by E. C. Blake
“She still breathes,” Athol said.
“She is dead nonetheless. Her body is an empty shell. There is no mind left within her.” She dipped her finger into the basin of magic again, drew it out glowing blue, and this time touched it to the woman’s chest. The light flowed into her body.
Her chest rose once more, then a second time, then stopped. Mara felt a chill. Ethelda looked at the assistant, who nodded and hurried away.
“Let’s move on,” Ethelda said, still in that calm-but-strained voice.
Mara expected Ethelda to cross the aisle to her bed, but instead the Healer went to the next bed on the other side. She continued in that pattern, going all the way down the row of beds on the far side of the longhouse before working her way back toward Mara, making her the last to be examined.
While Ethelda spoke to patient after patient, and occasionally drew blue light from the bowl, and Athol followed along, pushing the wheeled table, Athol’s assistant returned to the bed opposite Mara with two male trustees. The assistant pulled the covers off of the dead woman and stripped her of her linen shift and the soiled diaper beneath it. Then, with much grunting and muffled curses, the men maneuvered her nude, emaciated body into a bag made of rough hemp, pulling tight the drawstring at its mouth. Carrying the bag between them, they banged out through the door to Mara’s right. A moment later she heard the outside door open and close.
Mara watched it all in silent horror, made worse by the realization that the woman had been choked to death by some Watcher or other in the barracks—the barracks to which Katia had just been consigned. How long before Katia’s nude corpse was hauled away in a cloth bag?
How long before it would be hers?
Except . . . she had another way out. All she had to do was tell the Warden the truth about her rescue by the unMasked Army; cooperate, just a little. I wouldn’t have to tell him where the Secret City is, she thought. I could lie, tell him Grute escaped and took me with him before they ever reached their camp.
She recoiled in horror from her own cravenness. No! If I tell the Warden anything about the unMasked Army, the Autarch will send a thousand Watchers into the Wild to track them down. They’ll find the Secret City. And everyone will end up here—or dead. Hyram. Keltan. Alita. Prella. Simona. Kirika. Tishka. Edrik. Catilla. All of them.
I can’t do that. I won’t do that! Better to die than to help the Warden or the Autarch or the Watchers. Better to die . . .
Easy to think. Taking the secret of the unMasked Army to her grave would be the heroic thing to do, the right thing to do, the noble thing to do, the–the storybook thing to do. But as she watched Athol’s assistant change the stained linen of the bed where the woman strangled by the Watchers had died, she wasn’t at all sure she had the strength.
She turned her head to watch Ethelda’s approach, wondering what the Healer would say to her, wondering if she had brought a message from Mara’s father, her mother. Maybe she’ll take me away from here, she thought. Maybe it’s all been a mistake.
And then, suddenly, Ethelda reached her. Mara stared into the blue Mask. The matching blue eyes behind the eyeholes revealed nothing; the pale lips behind the mouth opening neither smiled nor frowned. “Hello, Mara,” Ethelda said, as if they had just met in the Outside Market at high noon.
“You know her?” said Athol.
“I represented the Autarch at her Masking. I was there when her Mask failed.” Ethelda cupped Mara’s chin in her hand and turned her head from side to side. “Why do you think her face is unblemished?”
“She was Gifted?” Athol said, sounding surprised.
“She was.” Ethelda released Mara’s chin, and touched the bandages on her head. “What happened to her?”
“Accident in the mine,” said Athol. “Compound fracture of the left forearm, with puncturing of the skin. Multiple bruises and scrapes. Minor concussion, and a scalp laceration. I kept her in an induced coma for three days, allowing her to wake late this morning.”
Ethelda nodded. “Let me look at you, Mara. Sit up, please.”
Mara sat up. Ethelda unbound her broken arm from its sling and unwrapped it. Mara glanced at it, then looked away, swallowing hard. A bloodstained bandage wrapped her splinted forearm, blue-and-green bruises mottled the rest of her arm, and a red streak ran from the wound halfway to her shoulder. Ethelda’s eyes narrowed. “Did you clean this wound?” she snapped at Athol.
