“I’m for it,” Ange says. I’d thought she might be. “We’ve built in worse circumstances before. Underfolk know how to survive, and take care of one another. It’s your lot who’re the liability.”
Ravel snorts. “The sheep’ll do whatever I tell them to.” Then he slips a hand into his pocket, his eyes darkening. “Sorry. I meant I’d be happy to help no matter what we choose. And there are worse places to try to rebuild. But as much as there’s no love lost between me and the fogeys, it might be easier in the long run to join Nine Peaks. Or check out glitter boy’s mythical island paradise.”
“You know my vote, C.” Ash’s face shines with hope at the thought of reuniting with his parents. “I can’t guarantee Grandfather wouldn’t make life difficult if we head north, but the islanders would welcome us with open arms. I’m sure their ship will be arriving any day now.”
“There’s not much here,” Sam puts in doubtfully. “I’d like folk to have a better life, you know? Even if we’re not much wanted by those up north, they live easy up there. And they owe us for turning our homes into slag. Wouldn’t hurt to play on their guilt a little. Besides, what about the ones we left behind?”
I nod. No matter what happens, we’ll need to send word to the first wave of refugees we’d left in Nine Peaks and offer them the option of rejoining us. But there’s one more council member to speak.
“Lily?” I say gently.
She’s the voice of the people for today’s meeting. We draw one at random each time we meet. My idea. I’ve seen what power can do, how it twists things and separates leaders from the people impacted by their decisions. Lily’s our youngest citizen representative so far, but I’m glad it’s her. She’s struggled to survive in a crumbling city, been separated from her family, and made the trek to Nine Peaks and back again. I don’t know about the others, but for me, her voice will carry the most weight in this decision.
“You want to build a city here?” she asks, digging a toe in the sand doubtfully.
Haynfyv kneels beside her, gingerly putting an arm around his niece and darting a look around our circle as if someone will tell him to stop. He gestures. “Not just here. We’re a big crowd, right? Lots of people. So we spread out a bit. Some over there. Some further inland. Some back that way.”
She furrows her brow. “Then where will the wall go?”
I blink. She’s right. Nine Peaks has its wood and earth barrier ringing the entire city. Refuge existed within the four walls of its tower, and the dome was a sort of wall around the whole city. She’s never seen people live without borders. Neither have I.
Maybe it’s time for that to change. “What if we didn’t have one?”
She tilts her head, her small face furrowed in concentration. “No walls?”
“Just for the buildings,” I clarify. “To hold the roofs up, okay? But no big walls, not like a fence around everyone.”
“Cole, I don’t think—” Ravel’s interrupted from a cough by Ash and a kick from Ange. He subsides.
“You really want to do this?” Ash says.
I catch Lily’s eye. She grins. I turn, studying each council member. Ange will back me up. As much as she tries to look out for her people, I think it’s as much so she can stay close to Cass’s final resting place as anything. Ravel will want to stay wherever there are people to work; that much will never change. Though he has seemed to soften a little since the fall of the city. Sam’s not sentimental, but he’ll go where Lily goes. Ash . . .
Ash wants to rejoin his family. They weren’t on the ship that went down with him on it, but people who claimed to know his parents were. He hasn’t seen his mom and dad in over a decade. It makes sense that he misses them. And I hope that they get a chance to reunite. I’ll do what I can to make that happen.
But I don’t want to leave. I want to start over. I want us to do better, this time. There’s more here to heal, and to rebuild. And I want to be a part of that. “Yeah. I really do.”
“SO?” I SETTLE GINGERLY on the damp bit of concrete beside Ravel. “You going to tell me what’s going on or am I supposed to guess?”
He shrugs. “Thought you had more important things to worry about.”
“True. I should probably get back to all that big important stuff I’m in charge of now—” I hop off the concrete.
Ravel snags my sleeve and drags me back. “Wait.” He grabs my other arm, turning my palms up, then down, to examine the backs of my hands. “The burns are still there.”
