Chapter 9
Nyx was never Hiding anyone’s memories ever again.
It was all Mary was thinking about. Nyx knew that, because she kept having to funnel magic into that Hiding.
Had she been this much of a drain on her mother’s magic for years?
Or had it been easier, since she hadn’t remembered anything of herself?
Since the complete failure to do so had led to her accepting that she was unlikely to ever remember?
After the first year, Nyx’s thoughts on her own amnesia had faded to a background noise, a low-level curiosity dulled by constant defeat.
Perhaps her drain on Elena’s magic had been just as low-level and dull.
But Mary knew enough of herself to know she should remember, and the effort she was putting into trying was proving hideously inconvenient.
After a couple hours she had a blossoming headache, so it was just as well that Morgen texted that he and Kaden had found the flyer on a coffee shop bulletin board.
The picture he sent her of it showed a colorful sheet of paper that promoted a birdwatching group walk through Central Park.
Woven into the elaborate artwork, buried in the feathers of a bird in flight, was the skull-and-crossbones caduceus.
Nyx was excited enough about finally having a tangible lead that she completely forgot everything that had happened with Kaden the night before, right up until the moment she walked into the cafe and saw him sitting at a table with Morgen.
She only missed one step before she made herself keep walking and sit down at the table.
Act like nothing happened. You totally don’t remember that you did dumb things last night. Be normal. “Hey.” She said this to the center of the table, then tried to recover with: “How is everyone?”
Evra, having taken the seat across from Nyx, gave her a what-is-wrong-with-you look. Nyx didn’t know what Kaden was doing, because she was very studiously not looking at him while trying to appear as though she wasn’t trying not to look at him. Did she normally not look at him?
“I am fine, little Guardian, thank you so much for asking,” Morgen said smoothly. “And how are you after polishing off half the hotel room’s liquor supply?”
“Dehydrated.”
“Ah.” He pushed his glass of water across the table to her.
She considered a snappy comeback, decided hydration was, in fact, the better option, and mumbled a thank you before downing the glass.
“Now that you are no longer dehydrated, does one of you finally want to tell me where you got the tip to look for yon flyer over there?” He nodded at the bulletin board hanging next to the drink pickup counter.
Nyx and Evra locked gazes. “Evra harassed a magical shopkeeper,” Nyx said, at the exact same time Evra said, “Nyx used the Harvester to pry the information from a dark witch.”
Morgen blinked slowly. “The two of you did what, now?”
“Evra noticed a shop selling magical items of dubious intergalactic legality,” Nyx said.
“She then took it upon herself to threaten the shopkeeper on the grounds of said questionable intergalactic legality. The shopkeeper, being a Dead Earther with no knowledge of the wider universe, was unimpressed by this threat.”
“Go on.” Morgen waved his hand encouragingly.
Evra beat Nyx to the punch, saying, “At which point Nyx decided to begin feeding the witch’s magical inventory to the Harvester as a means of persuading her to answer our questions. She then proceeded to feed it the rest of the magical inventory out of spite.”
“No, I fed it the rest of the inventory out of a moral responsibility to the people of Dead Earth.” Nyx jabbed a finger at Evra. “You were the one who said we couldn’t just leave all of that stuff there.”
“I did not say you should feed it to a magical thing we do not understand.”
“I’m going to feed the souls of over a hundred planets to this magical thing we don’t understand, so I thought I should get some practice in.” That practice had shown her, once again, that her control over the Harvester was tenuous at best.
“Are you two having your first fight?” Morgen asked.
“No,” they said in unison.
“Clarification is needed. No, you’re not fighting, or no this isn’t the first?”
“We have fought before,” Evra said, “so this would not be our first one, however it is irrelevant because this is not a fight.”
“Agreed,” Nyx said. “This is an energetic discussion.”
Morgen arched an eyebrow. “If you say so.”
Nyx glared at him.
He coughed and said, “So, according to this energetic discussion, you fed a dark witch’s trove to the Harvester of Worlds? Was that a good idea?”
Nyx lifted her arms in the universal I-don’t-know gesture.
