She’d been happy to see him—they hadn’t been able to hang out nearly as much as they used to back in New York. “I’m skipping social studies,” she said. “That class is pointless. It never gives, like, other sides of the story.”
Tony’s shoulders drooped and he gave his sister an exasperated look. “You’re a kid—you don’t get to decide what’s pointless and what’s worth it. It’s all school. You don’t have a choice.”
She’d felt something harden in her chest. She almost said, Who died and made you Dad? But even in her anger, she knew that was too awful to say. Instead, she asked, “Well, what about you? You have school too. And what’re you wearing, anyway?”
He squinted into the little mirror next to his bed. His room in their new house was even smaller than Sami’s. “I’ve got a job, if you have to know. Bussing tables.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“A job? But you’re fourteen.”
He shrugged. “It’s not exactly official.”
“What about classes?”
“I have school permission to miss the last two periods. I bike to the restaurant and set up.”
Her mouth had fallen open. For a moment she couldn’t even speak. Then she put her hands on her hips. “Was this Aunt Ivory’s idea?”
Tony turned away from the mirror. He looked angry—and years older than he was. “It’s my idea, Sami. Yeah, it’s no fun, you’re right. But we need the money. Mom’s struggling, trying to support us all by herself. And things are expensive down here—especially…” His tone softened a little. “Well, I was thinking—if we had a little more coming in, maybe we could afford, like, special care for Teta—here, I mean. At home. Ivory doesn’t know anything about this—and neither does Mom. And I don’t want them to know about it yet, either.” He crouched down and looked right into her face. “Can we please keep this a secret?”
Sami had stared back, not blinking. Everything was on his face—frustration, anger, sadness, but there was also fear. And that made her afraid too. She nodded in silence.
He lowered his eyes. “I’ll just try working for a while—until Mom’s steadier in her new job and we, you know, we can figure out how to take care of Teta. Don’t worry—I’m not going to get to quit school forever. I’ll be back at it way too soon.” He smiled at her and it was such a sad, fake smile, she couldn’t even look at him.
Sami tried to make the woman in the pool stay just a little longer.
“Please wait—where are you right now? How can we help you? Can we come to you?”
But the woman didn’t seem to hear Sami. Her sharp, beautiful face rippled, breaking up and re-forming beneath the surface. Sami heard Natala murmuring and a quiet thought reached her: She hasn’t much time.
“I must speak quickly,” the woman was saying. “It was terribly difficult to evade detection—her soldiers are everywhere.” Sami saw the woman’s eyes glow and her lips part. “Samara, please listen now.” Her eyes narrowed, their light was knife-edged. “You must find the Genie’s Eye. The most rare. The Eye is a weapon of sorts—a key—and it’s the one hope against the Nixie.”
The Genie’s Eye! Sami leaned closer to the water. She remembered the wild journey she’d made into the sky with the Shadow birds—and the mysterious images she’d seen revealed through the portal—a castle—and an eye. “The Eye—yes. Maybe I’ve seen something like that. But what is it exactly? Where do I find it?” she pleaded.
The woman’s eyes slid away again. It seemed impossible, but at that instant, Sami sensed the woman was afraid—of something or someone. “I shall not survive much longer in this place. And if Nixie is not stopped, neither will Silverworld. The Eye has passed between the Actual World and the Ifrit for ages—but it is time for you to return it to its rightful place. Its time is upon us.” Through the water, her gaze gleamed darkly—she seemed to be receding, sinking back from the surface. “The Eye must be replaced by the time of the gloaming. After will be too late.”
“Wait, please—” Sami begged. “I need to know more about the Eye—and the gloaming! I’m not ready—I need you!”
“The Eye shall be hidden in plain sight!” she cried as the pool grew brighter, light seeming to crackle and fracture into thousands of flecks. “I give you my blessings and my brightness. Remember who you are: Samara, descended of Ifrit, warriors, and Bedouin. Of Flicker and Actual. Brave and strong to the limits, and beyond.”
