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He heard Collette and Julianna talking in low voices and knew they didn’t have long before the noise of the collapsing wall su now"

"Oliver?"

Julianna’s face appeared at the grate

He jumped into the corridor and went up to their door

"What’d you do?"

"It worked" His eyes sought his sister in the darkened cell He saw Collette pulling on her shoes She stared up at him

"How?"

"It’s all real, Coll Melisande was our mother I went over it athat could be true We crossed the Veil, sis All the legends are real, here, and we’re one of theone to such trouble to deal us out of the gaend-Born"

He sazed at him in wonder

"Now, stand away from the wall We’re out of time"

Oliver placed both hands on the stones, ran his fingers and palht about entropy About the loss of cohesion More than anything, he thought about his mother, and wished he could have known her true self

Once again, the ave the wall a shove and the stones tumbled into the cell Oliver stepped over the rubble and into the cell

"I’ve tried," Collette said

Their eyes s It’s about letting the them surrender"

"What the hell does that mean?" Julianna asked

But Oliver kept his focus on Collette "You did it before, when you weren’t thinking about it, or when you were so exhausted you couldn’t think straight Now you’ve just got to…no, believe isn’t enough You’ve got to knohat you are"

He went to Julianna and slid one hand behind her head, fingers tangling in her hair They kissed, and he felt like he could just cruo?"

Julianna stiffened, eyes full of pain "I can’t cross the Veil You know that"

"Screw that We’re out of here, one way or another"

He turned to Collette Pointed to the wall behind her "You take care of that wall We’ve got ht back"

"Where are you going?" Julianna asked

But Oliver had already jumped back into the hall His heart raced and he could not erase the grin on his face as he sprinted down the corridor He ran so quickly that when he had to slon toBut he recovered, and a good thing, too, for as he went through the arch toward the bottoate sla the Yucatazcan guards

Oliver ran to the stairs He took theuard rounded the curving stairwell above him and shouted Oliver heard the scrape of metal upon hed, crouching, and reached out to lay his hands on the stairs just above him They started to shift and crack iing his hands over the stones as he went

And the stairs gave way, leaving an empty pit behind

Oliver leaped the rest of the way to the bottoap The others rounded the corner on the stairs and stopped short, staring at the chasrinned and shot theer, then ran back down the corridor toward the cells

Julianna and Collette weren’t there, but the rear wall of the cell had collapsed Oliver whooped with joy and ran through the opening into the next cell That one had been opened as well, but in this case it had not been the wall that Collette had taken down It was the door

Oliver stepped into the far corridor The hall was filled with a cold mist, and the stone walls were ri, as he turned to see Collette and Julianna standing in front of a door that glistened with ice crystals

Frost

Collette put her hands on the door and hissed, pulling away frolanced at Oliver--past Oliver--and he knew she was re the last time she’d been here, and the horrid proain

Collette tried again, putting her hands against the wall of the cell instead of the door Oliver ran to join her The guards would figure out a way to reach them soon, he was sure

He put his hands on the door The ice was so cold it burned His eyelashes stuck when he blinked and his breath plumed in front of him But thethe hinges on pulled loose froan to shift

"Push," Oliver said

Together, they brought down the whole front wall of the cell, door and all Stones and wood crashed inward Ice shattered Frigid air rolled out, and then the three of the at the winter man Frost had been placed in a kind of stasis within a dark sphere of ic At least three quarters of the sphere had been covered with an outer layer of ice and snow Deep within, where the sphere was not covered, they could see Frost From what Oliver could tell, he did not look shattered any on?" Julianna asked "Is he trying to get free?"

"Repairing hi his way out," Collette said

Oliver shook his head "We don’t have tilanced back at Julianna and then put his hands on the purple-black sphere

It crackled at the touch

Nothing happened

"What’s wrong?" Collette asked

Oliver frowned He could try to concentrate, but what little he knew of the power he and his sister shared told him that it didn’t work like that

"I don’t know"

"Magic," Julianna said, sounding als that have a real substance before The sand The walls Maybe ic isn’t like that"