Trying hard isn’t enough, no matter what Ash says. I unclench my grip on the kelp fronds, letting them flutter off on the current, along with all the possibilities for a future I don’t dare hold onto. “Enough. You’re right—the whole world is crashing down. I need you to stay focused.”
There’s a beat of tension, an extra weight to the water. Then it’s gone. “I—I know. Sorry. I wasn’t trying to pressure you. I just—here.” He shoots in front of me, twisting one wrist, palm up, fingers curled to hold—nothing. He follows my stare, blinks, and shakes his head. “Hold on—”
The waters drain away, the seabed turning to rolling dunes, dry as far as the eye can see, except for a glistening orb slowly spinning on Ash’s upturned palm.
“What is that?” I step closer, fascinated by the flickering way light shifts and glistens off particles suspended in the water. I turn my palm up and summon water to it, but the effect is lacklustre, little more than a wet, transparent ball. “How are you doing that?”
Fluffy winds its way up my arm and pokes a tendril through the bubble of liquid in my hand. It bursts, splashing into the sand. Ash holds his out to Fluffy instead.
“It’s for you.”
“You’re giving the treespawn its own fishbowl?”
“Not for the forest, for you, C. The waters sent it. Sent me with it.”
“The waters.” Maybe he needs to get some sleep, too? But there’s something about the shimmering thing he extends toward me, something almost alive. I reach for it despite myself—and he draws back. “I thought you said it was for me?”
“It is. Or I think it is. Just . . . be careful. The forest, I know. It’s slow, steady. The waters aren’t. I didn’t think I’d make it back to you. I don’t know why they sent this or what’ll happen if you—”
I grab it from him, letting Fluffy hang on or drop as it likes. The treespawn anchors my dreamscape to the forest outside Nine Peaks—maybe to all the forests. If the ocean’s gift works the same way, who knows what I’ll be able to do now?
But nothing happens. That cool, smooth surface is inert. I squeeze, prod, bring it up to my face to peer into its depths. No response.
I glare at Ash.
He shrugs. “Okay, so maybe it’s harmless. Pretty, though, right?”
I don’t need pretty. I need power. “How’s a floating puddle supposed to help me stop Maryam?”
“Uh, not sure that’s what it’s meant for.”
I chuck the orb into the distance. “Then I don’t need it.”
He jogs after it. I don’t bother staying to watch him hunt among the dunes. I’m done watching other people do the work. That way leads only to disaster—death, or betrayal, or both.
I need to find a way to fight back for real. If whatever power or magic I once held was Cadence’s all along, fine. If the trees and the waters can’t or won’t help me, so be it. I just need to find something of my own. And I think I know where to look.
Only, Ange isn’t sleeping anymore.
“Figures,” I grumble. “Now you’re up and about?”
Her fingers dig into the sheets. “Cole?”
“You can hear me?”
She frowns. “Where are you?”
“No time for that. Go to sleep. I need to test a theory.”
She shakes her head but obediently rearranges the bedding and folds herself down under it.
“Can’t you hurry up? This is taking too long.”
She cracks an eyelid. “You try falling asleep on command. Especially after sleeping for like three days straight. Why do I have to do this, anyway?”
Maybe I can bore her to sleep? “You were sick. I helped you get better. Me. Alone. Well, mostly alone. Ash was there, but he didn’t heal you, I did. I found the threads again, fixed them. But I don’t exist on this side of reality, not really. I can’t see or feel the threads unless I’m in the dreamscape. Deep in. I think. I don’t really know. I need to try again.”
Ange sits up slowly. “I’d rather not have you rummaging around inside my unconscious brain if you don’t mind.”
I consider this very reasonable perspective. “Fair. Counterpoint: playing test subject might help me stop the Mara from devouring the world. Also, not to nitpick, but you would be dead right now if it weren’t for me, so you kind of owe me.”
Am I being pushy and inconsiderate? Yes. Am I going to apologize for my rudeness? Who has the time? I am stone, and stones don’t get embarrassed.
