Chapter 25 Silver
Silver
The sun disappears behind the horizon, and it starts as a whisper. Fears tickling the back of my mind.
You’ll never be good enough.
No one really likes you.
Happiness is for other people, not for you.
At first, I don’t think there’s anything weird about it.
The whispers are something I’m used to, and a lot has happened today to trigger them. The Citadel, the breakup, the fact that my two best friends seem to be a unit without me now.
I try to pull the fear out of my chest, just like I’ve done a few times now.
But my magic fails me.
And then other thoughts start leaking in, ones that don’t belong to me.
The Forest Realm will never be what it was.
If they find out how much my leg hurts, they won’t let me fight.
With all this violence, we’re going to lose the baby.
I have enough time to be confused, and the briefest of moments to be alarmed, to realize that there’s something foreign in my own mind and to feel a violent revulsion at the very idea of that.
And then, an onslaught.
Fear, so potent that I can feel it in my bones, like being hit with a sledgehammer.
“Silver?”
I’m on my knees. I might be screaming. I don’t know who spoke.
“What do we do? Silver, what do we do? What’s going on?”
I’m not even sure if their voices are outside my own head. There are so many. Thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, all revolving around fear.
The fears that I stoked today. This is what I made all those people feel.
My breaths are rasping. My eyes are bulging. My entire body is shaking. I can’t tell if I’m screaming or crying. Maybe both. My pulse is racing and my jaw is clenched so tight it feels like it might shatter.
But worse than the physical sensations are the terrifying scenarios that I live, all at once.
The blackness of the Citadel rushing in.
Water closing over my head. My spouse leaving with someone else.
Beetles crawling on my tongue. The inability to find a friend.
An explosion in the middle of my home. Blood on my hands.
A slamming door. A rib cage made of twigs. On and on and on and on.
And this continues . . .
All night.
I’m pretty sure the mind isn’t meant to stay in such a heightened state of fear for such a long period of time.
Aside from the emotional anguish, my head is pounding, my muscles ache from the prolonged tension, and I can’t stop hyperventilating.
It feels like my body is shutting down around me.
Or maybe that’s just one of the fears I’m living, playing out so realistically that I can’t differentiate it from my actual physical sensations.
I’m certain I’m dying.
I’m certain I’m dead.
The onslaught never pauses, not even for a moment.
Not until the gray light of the morning reaches over the horizon, and then, suddenly, it all disappears at once, and my mind is startlingly, blessedly empty.
There’s a weightlessness to that moment. Reality takes a few seconds to catch up, the memory of the smorgasbord of anguish that I experienced still lingering, blending with the very real aches and pains of my body as the tension finally sags out of it and I slump against the floor.
Actually, the floor feels weirdly soft. I must be in a bed now. I don’t remember being moved, but that doesn’t surprise me.
Rooftop is dabbing something cold and wet on my face, and his eyes widen when they catch mine, the cool cloth stilling against my forehead.
“Hey,” he says softly. “Are you back? Is it over?” He’s trying to sound casual, but I hear the catch in his voice betraying how awful the last few hours must have been for him.
I didn’t experience his fears last night, but I know him well enough to know that being unable to stop the suffering of the people he cares about is one of them.
I reach up and squeeze his wrist, croaking out a reassurance before my attention is pulled beyond him by the sound of something shattering.
Vie and Mance are screaming at each other, locked so deeply in an argument that they haven’t noticed yet that I’m awake.
I prop myself on my elbows, taking them in.
It’s jarring to see Mance here.
Not just because it’s here.
Not just because we broke up.
But also because her fears were among those I lived.
For the first time I felt the pressure of rule, how badly she wants to do the right thing and how scared she is that she is too broken to figure out how.
There were a fair amount of fears around losing me as well.
And it was odd to experience losing . . . myself.
I wonder if the different parts of Mance have different fears, or if her fears are core enough to who she is that they translate across her selves.
I blink at the Mance in front of me, trying to figure out which one she is, and my brain must still be foggy because it’s taking longer than usual.
Her hair is down like Heart wears it, but instead of being breezily free-flowing, it hangs in her face and she glares through it, in a way that Heart never would. In a way that I haven’t seen Mance glare in a long time. Months.