“Yes, Healer,” he said. “To the best of my ability. But . . .”
Ethelda sighed. “But the best of your ability is not quite good enough.” She turned to the wheeled table. Magic still glowed within the black basin, but it seemed much diminished. “We’re almost out of magic,” she said.
“I cannot get more until the first day of next week,” Athol said.
“What?” Ethelda rounded on him. “That’s two days! What if someone else is hurt before then? What if one of these patients suffers a crisis?”
“I cannot get more magic until the first of the week,” Athol repeated. “I do not control the supply, Healer Ethelda.”
Ethelda gripped the edges of the wheeled table. “This place is barbaric,” she grated. She turned her Masked face toward the Watcher. “It is a horror. When I return to Tamita, I will report to the Circle exactly what I have found here. These people—”
“These ‘people’ are unMasked,” said the Watcher, speaking for the first time. “They are lucky to be alive, and it is the Autarch’s will that they be here. Do you question the Autarch’s will?” The Watcher took a step toward her. “Have a care, if you do,” he said in voice low and rough as the warning growl of a dog. “You risk your Mask. And not all who end up here failed their Masking. Some arrive later in life. Much later.”
Ethelda stood silent and frozen for a long moment. Finally she released the edges of the table and turned back to Mara. “I will heal the bone, and stop the infection from spreading, if I have enough magic.” She glared at Athol. “I will have none to spare to remove the pain of that process. And so this will hurt.” She plunged her hands into the bowl, turned back to Mara with blue-coated hands, and touched Mara’s arm.
Mara screamed as searing pain enveloped her arm, as though skin and bone had burst together into flame. But as suddenly as it had come, the pain vanished. Sobbing, she stared wide-eyed down at her injured limb. If the flesh on it had been blackened and sizzling, dropping off the bone like cooked meat, she would not have been surprised, but in fact it looked normal: completely normal, with the bruises and the red streak alike gone as though they had never been.
Ethelda patted her on the shoulder. “Try moving it,” she said, and Mara did. Nothing hurt, though her arm felt weak. Ethelda watched. “Good,” she said. “I am sorry about the pain. But the magic—” she glanced at the empty basin— “has run out. Let us hope the head wound is healing on its own.” She leaned forward and unwound the bandage around Mara’s skull. Mara felt her gentle fingers probing her scalp and winced as she touched a tender spot. Then she straightened. “You are fortunate,” she said to Mara. “I see no sign of infection, and the stitches are . . . adequate. It should heal without further intervention. There will be a scar, but your hair should hide it. Rebandage that, please.” She stepped back. “Anything else?”
“She screams in the night, Healer,” Athol said. “It disturbs the other patients. She says she has bad dreams.”
Ethelda snorted. “I’m not surprised in this place. I suspect I’ll have them myself after I leave it.” She sighed. “But perhaps I can help. Is there somewhere I can speak to her alone?”
“Why?” said the Watcher bluntly. “To protect her privacy? She has none.”
“Do you presume to tell me my job, Watcher?” Ethelda said, turning to face him so fiercely that he took an involuntary step back, though she barely came up to his shoulder. “If I am to stop her night terrors, I must work with her someplace
completely quiet. It has nothing to do with protecting her privacy; it has everything to do with allowing me to do the work I was sent here to do. If you want these workers back on the . . .” she glanced at the empty bed across from Mara, “. . . job any time soon, then we must stop this one,” she jerked her head in Mara’s direction, “from waking them up night after night with screaming.”
The Watcher glanced at Mara. “Very well,” he said. “There is a room we use for questioning. In the Warden’s house. You will not be disturbed there.”
Ethelda nodded, and turned back to Mara. “Can you walk?”
“I haven’t tried, but I think so.”
“Then get up.” To Athol, Ethelda said, “She’ll need something warm to wear. And she can’t go barefoot.”
Athol nodded to his assistant. “Bring a cloak,” he said. “And her own shoes.”