“What are you trying to do?” Ash says, stretching and stifling a yawn as he returns to his body.
“Can you take me back there? To her threads? I’m going either way.”
Ange waves. “Still awake over here, by the way.”
Ash points. “She says she’s still awake, so you’re not going anywhere for the moment. Why don’t you try explaining what it is you’re hoping to do?”
“Why? So I can get more people involved, get betrayed or get them killed? Nah. I’m good.”
He blinks. “Cole, right?”
“Who else would it be?”
“What happened to you?”
“Try to keep up, sparkles. Failure. Betrayal. Hard deadline rushing up to smack us in the face. Ring any bells?” I’ve never been this mean in my life. Or un-life. It’s kind of freeing, not needing anyone on your side.
Do I feel bad about alienating my friends for their own good? Maybe a little. But if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s burying squishy, useless feelings to get the job done. I am stone. I will not crack.
Fluffy nudges me worriedly. I nudge back, hard. “Mind yourself, treespawn.”
“Treespawn?” Ange says. “Also, who broke the kid?”
“You know you don’t have to do this alone, right, C?” Ash says. When I don’t answer, he scratches his head, making his tangled hair stand up in clumps. “Look, at least take this.”
He turns his palm up. The orb is there, suddenly, glistening and casting ripples of light across the room. Ange sucks in a breath. I don’t blame her. It was mesmerizing in the dreamscape. It’s miraculous here.
I reach for it, without hands, and suddenly Ash’s are empty. The light is gone, the sea’s gift vanishing in an instant, at least from their point of view. From mine, it rocks up against Fluffy and burbles contentedly, coming to life and following me around with the same mysterious ease the forest’s gift exhibits.
Disappointingly, I don’t feel a sudden surge of power, and threads don’t materialize out of thin air. Not that I was expecting any such thing. It’s not like the ocean was going to magically give me my, well, magic back. But it would’ve been nice.
In the waking world, Ash starts bringing Ange up to speed on what she’s missed, so there goes any chance of her falling asleep in the immediate future. Guess I’ll just have to find someone else to practice on.
Up in Refuge, drones are busy carting away the bodies from the monsters’ feast. The remains will probably be fed to the same insect masses that will eventually be processed into ingredients for Noosh. Thankfully, in my current form, I have no stomach to turn.
The Mara are quiet for now. Digesting, maybe. Ravel and Cadence are yawning through Maryam’s slate of official audiences for the day, all the excitement of mass slaughter apparently over and done with. What would happen if I could get inside their heads and tangle some threads on purpose? Or Maryam’s, for that matter? There’s a thought—
But that takes me right back to where I was, trying to manipulate others into doing everything for me. It just doesn’t work out. It’s too easy to miss something, to send them in the wrong direction. I can’t afford to wallow in circles repeating past mistakes. I need to focus on what I can do.
And apparently, what I can do is heal. Which means I need to find someone broken.
Yesterday, there were dozens of options. But with the prisoners’ ranks so dramatically thinned, today there are only two who fit the bill. Both are women, neither young nor exceptionally old. One has the greyish undertone of a
former Refuge drone, Noosh leaching the warmth from her flesh, but her flaking paint and torn costume point toward recent time spent in Freedom. The other looks older, skin etched by the harsh fog of the streets. Both must have fought capture; they’re bruised and broken and feverish.
I choose the dancer first, diving headfirst into the chaos of her fading mind. Ash isn’t here this time to help me build an island of serenity inside the madness. Good. I don’t want to waste time finding my balance when what I really need is to immerse myself in the overwhelming otherness and fight my way through to that hidden inner place.
But Ange was Ange, and this woman? I don’t know her, can’t locate the core of who she is in the midst of her illness, can’t even being to know where to look, or how . . .
Fluffy pokes me, grumbling. The other one—Squishy, let’s say—gives me a little slap, too. I look down to see them huddled together, forming a small, perfect bubble of clarity. They jostle and nudge until I lean into it, letting it grow around me until the island of stillness pushes the otherness back completely.