“I didn’t accidentally consume the entire planet, so I guess it’s fine.
” No one needed to know how close it had come to not being fine.
She was running from the reality of it herself, which was probably why her brain started turning over exactly how the Harvester would consume a planet, and her mouth decided to spout those questions to the entire table.
“Do you think Laiveran was on the planets when he fed them to the Harvester? Like, was he just standing there, on the ground and everything, slowly feeding the entire thing to it until boom, no more planet and then he’s just floating in space?
Or did he start out in space using one of those nice insulating spells Jevryn won’t teach me about because he thinks I’ll get into trouble with it? ”
Morgen stared at her for a moment before dropping his head into his hand. Evra thumped him on the shoulder. “It will be all right. I do not believe she is curious enough to actually consume the planet to discover the answer.”
Morgen lifted his head enough to rest his chin on the palm of his hand. “I suppose not, but now a dark witch is angry with us.”
“She would have to remember us to be angry,” Evra countered.
“Why would she not—” Morgen’s gaze snapped to Nyx, and she wasn’t sure she liked what she saw there.
She jumped up. “I’m going to go look at the flyer.
” She did not need to look at the flyer.
Morgen had texted a picture of it to her earlier, but she wanted to get away from the table and the reminder that, when it was convenient, apparently she was just like her mother.
As if to underscore the fact, her Hiding took another hit from Mary’s frustrated attempts to claw her memories back.
It isn’t the same thing, she told herself as she walked up to the billboard, her gaze landing on the flyer.
She was going to undo it, once they were safely back in Earth Between.
Mary Turner would regain her memories. She wouldn’t spend the rest of her life wondering about her missing time.
Nyx wasn’t even certain it was a courtesy the woman deserved, given what Evra had said about the nature of the magical items she sold, but she did know she didn’t want to be the person who decided someone else deserved what they got simply because what they got was convenient for her.
She closed her eyes and gave in to the constant desire to close her hand around the black rock that rested always against the hollow of her throat.
Ever since Seth had died, it felt like she’d lost her moral center.
It wasn’t that Evra and Morgen wouldn’t tell her when they thought she was out of line—they could and they did—but they didn’t know her the way Seth had.
When a person made friends, they showed those friends the best parts of themself.
The person they wanted to be, always. It took years—decades—for them to learn the darker, not so pretty parts.
Nyx had always tried to show Evra and Morgen the best parts of her. They certainly hadn’t seen the darkest parts. The parts Seth had always known, because when Nyx had been a child, she hadn’t been able to hide them.
Now that he was gone, a selfish part of her wished she’d never regained all those memories she’d lost. Because she hadn’t ever really had to make hard choices living in Dead Earth with no memory—she hadn’t been able to interact with others long enough for it to be an issue—and when she’d found the Station, and Griff and Evra, it had felt like deciding for herself who she wanted to be.
How she wanted to be. It had felt like making herself.
And then she’d found Seth and she’d had to know.
Who she’d been. Who they had been. So she’d remembered, and the person she’d been making herself into had collided with the person she’d always been, and she’d had come to terms with that merging.
Then Seth had died and it had ripped away so much of her identity, and she was back to asking herself who she was.
But this time, she was doing it without either the hope and happiness of the version of herself that had first found somewhere to belong in the Station, or the solid steadiness of the single most constant point in her life.
Did it ever stop? She brushed her thumb across the smooth surface of the rock. Did a person ever just get to be who they were without having to ask themselves these questions? Without having to start over and rebuild themselves every time the universe decided to be cruel?
She stared at the flyer. It led to a man who had once been a boy, who had been through something terrible enough that he had broken the foundational rule of his people and had no doubt expected to die for it.
She did not know what that something had been.
But she did know that she was not the only person who had suffered loss.
It didn’t make her own loss hurt any less. But it did make her not feel so alone.
She typed the number on the flyer into her phone, held it to her ear and listened to it ring. After three rings, a woman answered. “Yes?”
“Hi, I saw your flyer for the birdwatching meetup.” She waited, but only silence greeted her. “There’s not a date or a time listed, and I really want to go.”