Free Neverfall by Brodi Ashton Page A

alive?”
    Devon sighed. “Brother, when you’ve been here as long as I have, you’ll come to discover there are only one or two essential things worth living for. Unique to you and you alone. My honor is one of them for me. I keep my honor by keeping the relic out of their hands.”
    I closed my eyes. What was the essential thing I was living for? Honor, like Devon? I could hear Nikki inside my head snorting at that one. Music? The search for the next Forfeit? Eternal life? That one made no sense. Eternal life, by very definition, couldn’t be the thing worth living for.
    If I had to choose one, I would choose the search for the next Forfeit. That’s what I was living for right now. The chance for another Forfeit who could survive the Feed.
    I rubbed my eyes. What was the point of finding something worth living for if my life was no longer in my own hands?
    Devon still had something the Delphinians wanted, so there was no way they would kill him. But me … I had nothing they wanted. “Why don’t you make the decision for them?”
    “What, kill myself? This close to the Everneath, any scratch I get heals too fast. Except the scratches from the Ever-rats. You know how it is.”
    Somehow knowing that I wouldn’t be able to off myself made me feel even worse. You never realize how much you rely on the option of suicide until the option is removed. I’m not saying that sentence would make a good bumper sticker, but it was the truth.
    I felt around my cell until I found the jagged rock I had broken loose the night before. I found the smoothest part of the wall and, using the sharp point of the rock, etched a single line to mark my first day in the Delphinian Dungeons.
    And then I started to dig at the bottom of the bars.
    I had three months to dig a hole to freedom. All I could think about was going home. Maybe for the first time I could understand where Nikki was coming from when she chose going back home over an eternal life with me.
    No. I would never understand the choice she made.

ELEVEN
    I marked the passage of time, and the erosion of my hope, in weeks.
    Week one: When I actually thought my stay here would be so short, it would be pointless to mark my days.
    Week three: When I had to start reminding myself that the Nikki hallucinations were just that—hallucinations.
    Week six: When I discovered the stone holding the iron bars in place grew back, despite forty days of me scratching away at it.
    Week ten: When the rats had taken off enough skin that I felt my ankle bone sticking out.
    Week twelve: When I started begging for judgment day, and my own death.

TWELVE
NOW
    Judgment day .
    I used the sharp rock—the one I’d been so excited about that first night—to scratch another tick on my homemade calendar on the rock wall. The line was jagged. Finding the energy even to hold on to the rock made my hands shake.
    There was no need to add up all the marks. I knew that my fresh line would bring the total to ninety.
    Ninety days in this prison. Ninety hallucinations of Nikki. Ninety midnights with the rats.
    The rock slipped from my fingers, which were slick with fresh blood, and landed in a large pile of similar rocks, each one carved out of the stone by my fingers.
    All those loose stones, and yet the walls were as firm as they ever were. Maybe the stones were hallucinations too. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling.
    Suddenly Nikki was lying beside me. Ninety-one hallucinations. “Starting to doubt your own mind?” she said.
    I knew she wasn’t real. But I still answered her. Every single time.
    “You would too,” I said. She just looked at me in a way I’d imagined the real Nikki would someday look at me. A way that says I’m the one who knows you . “Can I tell you something?” I asked. It hit me that yes, I was asking a hallucination for permission to speak.
    “Yes,” she said, blinking in the dark.
    “I dream of holding your heart in my hand.” Okay, three months in hell had made me a bit