by Adam Silvera
“No,” Maribelle says. “I’m going to live with the fact that I will be the one to kill her.”
She storms from the room.
Atlas sighs. “I’ll talk to her.”
“If you can’t get her to cooperate, you know what’s going to happen, right?” Iris asks.
“I will do my best, but Mari is Mari. She’s just as heartbroken as you are.”
“It’s different!”
“How?”
Iris shakes her head. “I’m older. More time with my parents and fighting alongside them. More weight on my shoulders. Just . . . do your best to get her to cool it. We need to be united.”
Atlas nods and leaves.
Everyone is quiet.
“I can make this right,” I say. “I’ll film an apology and own it.”
“We should hold off on videos,” Iris says. “We can’t react impulsively.”
“But . . . I’m still going on missions, right?”
“We’ll talk.”
Those two words tell me everything. I take a deep breath and run past everyone. Emil and Prudencia chase after me. I snap around. “I’m fine,” I lie. “I just need some space.”
“Let me get some space with you,” Emil says.
“Just me,” I say.
“Brighton,” Prudencia calls, but I run back onto the roof and stare out into the bright city.
I screwed up. I did so much good and had more to accomplish, but I screwed up. This isn’t like the couple times I didn’t study properly for an exam. This is colossal. I made the heroes look like heartless terrorists. I have to figure out how to bounce back from this. If not, who am I? What’s my role?
It’s one thing to be powerless and another to be completely useless.
Twenty-Five
Infinity Cycle
EMIL
Everyone is falling apart.
Maribelle and Atlas have been hitting the streets the past couple nights, trying to track down any acolyte or alchemist or dealer who has a direct connection to Luna. When Iris isn’t locking herself away she’s been negotiating with Ness for some intel, but he’s not budging on what the Blood Casters are up to. Eva is bone-tired as she bounces between therapy sessions with celestials who are feeling more hopeless by the day. Wesley is clearly itching for a trip to Philadelphia to visit Ruth and Esther, but remains close to shop for supplies and coordinate moves to other shelters for the celestials who no longer feel safe under our care.
I wish I could send Brighton, Prudencia, and Ma elsewhere. Brighton has been damn near manic since he pulled his video offline. He’s locked himself in the computer lab, and from what I can see, he’s monitoring our social media accounts but not posting anything as Iris instructed. I think he’s looking for an impossible solution. Sort of like Prudencia, who is spending all her time in the library to unearth more information about the mysterious ingredients Sera listed in the journal. I try to help, but she’s been rejecting my company. I can’t help but feel like she blames me for everything that’s going wrong in her life, like having to turn her back on her aunt and Brighton turning his back on her. Ma was running dangerously low on heart and anxiety meds, so Wesley braved returning to our apartment to get more for her, but since we can’t exactly risk Ma personally going to get her prescription refilled, it’s only a matter of time before we’ll have to break into a pharmacy to steal everything she needs; more ammo for Senator Iron’s campaign if we get caught.
There’s a shift whenever I walk these halls. The people in our care used to admire me, and now they walk past me like there’s nothing I can do for them. Honestly, I’m with them. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that we’re fighting a losing war. Iron will be elected president. The future for all celestials will grow grimmer by the year. They’ll lose their rights and will be forced into camps—or worse—for their powers. History repeats itself, and in my past lives, I die young for the cause. This one won’t be any different.
Instead of hiding under the covers and dreading whatever mission we’ll have to go on next, I take care of Ness. The others haven’t been particularly sympathetic considering that Ness has been rallying hate against celestials since his early teens, but I can’t forget that he’s a human who was raised by a monster. Iron won’t ever change his ways, but I have hope that Ness can bounce back. So I get him time in the bathroom to wash up and handle his business. I give him an air mattress so he doesn’t sleep on the floor. I make sure we’re feeding him as much as anyone else, sometimes even hooking him up with extra portions from my plates that I can’t eat since they’re not plant-based.
