by Jeff Hirsch
“It’s okay,” he said. “We’re going to be okay. They don’t want to hurt us.”
Glenn looked out toward the edge of the cliff, but the creatures were gone.
In their place lay a man, a boy, and two women, horribly thin and dressed in rags. Their skin was waxy and pale. One of the women drew herself up from the ground. A girl, really, not much older than Glenn.
She touched the others reassuringly. When she turned to look up at Glenn, her eyes were huge and bright blue, her hair a greasy, matted blond.
“Thank you,” she said through the aching wreck of her voice.
“Thank you for freeing us.”
“What’s your name?”
The girl with the blue eyes stared down at the rock floor. In the light of their small campfire, her pale face seemed nearly translucent.
She had led them here, to a small cave cut into the hill below where they’d stood only minutes ago. She said they came here when they weren’t out hunting. Her voice had trembled when she said it.
While Glenn waited for an answer, she raised the flat of her palms in front of their small fire. Even now, in the haze that came once the bracelet was back on, it seemed strange that she was separate from the fire. Something about it made Glenn ache, like she was missing a friend.
On the other side of the fire, Kevin sat with his back to her, talking low and encouragingly to the others. The woman would listen to Kevin a while, but inevitably she turned away, slipping glances out the mouth of the cave into the night, her face slack, as if she had lost something but couldn’t remember what. Each time the man noticed, he would whisper to her and she would nod and turn back toward Kevin. It was never long before the whole process started again.
The boy seemed worse off. As soon as they’d reached the cave, he’d ignored the rest of them, slumping down outside of the fire’s glow and muttering to himself. Glenn kept expecting the older man to say something to him, to reach out to him in some way, but he only glanced at the boy without emotion or recognition.
“Margaret,” the girl said.
The girl was twisting the ragged end of her sleeve in her fingers.
Dust fell from it as the old fibers tore. Her brow was furrowed in concentration.
“I think my name was Margaret.”
“Is Margaret,” Glenn corrected. “Your name is Margaret.”
Margaret stared at Glenn as if she was struggling to translate her words into another language. The tip of her finger had gone a tortured white where she had turned the frayed cloth of her sleeve tighter and tighter around it.
Glenn reached for her pack and rummaged around inside. There wasn’t much left: a crust of bread, some cheese. Glenn tore the bread in two and held a piece out to Margaret.
“You should eat something.”
Margaret looked at it strangely.
“Go ahead,” Glenn urged.
Her fingers trembled as she reached for it. Margaret set the piece of bread in her mouth and held it there for a time before slowly working her jaw around it and then swallowing. Glenn handed her another.
“Do you know what happened to you?” Glenn asked.
“I think … we came here. I don’t know how long ago it was.
My …” She searched for the right word. “Parents. They were …
scientists?”
“You’re from the Colloquium?”
“Colloquium,” Margaret said, balancing the word on her tongue.
“Yes. We came because of an … idea my father and she — my mother
— had. We came to see if their idea, if it was real.”
“What was their idea?”
The girl didn’t answer. Glenn wasn’t sure if she had heard her.
“Margaret …”
Margaret’s eyes narrowed on the ground in front of her as if she was trying to will the pieces of a particularly complicated puzzle into place.
“Do you know how … when there’s a tree? A tall one? An oak?
First there’s a seed. And then there’s a tree, but once there’s a tree, you can’t … you can’t make it into a seed again. Is that right? Is that true?”
Glenn didn’t know what to say. Margaret stared hard, searching, then shook her head.
“It’s … there’s now, and then there’s what was before now. We weren’t these people then. We were other people. I remember yellow paper on the walls and … a table. Blue. And chairs. But then … we were here and those other people were gone and there was just us.
These people. Now.”
“What happened when you came here?” Glenn asked.
“Margaret?”
Margaret stared out into the darkness beyond the fire. She pulled at a thin layer of flesh on her arm, pinching it cruelly between her fingers.
Glenn held out another piece of bread, but Margaret ignored it.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t — ”
“We had been here … it was a while, I think. Tommy and me thought it was fun. There were birds and horses, but the people wouldn’t talk…. Dad said they were superstitious. He laughed. Scared of their own — what was it? Shadows. We lived in the woods near a village. A camping trip, Mom said. A holiday. Dad wanted to teach the people, give them … something. I don’t know what it was. Something to make them better? It was our duty to show them how life could be better. Then one family finally talked to us. They told us to leave before” — Margaret’s breath hitched in a small gasp — “the man said there was a woman.”
Something cold spread through Glenn as she said it. Margaret leaned farther into the fire.
“A woman in black. He said we had to leave before she came. No outsiders, he said. Dad … he always … he was so happy, he always laughed. ‘Send for her. Let’s meet this woman in black.’ Mom laughed too. But then she came. The woman. Very beautiful. She was full of birds. My dad raised his hand and said hello and she raised hers and she said some things and there was a sound like something cracking open. I thought it was the world, but really it was us. We were dropped into the hunger, and then time turned without us in it. People crossed our paths and we … pulled their hands and their faces and their breath into us until they weren’t anything anymore. We took them and we made them into us. Just so we could be warm. But it was never enough.”
