And it has gone—the connection. I stare at my arms. The fitted shirt has long sleeves, but one of them is ripped and the fabric falls away. I can see my skin. Pure, beautiful. No gold marks. The Promise Marks have gone. Gone.
I died.
And I’m back.
And Raleigh can’t control me. Raleigh no longer has my soul. I feel like screaming.
Now Raleigh looks at me. “You—your heart stopped beating—I heard it… I tried to…” And then, “Sev?” And he buries his face in my chest, and he’s shaking, shuddering with emotion that can’t be true….
But I sense his emotions, the waves of them, like they’re tangible, wrapping around me, trying to fool me.
“Get away from me.” My voice is weak, and it sounds strained, raspy. I blink hard as light-headedness swarms within me. But I can feel my powers are there, my Seer powers, and they make me feel stronger, internally. Not as vulnerable.
I push at him again, but, physically, I’m weak. So weak. Do I use my powers to get him away from me?
Raleigh lifts his head and stares at me with Corin’s eyes. Why is he using Corin’s appearance? Again? Still? Why?
To torment me.
“Get away from me,” I say again. “Leave me alone. And at least have the decency to use your own image.”
“My own image?”
“I know it’s you,” I growl.
“What?” Raleigh says, pushing his sleeves up. His shirt’s blue: brighter in some places, faded in others. He’s changed his shirt—his whole outfit. I look at his torn jeans, heavily scuffed. But…but they look familiar… “Sev, it’s me. Corin.”
“Don’t lie.” I shake my head then gasp as pain engulfs me, sends sparks down my spine. “Don’t lie, Raleigh.”
“Sev?” He shakes his head. “Look, it’s… It is me. I’m not…not Raleigh.”
He shakes his head harder, and then the faint smell of cigarette smoke teases my nostrils.
Smoke. Corin? My breath catches in my throat. It—
“We need to move,” he says. “They could be out here any minute. Where’s Esther? Is she still in there?”
Esther. He’s asking about Esther.
Raleigh didn’t ask about Esther before, when he was pretending to be Corin. My chest twists.
This is Corin? The real Corin?
A strange taste takes over my mouth, and I wince.
The man in front of me looks grim for a moment, and I don’t know who he is. Corin or not-Corin. Because he can’t be Corin—not my Corin—because he’ll be long gone. He won’t have hung about. The Enhanced Ones’ drones would’ve found him, wouldn’t they? And it can’t be Corin—coincidences like this don’t just happen.
Yet he’s asking about Esther.
A knot in my stomach hardens and twists.
“Sev?”
Corin grabs hold of me, turns me away from him, just as I throw up. My vomit is watery, dark in color, and has even darker bits floating in it. The sight of it makes my stomach flip again.
I lift a hand to my head, breathing hard. “What….”
I wait for the next bout of nausea to pass before I look at him. My dog trots into view. He’s not growling at the man. At Corin? The man I love? The man who doesn’t know I love him?
“How do I know it’s you? Really you?” I whisper.
He grimaces. “Because it’s me. And we’re—we’re a team, Sev. You and me.” He holds my hand gently, then presses my fingers against his heart.
We’re a team.
Something in me stutters.
I shake my head and pull my hand back, ignore the hurt on his face. “I need to be sure… Tell me something about Nbutai.”
His eyes crinkle. “After Finn emptied the toilet pot over you—years and years ago—I caught a scorpion and threw it at him.”
“A scorpion?” I stare at him. “That didn’t happen.”
He nods. “It did. Rahn found out. Went mad at me. But he told me and Finn never to say a word about it.”
I frown, feel the lines on my forehead. “No. Tell me something else, something that proves it to me.”
“That wasn’t good enough?”
My breathing gets shallower. I look down at my once-beige shorts; they’re covered in stains, and there’s a rip across the fabric on my upper thigh. I can see more of my skin through it, skin with no gold marks. “It’s got to be something I know too…something I can verify. The details.” I wince as more pain snakes around me. It’s on my left side mainly. My ribs, my chest, my shoulder. My hip, my leg.
