Chapter 78

“Do you notice that?” he asked me.

“What?”

“Straight ahead. It gets even darker. Is that it?”

Seeing as how we were standing plunged into the blackest darkness ever, I was about to tell him he was imagining things, but I looked up the path and saw that he was right. The blackness had more black to it; it seemed almost palpable.

I took about three short, tentative steps forward, then put my free hand out in front of me to avoid contacting the Great Wall face-first. Which I would have done in one more step—I’d planned to raise my hand to chest level, but smacked into stone about halfway up.

“Ow, fuck!” I hissed. In the thick blackness and equally thick silence, it might as well have been a blood-curdling scream.

“Is that it?” Josh asked, coming alongside me, still holding my other hand.

We craned our necks and watched the darkness in front of us rise up towards the sky. This close to it, we could discern the top of the Wall as the place where the stars began.