Ever by Gail Carson Levine Page B

this gloom. Carefully, I turn and try to climb back, but I can’t lift my foot. It will not obey me.
    Down is possible, if not easy. Up is impossible.
    I begin to count the steps as a way of keeping time. Slow and cautious as each one is, five steps may fill a minute. Ten steps. Twenty-five. One hundred. Six hundred. Two hours, more or less.
    One thousand steps. My legs ache. I’m hungry and thirsty again. The stairs never end. I sink down to rest but drag myself to my feet immediately. While I’m idle, there is no way to mark the time. I try to picture the blue sky, Olus’s face, my home in Hyte. But the images belong to the upper air.
    Two thousand steps. Above, night must have fallen. My twenty-fifth day is over. Admat, or any god who is listening, let me reach Wadir. Let me find Admat. Let me return to light and Olus.

43

    OLUS
    F IVE FEET.
    Four feet.
    I shriek, “Stop!” and stop pacing.
    For a moment I’m bewildered, not sure what I’ve been doing. The water has risen to my thighs. It’s night again. I’ve passed what I believe is Kezi’s twenty-fifth day down here.
    I lift Kudiya to make one more attempt at carrying him out. We fall and land splashing. His eyes are all whites. I prop him up so his head will stay above the water as long as possible. I begin to climb alone.
    It is easier than I expect. I think the well has tipped, giving me a slope, not a vertical. Betraying Kudiya and Kezi makes everything possible.
    After I emerge I will go straight to Enshi Rock and join the gods who sleep away the millennia. I won’t see Kezi’s sacrifice or tell her good-bye or say I didn’t love her enough.
    I am weeping, pitying her and me.
    Mostly me.
    I pause, feeling supremely foolish. She’ll die and Kudiya will die. I’ll lose her and sleep out my own life because of fear.
    I drop back down, a vertical fall again. Kudiya may die, and so may Kezi. I may sleep away eternity. But I’ll stay with him until he takes his last breath.
    His head is tilted back, floating as though no body were attached. I hold him up.
    If I had something in addition to my knife . . . I look at the rising water where the balled-up spiderwebbing—
    I grab a clump. The webbing is still sticky. I spread the mass across the fingers of my right hand. I grip a rock and can hold on despite the wet.
    Am I now stuck to the rock? No. I’m able to let go. I plaster spider glue across my palms and fingers and on the undersides of my feet. It adheres even in the water. I drape Kudiya over my shoulder, where he hangs limp.
    I can climb! The spider glue never fails. Soon I’ll feel my winds again.
    We’ve risen about eight feet. Above, the night sky hasgrown from a coin to plate.
    I hear a rumble, like thunder, but this thunder is in the ground.
    Hannu!
    The rocks tremble.
    I climb frantically. We have only a few yards to go.
    The rocks dance in place.
    I find new handholds, new footholds. We’re almost there.
    The rumble grows. The rocks slide sideways. But we’re out. My strong wind lifts us above the heaving earth.
    Now I have to find someone who can save Kudiya or make his dying comfortable. I command my swift wind to take us to the nearby hamlet.
    But Kudiya evaporates from my arms. The ground continues to buck, then levels. The well is gone, replaced by a rock-filled basin. Next to the basin is a rubble of wood and thatch, a collapsed hut. On the ground between the two, Puru appears.

44

    KEZI
    T HE LIGHT CHANGES so gradually that I fail to notice Puru’s branch dimming and the tunnel brightening.
    Three thousand steps. I lose my balance and tumble the final three, landing on my side. My fall is cushioned somehow. Still, I’ve made a lively arrival among the dead.
    I sneeze. Gray feathers billow around me. When I stand, they’re ankle deep, like ghostly fallen leaves. I brush them off and am relieved that touching them hasn’t made any sprout from