Elstrin helped him into bed. Kana curled up into a ball, reminding Elstrin uneasily of the captain's pose on the stretcher. He stroked his black hair and thought of the terrifying, sudden, impossible turn the party had taken. No warning at all. Snow had just…
"Maybe he just got really angry," Kana murmured, as if he could read Elstrin's mind. "Maybe I'm wrong. He could've just lost control and… I don't know. Crazy spike of energy. It could happen."
"It must've," Elstrin decided. "What other explanation is there?"
Kana blinked once against the pillow before his eyes slipped shut, more exhausted than Elstrin had ever seen him. "Maybe Snow's not human," he mumbled. His breathing deepened and evened out, tension lifting from his shoulders as he fell asleep in seconds, leaving Elstrin alone in the silent room to ponder those four words well into the pitch black night.
Chapter 19
On Monday morning, Elstrin had a plan half-worked out. It was probably a very bad plan, born of scraps of information and rickety guesswork, but he was sure it was the only plan that would maybe explain what had happened at the party. There was no chance in hell anyone would answer his questions if he just plain out asked.
Kana had stayed in, still groggy and weak. It was as if he was allergic to whatever magic he'd encountered last night. It just served to convince Elstrin that what he was about to do was likely suicidal, but he hadn't been affected, so he clung on to the thin hope that nothing would go wrong.
It wasn't just curiosity driving him this time. He wanted to know so he could help Snow. Even if he couldn't actually do anything, if he understood the problem then he could at least provide some moral support. There was clearly lots going on with the lieutenant despite all he'd said, and Elstrin refused to just sit and watch while he got worse. He couldn't; the guilt would kill him. Snow had done so much for him, and it was his responsibility to at least try to return the favour.
Elstrin skipped breakfast, feeling too queasy to eat and not wanting to discuss anything with the others. At roll call, they assembled in front of the lieutenants as usual. Most of the soldiers seemed at ease, or they were just really good at pretending everything was fine. Snow was there too, standing with the group, looking preoccupied. Well, that made things easier. The lieutenants carried an assortment of weapons, presumably things that each cadet needed polishing up on after the exam, and none of the cadets looked enthusiastic. Most were shooting Snow apprehensive glances (which he totally ignored) as if expecting him to flip out and hurt someone again.
Stag dismissed them and the crowd of cadets broke apart reluctantly to their individual instructors, avoiding Snow as much as possible. Elstrin waited until everyone was a safe distance away, then walked straight towards him, pushing the nervousness from his heart. Nothing bad would happen. He was just going to do a simple, small thing…
Without thinking, he imagined extending an invisible arm to Snow. Imagined a thin tunnel of consciousness from him stretching to tangle with the lieutenant's. He wasn't sure exactly how to do this—he hadn't ever used magic before, and everything Kana had (or in some cases had not) told him, had made him wary of it. Imagining was the closest he could get to experiencing something while having no idea what it actually felt like. He pictured that line unravelling from himself and snaking forward. He pictured a messy nimbus of energy around Snow, the line crawling toward a pulsing mass of awareness. It would touch him right as Elstrin physically reached him. Almost there—
He looked into pale blue eyes and plunged into chaos.
There was a horrible press and squeeze of pure coldness, like a python made of dry ice was
around him in an instant, around his mind and his soul, erasing everything, his attempts to struggle, his thoughts of struggling. Flat and compressed. It was the nothingness that he'd felt ages ago when the dragon talked to him, only a million times too enormous, too cold, like being trapped under a millennium-old glacier. There was something terribly wrong with this crushing void. It was diseased. Sick and broken things lurked within the python, guts made of rust-eaten skeletons and spikes. Ice covered all.
And then it slithered away, released him to a world of confusing winds that buffeted him this way and that. It was dark; he was indoors somewhere. Pressures and little barbed hooks tore at him painlessly. He tried to gather some semblance of ordered thought. What was happening—no, too complex—where? Where was he? His own body?
