Drowning was better. It hurt less.
She smelled metal.
“Towels!” Jorn shouted. “Clean towels—sheets—everything!”
Inside was darker, safe, the way she liked it. Sometimes she liked the outside, too, with the beach sand ugly and gray and filled with bugs and dried jellyfish and dirt, and the water just as ugly and just as gray. The diggers made up for all that. Their funny legs and pointy noses. In the north of the Continent, the Jélis had white beaches and blue water but no diggers. Amara had seen paintings. It looked pretty but fake, as if someone had used too much pigment in their paint.
A table pushed into her back. Her legs dangled from the edge. She moaned without wanting to. She was far gone, farther than she’d ever been. Was this what happened when you got hurt? Really hurt? Maybe she’d run out of healing. Poof. Maybe Nolan had screwed with it. Maybe Nolan had broken it. Maybe Nolan had broken her.
She hated him. She didn’t know him. But the hate stayed.
“That’s runaway palace scum,” a deep-voiced man said.
Palace scum. That meant he saw her tattoo. The way she lay on the table, her hair was probably pooled under her head. Amara would peel her skin to the bone if the tattoo wouldn’t simply return five minutes later.
Sometimes, five ink-free minutes seemed like enough.
“Did she get injured in the magic blow-up?” someone else asked.
“She’s not a runaway. We’re here on … an assignment,” Jorn said. “Help her!”
“Hey—you, I’d help,” the first man said. He must be talking to Cilla. It didn’t matter to Amara, since you wasn’t her, and right now she really needed help. Jorn was pressing on her stomach to keep the deepest wound shut, and she was shivering with cold or pain or something else, and every movement pulled open a different cut. She tried to help Jorn apply pressure to her stomach, but her hands didn’t listen.
“You’re lying, though,” the man went on. “She must’ve run. Her hair’s too long.”
He had to be Alinean. Few others would notice her hair, and none would dare call her palace scum. No one else had the money or connections to get away with it. That was what Maart always said.
Maart would be so upset. He would be so upset when he found out.
“I’ll pay you!” Jorn shouted. “Get some damned towels!”
“Listen—”
“You listen.” Cilla was still here. She’d been so quiet. Amara heard her footsteps on the floor. She stepped into Amara’s view. She was hard to see from this angle, and in the dark, and with everything red. Cilla still kept her scarf pressed to the side of her mouth, and she lifted her head higher, her hair falling away from her face. She was pretty like that. Even upside down. Even when red.
“Don’t!” Jorn snarled, but he couldn’t stop her with his hands pressed to Amara’s stomach.
Cilla couldn’t do this again. Not after that mage had just—didn’t she see the danger?
Cilla’s free hand went to her scarf. Most of the fabric was already wadded up, so she pulled the rest loose easily. The scarf drooped over her arms, exposing bare shoulders, the beginning swell of her breasts, and that single mark right in the center of her chest. The tattoo’s glow pulsed with her heartbeat.
That tattoo was pretty, too. Even when Amara hated it. And she always hated it.
The pub fell silent.
Someone barked an order about getting towels, and the world went away.
at didn’t realize he was there.
Nolan had taken up a quiet spot at the other end of the middle-school gym, leaning on a vaulting horse to watch Pat and her classmates rehearse. They wore their regular clothes and didn’t use many props, but when Nolan imagined them in fake hospital gear, with clipboards in their hands, he had to admit the scene might work. Pat was doing a good job. Her biggest problem was waiting for others to finish before she blurted out her lines. No one seemed to mind, though. Their biggest problem seemed to be remembering their lines in the first place.
After twenty minutes, Pat noticed him. She squeaked an apology to her drama teacher and crossed the room. “Nolan! What’re you doing here?”
“I was thinking about the movie from last night.” Nolan stayed by the vaulting horse. It was weird being back in this gym—though his leg meant he’d never spent much time here to begin with. “That actress was good.”
“You just liked her boobs.”
“That, too,” he said, mainly to get a laugh or cringe out of her. Not that she was wrong. “But her expression when she saw that train explode … I was impressed.” He nodded slowly, casually. A simple conversation with his sister shouldn’t make his heart race like this.
