Chapter 23
CORIN ATTEMPTED TO swim back to Summerland, but the currents had pulled her too far. Her strength had already waned when a large shadow cast from the sky. Malicine’s wings flapped rapidly as they dove toward Corin to retrieve her. It was hardly a rescue mission, since they were quick to release Corin mid-air by the time they reached the shore. The force rolled her body across the sand until her chest slammed into a rock. She reeled over and heaved water. Several pearls had clogged her throat and spewed into the sand. It wasn’t until her retching subsided that Malicine towered over her.
“What is wrong with you?” they snapped. “I told you to get out!”
Corin looked back at the ocean. Beyond the horizon, an island loomed as a speck of gray, like a blot of ink that stained a ruined canvas. The faraway land had crept onto her without her even noticing. By the time she did, the clouds had unfurled like rotting flowers, and the bottom of the ocean had pulled her to drown. Strands of kelp had wrapped around her ankles, wrists, thighs, almost as if the island’s fingers were tightening around her, claiming her for its depths.
How had it been possible that she didn’t notice the island until now?
Elly’s voice brought Corin back to shore. Her small figure darted across the sand, followed by Briar, who had reverted to normal in her pristine dress and sun-kissed skin. As if she hadn’t been caught in the tides, wrecked with despair in her truest form, mere moments ago.
Elly leapt into Corin’s arms and squeezed her tight. “I thought I lost you,” she sobbed.
Corin buried her face into Elly’s hair, welcoming the smell of salt instead of death, her warm skin instead of the corpses Corin had seen below. The steady drum of Elly’s pulse reminded Corin they were both alive and safe. “I could say the same to you,” her voice muffled in Elly’s hair.
Malicine continued stewing in irritation while they healed Corin’s wounds. Corin tested their patience anyway.
“What the hell was that island?” she demanded.
“A place I separated from the rest of the dreamworld,” they growled. “Get close to Autumnland, and the island will drag you down into its abyss.”
“I don’t understand. You were the one who created this world. I thought this was supposed to be a perfect paradise for—”
“Just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it can’t turn into a nightmare,” they said. “Imagine every skeleton you’ve kept locked in your closet. Autumnland is where they stay. And if you visit them, they will kill you.”
“You mean I’ll wake up,” Corin said with wariness, as if this were a test.
“No. Amelia may be the one sleeping, but our bodies crossed from the physical world to the dreamworld when we entered. Which means if you die here, you will cease to exist at all.”
The words raised goose bumps to the back of Corin’s neck. She imagined turning into nothing, as if she’d never been real to begin with. As if she’d never even mattered.
She glanced at Briar, whose skin slowly filled with color again. The princess ran her hands over her arms, rubbing them for warmth and hiding the prickles of flesh that Corin had seen stained with blood. The strange visions in the dark depths of the ocean revealed something real. Perhaps it was the only real thing Corin had witnessed throughout the dreamworld.
I see you, Amelia.
“We should continue our journey,” Briar murmured. “There’s no need to revisit the currents again.”
Corin knew what Briar did not want to discuss what happened. The girl needed to avoid the pain, even if it meant severing whoever she loved before. But the agony Corin had experienced in the ocean told her it didn’t matter how deep Briar tried to bury her suffering. It would always breathe back into their lungs, one way or another.
Waves crashed against the shore and retreated like a whisper. Sunlight trickled across the beach, and a group of tiny spheres glinted like stars in the sand. Corin recognized the pearls that had spewed from her throat moments ago. As they melted in sand, a small wire emerged from each gem, stringing them together into a necklace. She picked them up and inspected closer. The coating had worn off, and the glass base underneath had been what caught the light. There was a stain on several of them, so small and minuscule that they could have been constellations.
But stars were never as red as this, and blood had never looked so familiar.
? ? ?
THE VISIONS CONTINUED taunting the back of Corin’s mind, distracting her from new senses in Summerland. They had left the beach to hike an upward slope in a jungle, where the air turned thick and warm, and sweat drenched the back of her shirt. Somehow, Elly had enough energy to climb thick trees and tangled vegetation. She combed her fingers through tropical flowers and splashed her boots in mud to see how far they’d splatter her clothes. Malicine even entertained her whimsies and led her below a canopy. They made Elly look up at the overhang until it burst with colorful birds, and she laughed in delight, climbing vines to reach them.
