CHAPTER 24 RAYA
RAYA
It hurt more than I thought it would, watching Killen kiss another girl.
Not because he was cheating, or because the future planned it, or even because I paid a courtesan to do the kissing.
It hurt because watching him kiss her made me remember all those times he’d kissed me.
How, despite the fact that I wasn’t in love with him, the friendship that held us together was real.
And now he’ll never forgive me—not once he finds out what I did.
I’ll never forgive me.
“Raya—are you listening to me?” A snap of Akari’s fingers jerks me out of my guilt.
“Sorry—what?”
“I said: have you ever known a vision to manifest this way?” she repeats. “To self-fulfil?”
Right, yes. I was mid-explanation when a peal of the courtesan’s laughter pulled my attention away, drew it to the fact that she and Killen were leaving the tavern.
“Erm . . . no, but I have heard of it happening.” They are allowed to leave.
I try to shake off the nausea and focus on what’s important.
Leaving doesn’t mean she’ll do anything you didn’t ask for.
Or at least, I don’t think she will. That’s not how courtesans work, is it?
They don’t offer up extras just because they like who they’re dallying with?
“Damn it—Ray!” This time, Akari’s reproach includes a none too gentle poke to the ribs.
“Sorry—sorry.” I dig my nails into my thighs and force my attention to stop wandering. “It’s an incredibly rare type of prophecy. Only ever seen in relation to a very specific kind of fated path, called a fundamental.”
“A fundamental path? You’re sure?” Ezzo immediately understands what that means, the potential ramifications.
“I’m not sure about anything,” I tell him. Not the vision, not my actions, not our future—never mind something as monumental as this. “But I don’t know what else to think.”
“And is either of you going to explain what fundamental path means?” Saleen leans forward in her chair, her displeasure drumming angrily against the table. “Or are the rest of us supposed to just guess?”
“Sorry, it’s . . .” How to even begin describing such a nebulous concept?
Let alone to the livid Red I dragged into my scheme.
“Think of the future as a tapestry—an intricate image made up of millions and millions of threads.” I decide to start at the very beginning, with the same analogy Professor Lyons teaches every class of Indigos on their first day.
“Individual futures—or threads—aren’t set in stone, they’re altered by the choices we make.
But there are certain futures that are integral to the big picture, and we call those fated paths, because they’re less amenable to change.
It doesn’t mean they can’t change, just that the future will endeavor to maintain them wherever possible, because if they do veer too far from the big picture, then it’ll affect all the other threads—though usually, the tapestry can survive that.
Fate . . . destiny . . . whatever you want to call it, is pretty adaptable; free will couldn’t exist if it wasn’t.
But there are some rare circumstances in which a fated path becomes fundamental to the big picture.
Stray from it, and one by one, every thread unravels until there’s no big picture left, just a cataclysm.
I suppose that’s why my original vision was filled with so much death.
” Including my death, their deaths, and the death of the Gray.
“So, you’re saying we have no choice anymore?” If Cemmy grips her glass any tighter, it’s going to shatter in her hand. “We’re just stuck doing the future’s bidding?”
“Yes and no,” Ezzo cuts in on my behalf.
“She’s saying the future will continue to nudge us along this path until we get to the end, but that it can’t decide what we do when we get there, whether we live or die, succeed or fail.
” He sums up our predicament perfectly. We can choose to keep fighting the future—and each other—but we’d likely still find ourselves in exactly the same place.
With a front-row view of the catastrophe I saw in my head.
“Then why us?” There’s an exhaustion to Chase’s ask, a hopelessness that reaches down to the marrow. “Why are we responsible for saving the Gray?”
“Probably for the same reason it was us last year.” Ezzo shrugs. “The future needs our gifts.”
Their very scarce gifts, I realize, because thanks to the Council—thanks to all of us full-bloods—there’s hardly any of them left.
We’ve been systematically purging their magics for centuries, and then we went and closed off the mechanism by which our seers could have predicted this type of event.
In trying to do good, we turned what might have otherwise been a regular path into a fundamental thread.
Though all that does is bring us right back to the Divine Meridian.
We need to stop him—that much, my visions have made clear—preferably before he drags another Shade into his cellar.
