CHAPTER 31 EZZO
EZZO
If you had asked me a week ago, I would have said to hell with the magic.
To hell with the typics, to hell with the Shades, to hell with anything I couldn’t find in a tavern.
I didn’t want to care anymore. Not about my life, not about their lives, not about the Gray.
Yet, here I am, a week later, racing to save all three.
In the Academy, no less.
The one place no Hue should ever be.
This is Raya’s world, not mine. It’s where—until just a few days ago—she lived, and learned, and loved, where she grew to doubt her magic so deeply that she risked it on a forbidden question.
It’s hard not to see fate’s hand in that.
It’s hard not to see it in the way we keep finding ourselves at the heart of these impossible tasks.
The future doesn’t think they’re impossible.
Hells, it seems to think I have a future with Raya, which does suggest that we might make it out of this alive.
That’s not what it suggests, and you know it.
I mean, sure, Raya’s vision means it might be a possibility—but that’s all the future is: a possibility.
A hundred thousand of them, in fact. Ask a slightly different question, get a slightly different answer.
Make a slightly different decision, kick destiny onto a different track.
Being on a fundamental path doesn’t change that.
The future may have nudged and nudged and nudged us in order to try and stop its own demise, but now that we’re here, it’s powerless, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that the choice to split up was right.
We might not survive it.
Even if we succeed, we might not survive it.
Raya might not survive it.
It wasn’t until I watched her shimmer away that I realized how much I’ve come to worry about her.
That all the be safes and casual touches might add up to more than just friendly like.
That, despite what I told her in the cell, I might actually want the possibility the future’s offering—but that the very thought is also riddling me with doubt.
Because it’s not been long enough, has it, since Eve died?
How long even is long enough? How do you suddenly reallocate the space in your heart?
And Gods, how do you do it with a Shade?
“Any change?” Saleen’s voice snaps me back to what’s important: Adriel, the castle, the room full of acolytes and initiates we’re somehow supposed to save.
Right, yes. I force myself to focus, to replace the thought of Raya with the trails of light flickering behind my eyes.
“Not much. Looks like Alara’s got a Green with her now, but they’re still by the dorms—and I’m still getting nothing from inside the chamber.
” Which means we still don’t know exactly what we’ll find when we get in there, whether the typics are alive or dead or how Alara is keeping so many of them under control.
“Then it’s a good thing we’re almost there—just around the next corner,” Saleen says, though even without her direction, I’d venture we’d have recognized the right door.
“Holy fuck.” Cemmy’s curse is an echo to my own, her hand pitching out to grip Chase’s. The entire corridor ahead of us is engulfed in a dense and heavy fog, as though the shadows around the court are congealing.
“Is it me or do they look a little . . . angry to you?” I finally understand what Akari meant by the Gray feeling sticky.
Not because casting my In-Between has become harder—if anything, it’s actually grown easier, like the shadows are too distracted to bite at my spell—but because the weight of my magic suddenly feels different, like it’s thickened in depth and coarsened in texture, hooked razor-sharp talons beneath my skin.
“Oh, they’re definitely angry.” Saleen takes a hesitant step forward, shuddering as the darkness parts to allow her through. “But not at us, I don’t think—it feels more like they’re . . . angry at the room. Stay close, okay? I’ll shimmer us out if there’s trouble.”
Though as it turns out, trouble is too weak a word.
What in the name of all three Gods . . .
The sight that greets us is enough to rip the air from my throat.
Gone is the court from my execution, with its gallery, and the judges’ bench, and the dock.
It’s as if the entire chamber has remade itself for Adriel’s purpose, the shadows reshaping to form a ring of vertical tables, each pair designed to hold an acolyte and an initiate while the needles in their arms do their work.
“How is this possible?” Cemmy’s gasp is almost lost to the muffled chorus of fear and pain. We’ve seen the shadows manipulated before—cajoled into ignoring her physicality or even spurred to attack, on occasion, when their existence was threatened by a different zealot with a different goal.
But not on this scale.
Not to the point where their original shape was lost.
“I don’t know,” I say, though the Academy is an anomaly, I suppose, a castle made entirely of magic that has no counterpart in the real world. Maybe that’s why these shadows are so ripe for manipulation, because there’s no physical structure out there anchoring them to their form.
“If Alara’s not here, then how are the typics not shattering?” Chase’s question, however, is answered the moment we step through the door.
Whoa. The shift in pressure is immediate, like walking into a cave or diving too deep into the ocean.
“Erm, so . . . did your In-Betweens also just vanish?” I ask, trying furiously to reignite the spell.
As much as casting it has grown as natural as breathing, I can always feel the magic when it’s active, sense the Gray searching for any cracks it can exploit.
Whereas now, I feel nothing. Not my shield. Not my gift. Not
the shadows.
“Yeah, mine’s gone, too.” Chase is hopping back and forth across the threshold, as if testing to see where the deadening stops.
“And mine—but weirdly not my physicality,” Cemmy says, running her hand along the nearest wall. “Give it a try real quick for me, Ez? I want to see something.”
Well, I’ll be damned. I let out a long whistle as the stone refuses to yield beneath my touch. “Looks like you called it right, Cem—I’m physical now.” A first for me in the Gray. I’ve always wisped through everything.