Corin took advantage of their distraction by seizing Briar’s arm. She pulled the girl behind a thick cluster of ferns. Hanging foliage swayed behind their heads like curtains, shielding the two from view. Corin cornered Briar against a tree trunk, her palm pressed against the bark, her voice lowered into a whisper.
“What the hell did I see back there?” she hissed.
“It was just a nightmare,” Briar replied evenly, like she had practiced this response. “It wasn’t real.”
“You’re lying. That was a memory.” Those visions had felt too real to be imagined, too painful to be a dream. Grief clung to Corin’s chest long after the mirages disappeared, twisting her heart as if she, too, had experienced the worst night of her life and wanted to die. “Why are you hiding Amelia?”
A flash of pain crossed Briar’s face. Her eyes lost focus, clouds from a dark night shading the once bright color of sea glass. The rosy blush in her cheeks left behind pallor and clenched teeth.
“The stories say Gyldan would prosper so long as their royalty carries golden blood. But such things never held weight. The king and queen died because of Amelia,” Briar said. “It is better to be a coward. When I try to fight, it only ends in death. At least here, I can forget. I can be someone else.”
“But you’re not someone else,” Corin argued. “You’re Amelia. You saved me. Which makes everything confusing, because I’m supposed to hate you.”
Sunlight filtered through the trees, fractures of light falling on Briar’s face like crystal gems, yet never meeting her eyes. Their breaths were warm against each other’s faces as they stared at each other. If Corin looked long enough, she could see the small crack in Briar’s lips, the uneven rise and fall of her chest. If she stroked Briar’s jaw, she could notice the way it clenched, the vulnerability of flaws that lingered behind a false painting. Corin had felt Briar’s despair so acutely, because it lived in her bones as well.
She longed to meet Amelia and tear open her heart. She wanted to peer inside that bleeding organ and ask, How did you know this was my pain, too?
“I saw you, too,” Briar said. “When we were drowning in the ocean. Your memory with your friends. And what you told Elly before she ran away.”
Corin took a step back, reeling in shock, as if Briar had cut her open. But of course Briar had seen it. If the ocean revealed the worst night of Amelia’s life, then Corin’s would have been on full display in return. In the underwater depths, their open wounds existed, gaping at one another.
“Don’t,” Corin said, bristling at the edge of her words. “Don’t you dare judge me for that. You don’t know everything.”
“I would never judge you,” Briar whispered, her voice so gentle it made Corin’s heart crack. As if the girl sensed the fracture, she placed a hand on Corin’s chest, filling it with warmth at her touch. “You and Elly can be happy here. After everything you two have been through, isn’t that enough?”
Corin could no longer meet Briar’s eyes. The girl saw too much, excavating her bones and unearthing her sorrows without permission. How could Briar have heard what Corin told Elly and believe Corin still deserved happiness? Corin glanced upward, fighting back tears, and fixated on the apricots hanging from a tree. A tiny punch of sour hit her tongue, as if she could taste the fruit. Orange paint filled her vision, a bright round orb that dripped to the bottom of a canvas, her mother’s hand steadying hers over a brush.
You just made the sun, her mother had said. As if Corin really did have that kind of magic in her hands.
But she was not a girl who held magic. She was only a thief with bitter words, nothing more.
“This isn’t real,” Corin insisted, her voice close to breaking.
Briar’s stare seemed to trace the curve of Corin’s face, unearthing her shame and accepting it anyway. “And what if it’s not?”
Corin shook her head. “I can’t do that to El. Or Harlow. Or anyone.” Her voice trembled. “It’s not fair.”
Not after what I did.
Corin heard Elly shouting from the other side of the foliage, her voice breaking their reverie. The sound made Corin’s heart leap out of her chest and jolted her forward. Her limbs thrashed the thick grass surrounding them as she charged through tangled vines to find her sister. In the open clearing, Elly and Malicine had both turned in the same direction, gazes caught by a wild fox behind the bushes. Corin recognized the brown fur and beady eyes in the dappled sunlight. Even when the fox turned to run, she knew he had been following her.
Mud spat in the air as Elly charged after the fox’s blurry tail, leaving the group behind. Panic overtook Corin’s pounding heart again.
“El, wait!”
