Aura.
Aura drops her on the ground, hard enough for stars to sparkle across her eyes. When her vision clears, Aura is all she can see.
“I should have let you suffocate,” Aura says, her voice low and terrible. She yanks Heather up by the shoulder and stares her in the face. “I almost,” and she squeezes Heather’s shoulder so hard she gasps, “didn’t get here in time. I almost didn’t come here at all! If Estajfan hadn’t told me to check on you—Heather. A few more seconds and you would have been gone. The ground was already smoothing over. There was almost no sign of you at all.”
“I just—” Heather stares, her teeth chattering. “I just—wanted—to be different. I wanted my life to be—different.”
“You are different,” Aura says, and she lets Heather’s arm drop. Heather backs up until she’s leaning against the willow again. She feels the ground rumble and then go silent.
But she’s not different—she’s the same, Heather realizes. Covered in dirt—dirt in her clothes, stuffed in her ears, gritty in her mouth—but every bit the same. Her own two legs. Her own fragile human body. The baby kicks, fierce and alive. She bends over her belly and sobs.
“You can’t trust the mountain,” Aura says. “If the mountain can birth a centaur, it can birth all other kinds of lies.”
“But it made your father different,” she whispers.
“My father was already halfway into another world. You don’t want that—you just want the world to know who you are.”
Heather shuts her eyes and leans back against the tree. “There’s no one left to know who I am,” she says. “Everyone is gone.”
“Not everyone,” Aura says. When Heather looks at her, the moonlight shines behind her head like a halo. “You and Estajfan—” Aura makes a gesture with her arms, a half-circle—“I see you in his face. In the way he moves. I don’t think even he understands it. The way our father kept seeing our mother long after he’d left the village and come back to the mountain. Your bond marks you both in ways that even the mountain does not understand.”
There’s another rumble beneath Heather’s hands. She thinks it’s the mountain, disagreeing, but then the rumble resolves into hooves striking the ground. Petrolio bursts from the trees, his face full of terror.
“Estajfan!” he cries.
“What?” Heather pushes herself up and stumbles to Aura.
“He’s in trouble,” Aura says, knowing instantly what Petrolio means. “The mountain”—her voice drops low—“the mountain won’t let me see anything else.”
Heather goes to the three willows and places her hand against a trunk, looks out across the land that stretches on and on into the dark. Foothills and flatlands and the ruins of so many cities. Far beyond that, the sea.
She couldn’t see him on the mountain, but she can see him now. Below them, back down in the world that she knows.
“He’s by the water,” she says. “Or close to it.”
“Is he hurt?” Aura and Petrolio cry together.
She closes her eyes and feels a darkened space, shadows skittering over the windows. The floor cold against her cheek. Against his cheek. The glint of metal. A rifle in the corner.
“People.” It’s the first thing she can say.
“What?” Petrolio grabs her free arm hard.
“He’s alive.” Dark silence, pressure against Estajfan’s wrists and legs. He can’t move. He’s hurt. Around him, the reek of bodies that haven’t been washed.
“Heather,” Petrolio says, and she opens her eyes.
“He’s in a truck,” she says. “There are people with him. I think they’re heading this way, but I’m not sure.” She grabs Petrolio’s hand. “We’ll find him. I can help you find him. But we have to go down.”
“Estajfan chose to go down.” A new voice behind them. They stiffen in surprise, then turn to see a mountain centaur, tall and stern. Behind him, others in the trees. How long have they been watching? “Centaurs do not belong off the mountain. No one is to go down except for the human.”
“I’m not abandoning my brother!” Petrolio cries, his eyes wild.
The centaur only watches him. “Then you make the same choice he made,” he says. “And the mountain will dismiss you too.”
Aura offers a hand to Heather, who takes it and scrambles up onto Aura’s back. She wraps her arms around Aura’s slender torso, then buries her face in Aura’s hair.
Then Aura’s hooves leave the ground, and they are running.
When they reach the bottom of the mountain, Aura pauses for the tiniest of seconds.
“Where is he?” Aura shouts back to her. “Where do we need to go?”
The warm smell of metal; the tang of fear and fire inside her mouth. He still can’t move, but they are moving. Heading north, toward the mountains. She was right.
“They’re on the road,” Heather says. “Turn south, and we’ll meet them.”
They run for what feels like hours—through the dawn and into the morning. When the road is blocked by sudden mounds of tangled vines—a buried car or two or three—Aura leaps over them, Heather clutching hard in panic, Petrolio at their heels.
As they get closer to Estajfan, a wave of pain rises behind Heather’s eyes. She can feel him moving against his restraints, his fingers curling, his body flexing, getting ready.
The humans don’t see it. They have no idea.
18
Snug on the bed in their townhouse, nestled between Tasha and Annie, Elyse is weak, but alive. They feed her carefully—canned beans, rice, tuna—until colour comes back into her face. The day slides into night. They sleep. They wake. They sleep again and dream.
“What happened?” she asks them, when the night has turned to day again. “What happened, outside, with the flowers?”
They tell her what they know, which isn’t much. The scream. The long standoff with Annie.
When they get to the part about the grief and the despair, Elyse nods. “I was ready to give up,” she says. “If it hadn’t been for the coughing, I’d just be another body on the street. The breathing was the only thing that saved me.” She told them about this when she’d recovered enough to speak—the scream of the flowers rising around her just before she reached their townhouse, the panic that had driven her to the house next door, which was closer, and then the default mechanism that had kicked in, the thing she knew to do when the air overwhelmed her, when breathing was hard. She’d learned it as a child. It went even deeper, now, than madness.
Breathe in until her lungs were three-quarters full. Then hold. Then out. Breathe in. Then hold. Then out.
Again. Again. Again.
Thinking back on it now, she manages a wry chuckle. “My banged-up lungs kept me alive, I guess. That’s definitely a first. What saved the two of you?”
Tasha hears the brief whisper of wings. “I’d been around the flowers all winter,” she says. “The greenhouse—I went there alone. It made me”—and she thinks back to those moments, her knees against the dirt—“delirious. Mad. I don’t know. I felt the grief then too. But the more I went to the greenhouse, the less it affected me. Like I was becoming immune.”
Elyse looks over at Annie. “Was it the same for you?”
Annie flushes, clears her throat. “I wasn’t immune, or whatever you want to call it. If it hadn’t been for Tasha”—she swallows hard, looks at her hands—“I don’t know what would have happened.”
Silence settles over them, broken by Elyse’s ragged lungs. “Maybe Tasha was your breathing,” she says. “The thing that kept you afloat—the way that the rhythm of my breathing saved me.”