They help Alicia carry Oliver from that tunnel, his eyes fluttering but consciousness not reaching him. She stays by his side, gripping his hand and trying to keep her emotions at bay.

They set him down by the cart, one of the men quick to fetch the medical kit.

"I've got him, Alicia." Alicia looks up from where she kneels beside Oliver, a woman settling on the other side of him. Kendra, her name is, her skin as dark as night but her eyes as light as the sky. "Get someone to look at that wound."

Alicia glances down at herself, having forgotten that she's coated in gore. She peels back her stained shirt to look at the bite, red and angry. She's going to turn. She's going to become a Grey Blood while the grand duke continues to exile people, while her brothers are still within those walls unaware of what's happening, unaware of what she did to get them out of the slums. She's going to turn into a Grey Blood while the rebels are still in hiding and the queen is dead and these people would rather see Muovea burn than save it.

Alicia pulls her satchel over her head, dumping it on the ground before grabbing the gun from within. She reaches for a lantern, quick to light it and hook it onto the belt around her waist.

"What are you doing?" Kendra asks, grabbing Alicia's hand, stopping her movements.

Alicia just blinks at her, numb to the very core of her being. "Within that satchel is a book. Make sure Oliver gets it," she replies, taking Oliver's blade from his belt and standing.

"You can't go back in there, it's not safe."

Rolling her shoulder to feel the wound soak more blood into her shirt, Alicia finds she doesn't care. "I'm going to die anyway. It may as well mean something when I do."

Alicia's world becomes dark and cold once again as she traverses deep into the tunnels. She finds her way back to the collapsed tunnel, her boots trailing through the blood of Jackson and the gore of the felled Grey Bloods.

Alicia is numb still as she goes deeper, her lantern barely piercing the suffocating darkness. There are moans ahead, the calls of the dead as they meander through the tunnels, lost within the darkness.

She kills the first of them easily, plunging the blade into its rotted skull before heaving it back out and continuing onward.

She's not within her own body, her limbs move of their own volition. Cutting through the Greys, venturing further into the tunnels, unable to feel the cold of the sticky blood. Alicia isn't herself at that moment, she's the ghost that her ma honed her to be.

All she knows is she's going to die and everything she did for the past six years has amounted to nothing. All the pain she caused. Everything she took. The innocents she murdered. It all means nothing.

The lantern chases away the shadows before her, and Alicia stumbles into a room cluttered with crates. She sees more Grey Bloods within, roaming the room like they were simply put here to guard the place. It would certainly explain how they never activated the tripwire.

Alicia raises her gun, the shots loud in the small space as she picks them off one by one. Her aim is precise, her hands know exactly what to do. She thought she'd buried such instincts. She was only fooling herself.

Once they're all dead, she approaches one of the crates, using the blade to pry open the lid with hope finally flaring in her chest. Alicia pushes the top away, the clatter of it echoing in the space. She reveals an abundance of medicine, packaged and neatly slotted within the crate, ready to be shipped off to war.

But this isn't why she came. She continues on, following the tunnel deeper, the old ruins leading her to places that haven't been explored in years. Deeper into the unknown, she should be feeling the same dread she once felt six years ago, but she doesn't. The wound on her shoulder seems to make her immune to fear, to caring.

She's staring inevitability in the face and she'll be damned if she doesn't do anything with it.

The path leads her to a wide room, the floor littered with old, crumbled stone, the ceiling a patchwork of webs in the rock, like this place is only another few years from collapsing under the weight of the thriving vegetation above. In the centre of the room is a stone coffin.

Alicia's bloody fingers tighten around the blade in her grip that she raises, eyes darting to each shadowy corner of the room. The only thing that disturbs this place is her breath.

Advancing, she rounds the stone coffin, searching for traps, the slab keeping it sealed still in place. She finds no more of David's tripwires, nothing that'll leap out at her.

She tucks the blade into her belt and plants her hands on the slab of stone.

If the grand duke wanted something from this place, then she'll gladly make her last act in this realm one of taking it from him.