Elly didn’t listen and disappeared into the foliage. Corin chased her through a winding path of thick trees and sliding boulders. She cut through woody vines and fallen fruit, yelling for Elly to come back. She didn’t want Elly to find out.
Find out what?
Corin didn’t know. No, not that—she didn’t want to remember.
She slowed down to an open area in the middle of the jungle, where clusters of trees wrapped around them like a bowl. In the center, Elly knelt in front of a limp figure, hunched over in grief. Her back looked so small. What she held, even smaller.
Corin approached them from the side, even though she already knew what was in Elly’s hands. The fox had shrunk since Corin last saw him in Winterland. His tail drooped lifelessly over Elly’s arm, his head buried in her lap. Tangled clumps of dirt matted his coat. Elly picked through his fur, as if to inspect for wounds. She only found cracks in his skin, lengthening around his face and torso, his flesh split so far open it bled in clay. Her tears stained his porcelain coat as she kept piecing him together. Each shard sliced Elly’s skin while phantom pain coursed through Corin’s hands, her fists clenching to ignore it.
Fixing him was useless. Every time she fiddled with the pieces, they left cracks, evidence of it breaking apart.
“Don’t you understand?” Corin said. “We can’t put him back together again.”
Elly placed him gently to the ground, where he separated into pieces. She turned to Corin, tears slicking the dark pools of her eyes.
“Then why did you break him?”
Elly’s tears flashed in Corin’s memory. She gasped on Gyldan’s thick air, nearly choked on it. She didn’t want the anger and desolation to return—their year in that house, walls cracked and peeling, floorboards groaning under each step, as if the building had resigned itself to ruin. Elly had hated this home. She despised its protective isolation, craving instead to return to the commune’s shared tents, a place that rang with laughter and not secrets whispered through broken beams.
It didn’t matter that Corin had told her sister that their friends were gone. Elly was too na?ve to believe in the permanence of death. “Harlow wouldn’t have been caught so easily,” her sister had argued that night, fueling Corin’s irritation.
Corin paced around the muddy ground of the jungle, but the dreamscape morphed to the memory as if it were happening in real time. Tall trees melted into gray walls. Tangled vines transformed to leaking pipes. Bark turned to burlap, fruit and foliage to tattered sheets and dust and mold. The familiar flare of anger coursed through her veins, where any sound her sister made would set Corin off like a bomb.
She was cold and tired and hungry. The lease was meant to be a new beginning, yet the decrepit house was far from the home she’d thought it would be. She’d sworn to herself that stealing from the commune would be the last time, and a steady job would be enough, as if playing by the rules would make life fair. But she grew tired of tightening her wallet, rationing bites, screaming in the middle of the night from nightmares of raining bullets and dead friends. Sleep came to her only in fragments, for Corin refused to close her eyes and dream, terrified that she would see Harlow and the others bleeding before her every night.
Her sanity felt like a frail thread, one that would snap under any more weight. Still, Elly continued rambling. “Maybe their plan worked. Maybe they escaped Gyldan—”
Corin slammed a hand on the table inside their home. The ceramic fox Harlow once gave her rolled to the edge and shattered on the ground.
“They’re dead, El.” Her patience had worn thin, and she no longer cared about delivering the news so bluntly. “They used the tunnels to plant a bomb under a military post. The soldiers knew and wasted no time killing them. You should be grateful we never got involved.”
Elly rushed to the broken fox, her knees pressed to loose floor boards, fingers pricking against the jagged edges of clay. The attempt was so useless it made Corin want to scream.
“But they planned this for so long,” Elly argued. “How would they have gotten caught—”
“Because I told him, El!”
Her words spewed out in an angry rush, a dam burst open to reveal nothing but regret and self-loathing. She didn’t realize the snarl at the end of her sentence until it lingered in the air, silencing them both. The leaking pipe made a small, dripping sound that matched her heartbeat, though Corin could have sworn she heard the cracks in her sister’s.
“Who?” Elly whispered.
For the first time, her voice was quiet and frail, a flimsy hope that Corin would be better than this. They both knew that would be a lie. Elly believed in fairy tales, but even she couldn’t believe in something as impossible as Corin being good.
Corin could not bear to say his name without wanting to vomit.
“The man who put this roof over our heads.”