He’s quiet for a moment. I stare at the sky behind him. Is it darkening already? Or is that my vision? Got to be my vision…it was morning wasn’t it, when I escaped? Or…how long was I dead for?
“I broke the decent radios, before. At Nbutai. I was angry, and I trashed them. Gave your brother a load of extra work. And Esther told me off about that. Made me feel like a piece of shit. I was just so angry, and I didn’t even mean to break them—I just. I wanted to break something. That good enough?”
“Why were you angry?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
I nod.
He exhales hard. “I heard Finn talking about you.”
Cold air pushes against my teeth.
“He was saying some stuff. Stuff he shouldn’t have been. Stuff about you. And Nico and Yani were laughing with him. But I wasn’t.” His hand tightens into a fist. “Gods, I wanted to punch him—to break him, because of what he was saying. Not just because it was about you—I didn’t… That sort of stuff shouldn’t be said about any girl. But Rahn was watching, and I knew…” He shakes his head, then looks at me. “And…and I love you, Sev. Maybe I loved you even then, I just didn’t know it… But now. Gods. What the hell were you thinking? I saw you drive at those trees and…and you weren’t breathing when I got you out, and I tried to resuscitate you, but you were just….”
Resuscitate.
Mouth-to-mouth. I flinch.
I kissed Raleigh, because I thought he was Corin. And I don’t know why I think of that—why I let it consume me—when Corin’s here. The real Corin?
My Seer pendant flashes cold against my skin. I want to reach up and touch it, but I don’t.
Corin takes my hand again, and his fingers around mine should send jolts through me, I know that. But they don’t.
“Can’t you feel it?” he asks. “It’s me. It’s really me.”
I swallow hard, my eyes smart with the effort. And then—then I know I can verify that it’s him for sure. Dying didn’t take my powers away—I can feel them—and Death wouldn’t have thrown me back to life if it had. I need them to end the war. And I’m connected to Corin—all my connections to the Untamed, they’re still there. Suddenly, I can feel them, sense each one individually.
And the thrill of it fills me, the thrill of body-sharing, of becoming someone else.
You’re just like Raleigh. He loved controlling you.
No. I’m not like Raleigh. And I won’t be controlling Corin. I’m just doing it to confirm that this man really is him. Not another imposter.
I breathe deeply. I connected with Corin before—when he was outside, running—and it’s easy to follow the route to him now, to climb the mountain, find the key, to put it in the lock, to turn it. And before I’ve really thought about it, I’m in him. A quick snap and—
Emotion hits me. Waves and waves of it—the most turbulent sea.
I look through his eyes, see myself. See myself looking so…so different. Gaunt. Broken. They’re the only words I can think of. My cheeks have sunk, and my eyes—they’re haunted. So much pain in them. Cuts and bruises cover me.
Shit. She looks awful. Scared. Something’s happened to her, when she was in there. Must’ve, if she tried to—
I snap back into my body.
“Sev, it’s me.” His voice cracks, and I know he didn’t even sense me. I was careful. I hid.
“I know,” I say. Because I’m connected to the real Corin.
And this is him.
So why do I feel empty?
Corin carries me across the sand, weaving between rocks and low-creeping foliage. My head is against his chest, jolting against him with the momentum of his walk. The texture of his shirt is scratchy, and some of the buttons catch against my face. After a while, his arms—under my shoulders and knees—start to feel like rock.
The dog walks at his feet, and, every now and again, I catch a glimpse of him. I tried to walk at one point, but my injuries were too much.
Now, though, Corin stops for a short rest and sets me gently on the ground, helping me to sit up. I grimace as pain wracks through me, but I manage to support my posture myself.
We’re by two small trees—some cover, at least.
I swallow hard. I know we need to talk.
“I don’t think you know everything that’s happened,” I say. “All of it. And you need to.”
He’s sitting opposite me—so, between us, we’ve got eyes on most of the land around us—and his gaze snaps onto me. The look in them reminds me of lightning.