It was silent in the cave when Margaret finished. She sat poised over the fire, her eyes locked onto the night outside. Glenn fought to make a wall that would hold Margaret’s story at bay. How could she stand to hear more of her mother’s horrors? When she closed her eyes, she saw lapping waves and her mother’s pale skin shining in the sun at the edge of a lake. Glenn took a stick from the pile of scrap wood and poked at the edge of the fire. It flared and settled.
On the other side of the fire, Margaret’s parents were lying down on the stone. Her father’s arms were wrapped around her mother’s. His eyes were closed. Hers were open and staring blankly at the ground.
Tommy was lying on his side, his hands splayed out in front of him, twitching like birds.
“Maybe you should try to get some rest,” Glenn said.
“I don’t sleep,” Margaret said.
“Maybe you can now.”
Glenn waited, but Margaret made no sign that she had heard. She sat against the wall of the cave and stared over the top of the fire and into the dark.
Across from them, Kevin shook open a small blanket from
Glenn’s pack and laid it over Tommy. He whispered something in the boy’s ear, but there was no response. Kevin left him and went to stand out by the mouth of the cave.
He said that the innkeeper told him she had gone, and he had been able to find a ride with a hunter not long after she left. Other than that, they had barely even looked at each other since that moment on the hilltop. Every time Glenn did, she saw a stranger wielding a golden dagger.
Glenn left Margaret, edging around the fire toward Kevin, trying to ignore the churning in her stomach.
“We have to get t
hem home,” she said.
Kevin found a rock with the toe of his boot and kicked it into the dark. Glenn noticed bits of ash and waxy-looking burn marks on his cheeks.
“Kevin?”
“What does it feel like?” he asked. “To be able to do things like that?”
Glenn shuddered, remembering the mad rush of power.
“It’s like I’m not … me anymore,” she said. “I don’t know who I am, but I’m not me. I’m just … gone.”
Kevin stared at the rocky ground and slowly shook his head.
“You can’t destroy that bracelet,” he said quietly.
“Kevin — ”
“If you use it then maybe what happened to these people, what happened to Cort, won’t happen to anyone else. Let Opal teach you how to control your Affinity — ”
“So that’s why you followed me?” Glenn asked. “To take me
back to Opal?”
“I followed you because I woke up and you were gone,” Kevin said, raising his voice. “And you should be glad I did!”
“So it was all for me?” Glenn whipped his coat aside, exposing the gold dagger around his neck. “It wasn’t for your new friends?
‘Death to the Magistra.’ That’s what you said, isn’t it? I heard you plotting with your friends, Kevin. You’re not him. You’re not Cort!”
“I know that!” Kevin shouted. Then he glanced at the family behind them and stepped closer to Glenn, dropping his voice low and intense. “But I felt him die on that scaffold, Glenn. I remember it. I remember the walk to the gallows and how the rope felt on my neck and the sound of Felix crying and this feeling like …” Kevin struggled for purchase as his words slipped away. They were just inches from each other. Glenn could feel the heat radiating off him. “In all the time we’ve known each other, I’ve spent every minute of every day thinking about myself, about school, about some stupid band, and I’m sick of it.
There are other things in the world, important things, and I want to think about them for once in my life. We can’t let her keep hurting people, Glenn. We have to stop her.”
“Kill her?”
Kevin paused, flames from the campfire washing over the planes of his face.
“Isn’t that what she deserves?”
The cave dropped into an aching quiet. Cort was no mere ghost inside him now. The person in front of her, even though he had Kevin’s eyes and lips and the sharp angles of his face, wasn’t Kevin Kapoor.
Kevin was gone.
Glenn took a cautious step away. How could she tell him the truth about who the Magistra was? Would he even care now that he was more Cort Whitley than Kevin Kapoor? Worse, would he turn on her as well?
“Look,” he said. “We can cross the border tomorrow morning
and you can give me the bracelet. All of this can be over for you. I know that’s all you really want.”
“All I want is for us to get our lives back. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. My father is sitting alone in some prison because of me, Kevin.
You were almost killed! I’m just trying to put things back the way they were.”
Kevin’s eyes sharpened on her. “Do you really think that if you destroy the bracelet Sturges will pat us on the head and send us back to school?” he asked. “That’s a fantasy, Glenn. And even if he did, I don’t want that life back. I’m not going to waste another year dangling from your string while you figure out how to get as far away from me as humanly possible.”
Glenn felt a sting in her chest. Her eyes burned. “I never meant to …”
“Do you know why I came to talk to you that day at my dad’s office?” he asked. “I saw you on the train one morning. You were surrounded by everyone we went to school with and all of them were running around like they always do, and in the middle of all that was you. Sitting there with your tablet, ignoring it all, reading about the stars. I thought, this is someone who knows who she is. You were just you and I thought that was so amazing, but now … that whole time, you were just scared.”
Before Glenn could say anything, Kevin turned from her and
swept out of the cave. Glenn stood and watched his silhouette leap from rock to rock down the trail until the night consumed him.
