Chapter 26
CHAPTER
Back in the maze of my mind, Garvis and I had just meandered down another twisting alleyway where ice towered over either side of us when he flung out an arm.
“There. See that little memory tucked away in the corner?”
I squinted at the moving mist in a nook of an alleyway. It appeared to depict Emelle and me walking arm in arm down a crowded Esholian Institute square.
“Yes, I see it. It looks normal to—”
“Watch again.”
Frowning, I moved closer until I could clearly hear the echo of my past conversation with Emelle, both of us chattering away as we wove a path through all the Cardina peddlers from last year, occasionally stopping to inspect various bits of merchandise.
Right after I brought out a little copper coin to pay for two chocolate truffles—one for Emelle and one for me—the memory made a sharp V turn. Now, the two of us were heading toward Grandma Gretel’s gown tent near the fountain, our expressions… tighter than they had been a few moments earlier.
As if something invisible had happened to us between the abrupt change in our direction.
“It’s a blip,” Garvis said.
I couldn’t look away from the memory of Emelle and me—so happy and close back then. So trusting of each other.
“Are you telling me,” I started slowly, “that one of my missing memories used to be imbedded within this one? And you… buried it?”
“Yes.” Every syllable in Garvis’s voice whispered with shame. “I ripped the mist apart and stuffed it beneath the foundation of your mind. You were already… frosty back then. But nothing like this.”
My gaze snapped to the perfect, untrampled swath of snow beneath the memory’s feet and the thick ground of solid ice that surely loitered beneath. If neither Garvis nor Steeler could melt it…
No. I shook away the surge of hopelessness. This was my mind. I had control over it.
I clapped my hands together.
“Okay. How do I melt it?”
Garvis eyed me warily, but just blew out a clouded breath and said, “I want you to focus on the details of the memory you do have intact. Think of how those details made you feel at the time. Joyful? Hopeless? It doesn’t matter, so long as you allow yourself to feel something.”
Because all this ice served as a preservation of my emotions, I was guessing. And it wasn’t going away unless I let that preservation dissolve, fully dived into my own insecurities… and whatever else lay within me.
Reconsidering the moving mist of Emelle and me arm in arm, I watched our faces go from smiling and carefree in the first half of the memory to rigid and pursed in the second.
I moved closer.
This time, I could make out the tears glittering in Emelle’s lashes like ice crystals in the second half of the memory. I watched my free hand shake, each finger trembling like icicles poised to fall off.
I cleared my throat.
“I was definitely happy at the time—at least in the beginning of this memory. I felt like I belonged, like I’d finally found my own family here at the Esholian Institute.
I felt… amused at Rodhi and Gileon, how they both rushed off to find gifts for their crushes.
And I felt grateful that Emelle chose to stick by my side. ”
Garvis nodded gently. “Anything else?”
No. I didn’t want to say anything else.
I swallowed a lungful of biting cold and did anyway.
“I felt a little overwhelmed, I think. There were so many people around, so much going on. And…”
“Yes?”
“I was apprehensive,” I blurted. “I was waiting for something. Or someone.” I could see that in the periodic shift of my attention over all the tents and booths and haggling vendors, as if my eyes were hoping to snag onto… what? I wasn’t sure. Couldn’t remember.
Garvis persisted.
“And how does all this make you feel now that you’re remembering it? Or at least remembering part of it?”
I bit my lip, wishing I could keep it all in, not let the dam break. But…
“Nostalgic,” I blurted out. “For the moments when I felt like I fit in last year. For the moments when I felt… worthy. Of friendship. Of belonging. And now I’m… I’m sad that it’s gone, Garvis. I miss Emelle, miss feeling close to her…”
“Keep going. But now put your hand on the ground.”
Trying to sniff up the burn in my nose, I bent and planted my palms into the snow beneath the swirling mist, letting the crunch of ice crystals envelop the lingering warmth within me.
“I’m worried that I can’t keep a friend.” The words were rushing out, tumbling over my tongue, falling over this frozen bit of ground. “I’m worried I’m not worth permanent friendship because my whole life seems to be one giant ball of secrets and I can’t be completely honest about who I am.”
The ground seemed to be thumping, like a drum trying to beat its way out of the ice below us.
