Chapter 4 Silver #2
I slowly get to my feet, needing to touch her. Wanting to soothe away the hurt. Wishing I could go through time and pull her out of whatever moment she just came from.
“I thought when one of you got injured, it would heal when you merged,” I say. The words sound accusatory.
“It . . . used to,” Mance whispers.
And she used to be able to summon without any effort. But whatever happened today, it was powerful enough to make Mance’s magic change. Which doesn’t strike me as a particularly excellent thing.
Heart opens and closes her mouth like a fish, as though she’s trying to find one of her usual cheerful quips, but she keeps coming up short.
I take two steps forward and reach for her, but my hand barely skims the side of her cheek before she disappears in front of me and I am left with only dirt on the tips of my fingers.
“We have to go,” Mance says, already rising and heading for the door. “Now.”
I want to tell her to bring Heart back out immediately and let me hold her properly. To slow down before marching off. Because she needs comfort right now. I need comfort. We should be able to take a minute. But, gritting my teeth, I force down my objections.
Clearly, there’s something going on that I don’t understand. And if she has to go, then my job is to go with her. What she’s looking for is support, not criticism. So I will give her that.
Inside, though . . . I’m a mess.
And Mance isn’t looking much better. She takes off, hurrying through the castle with an irregular, jolting gait, like she’s fighting to keep the memories from overwhelming her. All I can do is follow.
“Asset,” she mutters under her breath. “I need Asset. Where is she?”
“The war room?” I guess. It’s where she usually plans.
Mance turns on her heel and flies up a flight of stairs, then down a hallway, practically falling through a large gilded door.
Inside, everything is cluttered. The walls are papered with maps, so many that it’s impossible to determine what color the walls themselves might be underneath them all. And the maps are covered in layers of scribbles, half in her father’s scrawling hand, and half in Mance’s own, neater lettering.
There’s a desk in the center of the room strewn with parchment, and crouched on top of it is Asset.
She’s peering very closely at a globe. When we burst through the doors, however, her head snaps up.
One hand half darts to a knife at her waist, but she doesn’t complete the action when she sees it’s us.
Her dark eyes assess our expressions in one glance.
“Tell m—” she starts in a low voice. But Mance calls her back before she even fully finishes the inquiry, and I quickly see why as a familiar stallion bursts into being in the middle of the hallway.
Asset holds all the practical animals. The sheep, the chicken. The horse.
Mance launches toward the beast, and for a second I’m afraid she’ll take off without me.
But once she clambers atop it, she pauses long enough to lean back and extend a hand.
Her posture and expression are steadier now with Asset present, but I can tell she’s still rattled.
Especially with her stallion flaring his nostrils and stomping his hooves on the carpet like it’s paining him not to break into a gallop.
With a stab of relief, I take her hand and haul myself up, settling in behind her and wrapping my arms around her waist. It brings back other memories, of fleeing together on this very horse, toward a boat in the woods where we spent the night curled up together in an ivy-covered room.
I pull her tightly against my chest, wishing we were headed there now.
She doesn’t push me away, but she doesn’t lean into me either.
“Are you okay?” I whisper.
She shakes her head once but says nothing, and I don’t press any further. I can see that she’s trying to hold it together, and the last thing I would ever want to do is undermine that. I’ll be there for her later when she can fall apart in private.
For now, Mance grabs ahold of the horse’s mane and he shoots forward.
We thunder down the steps—which feels incredibly unsafe and ill-advised (and that’s coming from me)—then burst through the front doors of the palace.
Alarmed guards cry out and scramble to follow, but we don’t wait for them.
We take off, thundering down the cobblestone streets, the din of pursuit falling away behind us.
At first, everything seems normal. All the houses are where they should be. The day is bright and clear. I even hear laughter on the wind.
But before too long, people start to trickle into the streets beside us, looking frantic. As we push forward, the crowd grows more and more, like rivulets coming together to form a stream, and then a raging river. It gets harder to push through them, but Mance is forceful in urging the stallion on.
It’s not until we get close to the base of the cliffs that I start to hear the wails.
They blend together and rise in a chorus of anguish that gets louder and louder as we ride right toward it, and my skin feels clammy.
I suddenly wonder if I’m ready to see what awaits us at the base of these cliffs. To see what caused Heart’s death.
Then we round a bend, and there it is. The Outskirts.
Or . . . what used to be the Outskirts.
Mance whimpers in my arms, and I make a noise that is not far off as I struggle to comprehend what I’m seeing.
Having lived out there for almost a third of my life, I am familiar with every tree—glass or otherwise. I know the location of each beaten-down base and ramshackle home, even the ones hidden from view.
But if I thought the place was a wreckage before, it’s nothing compared to the way it looks now.
Houses are not only ripped apart, but they’re also somehow half-submerged into the dirt, as though sinking slowly into a swamp.
Trees are buried, too, and bent at odd angles.
All the tent poles and ribbons from the cleanup efforts are gone.
And . . . all of the people as well.
All of them.
It doesn’t feel real until Mance flings herself off the horse and onto her knees, wailing just as loudly as everyone else. Before I can stop her, she begins clawing at the earth, coating herself in mud and filth. I reach for her, but then she flings herself backward, screaming.
Because there’s a face in the dirt. A man.
One with open, unseeing eyes.
As Mance collapses, clutching the dirt and sobbing, I realize that I know him. He was one of the faces I passed every day. Someone who sometimes slipped me a piece of bread that I knew he couldn’t spare when I really looked like I needed it. And now he’s . . .
I fall to my knees, but as soon as I do, I almost leap back up. It suddenly occurs to me that I have no idea how many bodies I might be kneeling on.
How many people I know, who I lived among, might lay dead in the earth beneath me.
“What happened?” I rasp. “Who could do all this?”
Mance looks at me with tearstained cheeks that match the ones Heart had when I last saw her, and I can see Heart’s stark vulnerability in her eyes.
“I don’t know,” she whispers. But then her gaze hardens, and it’s Asset who takes control, cold and calculating.
“But you’d better believe that I’m going to find out. ”