by E. E. Holmes
Each morning, I entered the enclosure, braced for the weightlessness, the disorientation, the deep discomfort that it was starting to feel a little too wonderful to be free from my body. The second day was no better than the first, as far as my ability to move around. Within minutes I was utterly drained, and had to return to my body out of sheer necessity. After I returned, I staggered back to our wagon and slept for hours, waking with a pounding headache and an odd tingling sensation all over, like I might get in my arm or leg if I’d trapped it under myself while sleeping. This would last until the next morning, when I would only achieve total relief when I started Walking again.
“I think I know why Irina started to hate reconnecting so much,” I grumbled after several days of this. “Being back inside my body is definitely uncomfortable. Not that I’m complaining, really. It’s definitely better than the alternative of not being able to return at all.”
Flavia, who was taking volumes of notes on my experiences, nodded thoughtfully, a ball-point pen bouncing against her pursed lips. “The bonds that connect you to your body are being stretched to their limits. The more you stretch them, the easier it will get, just like with any sort of exercise.”
“I hate exercise,” I said, rubbing my throbbing temple.
She bent over her notebook again, as though my hatred of exercise was worthy of note. “And how was traveling this time? Any better?”
“Not really. Irina keeps telling me that I’m not ‘letting go,’ but she won’t elaborate on what that means, so I can’t fix it.” I picked up the glass of water someone had brought for me and drained most of it in one go. “To be honest, she’s not very interested in helping me, now that she’s free. The problem is that she’s going to get bored in there really soon. I can already see her testing the edges, looking for places she might be able to sneak through undetected.”
“There are none,” Flavia said flatly. “I’ve been over every inch of that space, and there is no way for her to get out, as far as I can tell.”
“Well, that won’t stop her from trying,” I said. I glanced back at the structure where I could make out Irina’s blithely soaring form beyond the boundaries. “I just hope I can squeeze a little more information out of her before she starts to ignore me completely.”
Speaking of ignoring me completely, it had been nearly a week and there was still no sign of Finn. Ileana’s Trackers were supposedly on the watch for him, but he had vanished as completely as Hannah, on whom they still had no leads. I asked Ileana every day, and every day her answer was the same: “We continue to search with every resource at our disposal.”
I bit back the observance that, perhaps, they just didn’t have enough resources. Milo was absolutely beside himself, and I wasn’t sure how long I’d be able to keep him from doing something desperate. I was feeling pretty desperate myself. I lay awake at night, torturing myself with images of what the Necromancers might be doing to Hannah. And whenever I could tear my brain away from that, I replayed my last argument with Finn over and over in my mind until I was positively writhing with hot bubbling guilt and fear over what might have happened to him. I knew that wherever Finn was now and whatever he was doing, it was my actions that had driven him there.
What if he’d gone looking for Hannah on his own, and the Necromancers had captured him as well? What if they tortured him for information about where I was hiding, like they’d done to Pierce? Given his Caomhnóir training and a streak of stubbornness to rival my own, I cringed to think what he would endure before he would ever tell them anything.
That same stubbornness wanted to find Finn, just so I could shout, “I told you so!” at him, now that I’d managed to Walk without serious consequence. If he’d just listened to me. If he’d just had a little bit of faith that I could make the right decision on my own, without him hovering over me like a dark storm cloud of patriarchy. But no, he’d had to storm off in a fit of rage, and now who knew if we’d ever see him again, and it angered me to realize that it might be his own decision not to return. It might actually be his choice to stay away without a word, leaving us to stew in worry and fear, and in some ways, that was even worse than the thought that he’d run into the Necromancers.
As it turned out, I wasn’t the only one worried about the absence of Finn. Ileana and the other Travelers helping me to Walk were concerned as well, though not exactly for the same reasons.
“We need to discuss your protection,” Ileana said, after my fourth attempt at Walking. It had gone better than the previous one; I’d at last managed to cross from one end of the enclosure to another with a fluid, controlled sort of movement, and returned to my body tired, but not so exhausted that I felt drained. Ileana now stood over me as I sat on the border of the clearing with Flavia, she scribbling a transcript of my experiences, and me sipping water and attempting to regain my bearings in my body; it was a bit like acquiring sea legs.
“What about my protection?” I asked.
“It is traditional for the Caomhnóir to stand guard over the Durupinen’s body while she is Walking. I say traditional for lack of a better word, since of course we know there is nothing traditional about this situation. Nonetheless, documentation tells us that while Walking, the Durupinen’s body is left vulnerable to attack, and so having a Caomhnóir present limits the chances of the body being tampered with in any way while it is incapable of defending itself.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But my body isn’t in any danger while we’re here practicing like this.”
“Perhaps not,” Ileana conceded. “But as you say, we are practicing, and it is important for us to consider and prepare for all of the hypothetical possibilities. When the time comes for you to Walk in fulfillment of the prophecy, your body is likely to be at risk, and if your Caomhnóir is truly lost, we must make other arrangements to ensure that you are able to return to your body safely. Not to do so would be foolish in the extreme.”
“That makes sense, I guess,” I said, fixating a bit on the word “lost” and all the unknowns it seemed to contain within its four little letters. “What do you suggest, since Finn is… not back yet?”
