Chapter 2 #2
And the pain. I remember the pain. It was a physical thing—a crushing, a pulverizing, an agonizing, mottled wrench in my chest. For three days straight, I did nothing but cry.
In my bed. In the shower. In the car with my mom on the way to the police station.
Even when the crying began to ebb, the pain didn’t.
It stayed, slowly digging me apart from the inside out.
My limbs felt so weak, like the loss of half our family had taken the strength from my muscles with it.
It was too much. I kept waiting for it to get better, but it never did. And just as it reached a peak, just when I thought my mind might literally break from the sorrow, everything just… stopped.
I remember that morning so clearly. It’s my first true, cohesive memory, after the incident.
I woke in my own bed, pillow crusty from a week’s worth of snot and tears.
The sun was out. It cast a long, melancholy streak across the foot of my bed.
There was that blissful half-second of amnesia, where I was still just a regular girl waking in her childhood home, her parents in the kitchen downstairs, her brother asleep across the hallway.
And then I remembered.
I remembered, and I braced myself for the pain. For the wave of crushing sorrow.
But it never came.
I sat there for ten seconds. Twenty. My whole body was limp. I looked inside myself and I found nothing. No sadness. No anger. No pain. No happiness or contentment, either, but I didn’t care. I welcomed the emptiness. Relished it.
I swung my feet out of bed, feeling nothing. I trudged down the stairs, feeling nothing. And when I walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, I stared at its contents and felt nothing. No hunger whatsoever.
The emptying out of my emotional tank came just in time. That week, we were going to memorialize Dad and Michael, and I don’t think I could even have made it to the funeral home if I’d been in the state I was the week before.
First came the wake. Then the funeral. Then a constant stream of uncles and cousins and friends flowing through our tiny St. Paul bungalow.
Even a few girls from school attended—friends who would soon fade from my life, as I faded from the world.
We clustered together on the staircase in my front hall, the girls forming a jagged circle with me at the center, as if they could somehow shield me from my loss.
Every event included food. Canapes and finger sandwiches at the wake.
Cold dips and cups of fruit after the funeral.
And, of course, an endless stream of casseroles and tater tot hotdishes, towers of melted cheese and plastic wrap that swayed precariously in our fridge, threatening to topple over every time we opened the door.
I touched none of it. I couldn’t. Every time I brought a cucumber sandwich or pineapple cube up to my lips, all I saw was the parking lot.
Two blurry, faceless creatures. A spear through my father and brother, their souls leaking out onto the pavement.
And me, frozen. Doing nothing. Not running.
Not yelling for help. Not saving them. Not saving them. Not saving them.
I dumped the pineapple cubes straight into the garbage.
During those first few weeks, the only thing I allowed myself to consume was a box of expired graham crackers I found at the very back of the cupboard. When I nibbled at their edges, they tasted more like sandpaper than food.
I didn’t go back to school right away. No one expected me to—not my teachers, not my classmates, not even my mom. I spent my afternoons drifting from room to room, picking up books and putting them down without even cracking their spines.
This ritual continued for several days. It might have gone on forever, had I not eventually tugged Advanced Spanish Translation off a dusty basement shelf.
Of all the books I’d held in the previous week, this was the only one that caught my interest. There was something about its cheerful green cover, the stock images of children climbing mountains and exploring ceramic-tiled plazas.
I didn’t know where it had come from. A relic from one of my parents’ midlife crises, maybe.
This, the dusty old book seemed to say. This is your escape. I am your escape.
I’d always had a natural gift for language.
I grew up speaking both English and Danish, thanks to my mother, who grew up in Copenhagen.
I taught myself Maevish and Lukkarin not long thereafter, though I wasn’t doing it to impress anybody; it just sort of happened.
I was obsessed with the elves. Enamored with them.
I spent most of my free time watching YouTube videos about their culture, some of which were in English, some of which were in their native tongues.
“It’s remarkable,” I overheard my first-grade teacher whisper to my mom when they thought I wasn’t listening. “The way Quinn absorbs languages, she’s like a human sponge.”