I’ve been doing more research on shifters too, ever since Ness’s threat that he could kill me if he wanted to. I was getting nervous that he could morph into some six-foot-six bodybuilder and crush my skull with one hand, but his power only allows him to take on the physical glamour, not to gain strength or speed or mimic abilities that aren’t there. Still doubt that I would win if we threw down fists, so I got to be quick with fire if he comes for me. I don’t think he will. He’s been harmless—he doesn’t thank me for the food or books I bring him, but it’s all good as long as he doesn’t swing at me.
I’ve got dinner for him tonight, so I go to his room and knock gently. He doesn’t invite me in, but that’s usually how it goes down. I enter, and where Ness usually rests, there’s an older white man murmuring in his sleep. The first three times I walked in on Ness sleeping as someone else—a woman who was balding, a young boy with burnt fingertips, a man with greasy hair and a mousy face—I assumed he was playing some weird game with me. But this is the first time I’ve seen him so distressed. The man’s long red hair is plastered to his sweaty forehead, and a deep scar runs across his face. On closer inspection, he’s missing a chunk of his nose.
“Please don’t, please don’t,” the man mutters.
I set down the plate of food and rub the man’s shoulder. “Ness?”
The man snaps awake, and his hand finds its way around my throat quick as a blink. His nails are digging into my flesh and have trapped my next breath from reaching me when I need it most. He’s missing an eye, but the bright blue one that remains burns with more than enough hate to make up for it. I pound at his wrist, his arm, his chest, but every punch is weaker than the last. I’m fading, and a gray light and loosened grip and new breath keeps me awake. Ness is himself again, and he’s shaking. He removes his hand from my throat.
“That wasn’t me,” Ness says. “I didn’t do it.”
Of course that was him, of course he did it. What is he running his mouth about?
I fall on my back, breathing in and out, in and out. He hovers over me. He’s been threatened by Maribelle left and right, but this is the first time I’ve seen pure concern on his face. I massage my neck while my heart runs wild.
“I’m sorry. That happens sometimes,” Ness says as he helps me up, resting me against the wall closest to the door. “Turning into other people when I sleep.”
I’m so thrown by all of this—the strangling and the apology and the opening up.
It takes me a minute, but I get the words out: “Who is he?”
Ness sits against the opposite wall. There couldn’t be more space between us. “He was a trafficker who tried killing me that night on the dock. So I killed him first.”
I figured Ness had taken a life before, but the confirmation still pins me. I’m afraid to ask, but I have to know. “So those other people I’ve seen you turn into . . .”
“I don’t know who you’ve seen or haven’t seen, but I’m haunted by people who I haven’t killed too. I get so deep into some of these nightmares that my power mistakes it as concentration to morph into them. Dione was the only Caster who showed any sympathy. June doesn’t care, and Stanton thought it made me weak.”
“You’re not weak,” I say. “The strongest power above all is a living heart, right?”
“You pushing your brother’s campaign on me?”
“No. I’m heartbroken becaus
e we’re eighteen and we’ve been turned into weapons. You have to lie about being dead so your father won’t find you. You had to manipulate your way to safety. You had to kill for a gang you don’t want to be in. It’s only a matter of time until I find blood on my hands too.”
My eyes drift from Ness to the floor as I go off about all the pressure I’ve been under. I unload about all my guilt that’s tied up in Keon’s alchemy. But I talk the most about how I’m being so hard on Ma when she raised me right and gave me a home. It still feels impossible to forgive her since learning I’m not a biological Rey came right after another devastating surprise that has truly upended my life. Everything that’s happened the past three weeks is so wild. I crack and cry so hard that I wish anyone, even a stranger like Ness, would take me in their arms and lie to me about how it’s all going to be okay.
“Why are you telling me all of this?” Ness asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe because I’m freaking out about how to be a good brother and a good son and a good best friend and a good hero, and you’re the only person not expecting anything from me.”
