If Catelyn’s estimations were correct, we had less than ten—maybe five—minutes at most. But Connelly didn’t think I was referring to the storm. Instead, she flashed her teeth. A wicked grin. She thought I meant the bad bloods’ movement.
“You’re right,” she agreed. “This calm won’t last much longer at all.”
Logan II’s sister. I wished I had seen it before. But seeing it now had exposed a new weakness of hers she didn’t even know she had.
“If you blow up that wall,” I started, “the Highlands will drown.”
Not the outskirts. Not the bad bloods. But every person she wished to get back to.
“The Highlands will go underwater,” I emphasized. “All of it.”
Connelly flinched, but the crowd cheered.
“Even better!” someone shouted.
“Down with the Highlands,” another added.
“The Downlands,” they renamed it.
We were one step away from the underwater creatures in Caleb’s stories, and I was one second away from becoming a monster—or a hero—or the one who was both who never went remembered. But worse was the crowd. The mob. The one that wouldn’t get away or make a difference for something that mattered.
“You think she fights for you?” I screamed at the innumerable faces, the exhausted ones, the hungry ones, the ones driven mad by hate. “She’s with Logan. She’s his sister.”
“It’s a lie!” Connelly shouted. “They use the weather as an excuse to distract us, to fortify their ground more, to keep us away forever.”
This time, I lowered myself, bringing my face as close as possible to Connelly’s. She stared back, unwavering. But only one of our gazes was depthless.
“If we wait, we lose,” Connelly whispered, only to repeat it in a shout. “We tear it down now.”
“If you tear it down,” I spoke against her skin, “everyone will die.”
“No,” Connelly argued, then reached behind her. “You will.”
Against the approaching lightning, Connelly’s silhouette moved in slow motion. Through my new abilities to manipulate light and shadow, I watched as her right arm moved out from behind her. It held a gun, lifting it in my direction.
She pulled the trigger, and I shifted into the safeties of my shadows.
It seemed unfair, really, to know the face of the shooter who missed me, but not the one who took my leg away, even if only for a while. But the threat wasn’t over.
Though I formed wholly and without injury, Connelly continued to smile.
“Missed,” I said.
At the same time, someone released a bloodcurdling scream.
“The Angel!” someone yelled. “Vendona’s Angel!”
My stomach plummeted, and it took all my strength to turn around.
Serah.
She laid on the ground, a circle of blood collecting on her chest, a larger puddle formed behind her. The strands of her blonde hair went red. Her lips, though, became light. As did her skin. As did her soul.
“You thought I aimed for you.” Connelly spoke, but her words sounded far away. Almost underwater. “I know your weaknesses, too, or don’t you watch the news?”
Serah. Sweet little Serah.
She had stood with me at the front of her school, and she had grinned at her new name—the beginning of her stardom, she called it—and then, she began to write scripts over it.
A star. She wanted to be a star. And now, she bled on ground that was about to flood over with water.
Caleb kneeled next to Serah, frantically trying to contain the damage.
Suddenly, Serena leapt out of the crowd, crying.
Tears, I thought. I had tears of my own, and mine came with vengeance.
I balled my hand into a fist, feeling the shadows around me solidify, and I protected the one thing I could.
My plan will work, I told myself. It has to.
Then, to Caleb, I mentally said, Cover yourself.
As if to prove he could hear me, his head snapped up and he met my eyes. Don’t, he seemed to plead, but the time for desperation was long gone.
Behind me, Connelly’s thumb began to press down on the detonator. “Good-bye, Violet,” she said, and then she pushed the button.
Vendona came crashing down.
Ash rained down upon us, as heavy as the storm would be any moment, and the ground beneath us shook. Against all odds, the western wall stayed standing—every little piece of rock and steel remaining in place—though the bomb had exploded long ago. All because Violet’s shadows held them together.
Ash wasn’t falling from the sky, I realized. It was shadows.
Violet, if she could ever bleed beyond the injury she once had on her knee, could shatter into darkness. She could drown in it, too, by getting lost at sea. And now, she could lose her form, too.
She might have been as immortal as I was, probably more so, but I had stilts and she had forms, and we found ways to exploit our own flaws without the world forcing us to do so.
Our greatest weakness was how alike we were—both in immortality and pushing our immortality to the edge—but I also thought of it as a strength.
Violet loomed over us, after all. In the chaos, she had managed to save the last wall.
Days ago, I never would’ve seen it coming. But after hearing her shout at Connelly, I believed her words to be true.
The wall we hated—the one we fought to take down—saved us for now. And though Violet held it together as best as she could, the shore lurched and reminded us that all threats weren’t seen.
Below us, in the underwater part of our city, the west wall began to crumble.
As reality set in, Connelly threw her head back and cackled. “You can’t stop me, girlie,” she said to Violet—not realizing Violet wasn’t just a girl. Nor a shadow. Nor a monster.
But she could be all three whenever she wanted to be.
In a brilliant white flash, unnatural lightning slammed against the ground and made the whole world burn.
“That was a warning,” Violet screamed, and though Connelly had fallen to her knees, the worse had yet to come.