I look down at my arms. At where the Promise Marks were. Where that scar is now, from where I tried to cut one off. I run my thumb over it, wince. When I look up again, I see Corin’s watching my movements. He’s noticed the scar. He doesn’t question it though, just waits for me.
So, I start at the beginning. The very beginning of what he doesn’t know: the first time I saw Death, saw Waskabe. And I keep talking. I tell him about how the steam eruption in the Zharat den got me, how I lost consciousness, how I found myself in the Dream Land. And how it was my banishment. How the Gods and Goddesses were furious that I’d ignored multiple warnings and let people be converted. And how I didn’t understand because I’d only had one dream that could’ve been a warning—the nightmare of Three—and I’d decided it wasn’t as I hadn’t seen the bison. But I hadn’t had any other Seeing dreams. And I tried to tell Death that, but he didn’t believe me, insisted I’d let multiple conversion attacks happen—and Death thinks he sees all, but he doesn’t.
Then I tell Corin of the augury—why I’m so special, how I’m expected to end the war. His eyes never leave mine.
I tell him how Jed must’ve got me out of the Zharat cave, and what he did at the top of the Fire Mountain, how he bound my soul to Raleigh, how he was taking orders from him the whole time. And how I found out it was Jed who orchestrated it all—how he used kavalah spirits to block my Seeing dreams. Supposedly to ensure I wasn’t killed for being a Seer.
“He knew, Corin.” I grab a handful of sand, watch it run through my fingers. “All that time, he knew I was a Seer—and he was…he was trying to protect me.” My eyes widen.
“Protect you?” Corin shakes his head. “That man has caused all of this and—” He breaks off, then swears. “You think he was protecting you?”
“He kept me alive in the Zharat cave… The other men couldn’t kill me for being a Seer if I had no dreams.” My voice is low.
Corin shakes his head harder. “That is a twisted way to look at things, Sev. Jed is evil.”
Then he groans as he stretches his legs out, and I stare at the rips and scuffed marks on his jeans, see how the sole of one of his shoes is coming away.
“He was following his father’s instructions. He wanted—I don’t know what he wanted. Raleigh to like him?”
“Raleigh?”
“He’s his father. And Raleigh killed Jed, just like that. His own son.” It still makes me feel wrong.
Corin swallows hard. His hands close into fists, get tighter and tighter. A muscle pulses in his jaw. Then he shakes his head, and I continue.
I tell him what happened in the compound. How Raleigh had control of me, tortured me, how the Untamed were strangely allergic to the augmenters, how Raleigh activated my Seer powers, how he used them—made me kill Elia Jackson. When I talk of how I can body-share, my voice lightens a little—though I notice how Corin tries to hide his unease, his shock at this revelation. Then I tell him that Raleigh made me connect to other Untamed. And how he plans to end the Untamed with me.
Corin groans.
But I don’t tell him about Raleigh pretending to be Corin. How he tricked me. Even though, I suspect, Corin has probably guessed something along those lines, given how I was convinced he was Raleigh when I…when I came back to life. But I can’t tell Corin how we slept—me and Raleigh—curled up together. How I kissed him. How I pressed myself against him. How I was desperate to touch his bare chest, how I wondered what he’d look like naked. The memory makes me feel sick. Bad and sick. I shudder. A cold wind blows across my back.
I finish the story with how I escaped and how Raleigh made me crash the vehicle.
Corin exhales hard, then he looks at me, and I see tears glistening in his eyes. I watch as they spill over, make tracks down his face. “I’m sorry I left you. Both times.”
“Both?”
He nods, and his posture almost seems to get smaller. “In the compound, New Kitembu…and before…in the Zharat den.”
The skin around his eyes creases as he looks at me, holds my gaze for a second. When he looks away, I feel like I’ve been stabbed, and I reach for his hand, cling to it, feel something at last—even if it’s not the same.
“I left you there, Sev. In the Zharat cave. When the eruption…” He looks past me, but I see more tears in his eyes—the rawness. “Shit. I’m so sorry, Sev. It was—it was chaos. And we got separated, and then I saw you—on the ground—but I couldn’t get to you. Jed was nearer, and he shouted that he’d get you, and I had to get his daughter.”
