by May Dawson
As I ran, I realized it wasn’t just the truck that had detonated. The boxes had too. A bunch of guards lay prostrate on the ground, clutching tattered shells of boxes; most of them had lost a significant part of their chests and heads. Horror washed through me at the sense that could’ve been me with my head blown off.
Frederick must have given up on recreationally murdering me after all, because he was breaking open the exterior locks on barracks buildings. Prisoners piled out, and began to fight the guards, armed with whatever they could find.
“Initiate the camp shutdown,” the warden shouted.
We had to get everyone out. I’d been trying to find the shut-off for the camp immolation, and I ran the rest of the way to the castle, determined to get there first. Someone had to activate the mechanism, and I’d stop them to make sure there was time to free all the prisoners.
Then I spotted Silas standing on the steps, hands in his pockets, looking relaxed.
“We’ve got to do something,” I told Silas, seizing his arm. “The warden ordered a camp shutdown.”
He was watching the chaos of guards and magicians battling with a relaxed look on his face as if he were watching a polo match or something. He turned to me and raised a finger to his lips to shush me.
“I already have,” he said.
A prisoner hit a guard and the guard turned with baton, then fell to his knees, a shocked look on his face, as if the prisoner’s punch had killed him.
Silas flipped a bottle to me, and I caught it against my chest.
“What’s this?” I demanded. It was a mason jar, the small kind, and I unscrewed the lid even as I regarded Silas skeptically.
“Antidote,” he said.
“To what?” I demanded, “And also, you threw it at me?”
“Drink it,” he said with a smile.
I glared at him but I drained the glass anyway. “What the hell would’ve happened if I didn’t, Silas?”
All around us, bodies were dropping around camp. Prisoners stared in surprise at the guards that fell before they could even jump them. What had been a desperate fight was turning into a rout.
He’d been up to something the whole time. It’s a good thing I’m not your charge anymore.
Silas tucked his hands in his pockets and walked off whistling to find Frederick, in the chaos of the camp he’d just saved as if it were nothing.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Silas
When I walked into her room, Keen had obviously thrown herself out of bed to join the fight, but she hadn’t been able to reach the door. She looked up at me with the kind of dignity written across her face that someone only has when they are embarrassed.
There was a dead guard on the floor with her.
“You’ve never shied away from a fight in your life,” I said, “I guess you couldn’t resist helping us one last time.”
She huffed. “I recognize your work, Silas Zip.”
I smiled as I picked her up—she’d been muscular and strong in life and even now that her body was wasting away, she was heavier than I expected. I carried her back to the bed and laid her in it. “Until we’re ready to go.”
“I’m ready to go,” she said. “I don’t want you all to spend another moment trapped here.”
“Do you think I could get your advice one last time?”
“You’ve never wanted it before. Is this you taking pity on me, Silas?”
“I’m just pretty desperate.”
“Well, that I can believe.”
“You told me once,” I said, “that I should kiss the girl. Live life dirtside—really live it—so I could decide if I wanted to stay there or come back here.”
“What did you decide?”
“I didn’t,” I said with a frown.
She shook her head. “Look at you. Lost for the first time since I’ve known you. It’s rather refreshing—you’ve always been so smart.”
“Could you not gloat right now?”
“Silas, I think when you’ve saved your world, you get to think about what will make you happy.”
“I haven’t saved the world yet.”
“You will.”
“Because it’s prophesied?”
“Because you’re the incredible Silas Zip.”
“You know, if I could go back in time, I’d be the Realistic Expectations Zip.”
“That does not have the same ring,” she said, then added, “I would always believe in you anyway.”
“Because you trained me?”
“Because I know you.” She smiled at me. “So what will make you happy, Silas?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have good friends in two worlds. Family in two worlds. Doesn’t that mean I don’t really belong in either one?”
I hesitated, then said, “Maybe I could go back and forth.”
“Deep down, you know that’s not the answer.”
The rips. They were always getting worse. Establishment magicians were careless with the rips within our world, just as Jonathan Truby and Winter had been dirtside. They used the rips to move around. But we had only used them carefully, trying to keep the world from tearing into pieces even though our every passage ripped it a little more.
I’d never go back and forth carelessly.
“I’ll never be completely happy in either world,” I said.
“Oh, Silas,” she said, and she sounded as if she were laughing at me. “No one is ever completely happy in any world. That’s impossible for humans.”
“Depressing.”
“Or maybe it’s beautiful,” she said. “We enjoy life a little more because it’s finite and limited and we have to choose, and we hate that, but it also makes what we choose precious to us.”
I stared at her, and she said, “Listen, I spend a lot of time alone in this room. I’ve done some thinking.”
Then she held out a pair of gloves to me. “Well, I knitted these for you.”
“Did you knit them for me?” I asked. “Or for whichever Rebel Magician you wanted to smooth things over with next?”
She just smiled.
“Thank you,” I told her. “I’ll pretend the gloves were really for me.”