The thing was, they’d never had a simple conversation. Even the times when Amara slept were weighed down by her dreams.
“I know, right?” Pat said. “Did you see what she did with her lips? Just that little quirk at the end—it’s so subtle, you know? People online say she was flat, but—” She looked at her classmates and lowered her voice. “What’re you doing here?”
“Wanted to see you rehearse.”
“Did you walk all the way? It’s 108 degrees out!”
“Seemed like a good idea,” Nolan said, though his shirt was drenched and he must smell worse than the dressing rooms nearby. “So, you want to be an actress.”
“What? No.” She paused. “Yes. It’s stupid, I know, but—”
“It’s not stupid.”
“It is,” she said heatedly. “Whatever. I want it, anyway.” She tilted her head, and it took Nolan a second to realize she was redirecting his attention to the kids at the other end of the gym. “Claudia, over there? She’s got a big part, and her cousin is coming over from LA to watch. He’s mostly done ads and this one dumb reenactment, but Claud says he just got a part on a CSI-type show. I figure, if he sees me, and I’m good … maybe he can give me some advice?”
“Maybe.” Nolan tried not to laugh. That’d be one way to get Pat mad at him real quick. Today, though, not laughing was a real challenge. He was in his own world. When he shut his eyes, he still heard Pat and still smelled the stale sweat of the gym, the old leather of the vaulting horse under his elbows. He straightened out his smile. “Do you still need volunteers?”
“You have time to watch the movie? You’re sure?” Nolan asked Mom the next evening, halfway up the stairs. “I’ll get the laptop!”
“It’s that superhero movie, right?” Mom called. “Super-heroes are cool.”
“That’s why I downloaded it.” He returned to the top of the stairs with the laptop bag around his shoulders and hopped carefully down the steep steps.
This would be his third movie in as many days. He’d spent Tuesday and today doing more than he’d ever thought possible. He was nauseated from the increased dose of medication, yeah, but he’d rehearsed with Pat, who’d learned to get her eyebrows under control; volunteered with her drama teacher; done homework; flirted with Sarah at school—clumsily, though she seemed not to mind—and at the end of the day he still had energy left for TV, swimming, chores.
Maybe he could get superhero comics from the library and see if Mom liked those, too. Maybe he’d finally get to study Nahuatl alongside Dad and Patli; he knew how important Mexica pride was to Dad and how important it was becoming to Pat. To feel that kind of passion about who you were and weren’t … Maybe Nolan could learn. Maybe he could understand. God, he wanted to understand.
How had he been able to fill his days all those years, doing nothing at all?
In the kitchen, Mom was wiggling past Dad to grab plates. “Almost done,” Dad singsonged at the stove. He stuck a pinkie into the sauce and licked it off. “Very almost.”
Mom turned. With her free hand, she reached out and finger-combed Nolan’s hair—he could swear she’d lifted that hand before she’d even gotten a good look at him. “Ah, Nolan, you really need to use some gel. Did you run out?” She was seconds away from licking her fingers to improvise. Instead, her hand mov
ed down the side of his face to cup his chin. “I told you we’d get here.”
She turned for the living room with a bounce in her step.
Dad leaned against the counter’s edge, regarding Nolan appreciatively. “The new dosage really is working, isn’t it? You’re not having any seizures?”
Nolan aimed for a casual shrug, but the bag around his shoulder—the laptop was a heavy old model that by all rights should’ve broken down years ago—made it a challenge. “None.”
“You happy?”
Nolan’s growing smile should say enough. “Yeah. I’m adjusting, but I’m good.”
Dad twisted a knob behind him, turning the flame under the saucepan into a tiny blue flicker. “That’s what matters. What’s on your arm?”
