Chapter Twenty-One
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
EMBER
Where afflictions of the mind are concerned, a Healer’s touch will do no good. Though it sometimes happens the patient requires a Shield, and for that, the patient must seek a Creator.
— Ydris Ledoux, Echelon to the
School of Healing
Over the next week, I developed a routine: run to the city district in the morning, get food from the cafeteria to eat in my room, learn the ins and outs of Creatus, research at the library, and stay away from Leland.
For almost all of us, our days were filled with downtime.
Classes didn’t start until August, and, based on the laughter that floated up from the arcade every night, I guessed the fourth-year teachers used this time to enjoy each other’s company and get settled in the academy before the school year started.
No Echelons were around, Starvos was always at the palace, and non-student teachers lived in the city.
Leland, the busiest of all of us, spent most days working in either Gnarlton or Hartik’s Hollow.
I knew this because I always woke up to a message from him telling me where he would be.
I figured it was his way of telling me to stay inside, be safe, make his life easy — though he never directly told me not to go anywhere.
We brushed shoulders at breakfast, usually by the bacon, but we said nothing and didn’t see each other again until dinner, when he sat at the end of the long fourth-year table with Vyra on his lap, acting like he didn’t see me.
Skye vacillated between insisting I walk the passages of the academy with her, backward and blindfolded until we’d timed out every escape route from every direction, and being sleep-deprived and irritable from my phantom flu waking me — us — up with my screaming.
Rayne smiled. Belinda tried to get to know me. I tried to not be around.
And I never went back to Hartik’s Hollow.
* * *
I passed the majority of my time in the library, a grand, spectacular room with a gold, wrap-around mezzanine, overhead twinkly lights and recessed sconces, and wall-to-wall texts spanning the two floors.
I went there to be alone, but for whatever reason, the library keeper, Loree Flores, never wanted to let me read.
She spent most of her time reorganizing the sections surrounding my reading table, shaking her head at the mess, even though I’d never had a problem finding anything alphabetically.
“The Blackburn Artifacts,” she said one morning, spying the text I was reading.
“A beautiful new edition.” Her chin-length, dark-brown hair tucked behind her ears, I watched her dangling, candy-red earrings dance as she spoke.
“Is that the kind of book you like to read? You haven’t taken your nose out of that one all morning. ”
“No,” I sighed, repressing the urge to toss the text on the library cart with the other texts Loree was archiving.
Two hundred pages in, I’d barely made a dent in learning about the pair of letterboxes, and there were three more artifacts to go.
“I’d rather be reading anything else. This is research. ”
“Oh, well, if you don’t like that one, there’s plenty more good texts to read here. Tell me what you like. I’ll pull a few for you.”
I liked everything, but what I was in the mood for was historical romance, a story of a king falling in love with his queen, ideally the kind where they aren’t cousins, per the complex genealogy chart in the front matter. Though those, I told Loree, I never really looked at.
“You’re very right about that!” she agreed. “They all have the same names, or close enough anyway. John the son of John the son of Richard. When a book’s good, the story teaches you the names that matter.”
But as I sat alone one night, lights out but for a dying lantern at my small round table, slumped over another one of Helen’s biographies, I read the genealogy chart in the front pages and nothing else.
Skye found me rushing through the arcade afterward.
“Slow the fuck down,” she yelled, pointing downward at the freshly mopped and glistening floor.
“The Goddess?” I demanded.
“Yeah? What about Her?”
“She’s Helen’s ancestor.” Ten generations between them.
“Technically also yours.”
“No one told me.”
“Blackburns have four of Her eight magical artifacts, your mother is an Echelon, Ash is an Allwitch, you’re an Eight, and you didn’t think you were the product of the last time the Goddess participated in land breeding?”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”
Why would I?
* * *
The next day, jolted from my nightmare, and with no desire to put myself — or Skye — through the phantom flu all over again, instead of falling back asleep, I left our room to run. I was passing Leland’s room at the bottom of the spiral when his door swung open.
We hadn’t spoken since I’d left his clothes at his door. The beige hoodie, the white T-shirt, his gray sweatpants, and his sand-colored cooling jacket, all washed and folded.
“You’re running?” he asked. He checked the time on his transmitter and frowned. It was an hour before dawn, and a string was stuck in the neck of his hoodie like he’d just hopped out of bed and hastily thrown it on.
