by Unknown
“I had to,” I repeat after Echo, trying to drill this fact into my head. I had to do it. I had to do it to save Aura. But it doesn’t make me feel any better, and I can feel the tears start to well up in my eyes again.
Echo starts to cough violently, and he quickly grabs a cloth napkin that was set down beside his plate of food and presses it to his mouth. I look up to find him pulling the blood-spattered napkin away from his lips, concern in his eyes. “I need that cure.” Each word is raspy, and as he speaks, more blood trickles from the corner of his lips and slides down the side of his chin.
Jamie is quick to reach out with a clean cloth and sops up the blood as if it were drool from a baby and nothing more. “We will go check on it, Your Highness.” She smiles at Echo as if nothing could possibly be wrong with him just before she turns and drags Irene out of the room with her, tugging the other woman by her arm.
Echo rests his head back on the pillow and goes back to petting down my hair, though I’m sure it’s more of a motion to calm himself than to calm me at this point. I don’t want to fret too much over him, but I’m worried, and I know at this point it is a race against time. I can’t imagine having to leave Gabe behind, only to find out the cure hasn’t been made in time, causing me to lose Echo on top of everything else.
I lace my fingers with Echo’s and squeeze his hand, but he doesn’t squeeze in return. His arm is limp, and his breathing is shallow, and when I prop myself up on my arm to look over him, I realize that I’ve less time than I thought I did, and that Echo is starting to fade away.
“Please hang in there, Echo … ” I wipe the remaining tears from my cheeks in an effort to pull myself together. I have to be the brave one here. I have to have the strength to pull Echo out of this.
But it’s so hard to be brave when you’re losing everything you’ve thought you loved.
Chapter 19
Outside it is dark. Not even the stars can manage to shine through the blanket of blackness that shrouds the world and covers it in shadows. I am standing on a paved street, though the concrete is cracked and in some places ripped up from the earth, making it non-accessible and unusable. Tall, hardy weeds sprout up between the cracks, jutting upward toward the sky in an effort to find the sun, and during the day, it must not be too hard, given that the sun seems to burn hotter than ever after the War, and surviving outside and under it without protection is a feat in itself.
I look behind me and the road stretches into infinity, going places where I can’t see. Places I don’t know exist. We’ve been taught that the City is the largest established community left on this continent, that Aura is close to follow with its Dreamcatcher and Citizen inhabitants, and in between here and there are the Rogues, a group of people who never quite made it to either of the other options, stranded forever in the wasteland in the middle. But I feel as if this road doesn’t go to any of those options. That it will take me somewhere more, somewhere I’ve never learned of or seen before, and there’s an undeniable urge to follow it to see where it will lead me.
I start to walk north, a direction that always seemed off limits to the rest of the world. I step over the cracks and potholes, at times only narrowly avoiding twisting my ankle or falling onto the ground. Above me, the raven appears and starts to cry, as if warning me to stop and not go any further. I start to wonder if the raven ever had my best intentions in mind. Or is it still loyal to the Keeper previous me?
A deep, orange-y hue swirls into the night sky, casting a burning haze over the Earth, though it does little to actually light up the way and provide clarity where the night has swallowed it up. I watch as the pumpkin color twists and turns, always moving, like some sort of snake slithering its way through the darkness. When I look forward again to see where I am going, there’s the shadow of a man standing about a hundred feet in front of me, but I can’t make out who it is. The raven cries again, and I startle and quietly curse the damned thing for following me at all.
“Where are you going?” the shadow man asks me, his voice sounding much like someone I know, but I can’t quite discern it right now. With each word spoken, it also sounds like the wind is blowing, and I have to listen closely to decipher what is actually being said.
“I don’t know. I felt the need to head this way.” I point in the direction I was walking. His direction.
“Sometimes, Beatrice, we often don’t know where it is we are going, or where we will end up, but we are called to do it anyway. And we go.”
I start walking again, approaching the man, whose identity becomes clearer the closer that I get to him. It doesn’t take long before I realize that this apparition is none other but Gabe.