But the truth is, we don’t yet have enough information to do that, and even if—by some miracle—we do manage to puzzle out his plan and save the future, nothing I ever do is going to change the past, excuse the fact that I allowed Killen to get caught in the crossfire.
Allowed? You practically served him up to the fates on a platter. The shame in my stomach begins to prick. Because the truth is, I didn’t have to self-fulfil that prophecy; I could have made a different choice—any different choice. Forced the future down a less offensive track.
But I didn’t.
I went along with its machinations without so much as thinking the word no.
I let Killen leave this tavern with a courtesan.
“I have to go after them.” That reality lurches me to my feet. Paying
her to distract Killen was one thing, but I should have demanded that they stay here, where I could keep an eye on any unintended consequences.
Because what if the compulsion spell breaks?
What if she grows wise to the fact he’s a Shade or he wakes up to the fact she’s a courtesan?
What if their excursion leads them somewhere rich in iron and full of hate?
“Go after who, Ray?” Akari startles at my sudden urgency. “We don’t know where Adriel’s going to strike next, remember? That’s the whole problem.”
“No, not Adriel—Killen,” I say. “I have to go after Killen.”
“Erm . . . but . . . wouldn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of what you did in the first place?” Her head cocks with the question. “If he, you know, sees that she isn’t you?”
“No, that’s not—I’m not going to do anything,” I tell her.
Or rather, I’m not going to undo it. “It’s just .
. . letting them leave was a bad idea; I need to make sure he’s safe.
And look, none of you have to come, okay?
” I hurry to add before she can protest. “You should all go back to Saleen’s, see if anything Adriel said leads to something new in the books. I’ll catch up.”
“Uh-uh.” Akari crosses her arms and worries at her bottom lip. “That’s not a good idea. What if something happens and we need to find you?”
“Then I’ll . . . take . . . Ezzo with me.” I volunteer him for the task without thinking. “He can track you; you can scry him—if you don’t mind coming, I mean?” I turn to give him the option, all too aware that, once again, I reduced him to the usefulness of his gift.
“It’s fine,” he says, less to me than to Cemmy and Chase. “If we’re going to split up, doing it like this does make sense.”
“Great, then let’s go.” I practically wrench him from the table, steering us out of the tavern before the others can muster up another reason to object—which Chase very much looks about to.
“Raya, would you please slow down?” Ezzo sighs as I barrel us into the street. “They can’t have gone far. We’ll find them.”
And he’s right; we do find them. It only takes a few minutes of searching to stumble across the courtesan’s melodic laugh and her cascade of golden waves.
“There—in the park.” She and Killen are sat beneath the canopy of a weeping willow, cuddled together in a way that stings far worse than watching them kiss.
It’s like looking back at an old memory, of a boy who’s happy and a girl who’s pretending to be, a Blue who deserved better then and deserves better now. So much fucking better than this.
“Come on, let’s phase. We can keep an eye on them from the Gray.
” Ezzo blinks me away by the elbow, lending the scene around us a wholly different feel.
The air strips of sound and color, the trees blooming to smokey charcoal, the water in the stone fountain darkening to glossy black ink.
This late in the night, there aren’t that many others here, only a few scattered echoes passing through the park like phantoms, so even if Ezzo wasn’t as well versed as he is at tracking flickers, we’d still be in no danger of losing them.
“He’s important to you, isn’t he?” he asks, voice kinder than it’s been all evening.
“He was.” I sink down to the grass and wrap my arms around my knees, keeping my eyes fixed firmly on the sky, the wildflowers, the path that snakes between privets; on anything other than Killen.
“And he wanted to be again?” Ezzo guesses at the reason that led him to the tavern, why he left the Academy to come searching for me.
“Yeah.”
“But that’s not what you want?”
“Not because he did anything wrong.” It feels important for me to say that, for him to know that Killen did nothing that would warrant .
. . this. “He just thought we would be forever and I didn’t—even though I wish I did.
” As if on cue, Killen’s echo shifts closer to the courtesan’s, their lights encircling each other playfully until I grow violently ill.
“We don’t always get forever, Raya.” There’s a sadness to Ezzo’s words that speaks of experience, to a loss he’s had to endure because of us probably. Because for a Hue, even tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. “If you didn’t love him, then you did the right thing.”