One week, six days, twenty-two hours Before.

{Starlight}

We'd been walking for about two hours. Assuming my watch still worked correctly down here. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd notice if it broke.

I followed behind Night, letting him take the brunt of the spiderwebs. He got some in his hair, but I didn't say anything. First, because I think he would take my head off if I did. Second, because he looked...strangely attractive? Between that and his almost-translucent skin, he looked like some princely ghost who's come to haunt me. I wouldn't mind being haunted by a princely ghost, but unfortunately if I teased Night about it, he would probably feel uncomfortable.

So we just kept walking, mostly in silence. I switched arms every once in a while to keep the light high and to keep from getting tired. The tunnel was long—and boring. If this was what our entire trip would be like, I was going to be very disappointed.

"This might be the quietest I've ever seen you," Night told me. "Are you alright?"

"Bored, but fine."

"Are you hoping we'll be attacked?" he teased.

"I mean, yeah, a little."

His head spun on his shoulders to look at me like I was insane. "Are you serious?!"

"Don't you want some excitement?" I asked. "I want something interesting to happen. I want to fight by your side again. It's fun."

"I don't think I'll be able to fight at all until we can somehow get this bracelet off of me, and we can't do that until we know Troy can't catch up to us. So...no, I'd really prefer to not have any excitement. Honestly, I don't know how you make it through the day without being killed, if you go looking for trouble all the time."

Just as he'd finished speaking, the spider web he pulled at brought a couple hundred pounds of rock down from the ceiling with it. He jumped backwards, arms out to protect everything behind him, including me. As the dust settled and the last small rocks rolled to a stop, Night checked around the pile cautiously. "I wouldn't have thought that just moving a spiderweb would've caused part of the tunnel to collapse. We're lucky it didn't block the whole path."

I held my ball of light to the part of the ceiling that collapsed. In the gaps where the rock had been, there were wires lining the back of the indent. There was also a little steel lever, which was pushed out towards us. Finally, my light caught on a small piece of glass—it almost looked like a lens.

"Do you guys have cameras down here?" I asked him.

"Hm? No, I check all the cameras most days, and I never knew we had any tunnels."

"What do you think this is, then?" I pointed to the lens, and he picked his way over the wreckage to check it out. He leaned in to inspect it, and I didn't bother to move further out of the way—which meant that if he just moved his head a bit to the left, we'd only have an inch or two between us.

"I think it's a motion sensor. Which means...if I hadn't been pulling the spiderwebs away before we reached them, I probably would've been the thing to set it off."

My eyebrows shot up. "And you would've been under that pile of rocks right about now."

"Hm, in your dreams. Nothing can crush me." He flexed his arm muscles, grinning. And he did have arm muscles. Nice. "Probably they would've rained down off of me and onto you, and wouldn't that have been tragic? A world hero, reduced to a pile of rocks."

"Yeah, watch it," I teased. "This world hero has the upper hand right now—your powers don't work."

He turned to inspect the other wall to make sure there was no trap on that side of the tunnel. "The world hero would never lay a finger on me. Hero morals are too weak."

"Uh, excuse me? I just threw you off a cliff!" I said indignantly.

"Trying to save me!"

"So you admit that I didn't mean harm." I asked with the most charismatic smile I knew how to make, "Please forgive me?"

He glanced over his shoulder, eyes crinkled with good humor. "Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I have good news for you, Mr. Hero."

"That you're not going to hold a grudge?"

"Oh, no. I'm definitely going to hold a grudge. The good news is that this trap thing can only be triggered once—there's nothing left for it to drop on us. We can keep moving." He waved his hand in front of the motion sensor to prove it. A mechanism in the hole in the wall pushed forward when he moved. That must be how the trap works.

"More good news is that we should be able to tell where these traps are set up—those rocks had clear seams where they didn't fit with the rest of the wall. Also, the motion sensors stick out from the wall a bit. We should be able to tell where other traps like this one are." His hand dropped to his side, and he began to pick his way over the rubble.

I sighed. "So...still nothing interesting is happening. This is tragic. I thought road trips were supposed to be peril-filled."

He reached out his hand to help me over a particularly large boulder. The ball of light in my hand disappeared when we touched, and the cave was flushed in darkness. I hoped my palms weren't sweaty. I had sort of forgotten about the romantic subplot that we were currently ignoring. How long did he want me to ignore it? We had never really talked about his feelings for me before. Did he want to?

"Where did you learn that?" he asked in an amused tone. "I'm pretty sure road trips are supposed to be relaxing. Maybe exciting at most, but peril-filled is a level above that that I don't think anyone sets out for."

"Hm. Doubtful," I said absentmindedly. I couldn't see his expression; I could only hope he was thinking about how my hand felt in the same way that I was thinking about his. I didn't mind being shrouded in darkness for a while if it meant I could hold his hand.

"...You're not going to make more light?" Night asked slowly when I was at the other side of the rubble with him. We weren't that far away from each other. I could hear his breathing.

I considered thinking of an excuse for why we didn't need the light, but I sort of wanted him to know that I liked holding his hand. Besides—if I gave him an excuse, he could argue it because there was really no logic in walking in darkness.

Instead, I answered, "No." That was the end of it, and Night's hand tightened on mine. I had apparently said the right thing. Was this going to be our relationship? Just pure guessing what would let him feel safer?

I hoped that it was going to get easier. He was definitely opening up to me more in the last year or so than he had been before, but I was still lost around him most days. I didn't even think it was his fault. It hadn't escaped my notice that both Troy and his parents and almost everyone else seemed to be on a constant mission to invalidate Night's emotions in any way they could. It also hadn't escaped my notice that Night spent most of his time gauging how safe he was, or how safe he would be if he performed a certain action. I'd learned that he had some sort of scale in his mind that he used to measure what exactly was 'worth it,' although worth what was a question I didn't know the answer to yet.

We continued our walk in the dark.