Alicia shoves, throwing her dwindling strength behind her movement. Her shoulder burns, the skin tearing and blood drips onto the dusty stone. Baring her teeth, muscles straining, the stone groans as it begins to slide open. With a thud that echoes throughout the chamber, it hits the ground on the other side and Alicia leans against the coffin, gasping in mouthfuls of the musty air. As she blinks the swirling particles from her eyes, Alicia peers into the coffin and what she sees sends her gut plummeting.

It's empty. It's fucking empty.

"No," she pants, brushing her hand against the bottom of the coffin just to make certain her eyes aren't lying to her. All she touches is cold stone.

She wracks her brain, trying to understand why this could be happening. There should at least be old bones, rags belonging to Yorvik. But there's nothing. What could the soldiers who once looted this place need with crumbling bones of a man more myth than fact?

"Damn it!" she shouts, slamming her hand against the stone, the pain nothing compared to the bone deep throb in her shoulder. She leans over the coffin, closing her eyes as she breathes in century's old air.

She doesn't think about the lives that once wandered these halls. She doesn't think about the fact they succeeded in getting David's supplies. She doesn't think about the fact that Kathryn didn't die for nothing, because her pa did. Her pa was shot and killed for some fucking fallacy that she'd dreamt up.

Alicia the saviour. Alicia and her redemption. Alicia the restorer of all that is good and right in Muovea.

She was a fucking fool and now she's going to die as one too, still chasing after some grand ideas of retribution. There's no redeeming her soul, she's going to be dragged into the Reaper's den and torn apart by the souls she sent there.

The sound of her dripping blood is what brings her back to herself. Alicia sighs as she lifts her head and presses a hand to her shoulder. Then she frowns, reaches for the lantern on her belt, and lifts it above the coffin.

Her blood has left a trail on the stone, beads of it rolling into a divet in the rock, but where it should pool, it doesn't.

Where did her blood go?

Alicia traces her hand over the stone again, but now she feels the crack. Setting her lantern down in the coffin, Alicia grabs her blade and slips it into the miniscule crack where her blood disappeared. She pries it open and a small section of the stone lifts. Shoving it away, Alicia peers into the hole revealed and scowls at the box nestled within.

She drags out the box within the box, using the knife to pry open that lid too. Inside—glinting from the light of her lantern—is a golden key. It sits alone with nothing to tell her what it opens.

Picking it up, she twirls it between her stained fingers.

"Why were you buried with the man who killed the Faceless Queen?" There's no answer to her voiced question, but a weight settles on her chest and she knows this is just another piece to the puzzle the grand duke has been putting together. The Ghuls, the tomb, the Faceless Queen, and now this key is all leading somewhere that Sergey Volkov is trying to go.

Perhaps Alicia would have followed, but it seems the inevitable has caught up with her and the Reaper has come to welcome her home.

"You're not going to die," Oliver says with a sigh as Alicia peels back the bandage of her wound once again to inspect the teeth marks.

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because you would have turned by now if you were."

Squinting her eyes at the wound, perhaps waiting for her flesh to begin rotting around it, she realises he may have a point. In the low light that filters into his tent from the fire outside she notes that her flesh hasn't began to decay. "So, I'm immune?"

"Clearly."

"Huh," is all she manages, wincing as she slides the bandage back into place. "I could still die of an infection."

"I'm sure you'll get an infection if you keep playing with it," he grumbles, going back to cleaning his gun. Alicia sits back on her heels, staring at him with a deep frown. He pulls apart the gun, scrubbing at it furiously.

"Oliver," she murmurs, worried that he's going to break the weapon if he's not careful. But more concerned about the cold glint in his gaze. "Oliver." Alicia grabs his hands, placing hers over his, stopping his erratic movements. He doesn't look at her, simply stares at her hands, at the blood beneath her nails that she can't seem to scrub clean. Alicia isn't the only one who's suffered today. "Talk to me."

"And say what?" he bites back, straightening but still not looking at her, his gaze going to the slit in the tent that leads to the rest of the camp.

