Chapter 41
CHAPTER
Once, when Quinn and I were nine, her mother had tasked us with spooning out the seeds from a bowl full of pomegranates for her upcoming cocktail party. To keep us busy while she cleaned, she’d said.
As soon as Quinn had started chucking spare seeds at my head in fits of giggles, however, her mother had decided that busy wasn’t quite enough. She’d infiltrated Quinn’s mind right then and there and commanded her to be quiet. Keep her head down. Focus on the task.
The silence had thickened over the house like a congealing shadow, filled with the ticking of the clock and the beating of my heart as I stole glances at my best friend in search of signs that she was fighting the Mind Manipulation.
Nothing. Not even a flutter of her eyelashes as she deadpanned the spooning motions over and over, going through pomegranate after pomegranate like a child made of cogs and gears.
Now, that same shadowy silence fell behind her door. As if Quinn knew that she was about to be betrayed by the one person who’d seen what her mother had done to her and how much it had affected her.
No, I reminded myself. I wasn’t going to coerce her into doing anything. I was simply going to lower my blockade in her direction. And she’d betrayed me ten times over by agreeing to take part in that prank last year, so I—
The door opened a crack.
An inhale stung in my nose.
Through the tiniest crack behind the statue, I could see that Quinn’s hair was no longer a glossy curtain of ruby red, but pale, stiff, and cropped to her shoulders. The color blended into her pallid face as she took in her visitor.
“Dazmine.” Even her voice sounded more hoarse than usual. “What do you want?”
“Aww.” Dazmine tilted her head. “Is that how you greet an old friend?”
“We had a mutual friend, but we were never really friends. And I don’t think you’re under any delusions that we were, so what do you want?”
“To talk.”
Quinn puffed out a dry laugh. “No, thanks.”
Just as she was slamming the door shut, Dazmine stuck out a shoe.
“Would you like to talk in your room or out here?” she asked sweetly. “I’m fine with either one… though I’d love to meet the lucky guy in there.”
Pupils narrowing into lines that could cut, Quinn spared a glance over her shoulder, where I could hear the soft stirring of quiet breaths: probably whoever she’d come up with earlier. If this were any other circumstance, I’d feel horrible for interrupting them.
For a moment, sparks flared to life beneath Quinn’s fingernails, as if she had half a mind to blast Dazmine out of the hallway with her magic.
Then movement behind her had a panicked look scurrying across her face. She definitely didn’t want whoever was in her room to come out.
“Fine,” she muttered and slipped out into the hallway, quickly clicking the door shut behind her. The sparks beneath her fingernails died. “Go ahead, then. I’ll give you two damn minutes of my life.”
Caging in a breath, I slowly chiseled an opening into my blockade.
“Let’s start with that hair,” Dazmine said. “What happened?”
“What happened?” Quinn’s nostrils flared. “What happened is that I had a Shape Shifter dye it because I wanted a change. And why should you be inquiring about my hair, anyway?”
Lie. She’d altered her hair herself—because Mr. Gleekle had branded her with Shape Shifting weeks ago. I heard that truth burn right through me with roaring flames that nearly had me gasping for air again.
Dazmine was already ploughing on.
“Why did you go into the jungle with Jenia and Fergus that day?”
Quinn’s eyes flashed in alarm at the mention of those two names. I didn’t blame her, necessarily: one dead, the other exiled. They’d practically become a taboo topic.
Through gritted teeth, she said, “Last I checked, you’re not on the Good Council, Dazmine. I’ve already explained to the real people in charge that we were just going to play a harmless little prank.”
Lie. But her thoughts behind that lie were too muffled for me to pick them apart.
Dazmine drummed her fingertips over her crossed arms.
“Did the Good Council tell you anything else? Have you been in contact with them since that harmless little prank?”
The breathiest pause, then— “No.”
Lie.
Of course, she was lying. What else had I expected? I let myself cling to those outermost thoughts and dug deeper, searching for the truth.
Dazmine has no right to be here right now, she was thinking beneath her hardened exterior.
But I’m surprised she didn’t confront me sooner, she was thinking beneath that. And—
Rayna will never forgive me, she was thinking beneath that.
I tumbled into her mind.
When I straightened, it was to find a wall of ice so similar to mine that for a second, I thought I’d sunk backward into my own instead.