I sit up suddenly.
Rooftop tries to ease me back down, but I brush him off, instead getting up and shouldering my way into the middle of their argument. They both break off at the sight of me clearheaded and Mance doesn’t hesitate to shove me in the chest with two open palms, making me totter backward.
“Don’t scare me like that!” she berates me.
She goes to shove me again, but I catch her hands and use them to pull her closer. “It’s . . . you,” I say, studying her face. “You’re the one Mance didn’t want to tell me about.”
She bares her teeth in a way that is oddly more defensive than aggressive. “They call me Livid.”
I flash back to when Mance took down her father. I was in and out of consciousness, swimming through a haze of cold pain. But at one point I surfaced long enough to see Mance pulling a string of beads tight against her father’s throat. Looking like she wanted to keep them there.
“Yes . . . ,” I say slowly. “I remember you. Where have you been?”
She sneers, pulling out of my grasp and crossing her arms over her chest, rocking backward on her heels. “Mance locked me in the prison initially. I broke out about a week ago.”
“What?!” The idea of Mance doing something so drastic to herself is shocking. How could she trust herself so little? “And where have you been since then?”
“Here mostly.”
I turn to Vie incredulously. “Here?”
“What?” she asks. “She’s the only part of Mancella I actually like.”
“But you didn’t even tell me?”
“Once again, it’s not my fault that you never visit.”
I shake my head and refuse to engage in the argument, my gaze instead drifting back to Livid, trying to place her. There’s a fire in her eyes that I haven’t seen in what feels like so long.
She returns my gaze in full force and I feel the breath catch in my throat.
She takes a step closer to me, and for a second I sway toward her, drawn in somehow by the force of her.
But then I break eye contact and take a step back, a weight settling into my chest. “You should know . . . ,” I say. “Mance and I kinda ended things.”
She scoffs, angry. “Which one? Did Poise think you were messing up her image? Did Asset think it was the best tactical decision? Did Heart think she was sparing you from something? Or was Mance just too tired to put in the effort to keep you?”
Her voice is harsh and I can’t help flinching at each guess, wondering how close to true each of them might be. How very nearly every single part of her could have walked away from what we had.
I open my mouth to answer her question, but she cuts me off. “I actually don’t care. Because I didn’t break up with you. I am the one who fights, Silver. And you are one of the things that I will always fight for.”
Before I know what’s happening, she crashes her lips to mine.
Adrenaline sears through me, dulling the aches and pains I felt just a moment ago and lighting me up from the inside.
I try to fight it for the barest of seconds, but my willpower is shot, and I reach for her like a starving man, plunging my hands into her hair.
All the passion, all the feeling I’ve been missing from her, is here in this kiss, and it’s like waking up from a dream.
There’s stark, desperate emotion in her fingertips as she presses them into the sides of my face.
There’s yearning in the tilt of her body as she pushes closer to me.
And I return it all in kind, meeting her with the same fervor, holding her so tightly against me that I can’t tell where I end and she starts.
Our tongues tangle, our breath is hot, and then she whispers something against my mouth. I think it’s “I’ve missed you.”
I say it back, knowing immediately how true it is, and every inch of my skin is on fire.
When we finally break for air, I’m panting. She grins at me and leans up to kiss me again, but—with the supremest of efforts—I hold up a hand to stop her. Though my traitorous gaze lingers on her lips for another moment before I manage to wrench it away.
“We have to get you back to Mance,” I tell her.
Her smile evaporates, a scowl sliding into its place. “It’s not like she doesn’t know we’re apart, Silver. She doesn’t want me, and she won’t be happy to see me.”
“She may not want you, but she does need you. She just doesn’t realize how much.”
I make for the door, but she grabs my arm, her expression suddenly desperate. Almost scared. “Can’t we just . . . run away together? You get me in a way that she doesn’t. We could be good together.”
“We are good together,” I say, putting my hand over hers. “But it’s like I told Mance. I don’t want just part of you. I want all of you. Every single bit.”
Livid grimaces, but her eyes are vulnerable. “Even if she doesn’t want all of herself?” she asks.
“Especially then,” I tell her. “Come on.”