“I can’t sleep,” I said.
“Don’t run in a sweatshirt,” he sighed. “You’re going to pass out.”
I held out my hands to remind him. “Wrists.”
“Take my jacket.”
“No, but thank you.”
He palmed the back of his neck, then glanced behind him, turning back to me after spotting his running shoes. “You want company?”
I shook my head. “You don’t have to.”
“All right,” he sighed. “I’m going back to my bed.”
I tore myself from his door, and ignoring the growing pit of emptiness in my stomach, I set out for the city as the sun came up.
I ran through the desert, past the sea of purple ivy, the forest of spiky brambles, and the long stretch of land where there was nothing to see except twilight shadows and an occasional barren tree with alien probes for branches.
But scenery wasn’t needed. Paths through Creatus were either smooth concrete or, farther from the city, gravel, dirt, and sand.
The blurring, muted colors made it easy to forget where I was, so I slipped into my head.
“I’ll come by after my shift,” Gray had said the night we were supposed to camp in my backyard, though I was already back in bed by the time he texted he wouldn’t make it.
At that point, the tent I’d bought for that night was already broken down to its original, assembly-required state, a heap of stakes and poles stuffed back into its nylon stuff sack.
“I’ll make it up to you,” he’d said, and he did, but . . .
A spine-tingling sensation drew me back to the present, and the memory faded.
It was light out, and I didn’t know how, but I was standing directly in front of the portstop to Conventicles Crossing. An unknown voice spoke to me in my head. The Allwitch temple has the answers. Go to it.
I stepped on the egress, unable to deny the compulsion to port to Hartik’s Hollow.
When I got there, I hardly realized I was on Varanus Street, or that I was mindlessly walking up to the gates of the Allwitch temple. I reached for a rolled piece of parchment tucked between the iron fence bars.
Open it.
Read.
I stood beneath a streetlamp and unrolled the parchment to read the short letter.
As soon as I read it, the trance was over.
The Aspirants will be freed when you leave Everden, it said.
I blinked around at the forbidden part of Varanus Street and noticed the scrying orb, which had followed me my whole run, was suddenly nowhere to be found. I quickly stuffed the parchment in my sweatshirt pocket, realizing I needed to leave, ideally undetected.
Then I felt the sharp pain in my temples.
I was gripped by it, weakened. My limbs were heavy, cold sweat rolled down my spine, and I’d just made it to the front steps of the nearest shop before collapsing.
I was still sitting there, dizzy and trying to rub the headache out of my eyes, when Vyra Lennox stormed down the street in a huff.
“I knew it,” she said, marching up the steps with her French-manicured nails trailing up the handrail. “I knew you were running here.” One step below me, she stopped. “You really don’t get it.” She feverishly punched something into her transmitter. “The Allwitch temple is forbidden.”
My eyes, sensitive to the excruciating brightness of her green micro-shorts, wouldn’t focus. She didn’t seem to care that I was swaying and about to throw up.
“Now. I personally don’t care how you get yourself killed.
But when you drag Leland into it? That complicates things.
He doesn’t have time, understand? He has work.
He has me. He has — other friends. I haven’t even seen him in a combat gym since — since he started eating bacon.
He doesn’t have time to wake up at four a.m. to catch you breaking into the Allwitch temple.
Or to get caught not catching you, which makes him look bad.
” A notification buzzed her transmitter, the sound and the light rattling my head.
“I reported you. I expect the Echelons will get back to you shortly.”
My head was heavy, so heavy.
I forgot where I was, how I got there —
And I fainted.
* * *
“I’ve got you,” said a familiar voice.
My head fell back against something strong, and my eyes drew open. “Leland?”
He brushed my hair away from the back of my neck, the cool air hitting it just right. “Yes?”
“You were Scrying,” I said.
My eyelids were drooping, drooping . . .
Closed.
Leland pressed something cool into my hand and forced me to wrap my fingers around it. I lifted an eyelid.
Water bottle. With a straw in it.
“Drink,” he said.
I tried to shake my head, but it barely moved. Feeling hadn’t returned to my legs.
“But the scrying orb,” I insisted.
“Just drink it, Ember.”
* * *