Maybe this isn’t a waste of time, but the first step in a sequence. What did Ash do? First the island, and then a bunch of teasing nonsense that I definitely don’t want to repeat. But I can’t stop it from unspooling inside my head. The memory clicks forward without my permission. Ash is Ash, Cole is Cole, Ange is Ange . . .
No, that is not quite right, is it? What he really said was, “I’m me, you’re you,” not our names. Me. You. Them.
I repeat the lines, word for word, or as near as I can remember. But it doesn’t work. He’s not here with me. And this woman isn’t Ange.
I don’t have any idea what her name is. So really, it should go, “I’m me. You’re you,” and end there. Or, “I’m me. Fluffy is Fluffy. Squishy is Squishy. You’re you,” if I want to get really specific. But mouthing the lines does nothing but make me feel silly and useless.
It wasn’t a magic spell. It was a lesson. Me. You. Separate. This is ‘me’—the part that is contained, the part I hold together, that holds me together.
That is ‘you’—the part that is other, that is not me, that stands apart or, in the case of the dreamer, that surrounds that which is me.
I hold my hand up to the curve of the bubble and let my island of stillness, of me-ness, dissolve. I let the other surround me, immerse myself in the feverish remains of the woman I am trying to save, reach for the core—
—and step onto an obsidian sea reflecting a ravelling tapestry of living threads.
I don’t recognize these fragments of memory the way I did some of Ange’s, don’t resonate with these dreams and longings and fears the way I did hers. This woman is familiar only in her humanity, in our shared experiences of Refuge, of Freedom.
It’s easier, in some ways. I don’t feel the same guilt at exposing her deepest self, don’t cringe from the intimacy of holding the fabric of a stranger in my hands. But the difference comes in the re-weaving. I hesitate, less sure of which threads to twine, clumsily grabbing at whatever’s nearest, artlessly stuffing loose cords wherever they might fit, knotting them together recklessly.
I will heal this woman because that is what I set out to do. Not out of a need to restore her individually, but out of a general sense that healing is, on the balance, better than not healing, and more importantly, is something I can do.
The result is messy, but it’ll hold. When I crash back through that mirrored surface into the stranger’s dreamscape, she’s huddled in the corner of a dark room, arms clasped around her knees, shoulders hunched to protect her head.
I hesitate. “What’s your name?”
She peers out at me, wary. “What did you do to me? Who are you?” Then her shoulders draw back, her grip relaxing. “You’re her, aren’t you? Victoire of Freedom. Did you kill the monsters again?”
I stumble back out of her dreams. I had forgotten what this felt like. It’s been so long since I lost that power, but for a brief moment, I’d been a hero. The dancers’ gazes had followed me in amazement and gratitude. Underfolk had sought me out, finding excuses to visit, in awe of my power, my ability to protect them. Not Cadence, a talented child with more power than she knew what to do with. Not Victoire, as the woman had named me, not Ravel’s preening puppet, a creature of sensation without thought. Not Ravel himself, or Ange, or Ash, or Maryam, even. Me. I was the one they looked to.
And now I am again.
This is what I’m meant to be doing. This is why I wanted that magic in the first place. I can help people, save them. Beat back the monsters. Make a place for myself.
Or not even that, really. It is a chance that I could just . . . just have a reason to be. To keep being more than just another broken-down ghost haunting the halls of someone else’s nightmare . . .
The thrill of discovery ebbs in another wave of exhaustion, but I don’t want to rest, can’t afford to. High above, Cadence is arguing with Ravel about what needs to happen with the barrier. Far below, Haynfyv fires question after question at Ange while Ash tries to keep Lily from escorting a parade of new friends in to meet her hero.
Far, far away, Nine Peaks will be readying an attack that could ignite the end of the world if I don’t find a way to turn it back.
Luckily, I think I might just be able to do something about that.
Chapter 26: Unravelling
I make it through two more healings before collapsing into my own dreamscape to recover. Ash finds me there.
I refuse to tell him what I’ve been up to. He refuses to be upset about it—or to leave.
