After tossing on the first tee-shirt and skirt she found, Eva attached the vials of blood and her dagger to her belt.
She walked out of her room to rejoin Zoe and Arachne–who never had complaints about her lack of attire–in the common room.
It took three clearings of her throat to get Zoe to turn around. When she finally did turn, she just stared for a moment.
Eva cocked her head to one side while subtly glancing at herself. She hadn’t put on shoes or socks or anything, but she was otherwise decently dressed. “So?”
“I wish we had more time to allow you to rest. You’re looking rather harried.”
Eva frowned. She only just got out of the shower and hadn’t had the time to so much as glance in a mirror. Eva waved Zoe off. “Well I feel great.”
“Indeed. I suppose that will have to suffice.” Zoe gave a weak smile. “Just don’t push yourself too much.”
“I’ll try, I guess,” Eva said with a shrug.
“That’s all I can ask. Nel, at Genoa’s insistence, has started her attempts to locate Shalise and Juliana. I was unsure as to whether you–”
“Of course I’ll come,” Eva said. She gave a brief glance towards Arachne, prompting the spider-demon to approach and place an arm around Eva’s shoulders. Turning back to Zoe, she said, “she’s in Ylva’s domain, right?”
Zoe nodded. “Not the usual room. I’ll take you there.”
Eva followed after Zoe. She used the short walk across the prison compound to ask a handful of questions. Most related to finding out exactly what happened while she was out of the loop from Zoe’s mouth. By the time they arrived, Eva felt she had a decent, if brief, understanding.
The doorway they passed through within Ylva’s domain was on almost the exact opposite side of the throne room from the outside entrance. An endless ocean and a short beach lay on the other side.
It was her first time through that door in Ylva’s domain and yet it felt so familiar. The sand, the water, and the nighttime sky without a star in sight were exactly the same as her little island that she visited after escaping from Sawyer the first time.
A few steps out, Eva slipped out of Arachne’s grip and knelt down. A tingle of nostalgia tickled Eva’s mind as she lifted some of the sand and let it fall through her fingers.
Her island had been a refuge. She had rested there, half in the water, for a few hours. Upon entering, she had felt comfortable enough to slip into sleep for a time.
Considering that had been immediately after her torture session with Sawyer, that might have been more exhaustion than comfort. Still, it was a good memory; the island, not the torture session.
The island was similar enough that she might not notice the difference had she been able to see only a small slice of it. It was black and white then; her domain compensating for her lack of eyes in an imperfect method, according to Devon and Arachne.
The only real difference was that while her island was about the size of her dorm room, Ylva’s island didn’t even have curvature. As far as Eva could tell, it stretched on forever in either direction.
Other than that, the biggest change was the tiny tree. Eva’s island had one, Ylva’s had a massive black marble structure. It didn’t look anything like what she would have expected from seeing the inside.
For one, it was a whole lot larger. Inside, the space between the rooms’ doorways was the size of the doorway plus a few foot wide pillar. As Eva looked back at the structure, the door they had just come out of was a tiny keyhole in comparison to the main structure.
They hadn’t even walked that far away from it.
The area where the next room would normally be would take a good five minutes to run to from the beach.
The entire thing hurt Eva’s head. Escher himself would have headaches for weeks just trying to wrap his mind around the layout of the place.
All the gritty sand she had picked up had stuck around, getting in all the joints of her chitinous hands. Her feet were worse by far. She hadn’t worn shoes–it was more comfortable not to under normal circumstances.
The beach was not normal circumstances.
“How can you stand the sand?” Eva asked of Arachne.
“Got used to it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t annoying, but I can ignore it if I have to.”
Eva frowned as she started using the sharp tips of her fingers to dislodge a particularly irritating grain of sand. “How many millennia did that take,” she mumbled more to herself than anyone else.
It didn’t take much longer before their group reached the edge of the water. As in Eva’s domain, the pitch black liquid stretched out to the horizon without a single ripple marring the glassy surface.