“It is time for your spirit guide to take a greater role in your protection,” Ileana said.
“Is that why I’m waiting over here?” came Milo’s impatient voice, and he instantly appeared beside us. “Anca said you wanted me for something.”
“Yes,” Ileana said. “Flavia will explain.”
With an excited flurry that reeked of academic fervor, Flavia looked up from her notes and spoke.
“The Walker’s body is protected by the soul catcher casting from outside invasion. That is to say, other spirits cannot just leap into the body and take it over when it is abandoned. Think of the soul catcher as a key to two doors; it opens the front door so that the soul can Walk, but it locks the back door, so that no other soul can enter the house. The spirit guide is the single exception to that rule.”
“You mean I could still get in?” Milo asked, perking up with interest.
Flavia nodded and held up an ancient book, where a curling, yellowed page bore some kind of diagram of a spirit entering a body. “Yes. As the spirit guide, your connection enables you to occupy the space inside Jess’s empty body, and even control it in her absence. So if the body were in jeopardy, for instance, you could move it.”
“And if it were the victim of ill-advised fashion choices, I could give it a makeover?” Milo asked brightly.
Flavia just stared at him a moment, and then turned to the book, as though she might have missed a paragraph on the fashion implications of Walking.
“Ignore him,” I said to her. “He’s joking.”
“You wish,” Milo said, flashing a huge smile and waggling his eyebrows at me.
Flavia looked back and forth between us, unsure how to proceed.
“That’s enough foolishness,” Ileana said sharply from around her pipe. The fumes wafted straight through Milo, causing him to float back in disgust, though he can’t have been a
ble to smell them. “Go on please, Flavia.”
“Right,” Flavia said, trying to pick up her lost thread of thought. “Well, um, the spirit guide can act as a protector in this way. So in the absence of your Caomhnóir to guard your body, we thought we ought to teach your spirit guide how to practice corporeal habitation.”
A faint alarm bell went off in my brain. This was something I already knew about.
“We’ve done it,” I said, looking at Milo.
“We have?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
“You have?” Flavia asked in similar surprise.
“Yes,” I said. “I realize we’re navigating uncharted territory here, but I did manage to pay attention to the little bit of training we received before we burned our school to the ground, and we already covered corporeal habitation. Milo and I have done it.”
“Remind me?’ Milo said.
“When we snuck off campus with Savvy to go to London, remember?” I said, and then clarified for the others. “Annabelle sent a message to me asking me to meet her in London. We used corporeal habitation to get across the boundaries of Fairhaven, because the ghost masked our human presence as we crossed the wards.”
“Oh, right,” Milo said. “Why didn’t you just say, hey, remember that time we shared a body?”
I ignored him.
Flavia was looking impressed. “Did that actually work?”
“Yup. Savvy figured it out. She wasn’t Walking, obviously, so she didn’t vacate her own body, but a spirit could share the space, at least temporarily. As long as a spirit came along for the ride, the wards could only detect the spirit, not the living person. She made lots of excursions without permission, so she had lots of opportunities to refine her technique.”
“Interesting!” Flavia said, beginning to scribble, but Ileana placed a wrinkled old claw on her hand.
“Let’s keep that information to ourselves,” she said. “I’d rather we didn’t have the young ones trying to escape the camp when we’re within walking distance of the city. They get restless enough as it is.”
Flavia seemed to shrink a little. She put her pen back into the elaborate braid of her hair.
Ileana turned back to Milo. “So, then. What say you, spirit guide? Are you willing to attempt it? It would strengthen our defenses if you could protect her body in this way.”
Milo stopped grinning and became unusually solemn. “I should have realized this spirit guide thing would get serious eventually. So, yeah, I can do it. I want to help, if I can.”
I very nearly opened my mouth to protest, but thought better of it. It was true that I did not cherish the idea of Milo in sole possession of my physical person; in fact the thought of anyone walking around inside my body, of my body actually living without me, was repugnant. But Milo was already beside himself to help. I still hadn’t forgotten his heartbreaking offer to close the Gateway in my stead. If this was something he could do, that would not only help me, but make him feel as though he were doing something to help Hannah, I had to let him try.
So I just smiled at him. “Just don’t cut my hair, okay? And no pink.”
He grinned back. “No pink. Cross my heart.”
“Do you think you’re up for it now, or would you rather wait until tomorrow’s Walk?” Flavia asked.
I chugged the rest of my water and handed it back to her. “Let’s do it now. If this part is also going to take practice, we should get started already.”
As I tied on a new soul catcher, Flavia walked us through the process. Once I was inside the enclosure and had vacated my body, Dragos would perform a casting that would allow Milo to cross into the space as well. It would need to be done quickly, and without saying anything to Irina, because the brief moment that Milo was able to enter might breech the integrity of the enclosure, making it possible for Irina to escape through the same opening before Dragos sealed it up again. My job was to distract her while this was done. Then, Milo would enter my body and attempt to control it. I would allow him as much time as I could. When I was too drained to Walk anymore, I would reenter my body, with Milo still inside, and we would exit the enclosure together.
