The metal attendant finished its duties and wheeled back toward the door. Ahren pulled Ryer Ord Star out of its way and watched it disappear outside, leaving them alone. He looked around the room, at all the machinery. He could never hope to understand it, to learn enough about it to know how to free the Druid. The technology belonged to another era, and all knowledge of it had been lost for centuries. Ahren felt helpless in the face of that reality.
He bent close to the seer. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted softly.
She brushed at her eyes with the heels of her palms, swallowed her tears, and stiffened her body. He released her, waiting to see what she would do-because it was clear she intended to do something.
She took his hand in hers. “Stay close to me. Don’t let go.” He followed her as she hurried to where Walker lay, easing between the machines, stepping carefully over the wires and tubes. Ahren could see that the Druid was alive. He was breathing and there was a pulse in his neck. His face twitched, as if he dreamed. His skin was bloodless and damp with perspiration. Of course, he was alive. He would have to be alive to be of any use to Antrax.
The Elven Prince fought down his revulsion and fear. Don’t let me end up like this, he prayed. Let me die first.
Ryer Ord Star looked over at him. “I have to try to reach him. I have to let him know I’m here.”
Turning back to the Druid, she trailed the fingers of her free hand over his face and down his arm to his hand, then back again.
She spent a long time doing that, staring down at him as she did so, looking impossibly small and frail amid the metal banks of machinery. Ahren held her hand tightly in his, remembering her instructions, knowing that he was her lifeline back from wherever she might have to go to try to save the Druid.
“Walker?” she whispered.
There was no response. There was no movement at all that communicated understanding. His chest rose and fell, his pulse beat, and his features twitched. Liquids flowed in and out of his body, and the wires flashed where they connected to the glass containers. He was lost to them, Ahren thought. Even Ryer Ord Star was not going to be able to get him back.
The seer straightened and brushed at loose strands of her silvery hair. Her face turned slightly toward him. “Let go of me, Ahren,” she ordered. “But stay close.”
Then she was climbing onto the metal table, easing carefully into the nest of wires and tubes, fitting her slender body to the Druid’s, nestling against him as if a child clinging to a parent who slept. The Elf stayed so close to her that he could feel the heat of her body.
“Walker?” she said again. She lifted her hands to his cheeks and turned his head toward her own, snuggling into his shoulder. Her leg fitted itself over his, so that they were intertwined. “Please, Walker,” she begged, the words breaking on her lips like shattered glass.
There was no response. Walker lay as if his body had been drained of all but just enough life to keep death at bay.
“Please, Walker,” the seer whispered again, her fingers moving across his face, her eyes closing in concentration. Tears ran down her cheeks once more.
Please, Ahren repeated the word in the silence of his mind, standing over them both, watching helplessly. Come back to us.
Walker fought his way through the writhing tentacles of the jungle vines and grasses for what seemed an endless amount of time, burning them away to clear a path, fighting for space to breathe, and still he seemed to get nowhere. The jungle was vast and unchanging, and he could find no distinguishing features to mark his passage. In the back of his mind, deep within the hazy thinking that drove him on, he realized that by escaping Castle-down and gaining the jungle, he had merely exchanged one type of maze for another.