There’s something about his silence that pulls more words out of me. It reminds me of whenever I was upset as a kid and Dad would ask me what was wrong, and I would swear that I didn’t want to talk about it, but he kept me company until I eventually burst and got everything off my chest.
“I wonder what my dad would think about me today,” I say.
Before Ness can ask me about him or tell me to go away so he can eat his microwaved pancakes in peace, I tell him all about how accepting Dad was. He never questioned my sexuality and was quick to encourage me to shoot my shot with Nicholas because maybe I would marry my high school crush like he did. He made sure I never felt inferior whenever Brighton’s report cards were glowing and mine were disappointing.
“I really miss him, but maybe it’s a good thing he’s dead. He won’t have to watch me turn into someone I don’t want to be.”
“I think the same with my mother,” Ness says. “I grew up wanting to be an actor. We used to go to musicals and movies, and I felt this . . . this pull to be on stages and sets. Broadway, blockbusters, indies. All of it. We ran lines for school plays while our driver took me to acting classes an hour away. If she knew how much I was using all those lessons as a Caster, she would’ve told me to forget my dreams like the Senator did.”
Losing Dad at seventeen was hard enough, but I can’t imagine losing either of my parents at thirteen like Ness did.
“What was it like when she died?”
“Confusing,” Ness says after a beat. “It was so sudden, and the Senator told me how to feel—anger, hate, disgust. He forced me to grieve in front of cameras. I was a poster boy for children who lost loved ones because of celestial violence, and I leaned into that role because it’s the only way I got support from the Senator. Don’t get it twisted, I’m not talking about hugs. Handshakes on some days and pride on others. But it was something to fill that emptiness my mother left behind.”
I tell him I’m sorry for his loss, even though it’s too many years too late.
“You too,” Ness says. “You’re lucky that your last living parent loves you so much that she protected you at all costs. Mine threw me into the fire.”
He gets up and sits in the center of the room. It feels like an invitation, and I do the same. This time I’m able to breathe in the smell of the cheap lavender soap we’ve stocked in the bathrooms, and it settles my nerves like a well-lit candle.
“What was it like losing your father?” Ness asks.
I tell him how it was confusing too, even though we had months to prepare. Sometimes Dad pretended he was healthy, but we couldn’t play along when he was coughing up blood and had fevers burning so hot we would rush him to the hospital. Going to school was brutal because we didn’t know if he would still be alive when we got home. When it was looking beyond hopeless—wills were signed, goodbyes were had—the doctors suggested it couldn’t hurt to explore clinical trials. Except it did hurt, and the blood poisoning blindsided us all—especially Brighton, who will never be fully right after finding Dad dead.
“You’re lucky you’ve got your whole immortality thing going on, firefly.”
“You think it’s luck? This infinity cycle is a curse. It hasn’t even been a month, and I can’t look in the mirror because I don’t see this savior, this chosen one, this hero that the Spell Walkers are counting on me to be. I’m not trying to fight for the rest of my life—the rest of my lives.”
“But my mother would be alive if we could all be immortal,” Ness says. “Your father too.”
“You think immortality is a solution to the world’s problems?”
“I don’t believe in the world anymore. This country is about to elect my father—the Senator—as their president, and no one with powers will be safe. It’s only a matter of time until he discovers I’m alive, and he would have me executed to protect his image. That lifelong security of yours would be welcomed. I could run forever from the Senator and Luna and live my life.”
“Running and fighting forever isn’t life,” I say.
“It’s better than death,” he says.
I don’t get where all this is coming from, but this sounds like a nightmare. “I don’t want to lose loved ones, Ness, but I also don’t trust a world where we can’t die. To be hunted or tortured forever.”
Ness’s amber eyes are fixed on me. “You’re lying if you say you would give up resurrecting if you could.”