Behind the personal battle, a massive one began in the Highlands.
Skyscrapers swayed, as if cement and iron could dance, and two buckled beneath the weight of the world.
Only then did people begin to scream.
“No,” Connelly began. “I didn’t—”
“You didn’t mean to what?” Violet cut the woman off. “Drown them instead of us?”
Connelly, someone I thought was on my side from the beginning, someone I introduced Violet to, had wanted to kill us both all along.
“You have to understand,” Connelly began, but Violet was done listening.
“No,” she snarled. “You do.”
The shadows leapt up, gripped Connelly’s feet, and held her trapped on top of the wall so that the woman had to watch her city fall.
I scrambled up from Serah and Serena, to start my way toward the wall, but the panicking crowd pushed me back.
“I wanted you to see what you did before you went.” Violet continued her taunts as Connelly cried at her feet. “I want you to know you destroyed everything you tried to build. I want you to know—”
“Violet!” I shouted, wanting to stop her from whatever plan she had, but nothing stopped her.
“I want you to die,” she said, then Violet’s hair sprung up, as if electrified, and she threw her hands into the air.
My retinas burned before I realized I’d been blown back. My head spun. My lungs burned, too. Then, my nostrils did.
The rancid smell churned my stomach, but worse was the sight before me.
Where Connelly once kneeled now sat charred remains. A black splatter of ash—or something else—covered the dent in the wall, and Violet stood upon it, her fingers sparking. Her eyes purple. Her hair as black as the day I met her under the sea.
She once asked me why I hadn’t thought of her as a mermaid; why I had instead called her a shuǐ guǐ.
Now, I had an answer.
Violet had called upon the lightning. The storm swirled overhead, ready to return on its own, yet they seemed intertwined.
Both thrived in the dark and the light, and both could be fearsome at the same time.
Before I could mutter a word about the murder I had witnessed, Violet swept her hand into the wind, and the ashes of Connelly’s life fluttered away into the ocean. Then, in what seemed like a blink, Violet stood before me. Her purple eyes dimmed down.
“Violet…” I started, but, once again, she walked past me.
I knew where she was headed before even turning around.
Serah.
When Violet kneeled by Serah’s side, Serena scooped her younger sister up. “Daniel,” she said. “I have to take her to Daniel.”
I hesitated to speak at all.
Daniel could heal, not bring the dead back to life, and Britney could only sing a song for those still breathing. Even if Serah was alive somewhere in her subconscious, a new surge was coming. One caused by the collapsed western wall. The outskirts wouldn’t make it any more than the Highlands would.
In fact, no one would make it.
“Hurry up and go,” Violet said anyway.
Serena listened.
No matter the size of the hope, a sliver proved to be enough for survival.
But while the rest of the crowd ran for cover with Serena, Violet walked the other way. She went straight for the shore. I ran after her.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Where do you think?”
I stumbled over myself as we hit sand. “The sea?” I guessed.
Kuthun wasn’t the only one with psychic abilities. He might have been a bad blood, and he might have been able to see strings. But I could see my friends’ thoughts displayed through their emotions. I could guess where this was going, and I didn’t like it one bit.
“You can’t go out to sea,” I protested. “It’ll kill you.”
“So?” Violet countered, but her normally brusque tone lacked cadence. “Serah’s…Serah’s…”
“She’s dying.” Or dead. “But her death doesn’t dictate yours.”
“Or yours,” she added, turning to face me.
Though I had known her for only a month, I saw changes in her face. Where shadows used to cling to her eyes, light now seemed to escape them. She stood tall and proud. Talked back and made her own decisions.
But this decision I hated.
“If you stand here, you won’t be much better off than me,” she said, albeit quietly.
The storm rumbled behind her, as if in agreement.
I refused to listen to either one.
Instead, I took Violet by the shoulders and spun her around to face the very city she forced Connelly to watch. Buildings fell to the ground.
“That whole city is gonna drown,” I muttered, both amazed and terrified. Violet, however, looked upon it like she looked at paintings.
She studied it.
“That’s just how it is,” I said.
“Too bad it isn’t,” she argued, then folded her arms around herself. “I really wish I went to school.”
I reached out and took her hand, wishing I’d taken it a hundred times before this moment. I’m sorry, I wished to say, but she heard me anyway.
“I’m not,” she said, squeezing my hand back. “I’ll get to go one day.”
“What—”
“Listen to me,” she said, “and listen carefully.”
Her orders came soft, almost silent, and soft orders were always the worst ones.
“No…” I started to argue, but my confidence drifted away.
“I can lift it,” she proclaimed. “I can—”
“Lift it?” I interrupted. “The city?”
When she nodded, it somehow broke me.
“I did it with the glass castle,” she explained. “I held the sea back, and it listened to me.”
And Levi died, I wanted to say.
But I saved Plato, her telepathic voice argued. And you.
Years ago, in a time when I thought of her as a shuǐ guǐ instead of a ghost, before I knew she was simply a girl with a dream, she had let me breathe once more.