I squinted at the ice again and realized it was… opaque. Frozen walls of water drooped with icicles, their borders etched with frost. The scope of it was chillingly beautiful, but without a single sign of the raging flames I’d always associated Quinn with.
I hadn’t realized until just now how dark and thick my own ice was, as if something more solid lurked beneath its frigid surface.
This… this was bare and fragile and glittering with raw menace.
Even the moon, the tiniest slice of light I’d ever seen, looked like an icicle in the shape of a sickle above my head.
Quinn’s consciousness stood by her gate, so focused on her conversation with Dazmine that she was completely unaware of my presence as I tiptoed around her and nudged open the door.
It wasn’t hard to find her memories. Her maze was made of short, angular pathways, and the things she was trying to keep secret were already at the forefront of her mind.
“It’s insane here, huh?”
A misty version of first-year Quinn was walking next to Jenia on Bascite Boulevard during what looked like the first hour of our arrival. I crept toward the memory in order to analyze every detail of it.
“Oh—” Jenia flipped a partial curtain of hair over her shoulder. “—I’m from Belliview, so I’m used to all this.”
Quinn stared at her.
“So you’re like, right next to Bascite Mountain!”
“Well, yeah.” Jenia passed an amused smile to Quinn, but there was something keen and hungry beneath the curve of her mouth. “You must be from one of the smaller villages?”
“Yeah, Alderwick.” Quinn said the name of our home as if it were a centipede or something else she might squash easily underfoot.
“It’s kind of stupid there. Everyone knows everyone, and we’re all assigned the lamest jobs after our Final Tests.
No one ever dances or sings or… does anything else unless it’s a special occasion. ”
Jenia snickered. “God, that does sound stupid. My older sister and I—back before she left for the Institute, at least—we would go to these performances on the weekends, where Wild Whisperers would get the flowers to dance and Element Wielders would juggle balls of live fire and Object Summoners would fly you around the room.”
Quinn gasped. “Just for fun?”
“Well, yeah.”
Their conversation continued as they pressed further down Bascite Boulevard, but I studied Jenia’s eyes, how they swept over Quinn with that same keen hunger as before, and I finally understood: in Belliview, she’d never been seen as anything special surrounded by all that fantastic magic, but here, Quinn slathered her in attention and admiration and awe.
And when I’d showed up a little later that day and Quinn had called me her best friend from home, Jenia had fought tooth and nail to keep that feeling all to herself.
Even when she and Quinn ended up in different sectors, Jenia must have viewed me as the wrong person to have been given the same power as her.
I’d never looked at Jenia with attention, admiration, or awe.
I’d only looked at her with confusion and wariness and—later, when they were attacking Gileon for fun—disgust.
I moved to another memory.
This time, Jenia had cornered Quinn between two Element Wielder classrooms that glimmered with uncut rubies embedded into the alabaster.
“Do you remember what I told you about Kimber? How she’s on track to join the Good Council after her Final Test?”
Quinn glanced around nervously. “Yeah? What about it?”
“Well, she found out that one of our classmates isn’t what they pretend to be,” Jenia said, a cold glitter in her eye.
“And if we get her to confess, Dyonisia Reeve might let us join the Good Council, too.” She grabbed Quinn’s hands.
“Daz was too scared, but she doesn’t know what we’d get rewarded with.
She’s never been interested in moving up in life like you have. ”
A flicker of desire stuffed out the nerves written in every line of Quinn’s face. She closed her fingers around Jenia’s hands.
“Who isn’t who they pretend to be?”
Jenia uttered my name, and Quinn and I jolted with horror at the same time.
I ran away before I could hear her response, following the echoes of another memory.
This one was even more jarring than the others.
It started off as a giant gap, as if the beginning had been ripped away.
But then Lander was there, in his panther form, snarling at her with such vicious, spitting rage that I knew this must have been the tail-end of her memory of that incident in the jungle last year.
The part of her memory that Steeler had left intact.
A sob burst from Quinn’s throat at the look of such hatred on Lander’s shifted face.
She turned and fled.
Branches and brambles snagged at her clothes as she tried to tear through them.
She could have used her wind to push them apart and create a path home for herself, but something peculiar was happening to her body: it was growing frost. A hue of blue was washing over her skin, as if her magic was trying to calm down her racing heart. To freeze her panic in its tracks.