Nolan tilted his lower arm inward. “Just doodles. Hey, I need to set up the movie …”
“Sounds good.” Suddenly Dad was all business, stirring the sauce around the chicken, sending scents of peanut and sharp chili through the air. Dad rarely cooked like this. Real food took too long and cost too much. Nolan had taken care of the second part, calling Grandma Pérez for advice and using his last remaining birthday money to pick up the necessary items at the corner store, only remembering when he got home that his parents would have too much work to do to cook. They’d taken one look at the freshly stocked fridge, though, and decided to make an exception. Today marked Nolan’s third evening and second full day without seizures; they had something to celebrate.
Dad tested the temperature of the tortillas with two fingers. “Oh, this’ll be good.”
It was, and so was the movie, the four of them nestled on the couch with plates in front of them that they should take to the kitchen and rinse off, but no one did, and no one even opened their mouth to suggest it. By the time the main character’s son had a knife to his throat halfway through, Mom was squishing a pillow in her lap, and Pat was leaning forward with the widest grin on her face.
Surreptitiously, Nolan licked his thumb and rubbed at the Dit letters on his arm. In the glow of the television screen, he could see that the ink was already smudging. He’d doodled the letters in history class. He’d just … wanted to see if he remembered.
“You’re not watching?” Dad nudged him.
Nolan smiled, standing. “I’ll be back in a minute. No need to pause.”
He headed straight for the bathroom, locked the door, sat on the lid, and slumped sideways to rest his head on the cool wall tiles. He shut his eyes only to find the by-now-familiar black. What was wrong with him? The movie was good, or at least he thought it was; he didn’t have much to compare it with.
And the way Mom and Dad had been smiling at him lately—nothing beat that. They’d want to talk about the movie afterward because they so rarely had the chance to watch movies together, and they’d glow even brighter if he joined in. He could nerd out over the acting with Pat or gush over the action scenes, but how was he supposed to care about some actor on that screen? Out there, Amara—maybe Jorn had—
He’d hated her for years. But now, he worried. He missed her.
And the truth was, despite the flurry of activity, he didn’t know what to do with himself. Nolan thought of what Dad had said when they’d talked over laundry: What did he want to do? He had so many options now, a hundred options and more. He loved it, he did, he hadn’t lied about being happy—
But family nights and cute girls at school and playing big brother and all those things people expected of him paled the second Amara flashed across his thoughts.
He’d thought freedom would be different.
He’d thought he’d care more.
Nolan’s eyes burned. If he cried, he’d ruin the movie.
Amara, he thought, and—
—pain.
The pain was there, but through a haze of thoughts and images Nolan couldn’t identify. He recognized this. Amara was sleeping but not quite dreaming.
So why the pain?
And why was he back? Maybe Amara’s magic acted up in her sleep. He should let her be. He couldn’t explain the pain, though. It never lasted this long—she should be healing.
Nolan concentrated. He could wake her up, if nothing else. He focused on the center of her belly, the lids of her eyes. Then he opened them. He raised her arms. Bandages were wrapped around them, held together with neat stitches that must’ve been Maart’s doing. Nolan inhaled shallowly and tried to sit. A scream escaped. Something stabbed his—Amara’s—belly. He dropped again, panting.
“Amara!” Cilla appeared by his side. He studied her swollen lip, then the ceiling behind her, the walls, the smell of dust and charred wood. They were in the granary. He lay on a bedroll that must be Amara’s, though it had been moved. Not far off, near where Maart slept, embers burned in the fire pit. No sign of Jorn.
“Are you OK? Don’t move. The cuts might open. Jorn’s been using his magic to keep you stable, but he didn’t want it mixing with your own healing. We weren’t sure when you’d wake up.”
Nolan repeated Cilla’s words in his mind, as if that might help him understand what had happened.
“You’re bleeding again.” Cilla winced at the bandages around Amara’s stomach. “Jorn took care of most of the cuts, but that one wouldn’t heal right. We’ll need to wrap it again. Oh, thank the seas. I’m … so glad you’re …” She slowed, then came to a full stop. Her teeth pressed into her lower lip, a thin strip of white on brown. Her next words came steadily: “You’re not Amara.”
Nolan couldn’t sit up, but at least he could move his hands. “How can you tell?”
“The way you look at me is too comfortable. Nolan?”
He nodded.
“Did she pull you in again?”
