CHAPTER 13 EZZO
EZZO
I thought I had the stomach to watch. I thought I wanted to see Chase strip the Indigo of her superiority. I thought I wanted her punished for weaponizing Eve’s words.
The future told me to. She’d said it so simply—so flippantly—that it downright filled me with rage.
Because how dare she turn that phrase against me?
How dare the future use my most private memory as a bargaining chip to be traded and played?
Handing her to Chase felt like justice in that moment, and I wanted to stay while it was carried out as a way to even the scales, pay her back for my execution.
But though I’ve known, for a while now, the true violence of a Gold’s gift, I’ve only ever learned of its effects in the abstract, never been close enough to witness them for myself, hear what that pain sounds like.
It sounds like a mistake. The Indigo’s screams are a tempest, piercing and wrong.
The look on her face is worse.
Her cheeks are wet, her eyes bloodshot, her skin as pallid as a drift of snow, every delicate feature twisted into a pleading mask of anguish.
We were always going to need her magic. I try to rationalize the guilt away. Since the trackers know they’re hunting a palette of three Hues, her ability to see the future could mean the difference between capture and escape. This isn’t about Eve, it’s about survival. Necessity not retribution.
You keep telling yourself that. Just because something’s true doesn’t make it right—or easier to bear.
“Come on—it’s better if you leave him to it.” With a gentle hand, Cemmy leads me into the corridor, pulling the door shut behind us as a means of muffling the sound of pain.
But there is no muffling sound in the Gray; the shadows carry it like a feather on the wind.
“Is that how you stomach it?” I ask. “You just leave him to it?”
“We do what we have to, Ez. That’s always been true.”
Maybe. But it sure grew more violent when Chase entered the fray. And there’s always a reason to ask him to steal us more magic; we always need another advantage to help outrun our parents’ sins. Today, the Indigo just happens to be paying the price for them.
Gods, the Indigo, it suddenly occurs to me that I didn’t even ask her name.
Good luck getting it now. I flinch as, beyond the wall, her torment rises in pitch.
The extraction won’t kill her—unlike Hues, full-bloods have enough magic to survive the drain, and so long as Chase doesn’t take too much, her power will regenerate—but right at this moment, she’s probably wishing for death.
Or at least, she’s probably wishing that we’d never met, or that she’d handed me over to the trackers while she still had the chance.
I wasn’t helping you; I was helping me. Getting to the bottom of a future they can’t predict.
I didn’t get the sense that she was lying when she said that, but it does raise the question of: why does an acolyte believe that she saw something no one else did?
That no one else could? I mean, if the future truly has seen its own end—if it wants to prevent it—then why would it send that vision to one girl instead of an entire guild?
That’s her problem, not yours. I shake the sea of whys from my head. The only thing I need to do is help the others flee Sarotuza so that we can go our separate ways, live to see another city.
An eternity seems to pass before the Indigo’s screams begin to abate, the torture stretching endlessly, until at long last, Chase emerges, looking not one bit ashamed. He’s spent his whole life learning to live with the cost of his power; he’s beyond feeling pity for a crying Shade.
You should be beyond it, too. I swallow down the bile and will the nausea to go away.
The last Shade I was forced to work with was a monster, and this one was all too happy to corral me with threats.
They’re the bad guys. Always have been. So why should we feel guilty for surviving in whatever way we can?
The trackers hunt, we evade them, they catch us, we die an agonizing death in a cell—or in a court chamber—and no matter how small we make ourselves, how quiet, the Council’s soldiers still come knocking in the end.
They keep pushing metal to its breaking point then acting all surprised when it breaks.
“I don’t suppose you have any tips for using her magic properly?” Chase asks, drawing me out of my malaise.
“Tips? Why?” I blink at him. “You’ve cast seeing spells before.” Wasn’t that the whole point of doing this in the first place? Of inflicting such a mountain of pain?
“Yeah, and they’re always a bit temperamental,” he says, brow furrowing to a deep vee. “But I guess I’m mostly wondering why she seemed so adamant that it wouldn’t work for me—that it isn’t even working for her?”
“You were about to take her magic, Chase.” I shrug, since as far as mysteries go, this one basically solves itself. “Maybe she thought that would stop you.”
“Maybe.” He doesn’t look or sound convinced. “It’s more the way that she said it, like she was . . . I don’t know, confessing to something she didn’t want to admit. Something real.”
Except it can’t be real because I saw her using it. As we were working to escape the tavern, she was communing with the future every step of the way—and in a pretty intense fashion, falling in and out of the trance more readily than my mother ever did.
“Well, you’ve taken it now, so you may as well try to use it,” I say, unwilling to let all that ill-gotten color go to waste. “Just remember that premonition is question-based. The more specific your phrasing, the more reliable the vision.”
“So, if I ask where the trackers are heading, will it show us which parts of the city to avoid?”
“It should—in theory.” Though in practice, who the hell knows what answer we might get. Mom always said the future was intractable.
