Why are you showing me this?
I sat down in the dirt and stared up at the blue sky. I saw a fat bee, drunkenly buzzing in and out of the wildflowers. I felt the soil beneath me, soft and warm even though it was dry. I pressed my fingers deeper into the dirt, dry as coarse sand.
I knew why I was here. Whether or not I could finish it, I had to try.
That’s it, isn’t it?
I yanked on the hot, muddy boots and picked up the rusting metal wheel. I held the handlebars, pushing the wheel in front of me. I started watering the field, one row at a time. The wheel groaned as it turned, and the heat prickled my neck as I bent into the job, pushing as hard as I could through the bumps and ruts of the field.
I heard a sound like a massive stone door opening for the first time in a century, or an enormous stone being pushed out of the mouth of a cave.
It was water.
Slowly coming up, returning to the field from whatever old pump or well the hose was attached to.
I pushed harder. Water started to run through the dirt in rivulets. As it ran down the dry trenches in the field, it created tiny rivers that formed small rivers, which formed decent-sized rivers that I knew would eventually flood the path entirely, to form even bigger ones as far as I could see.
An endless river.
I ran fast as I could. I watched the spokes of the wheel turn faster, pumping the water harder, until the wheel was moving so fast that it looked like a blur. The force of the water was so strong that the irrigation hose split open like the back of a gutted snake. There was water everywhere. The dirt was turning to mud beneath my feet, and I was soaking wet. It was like I was riding a bike for the first time, like I was flying—doing something only I could do.
I stopped, out of breath.
The Wheel of Fate.
I was staring at it, rusty and bent and older than dirt. My Wheel of Fate, here in my hands. In my family’s old field.
I understood.
It was a test. My test. It was mine all along.
I thought about John, lying on my bedroom floor. The Lilum’s voice when she said he wasn’t the Crucible.
It’s me, right?
I’m the Crucible.
I’m the One Who Is Two.
It was always me.
I watched the field as it started to turn green and gold again. The heat subsided. The fat bee flew off into the sky, because the sky was real, not just a painted bedroom ceiling.
I heard the rumble of thunder, then the crack of lightning, and I stood in the middle of the field, holding the rusty wheel, as the rain began to fall.
The air hummed with magic, like the feeling I had the first time I stepped onto the beach at the Great Barrier—only a hundred times stronger. The sound was so loud my ears were ringing.
“Lilum?” I shouted with my Mortal voice, sounding small in the middle of the massive field. “I know you’re here. I can feel it.”
“I am.” The voice echoed down from above, from the blinding blue sky. I couldn’t see her, but she was there—not the Mrs. English Lilum, but the real Lilum. In her nameless, formless state, all around me.
I took a deep breath. “I’m ready.”
“And?” It was a question.
I knew the answer now. “I know who I am. And what I have to do.”
“Who are you?” The question hung in the air.
I looked up toward the sky, letting the sun fall on my face. I said the words I had been dreading, since the moment they first whispered themselves in the deepest, darkest reach of my mind.
“I am the One Who Is Two.” I shouted it as loud as I could. “I have one soul in the Mortal world and one soul in the Otherworld.” My voice sounded different. Sure. “The One Who Is Two.”
I waited in the silence. It was a relief to finally say it, like a crushing weight had been lifted off my back. Like I had been holding up the burning blue sky.
“You are. There is no other.” There wasn’t a trace of emotion in her voice. “The price must be paid to forge the New Order.”
“I know.”
“It is a crucible. A severe test. You must be sure. By the solstice.”
I stood there for a long time. I felt the cool air and the stillness. I felt all the things I hadn’t felt since the Order had changed.
“If I do this, then everything goes back to the way it was. Lena will be okay without me. The Council of the Far Keep will leave Marian and Liv alone. Gatlin will stop drying up and cracking open.” I wasn’t asking. I was bargaining.
“Nothing is certain. But—” I stood there and waited for the Lilum to answer. “There will be order again. A New Order.”
If I was going to die, there was one more thing I wanted. “And Amma won’t have to pay whatever price she owes the bokor.”
“That bargain was made willingly. I cannot alter it.”
“I don’t care! Do it anyway!” But I knew she wouldn’t, even as I said it.
“There are always consequences.”
Like me. The Crucible.
I closed my eyes and thought about Lena and Amma and Link. Marian and my dad. My mom. All the people I loved.
All the people I’d lost.
The people I couldn’t risk losing.
There wasn’t a lot to decide. Not as much I thought there would be. I guess some decisions are made before you make them. I took a step and found my way back into the light. “Promise me.”
“It is binding. An oath. A promise, as you call it.”
That wasn’t good enough. “Say it.”
“Yes. I promise.” Then she said a word that wasn’t in any language or even any kind of sound I could understand. But the word itself sounded like thunder and lightning, and I understood the truth in it.
It was a promise.
“Then I’m sure.”
A second later, I was standing in Lilian English’s parlor again, while she lay collapsed in the flowered chair. I could hear my father’s voice coming from the other end of the phone in her hand.
“Hello? Hello—”
My brain shifted to autopilot. I picked up the phone, hung up on my dad, and called 911 for the very Mortal Lilian English. I had to put the phone down without saying a word, because Sissy Honeycutt worked dispatch down at the station house, and she’d recognize my voice for sure. I couldn’t get caught at my unconscious English teacher’s house twice. But it didn’t matter. Now they had the address. They would send out the ambulance, like they did before.
And Mortal Mrs. English wouldn’t remember I had been there at all.
I drove straight to Ravenwood without stopping, without thinking, without turning on the radio or rolling down the window. I didn’t remember how I got there. One minute I was driving through town, and the next I was pounding on Lena’s front door. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was trapped in the wrong atmosphere, in some kind of terrible nightmare.
I remember slamming my fist on the Caster moon as many times as I could, but it didn’t respond to my touch. Maybe there was no way to hide how different I was. How incomplete.
I remember calling and crying and Kelting her name, until Lena finally opened the door in her purple Chinese pajamas. I remembered them from the night she told me her secret, that she was a Caster. Sitting on my front steps in the middle of the night.
Now, sitting on hers, I told her mine.
What happened after that was too painful to remember at all.
We lay in Lena’s old iron bed, tangled together like we could never be taken apart. We couldn’t touch, but we couldn’t not touch. We couldn’t stop staring at each other, but every time our eyes met, it only hurt more. We were exhausted, but there was no way we could sleep.
There wasn’t enough time to whisper all the things we needed to say. But the words themselves didn’t matter. We were only thinking one thing.