Chapter 29
CHAPTER
Steeler’s maze wasn’t a tangle of alleyways like mine.
It was more like a multilayered spiral.
Those marble walls curved and curved as I ran, other spiraled paths sprouting off the main one and herding me continuously inward. There was no snow to muffle my footsteps here, so each one of them clacked against the moonstone as I took one of those side paths and—
Steeler appeared in front of me between blinks.
He’d buttoned his pants back up, and there wasn’t a single tussled part of his hair or flush in his cheeks to indicate that I’d just sucked the life out of him. Even so, the smoky quartz of his eyes glittered with… something.
I didn’t halt long enough to figure it out.
Pivoting on a heel, I took another pathway, cursing those walls that only ever curved with smooth precision. Noise bubbled from a patch of mist up ahead, sounding a lot like my laughter used to…
But then Steeler appeared in front of me again, blocking my path forward.
A scream of frustration ripped out of me. I turned and sprinted back to the main pathway, aiming for another pocket of noisy mist that echoed from the entrance to a smaller path up ahead.
Only for Steeler to appear in front of me again.
And again.
And again.
But I wouldn’t quit perusing his mind until I’d found one. Just one single memory that didn’t seem to exist within me anymore. Just one damned explanation for the yearning I couldn’t shake off when I looked into his eyes and saw entire galaxies swirling within.
Finally, one of the pathways came to a tapered end, where a memory was replaying with a fluidity that made me think Steeler had mulled this particular one over again and again, smoothing out the details until it resembled an actual moving picture.
When he didn’t materialize in front of me to ward me off, I stopped to watch, even though I knew, deep down, that I was not a part of this memory. That this memory came way before me.
A group of children—six of them—stood in a line on a swaying deck bordered with polished wooden guardrails. I recognized five of them immediately, even though they couldn’t have been older than nine or ten: Steeler, Garvis, Terrin, Sasha, and Sylvie.
I didn’t recognize the sixth one, though, a boy with sand-colored hair and thick conglomerations of freckles running down his arms.
As I squinted at this one, a new figure of mist stepped up to the children, arms behind her back—and now my spine scurried with tingles, because I did recognize her.
She’d been in that vision I’d had to endure in my first hour at the Esholian Institute, the one where I’d fallen into the thrashing waves of the sea and climbed aboard a ship to meet a four-fingered pirate and the sting of her sharp slap across my face.
Now, that same pirate was staring down at the line of children in this tangible memory. The only difference between then and now were her sharpened ears and elongated canines that marked her as a faerie.
“The queen has requested that you get to know our enemy on a more… intimate level.”
Her voice was as coarse and gravelly as I remembered it, although now, with the moonbeam illuminating the entire memory, I could see more details: the tattoo crawling up her neck, for instance, toward her rough crop of hair.
The ink formed a circle at the top, almost like a badge of honor that shot more prickles down my spine.
The Fated General. This female had to be the mysterious Fated General that Steeler had been whispering about. There was an air of authority about her and that tattoo on her neck that made me want to snap to attention.
The Fated General removed her hands from behind her back and examined the stump where her fifth finger would be, its clump of skin like an outgrown socket, before continuing.
“You will all be shipped through the dome tomorrow morning to spend the rest of your adolescent years on the island.”
The children glanced at each other.
“But won’t we die if we pass through it?” Sylvie piped up, raising a little hand. “Like those faeries on that ship that approached the dome when we first got here? Everyone on board just collapsed into dust as soon as they touched the mist!”
The Fated General chuckled without a stitch of real humor.
“And eyes like yours are exactly why you’ll make great spies.
It is true that when a fully-matured faerie touches the dome, the venom within its substance targets the power in their blood and stifles it so viciously that every bit of their body disintegrates, too.
But because your powers are still shapeless, child, that venom cannot latch onto it well enough to stifle it, so you are immune to these catastrophic effects.
You will only feel a small tingle as you go through, my sources say. ”
My sources say. Even though this was only a memory, my blood boiled at the implication that the Fated General must have tested out said catastrophic effects on other children before this moment. And from the slight twisting of young Steeler’s face…
He’d been astute, I realized, even as a young boy. Astute enough to have plenty of questions brewing behind his little eyes.
