The ground beneath me was made of the same sharp black stone as the mountain itself, and I had to move slowly to avoid bearing down on the exposed edges of razored rubble. My hands felt like I’d shredded them to pieces; my knees, like two sacks of shattered glass. I wondered if dead people could bleed to death. With my luck, I would be the first guy to find out.

I tried to distract myself—counting to a hundred, humming the off-key tunes of some of the Holy Rollers’ songs, pretending I was Kelting with Lena.

Nothing helped. I knew I was alone.

It only strengthened my resolve not to stay that way.

It’s not much farther, L. I’m going to make it and find the Gates. We’ll be back together soon, and then I’ll tell you about how much this really sucked.

I fell silent after that.

It was too hard to pretend to Kelt.

My movements slowed, and my mind slowed with them, until my arms and legs moved in some kind of stiff syncopation, like the driving beat to one of Link’s old songs.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

Lena. Lena. Lena.

I was still Kelting her name when I saw the light at the end of the tunnel—not a metaphoric light but a real one.

I heard Exu cawing in the distance. I felt the beginnings of a breeze, the stir of air in my face. The cold dampness of the tunnel began to give way to the warm light of the outside world.

I was almost there.

I squinted when the sunlight hit the mouth of the hole. I hadn’t hauled my body out yet. But the tunnel was so dark that my eyes were having a hard time adjusting to even the smallest amount of light.

When I was only halfway out, I dropped onto my stomach with my eyes still closed, the black dirt pressing against my cheek. Exu was calling loudly, probably angry that I was taking a break. At least that’s what I thought.

I opened my eyes to see the sun glinting off a pair of black-laced boots. Then the bottom of a matching wool robe came into focus.

Great.

I raised my head slowly, prepared to see a Keeper towering over me. My heart began to pound.

It looked like a man—in a way. If you ignored the fact that he was completely bald, with impossibly smooth grayish-black skin and enormous eyes. The black robe was tied at the waist with a long cord, and he—if you could call it a he—looked like some kind of miserable alien monk.

“Did you lose something?” he asked. The voice sounded so much like a man’s. Like an old man, sort of sad or maybe kind. It was hard to reconcile the human features and voice with the rest of what I was staring at.

I pulled against the rock opening, yanking my legs out from the tunnel, trying to avoid bumping into whatever he was. “I—I’m trying to find the way to the Far Keep,” I stammered. I tried to remember what Obidias had said. What was I looking for? Doors? Gates? That was it. “I mean, the Gates of the Far Keep.” I got to my feet and tried to step back, but there was nowhere to go.

“Really?” He looked interested. Or maybe sick. Honestly, I wasn’t sure it was really even a face I was looking at, so it was hard to tell what the expression meant.

“That’s right.” I tried to sound confident. When I stood tall, I was almost his height, which was reassuring.

“Are the Keepers expecting you?” His strange, dull eyes slitted.

“Yes,” I lied.

He turned abruptly on his heel to go, his robe swinging after him.

Wrong answer.

“No,” I called out. “And they’ll torture me if they find me. At least that’s what everyone seems to think. But there’s this girl—it was all a mistake—I’m not supposed to be here—and then the lubbers came, and the Order broke, and I had to jump.” My words died out, once I realized how crazy I sounded. There was no point trying to explain. It barely made sense even to me.

The creature stopped, tilting his head to the side, as if he was considering my words. Me. “Well, you’ve found them.”

“What?”

“The Gates of the Far Keep.”

I looked past him. There was nothing around but shiny black rock and clear blue sky. Maybe he was crazy. “Um, I don’t see anything but mountains.”

He turned and pointed. “There.”

The sleeve of his robe slid down, and I caught a glimpse of an extra fold of skin flapping away from his body and disappearing under the robe.

It looked like the wing of a giant bat.

I remembered the crazy story Link told me over the summer. Macon had sent him into the Caster Tunnels to deliver a message to Obidias Trueblood. That much I’d already put together. But there was another part, about how Link was attacked by some kind of creature he ended up stabbing with his garden shears—it was grayish black and bald, with the features of a man, and deformed black bands of skin that Link was convinced were wings. “Seriously,” I remembered him saying. “You don’t want to face that thing in an alley at night.”

I knew it couldn’t be the same creature, because Link said the monster he saw had yellow eyes. And the one standing here was staring back at me with green eyes—almost Caster green. Then there was the other thing. The whole gardening-shears-to-the-chest thing.

This couldn’t be him.

Green eyes. Not gold. I didn’t need to be afraid, right? He couldn’t be Dark, could he?

Still, it wasn’t anything I’d ever seen before—and I had seen more than my share.

The creature turned around, lowering his arm that wasn’t an arm. “Do you see them?”