“Oh, please wait,” Sami cried as the woman dissolved into blue light. “Wait!” And then, staring into the water, she saw the haze lift from her forehead and the diamond-light in her own reflected eyes fade back to brown.
“Guys?” Sami looked from one Flicker to the other. “Exactly when is the time of the gloaming?”
No one spoke for a moment. A puddle formed under Dorsom’s feet as he dried in the Silverworld sun.
Sami raised her eyebrows. “That soon?”
Look there. Dorsom pointed past the water and the sloping lawn out to the ocean, where Sami noticed a crackling blue haze. It looked almost as if the horizon were catching fire.
What is that? Sami asked, shielding her eyes with her hands.
Natala barely glanced at it. “This is how it happens—just before the beginning. The start of the gloaming equinox,” she said. “Once in a Silverworld generation, there’s a shift in our lunar cycle. For a brief time there is naturally a greater amount of darkness in the sky than light. On that night, the powers of the Nixie and her Shadow soldiers are at their greatest intensity. They rove over Silverworld, spreading havoc and fear. Clocks go backward, birds tumble from the sky, rain falls upward. Flickers stay in their home-places and don’t venture out. During such time, the Nixie is released from her castle. She becomes even more powerful and brutal. She roams and steals Flickers and Shadows alike. None are seen or heard from again.”
Sami lowered her face into her hands. Then this is impossible. We’ll never make it in time.
No. Natala put an arm around her shoulders. “We are beside you. We will help you—no matter what.”
“Besides, we’ve no time to debate this.” Dorsom lifted his chin toward the horizon. “The gloaming is not yet here. We’d best keep pushing and save discussion for later.”
Sami, Bat, and the Flickers started back on the veering, broken trail. As they walked, the shrubbery seemed to grow denser; flat, eggplant-colored leaves shuffled and hissed, and thick spears of vegetation curled out of the ground like claws. The group grew increasingly quiet, and even though they were trying to move quickly, they seemed to go slower and slower. Sami felt as if the ground itself were clinging to her feet and weighing her down.
After a long, silent hike, Dorsom stopped by a stump ringed with jagged red plants and he passed around a canteen of water. “The air seems hottish and coldish both,” he said, rubbing the back of a wrist over his forehead. “How is this possible?”
“The elements are streaked,” Natala observed. “And uneven.”
Sami puzzled over the intensity of the sky, the way it seemed to grow thicker and murkier even though the sun was still out. And there was a movement in the air, as if something were pushing and pulling back on the light itself.
What do you see, Silverwalker?
She glanced up and noticed Bat watching her closely. Sami held out one hand, as if the light were something she could run her fingers through. Is this normal? Sami asked. It seems to be getting so dark so quickly. And that weird current—like breathing?
Now the Flickers were listening, the group looking all around.
Shadow soldiers, Dorsom thought-hissed.
I sense them close by. The bat nodded and looked over her shoulder. The reason we no longer saw the Shadow marks behind us, I think, is because they await us up ahead.
“A trap ’tis!” Dorsom searched the horizon. “The Shadows snuck ahead of us somehow. Did you know this all alon
g?”
“Never!” Bat’s eyes flashed. “I had no idea they’d learned to move so quickly or quietly. I’m just as surprised as you.”
“Then truly we are trapped,” Natala muttered.
A circular breeze stirred Sami’s hair around—a bit like her thoughts, turning and winding. It seemed they were blocked, but she refused to give up. At last she said, “Well, I’m supposedly last of the Silverwalkers, aren’t I? Doesn’t that mean I have, like, this special ability to move between places? I thought I was supposed to be able to go back and forth and travel around. What if we retrace our steps and go back to the island with the pillow-food? If we all eat it, maybe we could sneak out that way.”
Dorsom shook his head, his skin flashing from greenish to silvery-gray. “It’s not so simple. The portals are unstable—Nixie’s growing power has shaken the structures of the Worlds. It isn’t safe to retreat—the Bare Isles themselves are losing their integrity. The colors are off. When the gloaming starts, the beaches will begin dissolving. We can’t forward go, nor back.”