"Something," she replies, her hold on his hands tightening, hating the look of neutrality in his eyes more than anything. "Just say something."

He pulls his hands from hers, going back to putting his gun back together. "I'd rather be alone, Alicia."

She shakes her head, refusing to accept that. "Oliver," she says more firmly, cupping his jaw in her palms and drawing his face up until he has no choice but to meet her gaze. "You've lost two good men on this trip." A muscle in his jaw flutters against Alicia's palm, and he tries to pull away from her again, but she shifts closer. "You're allowed to feel, Oliver. You're allowed to mourn. No one here is expecting you to always be the stoic soldier, I'm certainly not." Alicia drops her hands, twisting them in the fabric of her white shirt. "Just because you're an exile, just because you have people relying on you, doesn't make you any less human."

"Alicia," he starts, letting out a breath, his mask beginning to crack. "I don't know what you want me to say. That I'm sad about what happened to Jackson and Vaughn? Obviously, I am. There's more I could have done for them. But if I dwell on every person I've lost, then none of us would have made it as far as we have." Oliver lays back on his bedroll, gazing up at the ceiling of his tent with glittering eyes. "If I can't continue moving forward, then no one else will."

"That shouldn't be on you," Alicia insists, her words sounding weak to her own ears. Oliver looks up at her, creases forming around his eyes in the first sign of sorrow she's seen from him tonight.

"But you understand, don't you?" The question has her mouth opening and closing, unable to answer it. She doesn't want to admit that she understands, that she's repeatedly lost the things she thought she could never live without, yet she's had to keep moving forward for the people around her. "You and me, Alicia, we're more alike than you'd like." Alicia's shoulders slump at that, the truth in those words squeezing around her heart.

Alicia moves, laying down beside him. Oliver shifts to make room for her on the bedroll. Tucking her hands to her chin, Alicia's gaze meets his as he turns his head to look at her.

"I never wanted to be this person," she whispers, her secrets sounding loud in the quiet of the tent.

"No one wants to be like us, Alicia, that's why we do what we do, so they don't have to." Oliver reaches down, tugging the blanket over the both of them, tucking it behind Alicia before brushing a strand of hair from her eyes.

"That's why I decided that helping Muovea as a noble would be a good path for me," she admits, Oliver studying her face. "I would have the power to make sure no one had to grow up the way I did in the slums. I would have the power to make sure no one had to do what I did to get out of those slums." There's a pause as Alicia stops the words from escaping, though she wants to speak them so severely they burn the back of her throat.

"What did you do, Alicia?" he asks, his voice but a breath.

Alicia swallows then, reaching out a hand to press her palm to his chest, feeling his heartbeat through his shirt, reminding herself that she's not alone. "I did for my family what I did for you today," she murmurs, blinking the tears away that blur her vision. She meets his sterling gaze, finding no judgement in those eyes. "I killed so they could live. I died so they could thrive." Oliver intertwines their fingers, his skin warm against her ice. "For you, for the Commons, for the people now suffering because of the duke, I'd do it all again. But I don't want to."

"I'm not going to promise you that you won't have to sacrifice to right the duke's wrongs, to right your own wrongs," Oliver tells her, his gaze flicking between hers. "That's not my place. But I can promise you that you won't be alone while doing it." Alicia watches him for a long moment, the truth in his words warming her heart, while at the same time filling her with dread.

But does she really want to embark on this journey again?

Today she touched death, felt it breathing down her neck, and all she could think about was the work she left unfinished. The notebook, the map, the key, she has in her possession the things she needs to continue on her journey of righting Muovea. But at what cost? Her brothers? Her ma? Oliver? How much more is she willing to sacrifice for a goal that may be doomed?

Except now she's not alone.

Eventually, she nods, accepting such a promise.

All she wanted as she fought her war in the slums was for someone to stand by her and tell her she's not alone. Maybe she doesn't have to come out of this fight as broken as she was then. Maybe she doesn't have to sacrifice as much.

It's a fragile hope.