“Then I’d guess that’s also how Adriel solved his typic problem.” She loops the logic back around. “He’s quite literally created a void where the normal rules don’t apply.”
“So then how do we un-create it?” Saleen’s voice is shaking with disgust. She wasn’t there when Raya and I found Akari strapped to his table; this is the first time she’s actually witnessing the horror.
And this is only the tip of the iceberg, there’s still over half a rainbow to go—though Alara sure didn’t waste any time bleeding the first half.
All three of the acolytes she’s already fetched are screaming into their gags, their fear as pained as it is potent.
But it’s the initiates I truly feel for, the kids dressed in Church vestments writhing in agony as they blister from the Shades’ blood.
“I don’t think we can un-create it.” My stomach sinks as I realize that Adriel’s typic problem just became ours to solve. “Not until we figure out how to get these kids to a portal.” Because no void means no protection; the shadows will rush back and shatter them whole.
“We can use our In-Betweens,” Chase says, like it’s blatantly obvious. “That’s what we assumed Alara was doing, isn’t it? No reason we can’t do it, instead.”
No, I suppose there’s not. I mean, none of us is an Emerald, so we can’t project our shields the way she can; we’d have to keep the kids in direct contact—but since there’s three of us and seven of them, that’s not exactly unmanageable.
“Let’s just stop the transfusions first.” I relegate those thoughts to later and quickly formulate the now.
“Saleen and I can get that one over there—” I point to the acolyte on the far side of the tables, a boy of fourteen, if a day, who looks as though he’s teetering on the edge of unconsciousness from the blood loss, the typic beside him crying a crimson river. “You two can take the others.”
But we never make it to them.
Hells, we’ve barely even started running when all four of us are seized by the overwhelming and absolute need to stop.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
Though I can’t turn my body to look at her, I recognize the seething edge to Alara’s voice.
“Damn it, what happened to being in a void?” Saleen grits through the compulsion. And it clearly is a compulsion—there’s no other explanation for why my legs are suddenly refusing to move—even though that should be impossible.
“Oh, you are.” Alara’s satisfaction turns cloying as she steps into view, two dazed acolytes trailing behind her.
“But a void only deadens the inertia which allows your magics to work, the act of casting; it doesn’t affect pre-spelled charms. That’s why we need the typics, to put an end to all magic for good.
” She says it so carelessly—so gleefully—as though that wouldn’t also put an end to her.
“Alara, please—you don’t want that. Adriel is lying to you. He’s just using you to get back at his father.”
It’s the wrong thing to say.
“That man is not his father,” she growls, her face hardening to stone.
“He’s a coward who wanted his son dead but was too weak to do the killing; he left him to rot on the Church’s doorstep so that the clerics would do it for him, murder Adriel when they found out about his power.
But they didn’t find out—just like they didn’t find out about mine.
They didn’t look at us too closely in the orphanage, but I saw him, I felt the power in him, and I kept him safe.
I am his family—not that Orange waste of bones. ”
“Then why isn’t he trying to keep you safe?” I ask, coming at her from a different angle. “If he loves you as much as you love him, then why would he poison the Gray? Why would he take away your gift?”
“Of course you wouldn’t understand—you still call it a gift.
” With another charm, Alara compels her acolytes to pick a table and gets to work.
“Our gifts are such a perversion that even the shadows want them gone. Why else do you think they try to shatter us?” The air fills with a fresh chorus of pain as she begins the nasty business of shoving needles into arms. “Once we’re free of them, we’ll no longer have to rely on an In-Between. The shadows will welcome us home.”
So that’s the lie Adriel’s been feeding her, then, the way he’s chosen to twist the dogma.
“That’s not true, Alara—it’s just not true,” I say, though I fear I’m arguing with a lost cause. “We can’t live without magic. If you do this, you’ll die. We all will—the Gray, too. Tell her, Chase—tell her what happens when you take magic from a Hue—”
“Enough!” Alara doesn’t want to hear it; she’d much rather shut me up with an Orange crystal and a magical noose.
“Let him go!” Cemmy yells, but another crystal silences her, as well, and the torrent of expletives Chase begins to spew.
“And why should I do that?” Alara only tightens her grip on my air. “If we’re all going to die anyway, then what difference does it make if he chokes to death? Or if your full-blooded friend here dies a little early?”
I’m granted a modicum of relief as she turns her attention to Saleen.
“You wouldn’t happen to be a Red, would you?” She fishes out a Violet crystal and asks the magic to check. “Oh, good. I was avoiding your prickly kind until last; you’ll save me a trip upstairs.”
“What—? No.” The blood preemptively leaves Saleen. “No, you can’t, please!” Her feet start moving of their own accord, propelling her towards one of the two remaining tables. “Please, I’m not a Red. I’m not a Red. Cemmy—Chase—help me!”
But she is a Red, and so she knows, better than anyone, that compulsion is the hardest spell to break, that while we remain in Adriel’s void, Alara’s crystals will ensure that all we can do is watch, helplessly, as a needle is shoved mercilessly into her flesh.
As her life begins to drain into a screaming initiate.
And more than anything else, it’s the satisfaction grinning Alara from ear to ear that tells me there’ll be no changing her mind or Saleen’s fate.
She believes Adriel’s truth. Unerringly. With her whole entire chest.
She’s going to destroy the Gray for it.
There really is nothing more intractable than faith.