“I’m already trying to figure out a cure. I don’t want to die, but I refuse to live forever.”
“You don’t get it, firefly. It’s too late. Luna is a chess master who has been setting up the board before any of us were born. She is patient and calculating. She could’ve given herself power years ago, but what use would that have been to her? She’s like the Senator that way—powerless herself, but one of the most powerful people out there. But now she’s dying, and the Crowned Dreamer has arrived in time for her to make her final move.”
Prime example of someone I wouldn’t ever want to live forever. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Blood illness,” he says, and my chest squeezes. “Once a host has taken in blood from one creature, it can’t take another.”
That’s great news for whatever cure we come up with to bind powers.
“Luna’s attempts to merge multiple essences have only gotten people deathly ill and weakened the power from the original creature significantly. It was pointless to her end goal.”
“Which is what?”
“Immortality,” Ness says.
“True immortality is impossible,” I say. “Even phoenixes die.”
Ness nods. “Yeah, but when Keon first died and he wasn’t reborn, Luna realized she wouldn’t have what was necessary to create immortality for herself on phoenix essence alone. She didn’t quit like many alchemists before her—she went darker.”
“Is there something about me that she thinks is the key?”
“No. She can’t drain you for your blood. It has to come pure from a creature. And Luna isn’t looking for the key. She already found it. Your old friend Orton is proof.”
“What is it? Celestial blood mixed with creature blood?”
“Orton wasn’t a celestial. He was full specter.”
“But he could phase through solid objects. No creature has that power.”
“Correct,” Ness says. He lets me sit with it, but I got nothing. “It’s the most superior blood of all, and Luna partnered with alchemists who specialize in necromancy to get it—she’s been killing ghosts.”
Oh, come on. I feel played, like he’s been telling me some campfire story all along. “But you can’t touch a ghost.”
“Tell that to June, the first ever specter with ghost blood, who not only possessed Maribelle’s mother and framed her for the Blackout, but saved my life when that explosion went off,” Ness says. “This is what I’m talking about, firefly. Luna is next
level. She will unite the blood of three entities—a hydra, a ghost, a phoenix. If you decapitate her, she’ll regrow a new head. If you try to harm her body, she’ll fade away. If you somehow manage to obliterate her completely, she’ll be reborn.”
“But it doesn’t work. Not for long, anyway. Her test subjects are dying.”
“Luna hasn’t been using pure blood on her test subjects. But for her true elixir, she needs the head of a hydra that’s never been decapitated before, a phoenix who has never been reborn, and ghosts with ties to her bloodline. Unite them all underneath the Crowned Dreamer’s zenith at the Alpha Church of New Life, and she’ll have her so-called Reaper’s Blood. She will be the closest thing to Death to walk the streets, and she will make history by never becoming history.”
I wish this was some story, but it’s all truth. Luna has lived a life engineering essences to make herself invincible. There’s no winning.
“But if she dies, she’ll have to start over like me, right?”
Ness shakes his head. “If her calculations are correct—and let’s count on them being right—she’ll be away from the world for a single moment and reborn as herself.”
“So she’s got the hydra now. What’s her next move?”
“What’s today?”
“Tuesday.”
He takes a deep breath. “Luna moves for Older Cemetery to capture the ghosts of her parents—tonight.”
“What? We’re screwed.”
“Probably. But the summoning is tricky enough that she’s hired Anklin Prince, this top alchemist, for the assist. The longer someone has been dead, the harder it is to catch their ghost. Unless they died violent deaths and didn’t have a chance to make peace with their lives. Luna murdered her parents when she was seventeen. The only time I believe she’s ever gotten her own hands dirty.”
“If it was that long ago, they’ll never find their ghosts.”
“They died very, very violent deaths. Luna was just as creative back then as she is cruel today.”
So Luna’s parents have been lost and wandering for decades, and she was going to bring them back to obliterate them forever. I don’t want to go up against someone so twisted.