“Jeena?”
“Yeah. I shouldn’t have agreed, but it was… I should’ve gone for you. And I didn’t even reach Jeena in time, her screams were… And then—then I saw Jed carrying you away, and I thought you were safe. Sev, I really did. I didn’t know he was going to bind you to the Enhanced. Make you do all—”
He meets my eyes again, and the watery layer does something to me. Makes something inside me twist uncomfortably.
Corin breathes deeply, like he’s struggling with everything. “I just had to get out after that eruption started. I didn’t—shit. I should’ve been the one to get you out. Not him. Not that bastard. If it had been me, none of this would’ve happened, and Raleigh wouldn’t be….”
“It’s all right.” I grip his hand harder, so hard I think I feel his heartbeat. The strong beat of life, thrumming into me.
“It’s not all right! It’s not f—” He takes a deep breath. “It’s not all right.” His nostrils flare, and he pulls his hand back from me—as if he can’t bear to touch me. “We’ve lost—”
“No,” I say. “We haven’t. Not yet—and we won’t.”
“But Raleigh can control you—he made you kill a girl. We’ve got no chance, and the Gods and Goddesses have turned their backs on you thanks to Jed and—”
“Stop,” I say. “I—he can’t control me now. Raleigh hasn’t got my soul. Not after I…” Died doesn’t seem like the right word, not when saying it out loud.
But that’s what happened.
And then Death took my death from me, threw me back to life with the promise of taking someone who was close to me. Who? Has it happened? What if it’s…what if he’s going to take Corin?
I gulp, suddenly filled with images of Corin dropping dead in front of me.
Corin sniffs loudly. “Does he still have your eyes?”
“What?” Then I frown, press my lips together, think hard. I lean back a little. “I don’t think so. Not after all that… The soul-commanding connection broke. The tracker must’ve too. All connections must’ve broken.”
But you don’t know that.
Corin’s silent for a long time. When he finally speaks, his voice sounds strange—a low murmur that’s angry and harsh.
“I should’ve protected you, and I didn’t.” A new film slides over his eyes, but he wipes the tears away with the back of his hand, won’t let these ones fall. “I didn�
�t, Sev. And I’m so sorry.”
His words are so angry, yet his face is so sad.
“You couldn’t have stopped any of that,” I say. “And it’s not your job to protect me. But we’re together now.”
And I love you.
I want to say the words. But…but I don’t, and I don’t know why I don’t because they’re burning a savage hole in me.
Corin turns his head, and I think he’s wiping his eyes again. When he turns back, his face is even redder. “Well, at least it’s sorted now. Jed’s mistake—everything he did—it’s been corrected. We’re back to where we were, as if we never went to the Zharat den. You and me.”
Except we’re not, and we both know it. I’m probably still banished from the Dream Land. Still a useless Seer? Or will Death be able to persuade the others now we’ve spoken, now that the Promise Marks have gone? But it wasn’t Death who undid them. It was my death. And did Waskabe even believe me, that I had no say in being bound to the Enhanced, nor in ignoring the dreams that Jed blocked?
But you have your powers now. Your Seer powers.
I try not to think of the girl I killed. The way Elia’s eyes followed me. How I dream of her in the moments I forget upon waking. How the guilt eats me.
How it felt, having Raleigh controlling me. How I couldn’t do anything.
How my brother’s one of them, fully, completely. And it’s my fault.
How it’s just me and Corin now, and the dog. No Esther. Just the two of us.
Nothing has been corrected. Just undone. Jed’s mistake has been undone. But, as Keelie would have said, a load more shit has happened.
But you know more too now. More about the augury. And you can connect to them all now as well. Good stuff’s happened too.
Like my Seer powers: unlocked. It seems crazy.
Corin moves and then pulls me close, carefully, gently. “You’re free, Sev. Free of them, free of it all.”
Free. I am not free.
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