easily find sitting in the very center of the park; a great white hub from which everything else radiates.

I follow a dirt path around the Children's Petting Zoo, down a vast flight of stone steps to an atrium where a fountain spews water, black and silver and silent in the starlight, around the perimeter of a still lake, dotted with the mute, floating silhouettes of swans and ducks, and finally through the center of a finely manicured lawn, at the center of which the Amphitheater is embedded; a meteor sized imprint pressed into the earth.

I perch on the top step of the arena and crane my neck over the edge, squinting at the circular stage that sits far below, shrouded in shadow and fog.