She had kept away from Woodbine shop whenever she patrolled the marketplace for easy pickpockets. He’d often conversed with soldiers, a business suit among steel uniforms, laughing in camaraderie as if they weren’t responsible for others’ suffering. The man was indistinguishable from any other landlord rubbing elbows and licking boots for approval.
Corin had caught his eye without stealing anything, as if her very existence had incriminated her. He’d approached her like she was a disposable body he recognized across the street, claiming she had a friend who took something of his. Even when she’d acted oblivious, he’d cornered her, a group of soldiers behind him in tow, ready to beat her into submission if she’d tried to run.
He’d claimed he’d seen Harlow and other vagrants skulking around the shops, collecting wood pulp and sawdust and gunpowder. He knew they were the same group of people spreading protest flyers around districts. What he’d wanted to know was what they were planning.
“You’d get in a lot of trouble for stealing from me. Fortunately, I’m a generous man,” he’d said. “I can tell you value the same things as I do. When there’s a lucrative opportunity, we take it. That’s the only way we survive in this world.”
The deal had been renting one of his vacant properties for five years and only paying for one year in monthly installments. Corin had been stunned by the proposition. She hadn’t allowed herself to believe it until he’d prepared the contract. A roof and four walls guaranteed by signature, even if the ink would be stained with blood.
He’d promised to send soldiers to kill her in their place if she warned the group about their conversation. On her last night at the commune, she’d told Harlow not to go to the tunnels, that they would die if they tried to execute their plan, but she could not reveal why. Did the reason matter? Her warning would have been the same even if she had not met Woodbine. They would have died regardless, with or without her.
She thought she’d made the logical choice for survival. And yet, with each night she’d screamed herself awake from nightmares, she only remembered herself as a desperate, pathetic animal that had been backed into a corner and chose to save only herself.
Elly must have thought the same, for she was still staring at Corin with disgust.
Corin had never seen her sister look at her that way before. Her skin itched with shame. She wanted to rip it off until she could no longer live inside her own wretched body.
“I warned Harlow not to go. I tried to get them to stop. But we had to leave them, El.” Like an afterthought, she added, “I did it for us.”
“Stop lying, Corin. You did it for yourself.”
Elly stood up, her volume raising with her height. Since when had she grown so quickly? The girl used to be a wailing infant in Corin’s arms. Now she stood almost to eye level and talked back when Corin did something irreparable.
“I was happy with them, and you couldn’t be. You kept wanting more.”
“Of course I wanted more!” Corin shouted, a burst of fury in her chest like her heart was a star collapsing into itself. “I don’t want to die a starving artist or be part of a rebellion. I don’t want to sleep on the ground because every army owns the land we walk on. I don’t want to hold on to little figurines and have my life be reduced to useless, sentimental trinkets just to cope with everything I’ve lost.”
Her boots crunched against the shards of clay on the ground. The sharp edges of the fox cut into the soles. Her bare hands grabbed the pieces. She held a jagged chip, the paint already peeling off. The cuts in her palm stung as if she held that pen again, signing her fate, throwing away her friends’ lives in return.
“You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed.” The words burst from her lungs like a sob while anger shook her body. She hated the cards that life dealt her, and how, no matter which card she played, she would lose every single time.
“I didn’t ask you to sacrifice for me,” Elly said.
“And I didn’t ask to be your sister. I never wanted any of this. I never wanted you.”
Elly took a step back, as if Corin had taken the shard and sliced it into her sister’s chest. The girl features crumpled up on her face, the way they always did when she was about to cry.
Briefly, Corin remembered the day Elly was born. Her wrinkly face, her earsplitting wails. Slicked in blood, skin crinkled and wet in the oddest of places, her baby sister had looked disgusting. Corin had been six years old and resented losing her place as the only child. She’d hated watching their mother’s gaze slip away from her to Elly, making space in her heart for a new person, a parent’s love that would surely be rationed the same way food was. As Elly grew, Corin had kneaded the rolls in her sister’s legs like baking dough, poked at her crooked teeth, made faces at the odd creature that inhabited her life. Elly learned to walk, but kept stumbling over her feet. Corin had never tried to catch her.
“We can’t survive without each other,” their mother had said. “You have to protect your little sister.”
Now Elly stood, crying once more.