“Madam Loressa has used her magic to inspire some coastal families to find the idea of adopting a welcome one,” the Fated General went on.
“When you arrive on the island, you will tell these families you were sent through as a distraction so that our fleets can attempt to breach the dome. You will not tell anyone you are spies. That is an order.”
Every single child in the memory straightened their spine, as if they’d been conditioned—cruelly—to always obey.
“And are you actually going to try to breach the dome?”
That came from young Steeler himself, in a voice that shocked the hell out of me: much too hard and cold for such a small child.
The Fated General leaned over him, and now something caught my attention from the stump of her finger: the socket seemed to flex moments before a silver finger shot out from the smooth patch of skin…
And kept shooting out. Longer and longer and longer the finger stretched, until it curled like a metal hook and lifted young Steeler’s chin. Apparently, the Fated General’s innate power was the ability to grow literal weapons from her body.
“You know as well as I do that when the time comes for the dome to break, it will not be me who shatters it, boy.”
The mist changed.
Now Steeler and his friends sat in a circle on fallen, moss-eaten logs outside a flickering village—older and more carefree than they’d been on the ship. The dense line of jungle in the distance told me they were indeed on the island, just as their Fated General had planned.
The bottle they were passing in circles, however, told me they weren’t taking their jobs as spies too seriously for the time being.
“Oh, come on, let me have another go.”
It was the sandy-haired boy, the freckles on his arms faded now that he’d been living within the shaded foliage of the jungle for the last ten or so years. He held out a hand toward Steeler and eagerly wiggled his fingers, wagging his brows along with them.
“Don’t be greedy, Mattheus,” Sasha snorted from across their circle. “Wasn’t it enough when you blew steam out of your ears a moment ago?”
The boy named Mattheus shook his head with a too-serious expression stamped over his face. “Until I can blow steam out of my asshole, too, I will never be satisfied.”
Sasha tutted and Terrin punched him in the shoulder.
Groaning, Steeler passed over the bottle of what must have been bascale, filled with several particles of the five different types of bascite all mixed together.
Rodhi had once claimed the effects were random, that our powers just didn’t know what shape to take until the actual Branding, but now I knew: with so many separate magics swimming in that liquid, the blood probably reacted to the strongest one in each individual swallow.
I held my breath, a chill of familiarity sweeping over me as the scene played out almost exactly like mine had in the tent with Rodhi.
Like me, these teenagers had shapeless power lurking in their blood, easily triggered by the drink.
But unlike me, none of them had exploded upon their first gulp. Now, though…
Mattheus chugged the remains, coughed, and wiped his mouth with his wrist. The others leaned in.
His eyes glazed over.
A shiver wracked his body.
Then it burst from him: not any of the five sanctioned magics, but his own magic, formless and raw and unending.
Steeler and Garvis, Terrin and the twins—they all flew backward off their logs, their backs slamming into the ground. Wails and moans rose from the five of them while Mattheus scrabbled at his chest, trying to contain the energy that was pouring out of him.
But he couldn’t. And where my recollection of my own memory had stopped abruptly after a few seconds, this one kept going.
And going.
And going.
Neither Steeler nor his friends could get up against the surge of power. They couldn’t do anything besides cower and cover their heads and wait for several adult figures to come sprinting toward them from the village, shouting out questions.
The mist changed.
Mattheus stood limply in the village square, each of his arms chained to a post behind him. I wanted to scream at him to run when Kitterfol Lexington strode up to him with a leather whip in his fist.
And a grin on his face.
“Ladies and gentlemen.” Lexington turned to address the crowd of villagers all smashed together behind a long line of Good Council elites.
His braids were shorter in this memory, but only slightly.
“This is what happens when our blood cannot handle the magic we are gifted.” He swept a hand toward Mattheus behind him.
“Chaos and destruction that threatens the safety of the entire island. This boy was not yet Branded, but he did steal a small amount of bascite and proved himself unworthy of even that. And such danger to our community will not be tolerated.”