There—here. He looked down at himself, uniform flapping around frantically in the wind, arms pale shapes looming out of the darkness. Oddly disconnected. He raised a hand and put it on the black in front of him. It split, gave way to more. The gentlest pressure broke countless layers of thin shadow-membrane. He raised a leg, put it back down. There was no way to tell if he walked or not. No indication of movement. Just wind, and the gloom ripping apart where he touched it.
Bring him back bring him back—
Elstrin stilled and focused on the direction of the faint noise, even though there was no direction in here. He moved his feet.
Rem you asshole what the hell are you doing bring him BACK god dammit—
Again, where? Where was the voice? As soon as he thought it, Snow was next to him. He looked different. Scary. His white hair kept obscuring his face but when it didn't, Elstrin spied ink-black eyes and a gaunt face, mouth full of snake teeth and jaw stretching wide enough to unhinge. But the image lasted for a second, flickered back to Snow being Snow, back again to the monster. He or it was shouting, beating at the never-ending shady drapes with clawed hands. Panicking.
The wind rose, stingingly cold, and blew away the dark a little. Elstrin could see more now. A high curved ceiling above them that stretched, without pausing for corners or edges, down to the ground. A perfect dome. As if shy that he'd discovered it, the sense of space retreated swiftly, and he and Snow were surrounded by shadow once more.
On foot level, but not on any actual floor that Elstrin could perceive, sat a frail-looking boy with bone-coloured hair that drifted as if underwater. He leaned against the armrest of a dull red couch. His eyes were grey-blue. His face was so similar to Snow's that they could be brothers. Except Snow was half-monster right now.
Rem please bring him back— Snow howled, voice shivering with rage or fear.
"No," the boy said calmly, gazing up. He did not look at anything. "You called me an asshole. In front of a guest. In front of two guests. That's really rude, Snow."
Who are you talking to? a different voice said, lost in the darkness as Elstrin once was.
He thought he was getting the hang of this. Where are you? he asked. It echoed a bit. Where where where where…?
"There," Rem replied with a small smile, nodding at the space in front of him. Another patch of shadow drifted away to reveal a second couch, the old dusty one in Gabriel's house. Gabriel was lounging on it, taking a drag from a cigarette. He coughed hard when he saw them and sat up sharply.
"Whoa. Holy shit," he muttered, squinting at Elstrin, then Snow. "What's going on, Rem?"
BRING HIM BACK, Snow roared, his skin rippling and cracking in a deeply disturbing manner.
Streams of ink and silver needles fell from the gashes. The wind screeched angrily with him.
"Fuck, Rem, what are you doing?" Gabriel cried, springing from the couch, eyes wide. He ran towards Elstrin but a thin veil of shadow separated them. Gabriel shoved and pushed at it to no avail. "Fuck, fuck, get him out of here—"
"Why? He wanted to come in," Rem challenged, pouting childishly. "And he's polite. Not like Snow."
"You're going to tear the whole fucking barrier down!" Gabriel gasped, fingers scrabbling wildly at the shadow for an edge to hold on to. "You'll kill him—"
"I will not," Rem countered viciously, his eyes bright.
"Rem, listen to me. If you do not return Elstrin right now I will never s—"
Elstrin fell away, collapsed into himself, stacked back up together and after a moment of glacier ice, he was under the sun again, out on
the training field, his foot just landing on the ground as he took the last step towards Snow and began to gaze up into pale blue eyes. Wait—no. No, he'd done that already—time had stuttered strangely just then—
Snow drew back a fist and punched him so hard that he didn't feel pain. But his jaw was numb,
his palms stung as he fell and failed to catch himself, and there was a weird scuffing noise when his left ear crashed onto the dirt and scraped along it a few centimetres. He coughed once. Dusty here.
