Chapter 13
ATLAS
The nightmares don’t stop just because the bond stops hurting.
They should. Logically, rationally, in a world that makes any kind of sense—fixing the bond should fix the rest of it.
But the bond was never the problem. The bond is a thread between five people.
The nightmares are mine. They live in the kitchen of a house in northern Vermont, in the yellow light of an afternoon that ended everything, and no amount of re-seated anchors is going to evict them.
Arizona is dry and wide and hot. I like it. The heat is honest—not the sticky, complicated heat of the East Coast where the humidity wraps around you like a lie. Desert heat is clean. It hurts and it doesn’t pretend not to. I can respect that.
We stay at Cyrus’s compound for a week after the procedure.
Nobody suggests leaving. Nobody suggests staying, either—we just don’t go.
Ren cooks. Felix plays cards against himself and occasionally against Cyrus, who cheats with chaos magic and still loses because Felix cheats better.
Callum reads. Everly sits in the dirt near the trailer and does something none of us can identify—reaching, she calls it, pulling at the threads of four disciplines that live in her now, trying to understand what she is.
I sit with her sometimes. Not talking. Just sitting. My conductor across my knees, the desert air pulling the sparks from my skin before they can land anywhere flammable. She doesn’t mind the sparks. She’s the only person I’ve met who doesn’t flinch when my hands light up.
After a week, we start moving again. Slowly. No destination. Felix trades the road atlas for a coin flip—heads we go west, tails we go south. The coin says west. Arizona.
We find a campground outside Sedona, the kind of place with hookups and a communal shower and a fire pit ringed with stones someone painted in what I think is meant to be a southwestern motif but looks more like a preschool art project.
The red rocks rise around us in formations that shouldn’t exist—spires and arches and walls of sandstone so vivid they look like the earth is bleeding upward.
I like it here. The landscape matches the weather inside me: scorched, dramatic, too much. The sky does things in Arizona it doesn’t do anywhere else. Sunsets that last an hour, colors I don’t have words for, the kind of beauty that burns your eyes if you look too long.
The nightmares come on the third night.
Same as always. The kitchen. The light. My mother’s hands on the counter—not gripping, not bracing, just resting there, like she was thinking about what to make for dinner.
Normal hands. Normal afternoon. And then the storm that came from inside her.
She was a grimoire. Nobody told her. The power just kept building and building until—
I wake up gasping. Sweat-soaked. The sleeping bag is scorched around my hands—two burn marks, palm-shaped, still smoking faintly in the pre-dawn dark. My conductor is singing, a high thin whine I can hear in my teeth. The air smells like ozone and burned nylon.
Someone’s hand is on my shoulder.
Not grabbing. Not shaking. Just resting there, the way you’d rest your hand on something hot to show it you aren’t afraid.
Everly. She’s sitting beside my sleeping bag in the dirt, cross-legged, wearing the moose shirt and a pair of Ren’s sweatpants that are four inches too long. Her hand on my shoulder is steady and warm and doesn’t move when the sparks jump from my skin to hers.
“Bad one?” she says. Quiet.
“They’re all bad.”
“Yeah.” She doesn’t say I understand or it gets better or any of the things people say when they don’t know what else to offer. She just sits. Her hand stays.
The sparks slow. The conductor’s whine drops to a hum.
My breathing evens out, not because I’m trying but because something about her being there makes the weather inside me less violent.
Not calmer. She doesn’t calm me—she’s not a sedative.
She’s more like a lightning rod. Something to ground into so the charge has somewhere to go besides the sleeping bag.
“She was a grimoire,” I say.
Everly doesn’t ask who. She knows. She’s known since the first night in the 4Runner, probably—since the nightmares started, since she felt my grief through the bond and didn’t name it, didn’t push, just held space for it the way she holds everything. Like her ribs are made for carrying.
“My mother. She was a grimoire. She didn’t know. Nobody—” My voice does something I don’t authorize. Cracks. Splinters. I swallow it down like a hot coal. “Nobody told her what she was. The power just kept growing and she couldn’t control it and one day it—”
I can’t finish.
The sentence has an ending. I know what it is.
I’ve known since I was eleven and the kitchen ceiling was gone and the windows were gone and my mother was gone and there was just the storm, the aftermath, the silence that comes after something has been destroyed so completely that even the air is stunned.
“You don’t have to say it,” Everly says.
“The Administration knew.” This part comes out easier—anger always travels faster than grief.
“They knew what she was. They had her in a file. They watched her fall apart and they didn’t intervene because—because she was data.
A case study. What happens when a grimoire goes untrained.
They let her die so they’d have a footnote. ”
Everly’s hand tightens on my shoulder. Not much. Just enough that the pressure changes, the shift from resting to holding.
