Chapter 18
CHAPTER
A thud to my left told me Garvis had fallen in here with me.
“Where are we?” I asked him immediately, scrambling to a stand and brushing snow off my legs as I gazed around the entire space.
My breath fogged out in front of me. Wherever it was, it felt like an Element Wielder had cast a spell over the whole damn place. The wall ahead of us glimmered with impenetrable blue, coated in ice that barely revealed what lay underneath: an arched gateway made of gnarled wood.
And the sky… a hazy pink blob smeared the far side of it, while the patch directly ahead of us winked with a crescent light so much like the shape of my knife—as if both sun and moon had tried to rise or sink and found themselves caught up in all the mist.
Behind us lay nothing but a frozen wasteland that melted into a horizon as black as the Cosmos itself.
“This,” Garvis said as he lifted himself to my side, “is your mind.”
“My mind?”
I stared at the wall in front of us again, gaping. How many times had I felt as if ice coated my veins, filling my very heart? And here, all along, my mind…
“Has it always been like this?” I breathed.
“No.” Garvis didn’t turn to look at me, but a tinge to his voice made me glance sideways at him. “I’ve only ever been in your mind once before, back when it was still frosting over, but Coen…” He coughed into a fist. “Coen’s told me it was once a lively place.”
I ignored the jolt that last part sent through me—the idea that Steeler had once known my mind intimately enough to describe it in detail to a friend. “You’ve been in my mind once before now?”
“Yes.”
Finally, Garvis turned to look at me, and I startled at the sight of a single tear frozen in the crook of his eye, hanging there like a crystalized diamond.
“Before we begin, I need you to know something.” Garvis took a long breath.
“It was I who buried your relationship with Coen last year. I buried every memory he was involved in beyond the moment you first laid eyes on him… as well as any memory that could’ve landed you in trouble with the Good Council.
Coen’s done all the meddling since then, but I…
I hid the heart of it all. I took it from you. ”
I blinked at him. At the guilt etched all over his face.
“But then…” The snow beneath our feet seemed to wake with a grumbling quake. “Then you can retrieve them again.”
Garvis was already shaking his head.
“I hid them so well that Lexington would have never been able to find them, and buried them so deep that they’re long frozen over. I’m afraid Coen’s right, Rayna. You have to be the one to retrieve them. I can’t melt all of this even if I wanted to.”
Diamonds were crystallizing on my lashes now, but I didn’t bother wiping them away as I trudged toward the wall of ice and said over my shoulder in as bright a voice as I could manage, “Well, then, I guess I’d better start trying, huh?”
Garvis followed me to the frozen gateway, where I leaned in closer to find—
“Look. Somebody’s already broken in.”
Indeed, deep gouges in the ice had carved an opening to the brass handle, and when I looked down, two very separate tracks had been embedded in the snow beneath the door: what looked like large, normal footprints, and something thick and tubular, like a long body had slid through.
“Steeler and Lexington,” I murmured, disgusted at that second wormlike track. I looked up at Garvis. “Why is it…?”
“Lesson number one: the longer you loiter in someone else’s mind, the more your intrusive consciousness morphs into a shape that reflects its true intent,” Garvis answered grimly. “Kitterfol seems to enjoy snooping in your mind, no matter what else he might claim—which is evident in these tracks.”
A worm. Lexington literally became a worm, a parasite, when he invaded my brain every weekend.
Holding back a shudder, I nodded down at Steeler’s footprints.
“He’s in my mind every week, too. How come he’s not…?”
“A monster?” Garvis smiled wryly. “I think you know why, deep down.” He didn’t even give me any time to process that statement. “Now, are you ready to go inside?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
I still couldn’t believe that I was a Mind Manipulator now. That I’d sunk into my own consciousness, that I was staring down my too-familiar wall of ice in the flesh.
Rubbing my palms together, I stole a deep breath of frigid air before pulling on the handle and stepping through.
It was a maze.
I knew that even before I’d let my gaze sweep over every winding pathway sprouting from the main walkway, each wall coated in such a thick layer of ice that I couldn’t tell what lay underneath, wood or marble or something else entirely.
There seemed to be no end in sight no matter which way I turned, and nothing stirred within the mist that clung to every edge like ancient cobwebs.
“What happened to me?” I whispered.
Garvis simply said, “Come on. Let’s go find a random memory.”
He started down the main walkway, the only path that didn’t curve or bend at odd angles. I followed until he stopped abruptly and turned toward a pathway that split off in a sharp zigzag, where we rounded a corner to find a condensed pocket of swirling mist.
As soon as we laid eyes on it, the mist burst into shape and sound—an echoing, familiar whoop.
“Is that Rodhi?” I gasped, incredulous.
Yes, that was definitely a ghostly version of Rodhi, butt-naked and balls swinging as he streaked down Bascite Boulevard at two in the morning after he’d chugged a quadruple shot from a pelican’s beak—a memory from last year that I’d tried very hard to forget.
Apparently, I hadn’t managed to stifle it properly, because now that I was watching the mist replay it over and over, I doubted I’d ever forget it again.
Garvis chuckled. “He was always a strange kid, wasn’t he? Tell me—where’d he get the pelican? I’ve never seen one on campus. And how did he convince it to hold still long enough for him to fill its pouch with that much alcohol?”
“The pelican was a migratory guest he coaxed in from the beach, and I don’t know how Rodhi does what he does. Or why,” I added as an afterthought. “Okay, so these are what memories look like? And in theory I could—”
“Bury it,” Garvis said, nodding at the snow-packed ground, “which would prevent you from remembering on a conscious level. You could also destroy it completely, which would make it impossible for that memory to ever be recalled. Or you could alter it, maybe give the guy some clothes. But those things all take complicated skill, whereas hiding it within an internal blockade… I could probably teach you how to do that tonight.”