“It’s true,” said Natala, pointing to the ground. “Do you feel the vibrations? Subtle they are, but Silverworld grows more and more unbalanced, with seismic and volcanic shifting. The pathways are collapsing.”
Sami crouched to touch the earth and she felt it—the softest tingle in her fingertips. She’d been hearing, and mostly ignoring, a low hum at the back of her head—barely more than a whisper—for a while. She hadn’t realized all this time that the hum had been coming from under her feet. “Whoa,” she said quietly.
“Well, then.” Bat put her hands on her hips. “The way forward is hard. Bigger than each of us. But the powers of the Flickers can be joined—our energy and concentration can be focused. The path forward is not bigger than us together.”
Natala put her hand to the base of her throat, her kohl-lined eyes bright and glistening against her purple skin. She seemed to be thinking very hard. “If we converged to join our energies, it would be hard to control. But we might be able to shatter a hole of sorts through Silverworld.”
“True. Possibly. Maybe—just enough for Sami to slip through,” Dorsom murmured.
“There’s grave danger, though. Such convergence could cause fault lines. It might break Silverworld into pieces,” Natala said. “It could create enough dust and debris to dim even the Actual World sun.” She paused again, as if working something out in her mind. “Yet even so, there is also the chance…if you were swift, and we focused our intentions—we might create a window, a narrow one, for you to leap to your destination—the Castle Shadow.”
Dorsom squinted at the green light. “The gloaming won’t be fully on us for a few hours yet. Once it’s gloamingtide, though, the Nixie will be let loose. The surge in her powers will be enormous—she will overtake Silverworld, blot out our sun, and certainly begin her attack on the Actual World. She has been building to this point for ages.”
Natala shook her head. “This is a decision only Sami can make—we can join our forces, but Sami is the one who will have to jump into a hole in the World.” She looked back at Sami. “If we create an opening, we won’t know how stable it will be—or exactly where it will send you.”
“Or how long last it will,” Dorsom added. “Such a hole would try to reweave and reknit itself quickly.” He took her shoulders. The softening light shone on his face, and she thought she saw glints of her brother in his dark Mediterranean eyes. He said quietly, “Natala is right. I believe we can get you into a portal, but beyond that, there is no telling.”
Sami drew a long and only slightly shaky breath. “If you guys can make this portal, I’m ready to jump into it.”
The wind was changing colors.
Sami saw shooting streaks of aquamarine, powder blue, and navy as they hurried toward the island beach. Dorsom followed her gaze. “Another sign…”
“Don’t tell me—” she said. “More about the gloaming.”
“There will be changes aplenty,” Natala admonished them. “But we must stay sharp on our task. Quickly now! Our powers will be greatest if we join in the surf, let the water unite us.”
Sami hung back a moment, foam rushing around her feet. Though they’d crossed between the other Isles without problems, now she hesitated once again at the water’s edge, remembering the whirling undersea Shadows when they first crossed the Bare Straits.
“No time to linger!” Natala urged. “This is our single moment.”
“But what about all of you?” Sami asked. “What happens after I jump and you’re left with a closing portal and an army of Shadows?”
Bat gave her a thin smile. “The Shadows have little interest in us. It’s you, Silverwalker, who are the true prize—and the one who must escape.”
Dorsom laced his fingers tightly through hers. “Sami, fearless you are. The most courageous and capable of Actuals.” His black eyes shone with conviction, though she wanted to ask how many Actuals he knew besides her. Instead, she nodded, took another breath, and together they strode into the rising waves. The water between them and the last remaining island—the one they called Castle Isle—was higher and rougher than that of the earlier crossings. Bat and the Flickers formed a circle of joined hands. Bat was on her left, Natala on her right, and Dorsom was directly across from her. She interlaced her fingers with theirs, squeezing nervously.