A few moments later, wrapped in a woolen cloak that scratched her bare arms, feet stuffed into the worn boots the unMasked Army had given her—the only thing she had brought to the camp that had not been taken away—Mara shuffled through the darkened camp, the Watcher on one side of her, the Healer on the other. Ahead, the Warden’s house glowed with light. The rumble of the always-turning water wheel sounded to her right. And beyond the Warden’s building, and off to the right, in the corner of the palisade, where the land sloped up . . . Mara blinked. Had she really seen that flash, like lighting?
It came again, a different color this time; and then again, and suddenly she recognized it as the light of magic. Up there, she thought. That must be the building Katia told me about, where they take the rock. That’s where they collect the magic to be shipped to Tamita.
If I could get in there, how much magic would I find?
The Watcher took them in through the big front doors of the Warden’s house, but instead of turning toward the Warden’s office, where Mara had been twice before, he led them past the stairs to a door near the end of the hall. He opened it, revealing nothing but blackness. “Wait,” he told them, and stepped into the darkness. Light flared. The Watcher placed the candle he had just lit in the middle of a small round table. It and two straight-backed chairs were the only furniture in the tiny windowless chamber. Empty shelves lined the dark walls, as though it had once been a storeroom, perhaps a pantry: the kitchen must be close by.
“I’ll wait in the hall,” the Watcher said as he stepped out.
Ethelda nodded, said, “Come,” briskly to Mara, and entered the room. Mara shuffled in after her, and the Healer turned and closed the door firmly.
She indicated the chairs. Mara slumped with relief into the one farthest from the door. She felt dreadfully tired after just the short walk from the hospital, and whatever Athol had done to take away her pain seemed to be wearing off. Her newly healed arm ached, her unhealed head really ached, and the other scrapes and bruises on her body sang their own chorus of pain. She felt the way she imagined it felt to be old.
Not just physically, either. Had it really only been a little over two weeks since she turned fifteen? She no longer felt at all like the all-but-carefree girl she had been before her Masking. Donning the Mask is supposed to make you a grown-up, she thought. Apparently failing to don a Mask makes you grow up even faster.
The thoughts of her Masking, her lost parents, her lost life, suddenly filled her eyes with tears. She scrubbed them away with the back of her good hand, and sniffled.
Maybe she wasn’t so grown up after all.
Ethelda sat down opposite her. In the lantern light, her blue eyes glittered above the white flowers on the cheeks of her immovable Mask. “Mara,” she said in a soft voice. “I am pleased to see you alive, but not at all pleased to see you here.”
Mara blinked. “What? But . . . you knew I . . .”
Ethelda shook her head slightly. “In the hospital, injured,” she said, but that hadn’t been what she’d meant, and Mara knew it. She opened her mouth to protest, thought of the Watcher outside the door, and closed it again.
“It was an accident,” she said at last. But her heart raced. Had Ethelda just told her that she had known the unMasked Army would attempt to rescue her? Had her father known? Was one of them the unMasked Army’s unnamed contact in Tamita?
Then why is Ethelda’s Mask still intact?
All those things ran through her head, but she couldn’t say anything out loud.
Ethelda smoothly continued, “Tell me about your nightmares.”
Mara hesitated again. She would have to tell Ethelda at least a portion of the truth if she were to gain any relief from the dreams of Grute. And she needed relief: not just to spend her nights free of the nightmares, but so that she did not wake the others in the longhouse. The threat of being smothered in her bed she took completely seriously.
“I . . .” Mara paused to gather her thoughts. “I killed someone. A boy. One of those in the wagon with me.”
Ethelda betrayed no emotion Mara could see. Her voice remained calm. “How?”
Mara hesitated again. She could lie, say she had bashed his head in with a rock or pushed him off a cliff, but she knew the nightmares she suffered were not the ordinary kind of bad dreams. Somehow they were tied up with how she had killed Grute. What made them so soul-drainingly vivid had to have something to do with . . .
“Magic,” she said at last, barely whispering. “I killed him with magic.”
Ethelda froze. Her wide eyes stared at Mara.
