Chapter 1 #3
I reach for him the way I've reached for the voice I’ve become comfortable with. The one I yearn for. I reach down into the low dark place under my ribs, that private channel nobody else gets, the one that always answered.
Emric. I nearly shout his name in my head.
Nothing answers. The channel's a scraped-out hole and I already know it and I do it anyway.
Emric, I swear to God, if you can hear me—
My thumb finds the bead on Nellie's cord and rolls it. Around. Around.
Come on. You found me the moment I stepped foot on campus with a skull full of dampeners. Find me now. I'm right here, I'm—
I reach for Aamon's stone, gripping it to see if my magic settles or maybe amplifies. Helps me find the voice I’m searching for somehow.
Nothing.
The channel's a hole and I keep throwing myself at it, out loud and inside my skull at once, both ways, like volume ever mattered to a door that isn't there.
My magic went through him like he was made of paper. That's the part that keeps running over and over in my head. Paper, then ash, then nothing—and the last of him was my name in his mouth, cut in half, and I never got to say one single word back.
"Take it back," I tell him, and my voice finally splits all the way open. "Whatever they put in me—take it. I don't want it. I never wanted it."
The stone bites into my palm, my other one still fisted shut.
Emric doesn't answer. I'm bargaining with ash in a dark room because the silence when I stop is so much worse than my own voice.
But it holds me. Barely. The way a hand around a cracked cup holds it.
The heat under my ribs backs off the edge it was climbing, banks down, waits.
Talking to him is close enough to reaching for the voice that my body can't tell the difference, and for one breath, then two, the grief stays grief and doesn't turn into fire.
But he’s gone. I can’t keep pretending he’s not.
My fire, my destruction took the gentlest person I've ever known and I took the voice with him, both at once, the boy and the presence in my head snuffed out in the same three heartbeats because they were the same and I never got to know it for sure and now I never will—
A sob tears out of me, cracked and raw, and it is the only piece of grief my body has the air left to give. I open my palm, finally, and the rest of Emric floats down to the cottage floor.
And then some cold animal part of me, the part the facility built, the part that kept me alive through twelve years of white rooms, takes the wheel.
Don't. Don't feel it. Feel it and you detonate again.
So I don't. I lock it down and I make my scraped-raw body move, because a body in motion doesn't have room to come apart.
I go to the wardrobe. My legs barely hold. I pull it open and the grey uniforms hang there in their neat row, but I ignore them and reach past them to the top shelf where my duffel is folded flat.
The canvas bag. The color of nothing. The one I walked out of the facility with a lifetime and a month ago, holding everything I owned, which was almost nothing then and is almost nothing now.
I drop it on the bed and I unzip it and look into the emptiness, knowing that’s exactly what I’ll be walking back into when I’m forced to leave this place.
Emptiness.
A life without meaning.
Without hope.
One pair of jeans. Two t-shirts. The stone from the nightstand—no.
I set the resonance stone down. I won't need it where they're sending me. I fold the jeans tight and flat. I don’t think about Emric, and I don’t think about Kage’s arms around me, and I don’t think about Aamon's hand at his side, and I don’t reach again for the empty place hole in my mind where the voice used to be.
I'm folding the second shirt when something shifts.
My heart skips a beat and my knees nearly give out.
Calypso.
I stop.
Warm. Unhurried. Sliding into the space between my thoughts like a hand through a cracked door, settling into the exact place I just found scraped down to nothing, like it belongs there, like it's always belonged there and I simply wasn't listening.
Not gone.
The shirt drops out of my hands.
Because I felt it die. I felt it cut off with him, mid-word, the same instant the fire took him, and I have spent the last hour grieving them as one loss—the sweet boy and the voice in my head, the same person, gone together.
Emric was ash in my fist.
But the voice is in my head, warm as it has ever been.
Which means…
I was wrong?
About what I've been talking to since the day I got here. About the thing that has lived past every wall I have, that knew me before the academy did, that told me I was strong and told me to stay away from Kage and went velvet-over-a-blade the one time it wanted something—
I go very, very still, in the darkness of my cottage over my half-packed bag.
Who are you? I think, and my own voice shakes inside my skull.
The warmth deepens. Leans closer. Wraps around the cold scraped place like it's coming home.
You're not going anywhere, Calypso, it says, gentle as a hand on the back of my neck.
I've waited too long for you to leave.