“Together we make-shall, together we unbreak-shall,” Natala chanted. They repeated after her, lifting their hands up over their heads. She heard the ruffle of Natala’s ringlets, saw the tattoos on the backs of her hands flex as the Flicker lifted her arms. Sami began to feel the words on her own lips, reciting with the Flickers as if she’d known them all her life. She knew the words even when they switched into another language that sounded to her a bit like French, a bit like Arabic, and a bit like the older, swishing syllables that rose from the waves. “Yah, al basah! Ouwai bosa, ouwai besiso!” Sami kept up, chanting fluidly. The wind grew faster, so strong that it stained the air gray and blue, and Sami didn’t know if the agitation in the wind and water was from the gloaming or their spell-chanting or the forces of the Nixie herself.
Gradually, she sensed a trembling that she thought at first was in her legs, then realized was coming from the ocean floor beneath her feet. It rumbled, growing louder. Back on land, a flock of golden-winged falcons burst from the trees and wheeled over their heads and Bat lifted her head to look at them, her face bright. It is happening, Sami thought. It really is happening! The water began to surge and swell, turning a vivid neon blue, forming a kind of whirlpool at the center of their circle. The water whipped and shoved them, but Sami felt strong, stronger than she ever had before, her legs so rooted, it seemed almost as if, for once, she was the one keeping all the others anchored. Then a kind of well began to form inside the whirlpool, a hole at the center, growing deeper and larger, so they each had to inch back, extending their arms to not lose their grip on each other.
“ ’Tis the break!” Bat cried.
“The tear in the fabric.” Natala’s face was stunned yet thrilled. “It’s happening. The portal.”
Dorsom looked at Sami. Through the whipping water and wind, his thoughts were written on his face: Wherever you go, Sami, I will be there too. He squeezed her hand tightly, then let go.
Everything went dark.
Sami felt like she was being blasted into a current of air inside a water tunnel. Her hair stood on end and her skin squeezed against her bones. The whirling mouth of the portal sucked her down.
She gasped for breath.
Everything seemed to be getting thinner and longer, including her. The joints and knobs of her vertebrae felt like they were actually starting to separate, her bones seemed to be stretching, and was that her chin at the top of her very long neck? Just when she thought that she couldn’t stretch any farther, that the air couldn’t get any thinner in her flattened
lungs, and that her finger bones were about to pop out of their sockets, she burst out of the other side.
And then she really was flying, skimming through air and water and blades of grass and dreams. Visions. She smelled the earth, and she was up high, looking down, and she could see small scenes, like fragments of memories inside snow globes. There were two little children—she and Tony—beside a Christmas tree, smashing up wrapping paper into snowballs and pelting each other, the smell of pine and paper twisting together as the two of them laughed wildly.
There was her mother, her hair as shining-black as feathers, with her arms around Sami’s scruffy father, ankle-deep in water, smiling and windblown. Then she saw Alia sitting at a wooden table in a library, years before Sami was born, surrounded by fat, hardcover books, studying for the bar exam.
There was the bombed-out room in Lebanon, whistling with wind and shards of broken glass. Then the same room appeared to her again, whole and sun-swept and filled with shoppers, elegant drapes, and porcelain dishes. At a counter, a young woman with a heavy silver necklace inspected a teacup. Outside, there were black-haired children chasing a ball along sidewalks, sounds of people speaking Arabic and French, a bakery with a red canvas awning, a café filled with young people sitting by the brilliant sea. Beirut before the war.
There was a long orange ray that seemed to light up the earth, sand like hammered white gold, a series of low, dark tents that billowed in the wind, herds of goats. Tied in long rows, there were camels and mahogany-dark horses.
There was a group of men crouched in low squats, sipping from tiny cups like the ones Teta had brought years ago from Lebanon. One man stood. He was tall with wary but kind dark eyes. He reminded her of her brother, Tony. A tent flap moved to one side and a young girl with the bearing of a princess came out. She wore a white tunic embroidered with silver and her long, thick twists of hair were braided with silver beads. Perhaps twelve years old, the girl had glowing black eyes and wheat-colored skin. A heavy silver necklace made of coins circled her neck.
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