“Gabe?” I run the rest of the way to him, no longer careful about watching my step. I just want to close the distance between us, then never let him get that far away from me again. When I bound the last few steps, I wrap my arms around his neck, and he spins me around in a tight hug, and I never want him to put me down. Never. “What are you doing here?”
“Where?” Gabe murmurs into my ear as he gently sets me back onto my feet. “I have no idea where ‘here’ actually is, to be honest.”
And neither do I. But it quickly occurs to me what is happening. I am in a dream, and Gabe is in my dream. Echo has managed to pull both of us together somehow, and here we are, in this dark space, on a road leading to nowhere.
“It is our dream.” Though I’m placed back on the ground, my toes safely reaching the road once more, I don’t dare let go of Gabe. I hang on to him with a passion and fear that I’ve not known before. In the back of my mind, though, I know that dreams don’t last forever, and at some point, I will be letting go of Gabriel again.
“Our dream?” Gabe asks, confused.
“Echo has put us in each other’s dreams. He’s Caught you, just as he’s Caught me.”
Gabe tilts his head up to look at the sky, which is still streaked with that deep, swirling orange that never stops moving. “I’ve been Caught?”
“It’s not as bad as everyone made it out to be, is it?” I laugh, though the laugh is dry, and it doesn’t last long at all. I bury my head into the side of Gabe’s neck and smell what seems to be dried sweat and blood. I close my eyes. “I’m sorry, Gabe.”
Gabe wraps his arms around my lower back, his fingers pressing into the small of my spine. “Don’t apologize, Bea. I blame you for nothing.”
“Nothing? Not even when I left the City to follow Echo?”
This causes Gabe to pause, but he squeezes me close to him and shakes his head. “Nothing.”
A wave of relief surges through me, replacing the twisting knot in my stomach that has been growing and tightening ever since I sped off on the bike, leaving Gabe with the Rogues.
“It will work out. I don’t know how, but it will,” Gabe assures me, and when I look up at him, I find he’s looking down at me, his dark hair falling in front of his eyes, matted with the grime and dirt from the Rogue camp. “I just need you to remember something … ”
I reach out and brush his hair out of his face, waiting for what it is he wants me to take away from this. He reaches out and takes my hand in his, lowering it away from his head, and stares down at me with a seriousness that I’ve not seen in Gabe for a long, long time. “What is it?”
“Do not forget the City. And remember what the Widow told you … ”
I close my eyes as the Widow’s words whisper through my mind: Trust in that which you cannot see.
“I won’t forget. I promise.”
The sky starts to turn a deeper shade of red and yellow, and the night is quickly becoming overwhelmed. Gabe kisses the side of my head, his lips pressing to my temple, and he holds me close to him once more. “We’ll find each other again, Beatrice. I don’t know when, but we will …”
I find no comfort in the prediction, though. This is not a Vision. This is a dream. It is me and Gabe, lost in each other’s minds, pulling at straws and guessing at what is going to happen, when really we
have no idea what will become of either of us. Echo gave me this dream to comfort me. It is beyond his capabilities to give me a Vision.
As the sky becomes brighter, Gabe becomes fainter and fainter until I can no longer feel his arms around me. The road under my feet has disappeared, and instead I stand in hot, unforgiving sand that soaks up the light and turns it into an unbearable heat. My mouth quickly becomes dry, and it tastes coppery, like blood, but when I lift my fingers up to touch my tongue and pull them away, nothing is there.
“Gabe?” I call out, but no one answers me back. I’m alone in this desert land. Alone with nothing but the burning sun to keep me company. And the raven, which starts to cry out once more, its noise jarring and annoying.
Just when I think it is too much, the dream starts to break apart, and I slip back into the waking world and out of the harshness of the light.
***
When I wake up, there is chaos in the room around me. It is filled with healers, one of which is trying to pry me out of Echo’s bed as the others mill about, propping his limp body up, poking and prodding with instruments that I am unfamiliar with. Echo’s head lulls to the side, and his eyes are half-lidded, the pupils rolled up into the back of his head.