That day, I spent hours flipping through Advanced Spanish Translation’s pages.
Despite its title, I wasn’t reading to learn translation.
I wasn’t memorizing nouns and adjectives, pasting Spanish words beside their English equivalents.
I’d started Spanish the year before and had already picked up an impressive collection of vocabulary since then.
No. I was reading for structure. I was reading to learn, in painstaking detail, the rules that governed the Spanish language.
I loved them. Clung to them—their clarity, their sequence.
Every sentence had a beginning, middle, and end.
There were no sudden cut-offs. Nothing left unfinished.
The book was divided by tenses: it began with the present, transitioned to the past, followed up with the future, and then, finally, magnificently—the subjunctive.
Technically speaking, the subjunctive is not a tense; it’s a mood. It is used for the theoretical, not the literal: judgment, preferences, emotions, possibilities. Uncertainty and unreality. Doubt and desire.
Language became my lifeline. I played translation games on poorly designed websites. I fed myself words instead of food. I stood before the bathroom mirror and conjugated verbs, watching my lips move with the detached interest of an artist painting another’s portrait.
“Yo voy, tu vas, él va,” I said. Present. “Yo vaya, tu vayas, él vaya.” Subjunctive.
With each passing day, I felt the present slipping away. I spoke to myself only in the subjunctive. Descended into a world ruled by the theoretical.
“Es posible que yo sea mala persona,” I said.
It’s possible that I’m a bad person.
“Es posible que yo pueda pasar hambre hasta que la culpa desaparezca,” I said.
It’s possible to starve the guilt away.
After a month of feeding myself nothing but stale graham crackers and the subjunctive, the world around me felt fuzzy. Unreal. Thoughts flitted through my head, but they felt separate from my sense of self, like far-off daydreams.
And still I conjugated.
“Es posible que el dolor nunca termine,” I said.
It’s possible that the pain will never end.
“Es posible que me esté volviendo loco,” I said.
It’s possible that I’m losing my mind.
And then, in the thickest depth of the fog, just as I felt my final tether to reality begin to slip loose…
“Es posible que mi hermano esté todavía vivo.”
It was like a bolt of lightning. Like an AED placed directly over my heart. Eight words that shocked me back to life. That cleared the fog in an instant, bringing everything into focus.
It’s possible that my brother is still alive.
It was true. It was possible. I’d seen my father die, but Michael? He’d only been injured before the elves swept him away. And my mother had told them that—the police, the paramedics, anyone who would listen. But they’d all said the same thing: there’s nothing we can do.
I understood why. The elves are above our laws. They do what they want, and who are we to try and stop them? We puny, magicless humans are nothing in the face of their power.
If it had been anyone but Michael, I would have done the same. Keep my head down, go about my life. But it wasn’t anyone else. It was my brother. My best friend in the world. I had to at least try. And if I couldn’t find him, I could at least do the next best thing. For him and for my dad.
I could get revenge.
Even at twelve, I wasn’t a fool. I knew I stood no chance at taking down the elves.
One human child against an entire race of powerful magical beings?
No. If I wanted revenge, I needed to play the long game.
I needed to dig past the elves’ seemingly impenetrable facade. I needed to find their weakness.
That’s why I worked my ass off to get where I am now.
Why I gave up my childhood, eschewing friends and free time and a social life in favor of study and tutors and practice tests.
I knew language was my best shot, so I pleaded with my mother to put me into Mandarin class as well as Spanish.
If I wanted to get into one of the schools where the four Princes of the Sun were posted—Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Beijing—I needed to be better than good. I needed to be exceptional.
I did it all for one reason: to get close enough to the elves to find their weakness.
Dad was a police officer, before his murder. Working his way toward making detective. He used to say: A person’s weakness lies in the secrets they keep. The information they deem too precious—or too terrifying—to reveal.
What is the one thing the elves have refused, time and time again, to reveal to humanity?
What was so compelling that it brought them to an entirely new world—but too precious to be shared outside their species?
Their goal. The thing they’re looking for. That’s their secret.
So, I’m going to find out what it is.
And then I’m going to use it to destroy them.