Glenn didn’t know what to say. Margaret stared hard, searching, then shook her head.
“It’s … there’s now, and then there’s what was before now. We weren’t these people then. We were other people. I remember yellow paper on the walls and … a table. Blue. And chairs. But then … we were here and those other people were gone and there was just us.
These people. Now.”
“What happened when you came here?” Glenn asked.
“Margaret?”
Margaret stared out into the darkness beyond the fire. She pulled at a thin layer of flesh on her arm, pinching it cruelly between her fingers.
Glenn held out another piece of bread, but Margaret ignored it.
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t — ”
“We had been here … it was a while, I think. Tommy and me thought it was fun. There were birds and horses, but the people wouldn’t talk…. Dad said they were superstitious. He laughed. Scared of their own — what was it? Shadows. We lived in the woods near a village. A camping trip, Mom said. A holiday. Dad wanted to teach the people, give them … something. I don’t know what it was. Something to make them better? It was our duty to show them how life could be better. Then one family finally talked to us. They told us to leave before” — Margaret’s breath hitched in a small gasp — “the man said there was a woman.”
Something cold spread through Glenn as she said it. Margaret leaned farther into the fire.
“A woman in black. He said we had to leave before she came. No outsiders, he said. Dad … he always … he was so happy, he always laughed. ‘Send for her. Let’s meet this woman in black.’ Mom laughed too. But then she came. The woman. Very beautiful. She was full of birds. My dad raised his hand and said hello and she raised hers and she said some things and there was a sound like something cracking open. I thought it was the world, but really it was us. We were dropped into the hunger, and then time turned without us in it. People crossed our paths and we … pulled their hands and their faces and their breath into us until they weren’t anything anymore. We took them and we made them into us. Just so we could be warm. But it was never enough.”
It was silent in the cave when Margaret finished. She sat poised over the fire, her eyes locked onto the night outside. Glenn fought to make a wall that would hold Margaret’s story at bay. How could she stand to hear more of her mother’s horrors? When she closed her eyes, she saw lapping waves and her mother’s pale skin shining in the sun at the edge of a lake. Glenn took a stick from the pile of scrap wood and poked at the edge of the fire. It flared and settled.
On the other side of the fire, Margaret’s parents were lying down on the stone. Her father’s arms were wrapped around her mother’s. His eyes were closed. Hers were open and staring blankly at the ground.
Tommy was lying on his side, his hands splayed out in front of him, twitching like birds.
“Maybe you should try to get some rest,” Glenn said.
“I don’t sleep,” Margaret said.
“Maybe you can now.”
Glenn waited, but Margaret made no sign that she had heard. She sat against the wall of the cave and stared over the top of the fire and into the dark.
Across from them, Kevin shook open a small blanket from
Glenn’s pack and laid it over Tommy. He whispered something in the boy’s ear, but there was no response. Kevin left him and went to stand out by the mouth of the cave.
He said that the innkeeper told him she had gone, and he had been able to find a ride with a hunter not long after she left. Other than that, they had barely even looked at each other since that moment on the hilltop. Every time Glenn did, she saw a stranger wielding a golden dagger.
Glenn left Margaret, edging around the fire toward Kevin, trying to ignore the churning in her stomach.
“We have to get them home,” she said.
Kevin found a rock with the toe of his boot and kicked it into the dark. Glenn noticed bits of ash and waxy-looking burn marks on his cheeks.
“Kevin?”
“What does it feel like?” he asked. “To be able to do things like that?”
Glenn shuddered, remembering the mad rush of power.
“It’s like I’m not … me anymore,” she said. “I don’t know who I am, but I’m not me. I’m just … gone.”
Kevin stared at the rocky ground and slowly shook his head.
“You can’t destroy that bracelet,” he said quietly.
“Kevin — ”
“If you use it then maybe what happened to these people, what happened to Cort, won’t happen to anyone else. Let Opal teach you how to control your Affinity — ”
“So that’s why you followed me?” Glenn asked. “To take me
back to Opal?”
“I followed you because I woke up and you were gone,” Kevin said, raising his voice. “And you should be glad I did!”
“So it was all for me?” Glenn whipped his coat aside, exposing the gold dagger around his neck. “It wasn’t for your new friends?
‘Death to the Magistra.’ That’s what you said, isn’t it? I heard you plotting with your friends, Kevin. You’re not him. You’re not Cort!”
“I know that!” Kevin shouted. Then he glanced at the family behind them and stepped closer to Glenn, dropping his voice low and intense. “But I felt him die on that scaffold, Glenn. I remember it. I remember the walk to the gallows and how the rope felt on my neck and the sound of Felix crying and this feeling like …” Kevin struggled for purchase as his words slipped away. They were just inches from each other. Glenn could feel the heat radiating off him. “In all the time we’ve known each other, I’ve spent every minute of every day thinking about myself, about school, about some stupid band, and I’m sick of it.
There are other things in the world, important things, and I want to think about them for once in my life. We can’t let her keep hurting people, Glenn. We have to stop her.”
“Kill her?”
Kevin paused, flames from the campfire washing over the planes of his face.
“Isn’t that what she deserves?”
The cave dropped into an aching quiet. Cort was no mere ghost inside him now. The person in front of her, even though he had Kevin’s eyes and lips and the sharp angles of his face, wasn’t Kevin Kapoor.
Kevin was gone.
Glenn took a cautious step away. How could she tell him the truth about who the Magistra was? Would he even care now that he was more Cort Whitley than Kevin Kapoor? Worse, would he turn on her as well?
“Look,” he said. “We can cross the border tomorrow morning
and you can give me the bracelet. All of this can be over for you. I know that’s all you really want.”
“All I want is for us to get our lives back. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. My father is sitting alone in some prison because of me, Kevin.
You were almost killed! I’m just trying to put things back the way they were.”
Kevin’s eyes sharpened on her. “Do you really think that if you destroy the bracelet Sturges will pat us on the head and send us back to school?” he asked. “That’s a fantasy, Glenn. And even if he did, I don’t want that life back. I’m not going to waste another year dangling from your string while you figure out how to get as far away from me as humanly possible.”
Glenn felt a sting in her chest. Her eyes burned. “I never meant to …”
“Do you know why I came to talk to you that day at my dad’s office?” he asked. “I saw you on the train one morning. You were surrounded by everyone we went to school with and all of them were running around like they always do, and in the middle of all that was you. Sitting there with your tablet, ignoring it all, reading about the stars. I thought, this is someone who knows who she is. You were just you and I thought that was so amazing, but now … that whole time, you were just scared.”
Before Glenn could say anything, Kevin turned from her and
swept out of the cave. Glenn stood and watched his silhouette leap from rock to rock down the trail until the night consumed him.