Lost Ones-Veil 3 by Christopher Golden Page B

and some of tears. Conversations had been whispered, particularly those held across the corridor with Oliver. They were wary of being overheard. Not that they had developed any real plan, but the guards were cautious, now. What else could they do but wither here and wait to die?
    Collette did not share these thoughts with her brother or with Julianna, but she knew her friend could see the doubt in her eyes.
    The thought made her shiver. Julianna huddled close to her on the mat, sharing warmth. Collette wondered if she was awake or if the gesture was instinctive. She did not turn to find out. Sleep was a precious commodity recently, and if Julianna had managed it, Collette did not want to wake her.
    Instead she lay there, trying to breathe through her mouth to avoid the stink. The bruises she had received from the guards were healing, but there was still an ache in her side where she feared their kicks had cracked her ribs. They would heal as well, but more slowly. The swelling on her face had gone down, but the flesh was still tender and Julianna had confirmed that her jaw still had a greenish-yellow hue. Her blood had stained the mat, but it had long since dried.
    Curled on her side, she let her right hand trail off the edge of the mat. Her ragged fingernails traced the lines of grout between the stones in the floor. In the dark, she could not see them, but she could feel the difference in texture between the smoothness of the stone and the rough mortar.
    Then her fingernail scraped something up off of the mortar groove between two stones.
    In the dark, Collette frowned. She ran the ball of her finger over the same spot and felt the loose grit again. With her nail, she dug between the stones and the grout came away, not in chunks but in a soft powder, as though whatever adhesive quality it had once had no longer existed.
    A tremor went through her.
    She sat up, rubbing the grit from her finger with the tip of her thumb. In the dark, she bent forward and tried to see the section of floor she had been scraping. Her fingers ran over the stones and the grooves again. She found the place where she had done her small excavation and brushed away the loose powder. Once more she tried to dig between the stones.
    Now, though, nothing happened.
    “Shit,” she whispered, some of the hope that had begun to rise in her slipping away. Collette tried the grooves between the other stones in the floor of the cell, but found only a few grains of loose grit, normal erosion.
    “What is it?”
    With a sigh, she turned to regard Julianna. In the dark, all she could see was the outline of the woman sitting up on the mat. Some tiny bit of illumination must have filtered in from the corridor, because Julianna’s eyes had a wet gleam.
    “I’m sorry if I woke you,” Collette said.
    “I wasn’t really sleeping. What’s wrong?”
    Collette gnawed her lip for a moment, wondering if she should say anything. Then she forged ahead.
    “Do you remember when I told you about escaping from that pit the Sandman kept me in? What I did with the sand?”
    She could still remember the way her fingers had dug into the walls. One moment they’d felt like concrete, but then they’d given way under her touch and she had been able to create handholds and footholds and climb out. Once before that and once after she had dug right through the walls of the sandcastle.
    “Of course,” Julianna said. “You and Oliver figured it had to do with your mother being Borderkind.”
    “Melisande,” Collette replied. Speaking her mother’s real name—if, indeed, that legendary creature had been their mother—still felt strange to her.
    “That’s how you two were able to destroy those sand-things so easily, and when you hurt the Sandman—”
    “Yeah. Exactly,” Collette interrupted. “It was like we could undo the things the Sandman had built. Unmake them.”
    “Unravel…” Julianna said.
    In the dark, Collette reached out to take her hand, afraid to hope.