“I don’t care about that,” I said selfishly and without regression. “If you become part of the sea—” I couldn’t stomach that reality. Not again. Not after I learned how the sea drowned her in the same way her darkness smothered me. “Violet,” I pleaded. “That’ll kill you.”
She smirked at the idea. “I’m immortal.”
The wind whipped her hair wildly about, as if it egged her on.
“Nothing’s killing me anytime soon.”
The ocean surged in a dare.
“And same goes for you,” she added, though she didn’t clarify who she spoke to—the city, the sea, or me.
I chose the latter.
“I’m dying.” I said two worlds I’d said a million times, but it felt as if it were the first time.
“You’re living,” she argued, “and you’re going to live for a long time with Britney.” Her pause could’ve lasted forever. “You and Kuthun, too,” she added. “You are going to be so happy.”
Rage washed over me at the same time the sea met my toes. But she held her hand out, and the sea edged back. The shadows. They fought with her. I did, too.
“That’s not your choice to make, Violet.”
“No,” she agreed, “but I’ll protect you when you go.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snapped.
“Ask Kuthun,” she said, then smiled. “He’ll know what to do. He always has.”
With that, she pressed up against my chest and kissed me as hard as the rain hitting my back felt.
It was painful and welcomed and full of dread and life. It was everything I wished to be—not frozen in a numb existence, but alive in a real one, even if it hurt. And now that I found it, found her, she was leaving. Again.
“Don’t go,” I whispered against her lips.
She whispered wishes of her own, and dragged her fingers through my hair. As she did so, the rain lifted. My hair dried. My clothes warmed. I could’ve sworn I felt the sunshine on my skin. And though her lips kept moving, and her body closed in on mine, I heard her heart, her voice, and the promises she could no longer keep.
If I don’t go, everyone will die, she said.
If you go, you will die, I argued.
I will go, and I will protect you when you go, too.
She pulled back and stepped away, and I met her brilliantly violet eyes. The color of sadness. The perpetual promise of her heartbreak. Her life couldn’t be destined for such a thing, could it? Could mine be?
Though Kuthun had always seen her tied to the sea, and me tied to the shadows, neither of us were tied to death.
“It’s gotta happen sometime, right?” Violet asked, referring to the elusive end, but I refused to imagine a world, a city, a shore without the ghost of a girl I had come to admire.
“Violet—” I pleaded one last time, but a cold wave met me.
I hit the sand, the ocean darkened in the distance, and the rain fell. When the sea surged, the city swayed, but the worst part I refused to believe.
Violet no longer stood by me.
Violet was gone.
The sea tore at my shadows. Slowly but surely, I fell apart.
If I were a human, I imagined my spine would have been severed and my head removed from my shoulders, but I was not. Often, I was more powerful when I was in pieces.
So far, so good, I thought as I dove deeper and deeper into the depths of Vendona’s ocean. Soon, I would find the floor and the wall that needed repair. It would all be over. Most everyone could be saved. But first—I had one last thing to say to Caleb.
Telepathically, I knew he heard me. How, I doubted I would ever know, but the unknown felt natural to me. Uncertainty was every bad blood’s nature. Where we came from, how we came to be, why we were here…it remained a
mystery to the world. And so did Caleb’s disease.
Perhaps, one day, the world would figure it out—find all the clues and piece them together—but for that to happen, a world had to stay standing. It had to survive. And if it needed me to do that, so be it.
As I dove deeper and deeper, and more of my shadows disappeared against the current, pain threaded itself through whatever veins I might have had as a beast.
I’m immortal, I had promised Caleb. I’m immortal, I now promised myself.
But only Kuthun could see the strings of fate, and only I seemed to believe in what he said.
He could see me, after all. Even when I lived in the shadows. Even when the world doubted I lived. Just like Kat did.
All my life I thought I could disappear, and now that I was proven wrong, I chose to disappear anyway—but at least no one would disappear with me.
Soon, Vendona would be underwater as well, but not if I could help it. Not if I could become the darkness needed to hold the darkest city of them all above water. At least until they could become strong again. Until they could find freedom without shadows holding back the sea.
I thought of Caleb, Kat, Hanna, and Yasir. I saw Frankie’s beautiful smile, Nuo’s scarred brow, and Ellen’s painting. I held Plato’s glass and heard Levi’s laugh. And I felt all the people who touched my life before the herd did.
The memories gave me the strength to continue, even as the pressure of the water threatened to crush me.
I could only hope Caleb ran. I could only hope a million things. And then, I could let go of my hope to concentrate on the task ahead.
In the darkest depths of Vendona’s ocean, I found the western wall, where the city began to crumble. Once again, I saw Jane slam her heel against the table to show where all the water would come crashing down.
The outskirts would no longer be safe, but everyone would stand an equal chance.
That had to be enough.
I positioned my strength between the cracks, separating my shadows into a dozen pieces along the way, and water rushed around each string of me.
Pressure squeezed me. Salt water choked me. But I’d felt this feeling once before—when I managed to save Caleb the first time—and now that I was older, I imagined I could do the same thing for others.
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