Corin remembered what happened next. She recalled it before the scene repeated itself in front of her. The seconds where Elly took a deep, trembling breath, before she let the words stab into Corin’s chest.
“I hate you.”
Elly ran into the darkness. Boots squelched in mud on Gyldan’s rainy pavements as Corin chased after her. Gravel-gray skies swallowed them back inside the sun-drenched jungle of Summerland. Corin watched Elly dart between trees and reached to grab her sister until quicksand gripped her shoes. Ankles stuck, her body fell forward, hitting a fresh sheet of snow. A blizzard roared in her ears as it turned the world white. Her eyes strained to see, barely making out the black spikes of Elly’s hair that ducked behind a castle formed in ice. As Corin got up, the snow melted to grass, stretching to endless meadows of green that sprouted wildflowers and camouflaged her sister. She barreled through a broken cottage, tore through stones and plastic furniture, chased after Elly through a winding maze of sunflowers.
Scenes morphed into one another. Seasons changed, the world continued turning, and still, Corin could never reach her sister.
Tears blurred her vision. It was bound to happen, ending up alone. She never understood how they always came back to this place. The cycle was the same. Talking turned to yelling. Loving turned to resenting. They didn’t know any other way to be together.
She threw her head back to the sky and yelled for the world to take them back, but she didn’t know where. Not to dreams or broken homes, not to any place where they had gotten along. As night descended, sunflower stalks groaned into limp postures. Their petals shriveled to brown and fell into heaps. Thick, woody vines wrapped around Corin’s ankles and pulled her deeper to the ground. She coughed out soil and rocks while her empty palms grasped for nothing. The harder she struggled, the deeper she sank. She clawed the dirt until her fingers turned raw and her nails went black.
Then a new voice emerged, one that stilled her into place.
“Don’t fight it.”
The sound had a familiar softness, one that brought forth a recent memory of ocean waves. From the corner of Corin’s vision, a small light appeared. A lantern dangled in Briar’s hand as she stepped inside the maze. The sunflowers slowly lifted, their heads tilting to one side.
Briar’s voice was gentle as she knelt in front of Corin, as if Corin had simply been lost. “You don’t need to run. Give in, and the sunflowers will take you where you need to go.”
“It’s not that easy,” Corin protested.
“You’re dreaming,” Briar said. “In dreams, you don’t need to make things harder for yourself than they already are.”
She set the lantern down and watched the tiny door swivel open. Her hand reached for the flame, cupping it gently in her palm.
“In the dollhouse, you said I was retreating into my dreams to hide. But you’ve been running away, too. Only, it’s been in the opposite direction.”
Corin’s hands tried clawing their way out of the hole, but as she sank, she could only think about who dug this hole in the first place. Was it Briar Rose who taunted her, or had Corin been the one holding the shovel, preparing her own grave?
“I felt your memories in the ocean,” Briar murmured. “I tasted you, and you were bitter. Like there was too much salt for the water to contain.”
The flame burned bright in her hand, charring the tips of her fingers. Briar held it gently, not wanting to snuff the fire out, even if it hurt her. Tears welled in her eyes yet refused to spill.
“But beneath the bitterness was something else. I felt like I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. Your anger shielded me from it. I think that’s what it’s been doing all along.”
Briar extended her palm to Corin, holding the fire close. The flame raged on, a bright burning ball that was too painful to look at. Corin wanted to turn away, but woody vines wrapped tightly around her limbs, fixing her in place. Her eyes took in the light, and there it was, the grief that she had swallowed, burning her insides. The suffocating taste of shame dried her throat like ash, curling deep into her lungs, quietly eroding her broken heart.
This kind of pain was worse than anger. It told her that she lost too many people she loved, not from the cruelty of their world, but because of her own selfishness.
As Corin continued staring into the fire, her heartbeats slowed into a dull rhythm. The pain was still there, though she became used to the sharp sting, the smoke lingering on her skin, the embers fading with each steady breath. She heard Briar’s quiet exhales, too, as they sat in front of the light. Neither exchanged words while feeling everything beneath the flame.
Here was the truth, ugly and imperfect and a part of her: Corin was not a realist, but a coward. She’d stamped over her sister’s drawings and scorned her friends’ plans because they saw something she could never grasp. They imagined a future, while she could not even believe in one.
She understood, then, what she needed to do.