This isn’t good. I search through the people in the room and spot Irene and Jamie huddled in the corner, their fingers by their mouths and panicked expressions on their faces.
“What is happening?” I ask no one in particular, hoping someone will answer me. No one does. I continue to stumble away from the bed and am eventually overcome by the healers, and walk over to stand with Jamie and Irene instead, realizing about halfway through that I’ve not changed since I got back from the Rogue camp, and that there’s blood spattered up and down my left arm, the one that was closest to Echo. Just as I get to them, the doors to Echo’s chambers swing open, and another healer dressed in a white robes hurries to Echo’s side with a vial in her hands. Behind her, Brandon and Elan appear, looking just as confused as I am sure I do.
“This is a mess,” Elan states in his typical, flat tone.
“Is that the cure?” I ask as I look back to the healer with the vial. They are shoving a tube down Echo’s throat now, and he doesn’t even gag on it. An IV bag has been hooked up to his arm, and the healer with the vial extracts the purple liquid inside with a syringe. I don’t know what they are doing to Echo, it all moves too quickly. Suddenly, the syringe is inserted into the tube from the IV drip, and the purple liquid mixes with the other solution, seeping into Echo’s vein.
“I think so.” Brandon scans the room, and I immediately know who he is searching for: Gabe.
“He’s not here.” I beat him to it and hope that maybe, just maybe, they will be content with that answer. But by the way Elan’s eyes meet with mine, with that “you better explain yourself” expression, I know it won’t be enough.
The healers form a circle around Echo’s bed and they all hold hands. The number of Dreamcatchers in the room reminds me of the headache building behind my eyes, as I haven’t had time to take any serum to protect myself from the pain. Whatever they are doing makes it that much worse, and the pressure starts to build inside my skull. I grab my head with my hands and murmur weakly to Jamie, “I need some serum.”
The girl’s face turns to one of alarm and she squeaks out a hasty, “Oh!” Then, she scurries off into the crowd of people and out the door.
I continue to hold my head, but watch the healers as they start to chant together. Their words are haunted and drawn out, and I can’t decipher what language it is that they are using. They start to sway back and forth, all at once, their movement like an unending, connected wave. It’s calming. Mesmerizing. I can’t take my eyes away from them.
Soon, Jamie returns with a small cup filled with the liquid that will take my own pain away. I am quick to drink it and hand back the empty glass with a thankful, though concerned smile.
“Where is Gabe?” Elan doesn’t seem to care about what is going on in the room right now. He doesn’t care that my husband is dying, and all we have is the hope that the cure will work. That Gabe and I didn’t make a mistake by leaving Aura to find the plant.
I can pretend to be distracted, but I know Elan will see right through it. He’s too bright for his young self. I turn to him and lift my chin, trying my best to summon my position as Keeper over Elan. I have to be the part that I’ve been forced to play. It’s a lesson I’ve not quite learned yet. “I had to leave Gabe behind. We were being attacked, and he told me to flee before we were both taken down.” I don’t want Elan to argue me, so I straighten my shoulders and back, pulling myself up a little taller. “I had no choice.”
Elan’s violet eyes narrow, and he sets me with a look that I will probably never forget. I can sense his disappointment. I have let him down.
Brandon doesn’t look any better. He uncomfortably crosses his arms over his broad chest and asks in a quiet voice, “So we lost Gabe?”
Lost. Lost is such a strong word. Lost is what happens when you don’t think you can find something again. Lost is almost the same as gone. Gabe is not gone. He can never be gone.
“No. Gabe is not lost. He is at the Rogue camp.” The weight is heavy on my shoulders. It’s so easy to bend. But I won’t. Not even to my fellow Seers.
“It’s working!” one of the healers blurts, disrupting the therapeutic chanting.