“My Gift survived. Survives,” Mara whispered, horribly aware that somewhere outside the door the Watcher lurked.
Ethelda got up then, and rounded the table. She leaned down, her mouth close to Mara’s ear. “I knew your Gift survived,” she whispered. “Have you not guessed, child? Your father made your Mask to fail. He wanted you unMasked. And that being the case, he also wanted your Gift to survive. But, child, you killed with magic? How?”
She turned her ear toward Mara to hear her whispered answer, but Mara could not speak. Her father had made her Mask to fail? He had put her through that agony on purpose? He had deliberately sent her off into exile?
And arranged for the unMasked Army to rescue you, she reminded herself.
But why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t he trust me?
He couldn’t. You might have betrayed something, somehow. To the Masker. To the fat man in the warehouse.
The fat man who drew pictures of young naked girls . . .
Did my father know about that, too? How could he do that? How could he put me through that pain and degradation?
Unless . . .
She swallowed. Unless he thought he was saving me from something far worse.
What was going on with the Masks? With the Autarch? What did her father and Ethelda know or suspect?
She couldn’t ask Ethelda—not here, in the very heart of the camp. Ethelda couldn’t tell her. She must already be on the very brink of betraying the Autarch and having that betrayal revealed to the Watchers by her Mask . . . walking a knife’s edge, at constant risk of a fatal slip.
She swallowed again, then focused on the question Ethelda had asked her. In a hurried whisper she told Ethelda what had happened to her, the images from that horrific night springing to life inside her mind as she did so, so that her voice shook.
When she was done, Ethelda drew back and stared at her. Then she went to the door and opened it a crack. She peered out, then opened the door wider, put her head through it, and looked both ways. “A few more minutes,” she called loudly to her left, then pulled her head back in and closed the door.
She rounded the table and sat down opposite Mara. “The Watcher is at the end of the hall,” she said softly. “We can talk a little—a very little—more openly.” She put her hands on the table, and Mara, to her astonishment, saw that they were trembling. “Tell me again,” she said urgently. “When you saw the magic in the basin in the hut, what c
olor was it?”
“All colors,” Mara said. “Constantly changing. All the colors of the rainbow, and then some. That’s what I’ve always seen. I told the Tester I saw red-gold, but really I saw them all. I thought, as I got older, that ability would fade away. That’s what I’ve always been told.”
Ethelda glanced down at her trembling hands and clasped them tightly together. “I have never heard,” she said, “of someone who, at the Second Test on their thirteenth birthday, still saw all colors. And now you are fifteen, and you tell me you are still seeing all colors? And not only that, you used magic to slay an attacker? The implications are alarming.”
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” Mara said in a small voice.
“Don’t misunderstand,” Ethelda said. “I don’t care about the fact you killed a would-be rapist. Good riddance. But the way you did it . . . you exerted an enormous amount of power, without any training at all. You did it instinctively. And you did it again when you cleaned away the evidence. With my Gift I could theoretically do what you did, pulverize bone and flesh and brain,”—Mara winced—“but even if I could do it—which I am not at all certain of—I know I absolutely could not have done it when I was just fifteen and newly Masked. It took me years of training to do anything with my Gift at all. And you did it without thought!” Ethelda sat back again and unclasped her hands. They still trembled, until she pressed them flat against the tabletop. “The Gift is vanishingly small. Perhaps ten children in a thousand are born with it. Perhaps a quarter of those have enough of the Gift to use magic to affect the world around them. But someone with the power you have shown, someone who can see all the potential of magic and use it in multiple ways, it’s like . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head. “If the Autarch knew . . .”
Mara felt cold. “Will you tell him?”
“No!” Ethelda snapped, so instantly and violently that Mara felt ashamed to have asked. Ethelda sat silent for a moment. “No,” she said again, much softer. “No, I will not tell anyone you can see all colors of magic. But, Mara . . .” She hesitated. “I do not make this suggestion lightly,” she continued after a moment. “It cuts against my grain, for certain. But I think you should consider telling the Warden that you still have some measure of the Gift.”
