Chapter Fourteen. Rory
Rory
Rory found himself sitting with Daye in the fortress, legs dangling over the edge, looking at the swanlings learning to swim.
A plinking sound came from beneath them.
He peered down, and saw fish swarming over something in the water.
Another plink. This time, Rory could just catch the perfect crescent of a fingernail before it disappeared among the silvery, twisting bodies.
Rory looked up.
Beside him, Daye held her hands before her. Fingers were dropping from her palms, tap-tap-tapping into the pond like a soft rain, before disappearing into gaping mouths.
Rory screamed. Or he tried to, but his voice was lodged in his throat, like someone had put a stopper there.
The afternoon was alive with buzzing insects and brushing leaves and the soft, incessant sound of fingers falling while fish gorged themselves on flesh and nails below. But Rory couldn’t make a sound.
Beside him, Daye’s skin was cracking like dry earth. Through the fissures, he could see decaying leaves spilling out, browned ferns poking from the corner of her eye. Daye kept smiling. ‘What?’ she asked with hands that were still raining fingers. ‘What’s wrong?’
He was screaming now, as hard as he could, hard enough that it felt like something was breaking in his throat.
No sound came out. He tried to reach out, to pick up the parts of her that were falling before the fish could eat them.
But like his voice, his ability to move was simply gone, his hands hanging placidly at his side.
Daye was falling apart faster. Her palms were fingerless now, the cracks in her face wider, her hair almost gone.
Their eyes met. She mouthed his name around the dead flowers spilling onto her tongue.
And then a gust of wind came, and she simply … broke apart, dissipating into a cloud of leaf dust. Leaving nothing but a few flakes behind while Rory soundlessly screamed her name, staring at the empty spot where she was just—
Rory woke up, mouth still open in a shout, and kept panting long after he was sure that Daye was there, sleeping on the other side of the room, face limned in moonlight.
It had happened almost every night lately.
The moment he closed his eyes, a relentless barrage, a reel parading his greatest hits, would begin: Daye’s fingertip nestled in the grass.
Daye in bed, her skin cracked in ways skin should not be able to crack.
The silence of the house when she stopped breathing.
Opening Daye’s chest. Lifting off Daye’s face.
He would wake up gasping again and again and again.
Make sure Daye’s chest was moving in the bed by the window. Close his eyes. Rinse, repeat.
He was almost used to it by now.
He did all his usual checks: Her chest was rising and falling, all of her fingers were intact—one palm curled into a fist by her face, the other resting under her cheek. But he knew there would be no more sleep tonight.
Through the window, the scent of honeysuckle wafted in, heady and sweet.
It reminded him of the spring transition—the heavy sweetness of rotting flowers mingling with the smell of coffee on Wynne’s breath as she told him that he “absolutely got the knack of it.” How the mix made his stomach churn with nausea, or maybe it was the leftover adrenaline.
How wrung out and shaky he felt, clutching a fresh bouquet of horrors to decorate his nighttime.
Rory rubbed his eyes. He’d thought things would be better after. Once he managed to do the transition without any help from Wynne, like he had this summer. Once he wasn’t dependent on his sister’s erratic comings and goings. Once he knew he could take care of Daye by himself.
Instead, it was somehow worse. He kept thinking, What if he made a mistake, botched it up, hurt Daye in some way that couldn’t be repaired? What if he got sick at the wrong time, or lost his voice, or broke his arm exactly when Daye needed help?
Daye’s life was truly, literally, in his hands.
In the middle of the night, his throat still raw from shouting, the weight of it seemed almost incomprehensible.
There must be something I can do, he thought desperately, staring at the cracks running through the plaster. There had to be something that would keep Daye from falling apart every few months.
Because Rory could find no reason that Daye could last only one season.
Why not five months without a transition, or eight, or a year?
Wynne kept claiming that it was “just the way flower girls are,” but she could never tell him why they had to be that way.
And it wasn’t like she had ever tried to find a better way.
Hell, Rory could barely even make his sister take the time to do the transitions; he couldn’t imagine her trying to make the transitions better. She just didn’t care.
But Rory did. God, his throat still hurt from how much, how viscerally, he cared.
What if he could find a way to change it, fix it?
What if he could make Daye last longer, or—Rory could barely let himself think it—not fall apart at all?
Hydrangeas could survive until winter, and asters bloomed well into autumn—so why not Daye, too?
What if it was only a matter of different materials or balance or words; an easy matter to fix, the moment he knew how?
The answers must exist, somewhere. They had to. He just needed to find them.
The sky was paling with the muddy darkness of predawn when Rory got up, the beginning of a plan slowly taking shape in his head.
As the kettle hissed and bubbled, he went to the shelf, letting his finger bump along the spines of the books.
Forest Transformations. Evergreens from Antiquity to Modernity.
Construction: A Concise Guide. He paused at the last one, finger caressing the familiar green spine.
The kettle started whistling. Rory removed all three from the shelf and settled down to read.