Reversed

xxiv. twenty-four

Honestly, she shouldn't have been that surprised. Fintan had survived the Everblaze, after all.

Why couldn't Kenric have?

His normally messy red hair had been cropped to short spikes, and she was slightly shocked to see him wearing a Neverseen cloak. More than slightly shocked.

"Kenric?" She gasped.

He stared at her blankly. "Do I know you?"

Gisela stepped in front of her. "No, you don't. We're here about the Initiative."

Kenric's face lifted into a cold, empty smile that was so unlike the one she remembered. He swept his arm in a circle around himself and took a step back. "Feel free to look around."

That was enough set her mind reeling on a different track other than Kenric is alive?! and his sudden oddities.

Her fingers itched for her eyelashes. She remembered all the times the Lodestar Initiative had been mentioned casually, or not-so-casually, when she was still with the Black Swan. She and her friends had sacrificed so much just to find out what the Lodestar Initiative was, and now she was going to find out everything in a matter of minutes. 

The room behind Kenric was narrow. It was actually more like a hallway, or a corridor. It was even more poorly lit than the room downstairs, and there were still no windows at all. It gave off a sinister vibe that slithered down Sophie's spine.

Even the fire from the dripping candles seemed to glow an evil shade as the Neverseen tentatively walked forward. Kenric silently brought up the rear. Sophie counted the seconds habitually to calm her nerves.

As the her count rose higher and higher, there was still no end in sight. She wondered what the passage led to, and why it was taking so long.

Somewhere in the middle, she found out that there was indeed a window. It was small and circular, and while the view outside into the town they'd passed through earlier looked crystal clear, the light that should've been coming through it and illuminating the corridor seemed to be swallowed by the darkness around them. The window provided even less light than the candles. It was slightly ironic to see the contrast between the happy townspeople dancing below and the mood of the task at hand.

The whole situation reminded her of when she had traveled the Vasari Corridor with her old friends when they had first gone to find the Black Swan—just a whole lot more sinister. 

But she was leagues away from smiling and laughing like she had back then. And as they got closer and closer to the end of the hallway, the skulking feeling got so bad that Sophie felt her hands creep towards her knives, her thoughts becoming jittery. She was both relieved and anxious when another lone candle could be spotted through the semi-darkness and Vespera beckoned them through another door at the end of the corridor.

Based on the view from window behind them, Sophie assumed that they had passed into a whole new building. 

The room they finally stumbled into wasn't much better than the dark corridor—she assumed that there was no hope for proper lighting in an off-the-radar Neverseen hideout. Or whatever this place was.

The walls looked similar to Keefe's Alluveterre bedroom walls when he had taken a fathomlethe, the marble-looking medicine barraging his brain with surfaced memories so Keefe could write them all down. Every square inch of free space had been covered.

It seemed like whoever had plastered the notes all over the walls had taken a fathomlethe, too, because when Sophie looked closer, she could make out hundreds of tiny phrases, words, and sentences. She couldn't see what they were, because the candlelight was so dim, but she assumed that they all revolved around the Initiative.