“That’s why you’re here,” she says. She already knows.
“That’s why I’m anywhere. Every time I look at you—” I stop.
Regroup. The words are too close to the surface, too raw, mixing up the grief and the want and the fear into something I can’t sort out, a storm with no eye, no center, just wind.
“Every time I look at you I see two things. What she was. And what you could be. And I can’t—I don’t know which one scares me more. ”
She’s quiet for a long time. Long enough for the stars to shift, for the pre-dawn to lighten from black to charcoal. The red rocks are just shadows now, darker shapes against a dark sky.
“I’m not her,” Everly says.
“I know.”
“I have people. I have you. All four of you. She didn’t have that.”
“I know.”
She turns toward me. We’re close—too close, the kind of close that has weight, that means something, that changes the air between two people.
I can see the four colors in her eyes even in the dark, faint, like stained glass with light behind it.
Her hand is still on my shoulder and my skin is still sparking and she doesn’t pull away and I don’t pull away and for one long, suspended moment the space between us is so small it’s barely a choice.
I could kiss her.
The thought is a match strike. Brief, bright, consuming. I could close the distance and find out what happens when a storm meets whatever she is. I could stop being afraid of the fire and walk into it and—
I stop thinking.
My mouth finds hers. The contact is a shock—soft and warm and real, her lower lip catching against mine, and for one half-second there’s nothing but the physical fact of it, her mouth and my mouth and the electricity in my skin rerouting itself through every place we touch.
Then the storm inside me goes quiet for the first time in eleven years.
Not silent. Not gone. Just—quiet. Like the pressure front that’s been building since I was eleven and standing in a ruined kitchen has finally broken, and what comes through isn’t destruction but rain.
Her lips are warm and chapped and she tastes like dust and sleep and something underneath that my body recognizes before my brain catches up.
I open my mouth against hers and her lips part and the taste deepens—warm, alive, the kind of sweetness that has nothing to do with sugar and everything to do with the fact that she’s letting me in.
Her tongue finds mine and the sound I make is not a sound I’ve ever made before, low and wrecked and honest, and her hand slides from my shoulder to the back of my neck and her fingers are in my hair and the sparks don’t jump.
For the first time in months, my skin doesn’t throw voltage at the person touching me.
Like it knows her. Like it’s been waiting.
I pull her closer. My hands find the hem of the moose shirt and slip underneath and her skin is warm—so warm, summer-warm, alive-warm—and my palms flatten against the small of her back and her heartbeat through her ribs, or maybe that’s my heartbeat, or maybe it’s both, the bond singing between us like a wire in a windstorm.
She kisses me back. Not careful. Not the way you kiss someone you’re worried about breaking.
She kisses me like she knows I won’t shatter, and that’s the thing that undoes me—the confidence of it, the I know what you are and I’m not flinching of it—and something in my chest cracks open like a cloud bank splitting and I’m—
Crying.
I’m crying. I don’t realize it until I taste salt between our mouths and her hands are on my face and her thumbs are wiping my cheeks and I pull back—not far, forehead against forehead, her breath on my mouth—and I’m embarrassed and wrecked and the storm is still quiet and I can’t remember the last time I cried and I can’t stop.
“Hey,” she says. Soft. Her fingers in my hair. “Hey. You’re okay.”
“Fuck.” The word comes out broken. Half laugh, half something else. I press my face against her shoulder and her arms go around me and I let her hold me while I come apart in the pre-dawn dark, sparks flickering weakly at my fingertips like a fire burning down to coals.
She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t need to. She just holds on, her chin on the top of my head, her hand steady on the back of my neck, and the bond hums between us—not the frantic pull from before, not the pain, just warmth. Clean warmth. The kind that doesn’t burn.
We stay like that a long time. Long enough for the crying to stop, long enough for my breathing to even out, not because I’m trying but because something about her body against mine resets the weather inside me the way grounding resets a live wire.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say into her shoulder.
“That’s okay.”
“I mean with any of it. The bond. You. The—” I gesture vaguely at the space between us, which is approximately zero inches and contains more honesty than I’ve offered another person in a decade. “This.”
“I know.” Her hand finds mine. Threads her fingers through, squeezes. “We don’t have to know yet.”
The sky turns grey. Then pink. Then the Arizona sun comes up like it does—all at once, enormous, the kind of sunrise that doesn’t creep but detonates, flooding the desert in gold. The red rocks catch fire. The campground fills with light.
I sit in the scorched remains of my sleeping bag with Everly’s hand in mine, her shoulder against my shoulder, and watch the sunrise burn the nighttime away.
My eyes are swollen. My chest feels emptied out—not hollow, just light.
Like something heavy has been removed and the space hasn’t decided what to fill with yet.
For the first time in a very long time, the weather inside me is still.