Both hands are etched with the uneven whorls of the barrier. They used to be a near twin to his black tattoos, but those marks vanished along with his nightmare-gold eyes when the Mara gave back his body.
“We don’t match anymore,” I say softly.
He huffs a laugh. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily, flame. Besides, ink can be replaced.” But when he lets go, it’s only one hand. He reaches into his pocket, draws out a folded sheaf of paper.
I eye the pile of pages. A confession? Song lyrics? Blackmail material? “Do I want to know?”
He shakes his head, taps the papers on his knee, and finally extends them toward me. “Found them in one of the supply caches. They’re from her. My . . . From Maryam.”
“From your mom.”
He flinches. Nods. Shakes his head. “Just read them.”
He sits in silence while I read, his knee bouncing a bit, his hands clasped to keep them still. I take my time, pausing to watch the birds wheeling over the waves, not just seagulls, but herons and geese. A robin hops across the rubble toward us, hoping for crumbs. Heads peek from the water and nudge up against the shore—seals, and otters, and once, the sudden spurting fountains of a pod of whales daring the inlet, seemingly unperturbed by the creatures that share the deeps with them. We leave them alone, and they don’t bother us. We haven’t lost anyone to the sea monsters yet.
How different could things have been for Ravel? For Maryam? The pages are a letter for her only living son—a secret history, a tragedy, and a plea for forgiveness. She hadn’t been able to stop her people from destroying their world and stirring the wrath of the unseen creatures around them. I can only hope that we’ve learned to see and to share better. For my part, I’ll do whatever I can to make sure of it.
“I won’t forgive her,” Ravel bursts out. “She can’t just write a letter and make it all go away.”
I nod. “She did terrible things. They can’t be erased so easily.”
He rips the letter from my hands, stalks to the edges of the waves, and raises it.
I dart after him, catching his wrist just as he makes to hurl the pages into the sea. He jerks away, whirling, arm upraised and eyes wild. I flinch.
Then I raise my chin. I won’t be afraid of him. “How many lives did you sacrifice to the Mara?”
This time it’s his turn to flinch. I don’t give him a chance to respond. “I can’t tell you how many lives I sacrificed. Nor Cadence. I can’t even tell you we thought we were doing the right thing, or the only thing we could, at the time. Will you throw us away, too?”
He backs down, backs away, trips, landing with a squelch in the damp, pebbly sand. He tips his head back, inky lashes fluttering against damp cheeks. “So where does that leave me?”
“Alive. Broken. Healing. In debt to the other survivors. So pay up.” I offer him a hand. “Your mom hurt a lot of people. I’m not saying that what she did wasn’t awful. It scares me that she could do so much wrong and still believe it was the right thing to do. I’m not giving myself a pass, either. Or you. But we’re still here. We’re going to listen, and do our best to see, and try not to turn into crazy fanatics who think they’re the only ones who carry the weight of the world. And, starting today, we’re going to be okay just being us. Okay?”
He takes my hand, but I don’t pull him up just yet. “She loved you, you know?”
He blinks fast, ducking his head. “She didn’t know how to love.”
I lean back and pull. Standing, he’s ba
rely taller than me, his eyes damp and his bare face startlingly vulnerable, though it’s been some time since I’ve seen him painted and masked and costumed in the extravagant lies he used to cling to.
“I think she just forgot, for a little while. Or walled that part of herself off along with the rest of the world. You were the last thing she spoke of, at the end.”
Ravel scrubs his forearm over his eyes, leaving it there to whisper, “I don’t know who I am without her.”
I think about Cadence, and the memories she took with her. I think about the family I still don’t feel a part of, and the rule-bound life Ravel’s mother’s regime required of me, the one I never managed to live up to. I think about every life I failed to save, every choice I wish I’d made differently. But for all our failures, we’re still here.
I duck down to peer under his raised arm. “I know. Me too. So let’s find out.”
Chapter 37: Endings
Cadence found me the night I surrendered to the Mara. We’ve been together, one way or another, ever since.
And now, it’s time for her to leave.