Someone's shadow fell over him. He struggled weakly to get away—he didn't really want to see shadows. Not too fond of them after that odd little episode with the couches and the boy and the monster—
Snow put an arm around Elstrin's shoulders and a hand on his arm and slowly helped him up. He found his footing automatically. His surroundings lurched drunkenly. "I'm sorry," Snow was saying. Elstrin could just hear him over the sound of fifty televisions broadcasting different channels of white noise on full volume. "Are you okay? Elstrin? Can you hear me? Sorry. I shouldn't have punched you like that."
"Am I bleeding," Elstrin slurred, leaning quite heavily on Snow.
"A bit. Not really. Listen, Elstrin. Listen." His head was tilted up and he focused, once more, on Snow's eyes. Like pieces of the sky trapped in twin wells. No, was it the other way around? Standing at the bottom of a well, staring at the sky. Unable to reach it. "Do not do that again. Ever. Do you understand? Do not."
"'Kay." He was starting to slump. His dazed thoughts were simple and one-dimensional. "Your hands."
"Can you walk?" Snow began to half-lead, half-drag him towards the edge of the field. "I'll get you to the infirmary and you can have an ice pack and lie down for—"
"Snow, your hands are shaking," Elstrin said, closing his eyes to the spinning of colours all around him. He felt Snow take a large breath.
"Yes, I know. I'm fine. Just keep walking."
Elstrin decided that he kind of enjoyed the numb sensation pulsing around his face after all, and
the silence that it brought, and the uncomplicated view of the back of his eyelids. But his short-lived peace was interrupted by the sound of running footsteps and an angry, out-of-breath voice. "What the fuck was that?" Gabriel all but shrieked. "Why did you—"
"I didn't," Snow snapped. "I had my shields down and he tried to touch me. Rem pulled him in. Please stop shouting."
"Why did you have your fucking shields down, then? You shouldn't leave them down at all, you know that, there's—"
"They're not exactly the most comfortable things to wear."
"I don't fucking care!" Gabriel bellowed, so loudly that Elstrin brought a weak hand up to his ear to maybe block some of the noise out because it was making his head hurt. The faint sounds of others training could still be heard. Maybe there was a bubble around them. He wished it could tone the volume down. "Snow, he's sick, you're sick, you need your fuckingshields! You know what will happen if the bastard breaks loose—Serpent's brother is here, what do you think's gonna happen? He's just gonna sit back and watch him become a good soldier? He tried to kill Elstrin for a tiny little dismissal. Just imagine—"
"I get it, okay? I screwed up. It won't happen again. I'll talk to Rem later."
"He's fucking crying. You really hurt him."
"I know."
"That's it? That's all you're going to say? What'll you say the day the barrier finally crumbles and
I stand around screaming I told you so? You'll just go 'I know' and be done with it." Gabriel exhaled raggedly. "Fuck this. I've been spending every other day in that fucking dome with Rem for fucking months and it's not helping. I don't have time for it. I need to be down in the city with Keri, and you need to get your shit together."
There was a stretch of icy silence. Elstrin could feel Snow's heartbeat, pressed up against his chest as he was, and it was fast, fluttery, not at all calm and collected as it seemed on the outside. And he really didn't like it. Panicking again. He was not used to Snow panicking.
"I'm sorry," Elstrin burst out. With an effort, he put some strength into his legs and straightened
up a little, looking dazedly at a confused and livid Gabriel. Oh god, his jaw was really beginning to throb now. He pushed the pain out of his mind. Anything to get them to stop arguing, and stop all that panic from bubbling up. "I'm sorry, it's my fault. I was being stupid. Please don't fight. You two are friends, right? It's not nice to fight with a friend. And if Rem is crying you should go comfort him instead of having a shouting match. He seemed like a nice kid. Why did you punch me, Snow? I want an ice pack. Like. Now."
Snow exhaled wearily. "Don't try standing on your own. Lean on me and relax." Blue light flared around Elstrin's face, the trembling in Snow's hand making it unsteady, pinpricks of cold and cool, but it was comforting nonetheless. "Okay. Take it easy. We'll get you indoors."