Nolan tried to sit up a second time, grimacing at the pain that slashed through his stomach and fanned outward, but this time he managed. “Sort of. She pushed me out after last time. Not just out of her body, but her mind, too. That’s never happened. I haven’t been here at all since the day I took over. I think … I think this time I came of my own accord.”
“How? Don’t move. It’s dangerous.” Cilla reached for his shoulder to push him down, then paused. Her eyes went to some place past his. Her hand—oddly cool—brushed past his skin, then he felt her fingers on the curve of his ear. “She’s healing,” Cilla whispered. “There was a cut here. It’d scabbed over. I was just looking at it …”
Nolan touched his stomach where he’d felt the wound. He pressed. Minimal pain. He pushed on the other bandages, feeling nothing but the cracking of crusted blood between his skin and the fabric. He scrambled upright. Cilla didn’t try to stop him.
He looked down. Cream bandages, some stained red, covered Amara’s body. “What happened? Why didn’t she heal before?”
“We don’t know. She protected me from the curse yesterday morning. It’s evening now. It’s been a day and a half. Maart spent all that time looking after her. Jorn finally forced him to sleep an hour ago.”
“A day and a half? Without healing?” Nolan repeated with rushed signs.
“Until you showed up. She’s unconscious. How could she pull you in?”
“Maybe her defenses were down while she slept?” He felt warm, too warm, and it had nothing to do with the embers glowing nearby.
“How long has she been pulling you in?” Cilla’s voice sounded harsher than it ever did when she talked to Amara.
“Since we were kids.”
“Before she was chosen as a servant?” Before she had her tongue cut?
“After.”
“When did she start healing?”
“After I first came. I … after.”
Cilla looked at him flatly. “You appear, she heals. You disappear, she stops healing. Medicine gives you control when she’s never had control, ever. Are you sure you’re not the mage?”
“I think …” Nolan said, and he closed his eyes, his hands repeating the signs without him wanting to. “I think. I think. I just wanted to see how she was doing.
I was worried. I should go now.”
He couldn’t be responsible for Amara’s healing. He couldn’t.
He couldn’t be in charge of—
But he’d taken control just now, hadn’t he? Cilla was right. Amara was unconscious. She shouldn’t be able to pull him in or kick him out. If he could make himself leave now just as easily, then—
—Nolan slid against the bathroom tiles, tumbling to the floor. He flailed, his foot lashing out against the door, his arms stuck between him and the wall. “What—” he gasped.
“You all right in there?” Mom called.
“Yeah, pee carefully!” Pat laughed. She was joking with him more often now. He’d been trying to joke back.
“I’m fine,” he said after too long. He pulled himself up by the door handle, unlocked the door, stumbled out. “Keep watching the movie without me.”
The amusement faded from their faces.
Was he responsible? If, with those pills, he could travel back and forth whenever he wanted—if he made Amara heal—maybe she hadn’t been the one to kick him out on Monday. He might’ve simply snapped free on his own. And then, while he was back in his own skin, flirting with Sarah Schneider and finding sites to download films from, Amara had protected Cilla from the curse and almost died.
Because he hadn’t been there.
Nolan didn’t make it past the top step. He turned and sat, gripping the banister. He stared down the curve of the stairs with hollow eyes. If his presence made her heal …
If somehow, all along, he’d pushed himself into her world instead of being pulled …
Amara wasn’t a mage. She never had been. That was why her healing stuttered and paused: because he kept blinking in and out. Without him, she wouldn’t heal at all. She wouldn’t have been plucked from the Bedam palace to help Cilla. She’d still be there and she’d be following the caretaker’s orders and scooping horse manure and cleaning up after the cooks and sneaking around servant passages and it’d be shit, all of it would be shit and unfair and awful, but she wouldn’t be burned and cut and drowned and choked and—
And none of that.
Nolan’s hand dropped from the banister. He clutched his hair. The hair Mom obsessed over. He’d been running around blaming Amara for ruining his life while he—while Mom slicked his hair and Dad cooked and Pat freaked out about her play, and he had this cozy little life, and all this time he’d been the one to—
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