“Be careful,” Ash says. “Don’t forget to look where you’re going. You can’t just float through walls anymore.”
She rolls her eyes.
“She’ll be fine,” Ravel says. “Or she won’t. Either way, off you go kiddo.”
He makes a shooing motion. She sticks her tongue out at him.
“We’ll watch out for her,” an older woman says, slinging an insistent arm around Cadence’s prickly shoulders. “We did manage to raise three without too much damage, after all.”
This time it’s Steph who rolls her eyes, but she and Grace are having a hard time keeping the shy grins off their faces. The oldest sister, Banshee or whatever, is practically glowing, which is a weird look for her. But understandable. My cousins had believed their parents dead for years. Getting both of them back like this is more than they ever hoped for.
The ship appeared two weeks after Cadence and I woke up. I had given up on help from the island after Ash’s ship went down, but apparently, they hadn’t forgotten about us.
Would it have been nice if they showed up a couple weeks earlier? Sure.
Would it have changed anything? My newfound aunt and uncle don’t think so, but then we don’t agree on lots of things, not least of all what should happen with the refugees. They want to load us all up on their ships and sail back to their island—and I see the same longing in Ash’s eyes. But I look at what we’ve built already, and I’m not so sure.
The dreamwalkers, whether those in Nine Peaks or those from the island, say their purpose is to ‘heal’ nature. They’re supposedly trying to undo the harm humans caused generations ago through a slow and careful process of research and ecological restoration.
But then they go around doing stupid stuff like pretending kids’ parents died to try to stimulate the development of stronger powers and insisting on intruding on damaged landscapes and then killing the creatures who react to the intrusion, and—oh, right—redirecting nearby volcanic activity to attack people thousands of miles away.
It’s almost like hiding out in their painstakingly engineered and cultivated walled cities is keeping them from noticing just how crazy and unnatural some of the stuff they’ve been doing is.
At least, that’s what the Regen City Council has been talking about for the past few days. We’d started organizing people, and shelter, and stuff out of necessity, each of us bringing whatever skills or network we had to the table and adding voices as leaders emerged from the crowd. Now we’re working toward something more than just survival.
We want to try something different, right here on the blasted, broken shoreline. Instead of running away to untouched land high in the mountains or across the water, we’re navigating life in the midst of monsters—and we haven’t lost anyone yet.
Sure, we have to move a little slower than we might like when it comes to scouting for salvage, or picking a site to plant on, or wading into the water to harvest sea life, but we would rather take our time and get a little less done than take more than our share and start a fight. At least, that’s the plan. It’s not easy getting everyone on the same page when you start with a bunch of homeless strangers that includes everything from unthinking rule-followers to anti-authority revolutionaries, but I think it helps that every single one of us lost our home and our ways of life at the same time. We all have to adjust to a new world.
And it doesn’t hurt that we’ve got people with a little extra magic at their disposal—including the four orb-like creatures that bob around helping out here and there—but when it comes down to it, most of us have something to contribute. Ange’s underground engineers, in particular, were thrilled to compare notes with the kids from Nine Peaks and the newcomers from the island. Grace’s insight and Susan’s experience have been particularly useful. They’re already looking at ways to draw energy from the waves and the wind without disturbing the creatures around us. It turns out to be exciting—if, at times, exhausting—to look for new ways to build a better life for all of us.
Which is why I can’t believe Cady is willing to sail away from it all.
“You know you’re not getting rid of me that easily, right?” she says, tracking my thoughts a bit too closely as usual, even if I’m mostly sure she’s not really in my head anymore. “As if. Think of it as a small vacation. You’ll enjoy not having anyone around to call you out on your crap. Just don’t get too comfortable.”
Steph smirks. I eye her narrowly, not at all pleased that she and Cady will be spending some quality time together on this trip. I can already see a future where she and Cady are inseparable tag-teaming bullies.
“We really shouldn’t be gone long,” Grace chimes in. “We know you could use more supplies. And Mom said things are done differently on the island. We can bring back more teachings to help Regen City.”