He could. He could even take one person across with him. What he can’t do is come back, not in a hurry, not when the barrier does so much damage to dreamwalkers.
But even for Lily’s sake, he won’t be persuaded to go. So I leave him behind and hunt down more broken people to set to rights, doing my best to ignore how the ones I’ve just healed are being lined up for sacrifice at this very moment.
I don’t watch it happen—the press of the Mara makes that nearly impossible, even if I wanted to, which I very much don’t. But people keep getting carted away from the prison dorms and sickrooms, and the crowd of ghosts at the edge of realities thickens, an ever-growing number of familiar faces grimacing and shrieking and snapping at me as I struggle to pass, already worn down from pushing through yet one more healing than I really should have.
“I think it’s time to talk about Cadence,” Ash says. “You haven’t tried to—you know—yet, have you?”
I look away from Cass’s staring eyes and Suzie’s withered ones, drawing back from the edge, putting off pressing through the ranks of the dead and returning to the waking world with regret and relief both. “It’s her body, Ash. Let her die in it.”
He hesitates, scanning my face. Her face, because I don’t have anything better to imagine myself as than the girl I used to be. “How can you be so sure, C? When you woke up the first time in Refuge, Cady was the ghost. And neither of you are dead—”
“Yet,” I interrupt.
He frowns. “Fine. Neither of you are dead yet—”
“That you know of.”
“Cole. You’re not dead. Cady’s not dead. Let’s try to agree on that much, at least. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re alive, either. What if it’s not even a ‘life’ thing, it’s something else entirely?”
I press at a growing ache in my forehead. “I don’t have time for word games. Spit it out.”
“What if Cadence isn’t Cadence? Or you’re not you? What if you’re Cadence? Or—or the reverse—”
“Not helping.”
He sighs and scrubs a hand through his hair, rolling his eyes up at me in an expression that is probably meant to be exactly as distracting as it is. “No one has heard of anything like you two before. We’re dreamwalkers—ghosts aren’t exactly a foreign concept. But a person can’t be living and ghost at the same time. So what if one of you is something . . . else?”
That gets my attention. “L
ike what? You think I’m a monster masquerading as a ghost now?”
“Or Cadence is—or at least, she could be. I don’t know; that’s the point. And neither do you. Maybe she’s an embodied memory, some kind of fragment of who you used to be. Maybe she’s a new type of monster, or the Mara have gotten a whole lot more creative.”
“You keep saying “Cadence, Cadence,” like it couldn’t just as well be me that’s the freak. At least she remembers life before Refuge. What if I’m a—a clone, or something? Artificially produced, like Ravel.”
“If you were a clone, wouldn’t there be two bodies instead of just one between the two of you? And you want to know why I’m talking to you right now instead of Cady? Easy: which one of you is trying to unleash the monsters, C? Which one of you is wearing yourself into oblivion trying to heal people?”
“But that’s—she’s—”
“Cole, come on, don’t—”
I shoulder through my dead and lunge for the other side of reality. I can’t deal with this right now. He just—he doesn’t understand. Cadence is a pest, but she’s my pest. Working on the side of evil doesn’t change that. Maybe it would if she really meant it, but she’s just . . . stuck in the past.
Like a ghost. Or a fragment. Or—or a monster playing at being a ghost.
But she’s Cadence. It’s not just the memories of the past; it’s the way she is. And the way I am. I’m nothing like that child everyone remembers, fierce, and strong, and full of mischief and schemes . . .
Ash is trying to turn me against her. He probably believes it’s the right thing to do, making it easier for me to end her. He trying to sacrifice his childhood friend for the sake of the world and use me as the weapon to do it. His whole big confession under the sea was probably calculated to begin with . . .
Except I’m not playing along. I can’t take back a body that was never mine to begin with, especially not if doing so could destroy Cadence. I won’t. She’s just a kid. She doesn’t understand what she’s doing. She doesn’t really mean to hurt us. And she’s mine. I don’t want her back in my head, no way, but I can’t imagine a world where she’s not there, somewhere.
Burn the Skies Page 17