“I don’t think I’ll ever find someone as sweet and kind as Emelle again. I hate that I have to keep my distance and push her away. I wish—”
A crack fractured the ground beneath my palms, parting the snow until it fell away…
And mist rose from the crevice in the ground.
It merged with the mist of Emelle and me, twirling and dancing with its missing counterpart like long-lost lovers.
Gaping, I scrambled to my feet and watched the memory reform itself, swelling in size so that I had to take a few steps back.
Emelle and I didn’t just turn right around to go visit Grandma Gretel’s Gowns. A blanket peddler stopped us to give me a letter from Fabian.
A letter that told me to follow it.
And as my crescent moon beamed upon this first missing memory, I watched the whole thing play out like an unearthed dream.
Starting with that abandoned classroom in the Element Wielder sector—the very same one I’d seen and recognized on my first day of class when I’d been talking to the black mamba.
I just hadn’t realized why I’d recognized it.
I listened to Lord Arad and Velika tell me about my mother and Fabian’s love story. How she’d wanted to give me to the pirates. How he’d kidnapped me and stolen her knife—my knife now—too.
I saw Jagaros arrive to save Emelle and me when those tomb bats began morphing into their mutant vampire selves…
But then Garvis was pointing at a hole in the mist, frowning.
“Something is missing there.” He turned to me with furrowed brows. “Did you ever rip the mist? Hide part of it elsewhere?”
I shook my head, bewildered.
“N-no. I would have known if I’d done that, wouldn’t I?”
Garvis stroked his mustache. “Yes, you would have. That’s… strange.”
As I returned my gaze to that hole in the mist, the rest of the memory eddying and churning around it, I couldn’t help but feel as if its darkness matched the dense, fathomless darkness of Steeler’s Walking magic. Like once upon a time, he had filled that gaping absence.
For better or for worse.
Throughout the next few Sundays, Garvis and I kept searching for the rest of my buried memories.
We found the moment my innate faerie power had exploded with Rodhi in the tent.
The moment I dry-swallowed my first pill while I sat nervously next to Lander right before the Branding.
All the forbidden conversations between Ms. Pincette and me in the Testing Center and in her classroom.
Every wretched thing Fergus had ever done to me and Gileon and Mr. Fenway.
But the memories almost always cut short as the mist formed a gaping hole.
A very distinctly Steeler-sized hole.
I couldn’t find the first time he’d given me that pill. Couldn’t find a single exchange between the two of us, a single touch or midnight swim in the Element Wielder lake. It was as if I truly had somehow ripped my recollection of him away from everything else—and perhaps destroyed it.
“We’ve just got to keep looking,” Garvis said three weeks into it, both of us once again sitting cross-legged on the beach. Firelight flickered from inside the lighthouse, where I could hear the rumble of faerie, monkey, and human voices alike.
Although we made a point to never speak in public at the Esholian Institute, Dazmine had been sneaking into the jungle with me every Sunday so that Steeler could take her to the lighthouse, too.
There, she and Terrin sat hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling out various break-in plans that they always crumpled up and threw in the fire by the end of the night.
I wasn’t surprised they hadn’t come up with anything solid yet.
The faerie fleet had been loitering outside the dome for five hundred years, unable to figure out how to break into that prison to get their Good Council back.
I doubted a nineteen-year-old human and twenty-year-old faerie would be able to make much of a difference.
But Dazmine was determined, and I wasn’t about to break over the fervor that had twined around her over the last few weeks.
My Mind Manipulating power, on the other hand, needed a break.
“Maybe my mind doesn’t want me to keep looking,” I finally sighed at Garvis as a nearby seagull squawked at its mate about a slug that it had just found in the rocks.
This last week, Mr. Conine had been teaching my Wild Whispering class about the birds of the island and their mating habits, so I knew by now that gulls were monogamous creatures with low rates of divorce. If only my own not-love life could be just as straightforward.
“Do you…” I resumed hesitantly. “Are you really so sure my past relationship with Steeler was a good one?”
I couldn’t deny we’d had some kind of relationship last year. The way he looked at me and the way I felt around him must have had something to do with the history there. Whatever it was.
Garvis’s eyes landed on the pair of seagulls hopping over to us. He didn’t say anything for a long time, so I let him mull it over, watching as the male seagull began preening his female counterpart with gentle pecks.
Finally, Garvis craned his neck up to look at the sky.