“An internal blockade?”
“Yes. It would… camouflage the memory so that other Mind Manipulators like Lexington would have a harder time finding it, but you would still be able to remember it on a conscious level. Not as foolproof as burying or destroying sensitive information, but a whole lot easier. And what we’re doing now takes hardly any skill at all. ”
I arched a brow at him mid-shiver. “What are we doing now?”
“Shedding light onto the memory simply by observing.” Garvis gazed upward. “See how your moon has shifted its focus, how it’s beaming down on this spot now?”
I did. Whereas before a misty darkness had filled this pocket of the maze, now moonlight bathed it in a milky yellow glow.
Illuminating Rodhi’s bare asscheeks.
Fantastic.
“Maybe another memory?” I suggested weakly.
Garvis gestured for me to go on. “Lead the way.”
We followed path after path, twisting and doubling back and reaching dead ends but finding a new memory around every corner.
There was me, arriving at the Esholian Institute for the first time.
Emelle and I first saying hi while Jenia and Dazmine sneered at our backs.
Mr. Conine’s lesson with crocodiles, where Fergus Bilderas had insulted one of the females.
Parties, classes, and tests that all played like misty, moving pictures.
Nothing of Steeler, though. Nothing of a midnight swim in the Element Wielder lake or any of the other times he’d forced me to take a pill these last few months.
“Every mind is like this?” I asked eventually, after a particularly heartfelt memory of Fabian and Don making me some midnight soup when I couldn’t sleep a few years before the Esholian Institute.
Funnily enough, rewatching it made me notice new details I hadn’t before with that moonlight illuminating every angle: how Don’s Summoning magic did most of the vegetable chopping, for instance, while Fabian’s dealt with the mixing and the seasoning.
“Not exactly.” Garvis stroked his mustache.
“The substance of the walls always varies from person to person, as does the climate. But there is always a maze of thoughts—a twisting of neurons that we get to view in its personified form. There is always mist to make memories and moonlight to help guide our way.” He paused, as if weighing whether or not to continue.
“And a subconscious in the center of it all.”
“A subconscious?” For some reason, my stomach swooped. “Aren’t… aren’t I my own subconscious right now?”
“No. You are your outer consciousness right now. But the deeper you explore your own maze, the closer you get to her—and the more in-tune with yourself you’ll become. Would you like to meet her?”
Her. As if my subconscious were an entirely different being.
I shrugged, trying to hide the sudden chill that had trickled down my spine by crossing my arms. “Sure.”
We made it back to the main pathway and trudged through the snow, heading straight into the center of the maze. I tried to keep track of how many different winding pathways we passed, but eventually lost track after fifty. It seemed that the further we traveled, the lower the temperature dropped.
“Almost there,” Garvis said, his teeth chattering.
I squinted into the mist, where a dark, rounded shadow was slowly taking shape up ahead.
For a second, I wondered if my subconscious self had seriously decided to take the form of an umbrella…
but then we were stepping into a rounded courtyard, where a marble gazebo sat cold and impassive in the center like a dome-crowned shrine.
And in that gazebo, sitting on what looked like a frosted throne…
Was me.
I stared at myself.
She stared back, her head turning with creaking slowness to meet my gaze straight on.
Her hair—as wild and curly as mine—had stiffened into place. Snowflakes patterned her clothing like lace. Every bare inch of skin—her neck, her arms, her hands—appeared as cold and white and hard as the marble of the shrine itself.
My feet stumbled backward of their own accord.
“Go ahead,” my subconscious said airily, her breath forming a swirling fog that reached out with beckoning fingers. “Ask me anything.”
My face. My voice. And yet I’d never felt less familiar with myself than I did now. As if I’d looked into a warped, alternate mirror.
“N-no, thanks. I’m good.” I turned to Garvis. “Can we go?”
Perhaps a shade of disappointment flitted across his expression, but he bowed his head and took my hand in his own.
“It can be hard at first, I know. But you will get better and braver the more you revisit her. Now.” He smiled. “Before we go back, it’s tradition to give you the sector motto.”
And suddenly it wasn’t just his voice pitching into a chant, but the entire world—the frozen, far-off sunrise and icy walls and eerie subconscious in her shrine, as if Garvis had planted the words into my brain:
We, the captains of the mind,
Welcome all who’ve heard
The discordance of voices
And triumphantly endured.
For if a web of thought is tangled,
Who but us untwines?
If a memory is fading,
Who but us revives?
So we cast our rays of light
Onto what’s broken and amiss.
We fix and care, this we swear,
“By the moonbeam and the mist,” I whispered with the world, wrapping my arms around myself.
I was cold—much too cold in this space within me. A deep tremor was wrapping around my ribcage, shaking me from the toes upward, and my subconscious was still staring at me with too-green eyes, and I just… needed to get out of my own head.
“Okay, Rayna.” Even Garvis’s lips were turning blue. “All you need to do is reach for your surface. Imagine yourself rising, climbing up through the mist, using the moon as a footstool to leap up and away.”
I tried to do as he said, even raising a hand to scrabble at the sky, but…
Nothing happened. Snowflakes settled in my hair, and my subconscious continued to stare at me, and the mist just swirled and swirled and swirled.
Panic sliced through my every breath at the thought that I couldn’t defy gravity. I might be trapped within the confines of my own mind if I couldn’t find a good foothold on the—
“Don’t worry, Drey,” a voice drawled beside me. “I’ve got you.”
My eyes flew open to find that Steeler had arrived on my other side and already clamped a firm hand on my elbow.
A tug from him, and we were soaring upward, through the mist, past the streak of moonlight.
My eyes flew open again—this time to the real world.
To find that I’d collapsed right against his chest.