I break away from Elan, Brandon, Jamie, and Irene, and push through the circle of healers to get to Echo’s side. His color is returning to his cheeks, and his eyes move under his lids, though they do not open yet. “Are you sure?” I ask the closest Dreamcatcher.
“He’s coming around. Look!” he replies, pointing at Echo just as he opens his eyes, then covers them with his hands to block out the light.
I smile for what seems like the first time all day, then lean over him so he knows that I am here. “Echo? Are you feeling better?” It reminds me of when Echo healed Gabe, how when Gabe opened his eyes for the first time, he saw me … and the ache in my heart pangs through my limbs.
Echo smiles back at me as he pulls his hands away from his face and reaches up to brush his fingers down my cheek. “You did it.”
I shake my head, gesturing behind me with a sweep of my arm to indicate the healers who are standing by. “No, no. Your people did this. Not me.”
“But they healed me with the cure. The cure that you found. That you Saw in your Vision.”
There’s nothing to say to this. I don’t want the credit of saving Echo. I can’t celebrate it the way the healers can. They did not leave their best friend behind to save the husband that I married behind Gabe’s back. So, I don’t say anything at all, but allow Echo to keep brushing my cheek as he fills with life once more.
Irene claps her hands together and turns to Jamie, Brandon, and Elan. “We should celebrate!”
Elan stares at Irene, shaking his head. “Celebrate the fact that a Seer had to be left behind to save your king?”
The clapping stops, and Irene lowers her eyes, admonished.
“Elan, that’s enough,” I warn, unable to take any more of his scrutiny. “We will discuss all of that later. But for now, let them rejoice. Their king is saved, Aura is saved, and all those who are sick can now be healed.”
“We’ve already started the mass production of the cure, Your Highness.” A healer informs me as he bows deeply, and the rest of them follow suit. “We will leave you to your recovery now.”
“Thank you for your help,” I reply and watch as they file out of the room in a single line, disappearing into the hall. The room is much quieter now, and as if answering a cue not given, Irene and Jamie slip out after the healers, leaving only me, Echo, Brandon, and Elan in their wake.
I watch the other two Seers with a wary eye, as I know they are upset with me, just as I am disappointed in myself. Brandon looks more hurt than angry, and it’s in seeing that pain that hurts me in return.
“We will find him again,” Echo speaks
, drawing all of our attention. “Don’t worry. Your friend’s sacrifice will not go unseen. Nor will I let it just … happen.”
“And how are we supposed to trust you when you already stole our Keeper away and kept her prisoner in your city?” Elan snaps, his brows drawing together in anger.
“Beatrice came here of her own accord. My mother is the one who kept her prisoner,” Echo corrects Elan as he pushes himself up to sit a little straighter. His body is still stiff from the sickness, so I reach out to help him prop himself up against the headboard. “And my mother no longer rules over Aura. I do.”
“I will believe your so-called help when I see it. Until then, I don’t see why we have any reason to stay here any longer. We came to retrieve our Keeper, and now that she’s done her part, I think it is time for us to go home.” Elan and Brandon both nod at this declaration, their gazes shifting to rest on me. “After we get Gabe back.”
I run a hand back through my hair, dragging the black tresses from around my face as I think this over. Reaching out, I put my hand down on Echo’s arm to draw his attention to me. He lifts his pale blue eyes to mine, then squeezes my hand in his own. “They are right, Echo. I will need to go home. But you will need to uphold your promise to me before I can return to the City, and free the Citizens from their captivity.”
The king of Aura is silent as this notion runs through his head. I can see the way it tears him apart, not knowing how to let go of a way of life that has existed since Aura was created. Or maybe he doesn’t know how to let go of me.
“Let them work with you, and not for you, and I’m sure they will stay. Look at Jamie and Irene, for example. They are slaves of your household, but even if you free them of their fetters, they will probably serve you regardless. They love you and your house. Don’t you think the Citizens of Aura will do the same if you gave them the chance to live on their own?” I brush back Echo’s hair, my fingers running through the almost-white locks, soothing and calm. How do I make him see that he doesn’t need to keep these people against their will?