“Have you got all that?’ Flavia asked.
“Of course,” I said, throwing a look at Milo and grimacing “What could possibly go wrong?”
“A walk in the park,” Milo agreed. “Ready when you are.”
I crawled back into the structure, noticing as I did so the oppressive nature of it. The very air weighed on me, a constant reminder of the many forces that limited our existence inside it.
“You’re back so soon?” Irina asked. Her smile was so knowing, it was nearly smug. “I knew you’d soon enjoy it too much to stay away.”
“It’s not that, although I think it is starting to get easier. Ileana is angry with me,” I said, hoping my theatrical pout was convincing. “She says I’m not making progress quickly enough. She ordered me back in here to try again.”
Irina laughed. It was a rainbow colored sound that shattered and bounced around the space and fell like oversized raindrops to the grass. “How nice to have someone else in trouble with her, for a change!”
“Thanks for your sympathy,” I said. “Maybe if you tried a little harder to help me, I wouldn’t be in trouble.”
“Perhaps if you enjoyed yourself a bit more, I would be of more help. But I can’t help someone who won’t embrace the Walk,” she countered.
“Well, here I go. Let’s see if I can’t have a little bit more fun,” I said. I cut the soul catcher, the incantation a silent mantra now, and felt the fetters of my body fall away. I heard the dull thump as it slid softly to the ground behind me. I fretted, as I floated away from it, if it would feel different the next time I got back inside it, the way your bed would feel different if you returned to it after a stranger had spent a week sleeping in it. The thought made my skin crawl, but I shook it off and focused instead on the task at hand; distracting Irina.
I wanted to draw her eye away from the opening, to ensure she did not see Milo enter; I chose a spot as far from my body as I could with the confines of the space, and propelled myself there. My movement was still patchy, and I felt like I was riding a bumper car over an unpaved road as I traveled across the space.
“What am I doing wrong?” I asked, looking around me. “This is the spot I envisioned, and I think I’m imagining myself along the path, too, like you said. Any pointers?”
Irina sighed and came to rest beside me, with all the air of a teenager forced to babysit a small and obnoxious sibling. “Do you really wish to spend your energy on such trifles?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Irina waved a dismissive hand around the enclosure. “This is not worth your time. You are destined to Walk the wider world, are you not?”
I hesitated. “I’m not sure. I think so. I’m still hoping I won’t have to Walk at all, at least as far as the prophecy is concerned.”
“You cannot hope to truly appreciate the joys and freedoms of Walking until you are free. I mean entirely free, without the boundaries of this larger cage to confine you.”
We both stiffened at a small but obvious atmospheric disturbance within our little bubble. Irina’s chin perked up, her nose into the air like a predator scenting blood.
“What was that? Did you feel it?”
“Oh, that,” I said, keeping my tone offhand. “Yes, they’re adding protection to the enclosure today.”
Irina stared at me, nostrils flaring. “Adding protection? What else could they possibly come up with to keep us trapped? Every inch of it is crawling with runes to keep us here.”
“Oh no, not protection to keep us in,” I invented wildly. “Protection from outside attack. The Caomhnóir have intelligence that the Necromancers may be closing in on my location, and they want to make sure we’re protected if they find us.”
Irina cocked her head to one side. “They want you that badly?”
“Yes, actually, they do,” I said, confident at
least that this wasn’t a lie.
“What is it about you, Northern girl? What is it that makes you so great and terrible?”
I shuddered. “Nothing. My sister is the great and terrible one.”
“But they fear you.”
“I’m nothing. It’s Hannah they should fear. They might look at her and think she’s just a helpless little thing, but they have no idea what they’re dealing with.”
A strange sensation came over me. It was as though a fog settled over my new form, fading the rainbow colors, dulling my razor-sharp perceptions to a sluggish, intoxicated haze.
“What’s happening?” I managed to slur, but my question was lost in Irina’s shriek of indignation.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” she cried, pointing a shaking finger at something far below us.
I turned with great effort and struggled to focus on what she was seeing. In the far corner of the enclosure, Milo had entered and was crouching like a thief next to my body, one hand extended into my chest as though he were reaching in to grasp me by the heart.
At the sound of Irina’s cry, Milo pulled his hand back, and instantly my vision and thoughts became razor sharp again. Even in my agitation, as I thought what to say to explain Milo’s appearance, I realized that we had discovered a potential problem. If Milo’s presence in my body was going to cause such a compromised, disoriented state of being for me while I was Walking, that could spell trouble for whatever challenges I would face in this form.
But that was a problem for another moment. Right now, Irina looked ready to fly at Milo, claws outstretched. I placed myself clumsily between them.
“It’s alright, Irina,” I said, in as calm and reassuring a tone as I could. “That’s just Milo. He’s my spirit guide, and he’s part of the protection I was talking about.”
“Spirit guide?” She was glaring at Milo like she didn’t believe a word of it.
“Yup, that’s me,” Milo said. “Just your friendly neighborhood spirit guide. Nice to meet you.”
Irina totally ignored him, and turned back to me. “But he’s a ghost! What is he doing in here? How did he get in? I’ve been over every inch of this place. They’ve completely warded it against outside spirits.”