I started to get up, then said, “Oh. There’s something I’ve waited for months to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve got Echo,” I said. “He’s back home in Chase’s house. The Establishment didn’t get him.”
“Thank you,” she said.
I was almost to the door when she said, “He’s back home, hm?”
I turned and looked at her over my shoulder. The memory of what I’d said struck me hard, but all I said was, “I’ll send Isabelle in. Goodbye, Mistress Keen.”
“Goodbye, Silas.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Silas
Maddie and I’d had that brief, bantering conversation in barracks seventeen, but I wans’t sure how she’d really feel. Maddie and I were both the kinds of people who can always summon up some banter.
When I finished walking through the barracks to make sure they were all empty, and headed toward the castle, she fell into step beside me. The casual way she did it reminded me of all those times we’d walked side by side on the academy grounds, on the way to classes or lunch or the dojo. We’d been inseparable this past year.
Inseparable was a funny word.
“Silas,” she said softly. “What was the coin really for?”
“Can we burn the camp down before I tell you?” I asked.
She nodded. “Sounds like a date.”
Our hands bumped together as we walked toward the castle. Around us, the debris from the explosion had been cleared out of the truck, and Rebel Magicians were loading into it. We were hitching a ride as far as our own vehicle stash; then we’d go our own way.
Our mission was a long way from over.
Still, I wanted to savor this one win for a moment before I thought about anything else. My fellow Rebels clapped my shoulder as they wal
ked by or murmured a word of thanks.
“You’re not going to be a ghost anymore,” Maddie said lightly. “Looks like you might as well come home with us.”
My heart jumped at the thought she wanted me to come home with her, but the next second, I thought of Rafe telling me how much he wished I’d stay here.
I scoffed. “Rafe might prefer I was a ghost.”
Her brows rose, her protectiveness flaring to the surface. It made my heart jump; she still wanted me after all.
“Come on, let’s go blow something up,” I said to distract her. It worked as well as a diversion for her as it did for me. The two of us headed through the castle to the control room.
In front of us was a map table where the squat little prison buildings stood, each marked with a flag. One of them had already been crushed; the one that had burned.
“Let’s wipe Elegiah off the map,” I said.
I murmured burn in Latin as I pressed my fingers down on the roof of one of the buildings, and there was an explosion in the distance. Flames licked into the air, and I breathed in a thin trail of smoke like the scent of a dying candle. We’d made sure the barracks were all evacuated; now the Rebels were getting on the trucks and it was time to finish this.
“You try,” I told her. “It’s satisfying.”
She and I moved steadily through the map, destroying each of the buildings. The light had changed outside the window; it was still night time, but it was bright with the flames rising from the buildings.
Then we headed down the steps. I didn’t plan to ever see Elegiah again.
When we emerged from the front door, the colony was on fire.
I stopped and turned to face her on the steps. “The coin was for making you cry.”
“Oh,” she said, a faint flush rising in her cheeks, as if she was embarrassed by that. “You’d think after all that time at the academy, I wouldn’t cry anymore.”
“Stay just the way you are,” I said. “I never cry and look at me. Kind of an asshole.”
“Kind of a hero,” she said lightly, rising up onto her tiptoes. “Not that the two are mutually exclusive.”
“Especially around here.”
She brushed her lips over my cheek, and peace settled over my soul. I dropped a kiss in her hair.
Then I turned to see the burning buildings silhouetted against the sky. Rafe yelled at us impatiently from the truck. Of course he did.
I wondered if I should apologize for hurting her, but when I looked at her, she was smiling, the flames reflected across her face. I knew she wouldn’t care if I apologized. She was never the one who was angry at me, or doubted my love for her, because of it.
She still wanted me to come home with her.
“You have a flair for destruction, Madeline Northsea,” I told her. Along with a gift for so many other things.
Like saving the world, like saving me.
“Why thank you, Silas Zip. But I think you’re the one with a real knack for it.”
Hand-in-hand, the two of us headed for the truck.
Keen faded as we left the grounds. It was hard to see in the swaying truck full of Rebels, but her eyes fluttered closed. Isabelle reached out and took her hand, then gave me a meaningful look.
I took her hand too. Anything to make Isabelle happy. I hadn’t fully realized how much Keen had turned into a mother figure for all of us, until I saw how Isabelle loved her, but now I knew.
Keen wasn’t perfect, but she’d cared about us. As the light left her body, and she grew cold and heavy, Isabelle blinked, and tears clung to her lashes.
Frederick leaned forward, resting his hand on her knee, and she shook her head. “I’m still mad at you, Fred.”
“I know,” he said. “You can be mad at me as long as you want. It’s okay to take tonight off.”
He slid in beside her, wrapping her in his arms, and she leaned into him.
After a while, a few Rebels carefully checked Keen’s vitals and wrapped her up in a blanket. They would take care of burying her. A rebel’s grave was an unmarked grave.
“But not forever,” Isabelle whispered, as if she were finishing the maxim we always told each other, promising ourselves that one day, we’d be seen as heroes by the other Greyworlders.
Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn’t. I wasn’t sure that I cared for myself, but I definitely cared for my friends. Frederick and Isabelle and Sebastian deserved to have a good life here in the Greyworld.
I could almost feel Maddie watching me in the darkness, trying to gauge how I was doing.
Then the truck stopped. The guys filed off, but Maddie hesitated while I waited for Isabelle.
“She was proud of you,” I told Isabelle softly as she stood, casting one last glance at the body.
Isabelle scoffed. “She wasn’t proud of anyone. She thought I was sloppy and emotional.”
“Yes,” I said, shocking Isabelle; her eyes widened in the dim moonlight. “But she was proud of you anyway. Just like she thought I was reckless and arrogant.”
But she’d cared for all of us anyway, in her own way. Isabelle smiled back at me hesitantly, even as her eyes brimmed with tears, and I wrapped my arm around her shoulders. Here in the Greyworld, I was reunited with the brothers and sister of my heart, no matter how messy our family was.
The three of us pushed aside the tarp covering that closed in the back of the truck, keeping it warm in there with all the Rebels crammed together, and we jumped into the soft fallen snow. It crunched beneath our boots as we headed through the forest to find the vehicles we’d hidden.
The air was tense. Frederick had expected something different from his reunion with Isabelle; she definitely hadn’t kissed him hello. When he tried to talk to her and she ignored him, Sebastian gave him a look, warning him off.
I came alongside Frederick, who gave me an abashed face. “I guess you had the escape well in hand, hm?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I didn’t have a way to get all those Rebels to safety. It’s a good thing you showed up.”
“You were planning on a smaller rescue mission,” he guessed.
“Just you and Seb and Isabelle and Keen.”
“You’d have had to come back to help the rest of the Rebels escape.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to imagine myself leaving Maddie and the others with the shield, returning to fight alongside the Rebels. If my life were my own, if there was no mission… I couldn’t imagine what that would feel like.
“Just because you managed to wrap that mission up in a hurry,” Frederick said, “doesn’t mean you don’t have anything left to do here.”
He said it lazily, but he gave me one of those sidelong looks that always carried more of his emotions than he intended. He didn’t want to lose me to the other world.
I wasn’t in the business of making promises to anyone at the moment. Not even myself.
“So did you defeat the enchantment?” I asked him lightly. “Or are you still halfway convinced I’m an untrustworthy dickhead?”
He scoffed. “You really think that even you could work a spell that erases all those years of friendship? How cocky are you, Silas?”
I hid my smile. After all, he’d come to rescue Isabelle and Sebastian, assuming I never would. But that was okay.
“You’re right, you’re right,” I said, raising my hands. “I’m not that good.”
Maddie might disagree with me, but I didn’t think there was anything wrong with lying to one’s friends on occasion.
Chapter Forty
Tyson
Faer’s ball the next night was a nightmare.
Everyone fawned over Faer; that I expected. But I found myself constantly draped by high and low Fae, mostly female, who tried to touch me or kiss me or coax me out onto the dance floor. I pushed them all away in exasperation, and tried to lose myself in conversation with Arlen or Lake.
No one could tempt me. There was one female in the universe for me, and even a world away, I felt Maddie’s tu
g drawing on me. I couldn’t wait until we were back together.
“Incoming,” Arlen said, and I glanced the way he’d just darted his eyes.
Sure enough, Faer in his ridiculous gaudy jacket—not that I could talk, given that I’d let Raura choose my clothes—was winding through the crowd, coming our way.
“You two should find somewhere else to be,” I told them. I didn’t want Faer to take an interest in Arlen and Lake.
They nodded and melted into the crowd.
“I’m not a huge fan of parties,” I confessed to Faer when he asked me how I was. I’d never get over the debacle of Turic’s blood rite, when he’d tried to force us all to dance ourselves to death.
“You are so very boring,” Faer said. “I suppose you are half-mortal.”
“I suppose I am.”
He eyed me curiously. “What is it like? To go from your ugly mortal world to all this?”
I was getting really tired of people running down my world, actually. But I wasn’t going to waste my time explaining that to Faer.
It was better if he thought I wanted to stay here forever, even though it was painful to lie. It made me feel like I was being disloyal to Maddie, wherever she was out there.
“It’s like walking into a dream,” I said. “Mortals don’t realize what the rest of the universe is like.”
Faer nodded, seeming to eat up my stories, so I went on talking about how magical the Fae world was compared to our world. Even though I knew now, thanks to Raura, that Fae vacationed in our world, amusing themselves by laughing at our ways.
“Can you ever imagine yourself going back?” Faer asked.
My chest was suddenly tight; I couldn’t help but imagine how Maddie would miss me, how she’d mourn for me, if I never came home. I regretted every wasted moment when I thought we might be half-sister and brother, and most of all, I regretted hurting her.
“No,” I said. “I can’t imagine ever leaving this world.”
He nodded, looking satisfied.
“I need to tell you about my sister,” he said, clapping his hand on my shoulder.