He guided Elstrin to the infirmary. Gabriel followed, footsteps brisk. Snow waved the doctors away, went to a random room and helped Elstrin sit on the side of a bed. He ended up lying down. It helped banish some of the insistent revolving of everything he set eyes on. He dragged the blanket over his face. Soft shadows. Smelled like washing powder. Harmless.
Gabriel heaved a sharp sigh somewhere nearby. "We need to talk. Knock him out."
His words registered, and Elstrin had enough time to feel alarmed and start to claw the blanket back. "No, hold on—" he managed, but a second later the world was wrenched away from him and everything went dark.
x
He had a dream in which a white dragon led him into an alleyway, and a man with no face shot him in the head. He watched himself come apart, a shaky fountain of blood and bone, and suddenly the alleyway was jammed full of ten other corpses. They were him. Gabriel sat on the fire escape, Keri on his lap, and they watched impassively as his dead clones grew cold on the dirty cement. Keri pointed at one of the bodies and whispered to her brother, "Who's that, Gabe?"
"Max," Gabriel replied.
"Who's Max?"
"Just a ghost. We can't do anything for him now."
"Who made him a ghost?"
The gloom trembled apart at the dead end of the alleyway to reveal Snow, standing there with black eyes and bloody hands. Gabriel tightened his hold on his sister protectively.
Keri looked at him expectantly. "Did Snowy make him a ghost?"
"…No," Gabriel finally said. "But I almost wish he had."
Everything changed. Abruptly Elstrin was sure he wasn't dreaming anymore. He glimpsed a huge, still lake, and in its centre sat a person made of sunlight. Then he glimpsed Rem, lying alone on a bed of darkness, eyes wide with pain and torment, chest rising and falling rapidly, writhing slowly in the empty space. He clawed at the thin fabric of his robe, rolled over with a small, agonised groan, murmuring things to himself. Then a strong burst of cold wind, so strong it blew Elstrin off balance a little, flattening and blurring his vision. When he looked back Rem seemed healthy again, surrounded by scenery that wasn't there a moment ago. The boy was in a wet, overgrown garden bordered by towering pine trees. He sat on a stone bench before a pond lined with yellow lilies. A mossy statue of an angel stood behind him. Rem smiled, clumps of dirt flicking into the water as he kicked his heels against the bench, and tossed bread crumbs into the pond. Bright flashes of red and gold appeared as small agile fish emerged to gulp down the morsels. Rem laughed delightedly at the sight. He looked happy, and yet so sad….
x
Elstrin woke up disoriented and with a headache. The sky outside was dark. Snow was still there sitting next to his bed. The arrangement was familiar, except last time Snow hadn't looked like he hadn't slept in days. Elstrin took several minutes to reorganise his muddled thoughts. The vivid dreams faded from his mind.
"Um," he started, just to break the silence.
"Elstrin, what you did this morning was incredibly stupid," Snow said dully. He didn't even seem to have the energy to sound reprimanding or disappointed. He was just saying it
.
"But it was the only—"
Snow rubbed a tired hand down his face. "I was going to tell you," he said softly.
Elstrin blinked. "You were?"
"Yes."
"But—but that's not what you do. What about all those things you guys don't tell the cadets?"
"Those things have changed," Snow muttered. "I was going to just tell you, so you wouldn't do something stupid, and you went ahead and did it anyway."
Elstrin couldn't really make himself feel chastised, but since Snow was obviously having a rough time, he lied, "Sorry."
"It's not… you don't mean that, and it doesn't help anything. The point is, you just messed up a very unstable link that's been giving us lots of difficulty for the past few months. You pushed it to the brink of snapping, and if it does snap then we're all in trouble. Gabriel is out there right now trying to contain the damage, and…" He took a deep breath, voice trailing off.
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