Cady snorts, as she does every time she hears the admittedly grandiose name for our makeshift smattering of structures along the rubble-strewn coastline. But she lost the vote to call it Trash Town nine to one, so there’s nothing she can say.
She turns to leave, and hesitates. “Look, I’m just passing on a message, okay? They want me to tell you you’re doing great. Keep it up, and it’ll all turn out.”
“They?”
She holds Fluffy and Squishy out impatiently. “They. This lot. The sprites, or whatever. They said they’re glad they chose you. Even though they’re with me now.”
Puffy wafts over and nuzzles my cheek. I flinch back from Ember’s lick of flame on my other side. “The, uh, ‘sprites’ talk to you?”
Cady shrugs. “We share a wavelength. They said they liked your restraint. Like, sure, you want stuff, but you also know how to hold back and, y’know, share. Empathize. Maybe you’d know how to be less greedy than the ones who came before.”
My jaw drops. Cady peeks over her shoulder and hastens to add, “Don’t let it go to your head. I bet it was really just that you’re the only dreamwalker who’d developed a resistance to gold. So, like, you’d just suffered enough to maybe survive a revolution ’s all. But you’re not special, okay? So don’t go acting like it.”
She stalks off, the sprites bobbing in her wake. I call a shell-shocked thanks after her, though I wouldn’t put it past her to have made the whole thing up. Still, it was a nice conciliatory gesture either way.
Maybe it’ll be good for her to get away for a bit and figure out who she is without me. I certainly could use some time to get used to who I am without her. And I cannot wait for her aunt and uncle to try parenting my little trouble child. I stifle a smirk and turn to face the next wave of goodbyes.
Grace hugs me and Steph gives me a bruising cuff on the shoulder. Her older sister—who definitely has a name, but since everyone calls her Banshee, I can never remember it—sniffs and casts a frustrated look at Ash. He’s carefully examining his toes.
I’m too busy laughing at the look on his face
to dodge my aunt’s embrace. Thankfully, my uncle shows no inclination to give me a hug; so all that’s left is to wave awkwardly in Cady’s general direction as she lounges against the ship’s rail. She rolls her eyes and turns her back.
“She’ll miss you, you know,” Ash says, casually slinging an arm around my shoulder. He refused to go with her, even though I know he’s longing to see his parents. But I talked to Grace’s mom and dad. They’ll see that the next ship out is carrying a surprise for Ash. It’s literally the absolute least I could do for him after all he’s done for me.
Ravel glowers.
I shrug free. “She’ll just have to find someone else to pester.”
But my chest stays tight and my eyes prickle as Cady’s ship shrinks into the distance, the long, straight line of her back oh-so-casually propped against the rails merging into the amorphous dark blob of the distant boat silhouetted against the late afternoon sun.
Then Ange jogs up to say the council needs to convene—something about a wastewater disagreement—and Ravel makes a very childish joke that sends Lily into fits of giggles. Amy, red-faced, tries to explain why her daughter should most definitely not repeat it to anyone, ever, and Haynfyv turns an interesting shade of purplish-grey, sputtering.
Ash tries to cozy up again under the guise of escorting me back to the cleared area we have our council meetings in, and I sidestep, rolling my eyes at Ravel’s pleased expression. One of these days, I’ll have to sit them both down and have a chat about boundaries and independence. Right now, I just need a little more of both than either of them seems to have realized. Maybe that will change over time. Other things certainly have.
Maryam told me it takes an iron will and a heart of stone to lead. To provide. To stop the monsters at the gate and make a safe, healthy home. I am not made of stone or iron. I’m not totally sure what I am made of, but I’m not sure that matters anymore, either. The more important thing is what I want, and what I choose, and what I do. I won’t be the perfect leader—I’m pretty sure I won’t ever be the perfect anything—and I’ve made a lot of mistakes already, but I’m going to do my best to keep dreaming of better ways to live and be, and to work with friends and rivals and everyone in between to help us get there.
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