“Then let’s test the theory.” Chase closes his eyes, his face clouding with concentration as he reaches for the Indigo’s magic and begins to wrestle with the fates.
A few long seconds go by.
A few more.
A minute.
And then—right as I start to wonder if maybe the Indigo wasn’t lying, after all, if maybe her magic really is broken and we just tortured her for no reason—the future descends on him with a vengeance.
Chase’s head jerks back, his spine arching, his skin paling white as the cliffs. A strangled howl of fear escapes him, wild with hurt, and shock, and broken pieces of destiny so violent they send him crashing to his knees, his hands flying up to cup his temples.
“Chase?” Cemmy barrels up the stairs to meet his panic. “What the hells happened, Ez? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I say as she drops to his side.
“He was trying to use the Indigo’s power and then he suddenly just .
. . freaked out.” And not in a way I’ve ever seen before.
My mother’s visions were calm, temperate things.
Noticeable, yes, but never vicious. Never punishing enough to cause her pain.
“Chase.” Cemmy puts a gentle hand to his cheek. “Chase, can you hear me?”
With a sharp exhale, he snaps out of the future, the storm in his eyes clearing, the bloom of Indigo around his irises dulling violet until it fades.
“Hey—hey, look at me,” Cemmy urges, softly coaxing him back to speech. “What is it? What did you see?”
“The Gray,” he breathes, low and frantic. “I saw it dying, I—I saw the magic dying.” His fingers instantly close around the scry at his neck, the one bonded to Magdalena, his Amber sister who recently came within an inch of causing that very thing herself.
“Mags, is she—?”
“She’s fine.” The tension in his body instantly deflates. “She says she’s safe and hidden. Whatever this is, it isn’t her.”
“Could it still . . . be her, though?” Cemmy aims that question at me. “I mean, if it’s the future he’s seeing, then doesn’t that mean it hasn’t . . . happened yet?”
“Technically, yes, but the timeline doesn’t fit,” I tell her, thinking back to Mom’s stories about the fates.
“If Magdalena’s safe today, then it would take months before the shadows started feeling the effects of her gift.
” Or at least, that’s how long it took her to destabilize them last year, when the Church triggered her power and locked her in an iron cell.
“The future doesn’t usually reveal itself quite so far in advance.
There would be too many unmade decisions standing in the way. ”
“Then maybe it’s a different Amber.” Cemmy grasps at the next straw. “That dilution might be rare, but these things are random, right? We could have fluked into another one by sheer chance?”
“Well, if we did, they’re not in Sarotuza,” I say, crossing my arms. “I’d have noticed an Amber.”
“Are you sure about that, Ez?” Her reply is as condescending as it is blunt. “Because you’ve not exactly been paying attention lately.”
“Yes, I’m sure.” I bristle, but I make a show of blinking into my magic nonetheless, checking for any trails I might have overlooked.
My gift isn’t limitless, but it does allow me to sense Shades from dozens of miles away, to track even the barest hint of them through the shadows.
I only missed Magdalena’s trail back in Isitar because it never occurred to me to search the reformed side of the city—let alone an impenetrable fortress controlled by the Church.
Today, I’m not making that same mistake, and a systematically thorough search later, I’m a hundred percent confident when I declare, “Sarotuza is Amber free.”
“Okay, so they’re somewhere else, then.” Cemmy’s frustration is glib. “If the Gray’s dying again, what other explanation could there be?”
“No—whatever’s happening, it’s happening here.
” This time, Chase is the one to argue. “I can’t explain it, but I could .
. . feel that we’re in the right place. The vision, it was .
. . chaotic, fractured—more like flashes of truth than an actual scene.
But the future wants us involved, I just know it. And this is where it wants us to be.”
“Well, that’s too bad because we’re not staying,” Cemmy says, as though that decision isn’t up for debate. “We have to leave as soon as possible. The entire city’s looking for Ez.”
“Looking for us, actually.” I break the news to her with a sigh. “Turns out, the Indigo has a knack for resisting compulsion; she told the trackers about you two, as well.”
“Gods, of course she did.” Cemmy drags a breath through her teeth.
“Then you know what, fine, since she’s so intent on sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong, she can also tell us what this damn vision is supposed to mean.
” It’s always act now, think later with Cemmy, run straight at the problem until you slam into trouble head first.
“No—let me do it.” I reach out to stop her, unwilling to let that temper make a bad situation worse. “When I was in there before, she mentioned something about the death of the Gray, I just didn’t believe her. Maybe I can get her to say more.”
Or maybe she’ll tell you to pick a hell and go rot in it.
Given what I allowed Chase to do, I wouldn’t blame her for cursing me right out of that room. Right out of the shadows, too, if I’m honest; that’s what I’d be wishing on her if our roles were reversed. But for whatever reason, the future chose to weave our paths together and lead us to this point.
It chose to meddle.
And meddling is its way of showing us something.