A sound woke Glenn late that night. Her eyes snapped open, but she lay still. The fire had fallen to a reddish glow, barely illuminating the cave. Tommy and his parents were asleep in their places, but Margaret was gone.
Glenn sat up in time to see a figure slip toward the mouth of the cave.
“Margaret?” she whispered.
The dark form paused, then stepped out of the cave and vanished.
Glenn forced herself up. She was hungry and tired, and her body ached from lying on the rock, but she dug her feet into her boots and pulled on her coat before stumbling outside.
As soon as Glenn left the halo of the fire, the cold rushed at her.
She jerked her coat closed and buttoned it up, cursing as she squinted into the dark for some sign of movement.
A jumble of black on black hills was crowded all around, like a surrounding army. The canyon floor, hundreds of feet below, was invisible.
“Margaret!” Glenn called.
Nothing.
Glenn was about to turn back. If Margaret couldn’t sleep and needed to get out, so be it, but then there was a tumble of rocks and dirt above her head. Glenn saw Margaret’s leg slip up over the edge of the hill, onto the stone landing they’d been on earlier that night. There was a glimmer of moonlight, but a girl like Margaret, as confused as she was, shouldn’t be stumbling around up there, no matter how used to it she might be.
Glenn found the narrow path up the hill and stayed low, feeling her way along as it snaked up the cliff face. After several minutes of painful climbing, Glenn threw her arms over the top.
She was at the turn of the path that led to where they had first encountered Margaret and her family. Now, higher up, the wind swirled around her, cold and knifelike. She couldn’t stay up here long.
“Margaret!” she called, but her voice was scattered in the wind, disappearing inches from her mouth.
Glenn hunched over, hands crammed deep in her pockets, and
started down the path, following it until the low rock walls at her sides fell away. The gusts were even greater once she was out in the open.
Glenn raised the flat of her hand to shield her eyes from the wind as she scanned the hilltop.
“Margaret! Margaret, where are you? You have to come down!”
Glenn swept her eyes across the plain. A figure stood dead center on the hill out by the edge. Great, Glenn thought. I’m going to freeze to death because she misses the view.
As Glenn fought her way forward, she could see it was definitely Margaret, standing with her back to Glenn, her arms hanging limp at her sides.
“Hey, it’s freezing out here! We have to go back. We — ”
Glenn took another step and was starting to reach out when she saw that Margaret was standing with her toes at the very knife’s edge of the cliff. There was nothing in front of her but air. A bad turn of the wind and she’d be gone. Vertigo swam through Glenn, imagining it, and she eased back.
“Margaret? You have to take a step back, okay? It’s not safe.”
Margaret just stared out into the dark air. Glenn wanted to reach out to her but was too afraid she might startle her and send her over.
“Look,” Glenn said, doing everything she could to calm the
shakes in her voice. “Listen to me. Okay? You can’t be up here now.
You have to take a step back, for me. Just a little one.”
Margaret didn’t say anything. She didn’t move.
“Margaret …” Glenn said, softening. “I know … I know it seems like things are all messed up right now, but you need some time.
Things will get back to the way they were before this all happened.
23
Okay? Things will be fine.”
Margaret shook her head.
>
“Of course they will!” Glenn said, fighting the rising gusts of wind. “Look, your parents are down below. And your brother. Why don’t we go sit in front of the fire. We’ll get you something to eat and we’ll all talk. We’ll talk all night if you want, until things are better.
Then tomorrow you guys will head home and this will all be over.
Would you like that? Margaret? Things will be back the way they were.”
Margaret turned so that her profile was etched across the starry night behind her.
“You can’t make a tree not a tree,” she said. “You can’t take it back.”
Glenn swallowed hard. Her heart was racing now, but she had to keep calm. She took a half step, slow, and reached out to the girl.
“Maybe not,” she said. “But take a step back and we’ll get you on the road home.”
There was a gust of wind and Margaret’s hair snapped like a flag.
Her eyes were dark and huge and clear.
“There is no road home.”
Glenn made a grab for Margaret’s shoulder, but the girl took a single step forward and it was as if the darkness and the earth below reached up, desperate to snatch her away.
Margaret didn’t make a sound as she fell.
As the night deepened, the cold and the wind took Glenn in both hands and shook, but she didn’t leave her place at the edge of the cliff.
She imagined she was an outcropping of rock or a lone growth of mountain pine, twisted and hard, invisible amongst the others.
The moon led the stars down into the horizon, and then the first watery traces of sunlight spread across the mountains. At some point that morning, Margaret’s parents and brother appeared on the cliff behind her. They stood there a long time, their ragged clothes flapping in the wind. Their bodies gray and indistinct, like ghostly smudges on a pane of glass.
Glenn told them what Margaret had done, then turned away and watched the sun rise. They said nothing. Eventually, there was a sound behind her like dry leaves skittering across the rock and they were gone.
There was a flash of green as the sun crested the forest in the distance and for a moment Glenn imagined she was on 813, millions of miles away from the Magisterium and the Colloquium. Alone in the quiet. Her heart longed for it, missing another distant place she had never been.