Soil eroded below her ears as Corin felt herself floating back to the surface. Briar placed the flame back inside the lantern before passing the torch to Corin, whose fingers grasped the handle by instinct. They watched the light spread wider, like sunlight pouring from a bottle and crashing over a field. Sunflowers rose from the soil and dove their heads into an orange sky. Their roots untangled from Corin’s limbs. She shook off the vines with a strange sense of lightness in her body.
The stalks parted way for a clear path, where at the end of the field, Elly was waiting.
Corin left Briar behind and crossed the field, carrying the lantern and aching pain in her chest the entire way. Her breaths grew shaky as she drew closer to the curve of Elly’s back. Her sister sat hunched over the ground, the broken shards of the fox at her feet.
At the end of the road was just the two of them. The heavy weight of silence pressed on both their sagging shoulders until, finally, Elly spoke.
“You think I’m naive for wanting to believe in things,” she murmured. “But it’s not because I’m too young to understand how life works. I know how terrible the world is, Corin. I grew up in it, too. But I have to believe in something. Because if I don’t, what are we even living for?”
Tears spiked Elly’s lashes, gray memories flashing like nightmares. When she opened her eyes, she scrubbed the tears from her cheeks and sucked in a sharp breath, like it was the first time her lungs held air.
“I hate you, Corin. I hate you for betraying our friends. I hate that you destroy things before giving them a chance. I hate how you’re so afraid to be happy, like it’s some kind of trap.”
Corin’s knuckles turned white as her fingers curled into fists. Her tongue threatened to lash out, as it often did to bury the shame. But her eyes fell upon the flame burning inside the lantern. The lamp was too heavy in her hand, yet it had guided her down the road to Elly.
If Corin was going to say the truth, as painful as it was, she needed to say it while her sister was here.
“I hate you, too, El. You piss me off constantly. You’re annoying, and bratty, and never listen to what I say. When Ma was pregnant with you, I already knew you’d be a thorn in my side. I didn’t want you to be born, because you would be another burden for me to take care of.”
Raw emotion tumbled out from her voice, given way beneath the strain she’d harbored for years. She inhaled another shaky breath before sitting beside her sister. They didn’t look at each other. When their shoulders touched, a brush of warmth slowly filled her body.
“Then, somehow, you ended up being the best thing that happened to me. I can’t imagine life without you, El. It just—it doesn’t exist.”
Corin stared at the broken pieces of clay and felt a knot in her stomach. She would never be able to put him back together, nor would she ever be able to look away from her mistakes.
“I’m sorry I ruined everything. I thought if I always expected the worst, it would protect me. I was wrong. Harlow was a radical because she had hope. I was a coward because I couldn’t even dream it. I’ll always regret what I did. Every day, I think about how I should have died with them, because at least then, it wouldn’t hurt anymore.”
The wind whistled through the fields, rustling sunflower petals with a mourning howl. Corin took a deep breath, stilling herself before her confession.
“The only reason why I’m not dead is because of you. You are why I’m still here, El.”
Corin knew the life raft that was her sister extended beyond her mistakes from last year. Everything Corin did to keep them alive, every sacrifice she resented making, those choices had been made because Elly was there. If Corin was the darkness, Elly had been her light. Her sister was the thorn in her side that she refused to pull out.
Some pain in life was too excruciating to bear. The loss of their parents. Her betrayal to their friends. The slow death of her dreams.
And then there was some pain that made it worth staying.
The wind calmed into a gentle breeze, swaying the sunflower stalks. Somewhere in the distance, wind chimes tinkled like a childhood song. Corin could hear Elly’s heartbeats matching her own, a slow and steady drum. She did not expect her sister to forgive her. Some things could never be forgiven. So what was it that she was so desperate to have?
Spikes of hair grazed her cheek as Elly finally turned to look at her.
“I believe you,” she whispered.
Corin blinked through the burning in her eyes. She swallowed the lump in her throat while emotions surged inside her like a storm. She placed the lantern aside and crushed Elly in an embrace, holding her sister so tight their bodies could have fused together.
In the break of dawn, the sunflowers bent from their stalks, reached for the sisters, and enveloped the two together. Petals folded over their limbs, soft and sturdy as an anchor. Corin closed her eyes. With Elly’s hand in hers, the sunflowers carried them back to where they needed to go.