make her stronger even as her body withered. This, this, is the consequence.
Being this close to her is nothing short of excruciating.
I think I’ve screamed.
Have I screamed?
Everything about Emmaline is heightened to a fever pitch; her presence is wild, breathtaking, and it shudders to life inside my nerves. Sound and sensation streak across my vision, barrel through me violently. I hear a spider scuttle across the wooden floor. Tired moths drag their wings along the wall. A mouse startles, settles, in its sleep. Dust motes fracture against a window, shrapnel skidding across the glass.
My eyes skitter, unhinged in my skull.
I feel the oppressive weight of my hair, my limbs, my flesh wrapped around me like cellophane, a leather casket. My tongue, my tongue is a dead lizard perched in my mouth, rough and heavy. The fine hairs on my arms stand and sway, stand and sway. My fists are so tightly clenched my fingernails pierce the soft flesh of my palms.
I feel a hand on me. Where? Am I?
Lonely, she says.
She shows me.
A vision of us, back in the laboratory where I first saw her, where I killed our mother. I see myself from Emmaline’s point of view and it’s startling. She can’t see much more than a blur, but she can feel my presence, can make out the shape of my form, the heat emanating from my body. And then my words, my own words, hurled back into my brain—
there has to be another way you don’t have to die we can get through this together please i want my sister back i want you to live Emmaline i won’t let you die here Emmaline Emmaline we can get through this together we can get through this together we can get through this together
A cold, metallic sensation begins to bloom in my chest. It moves through me, up my arms, down my throat, pushes into my gut. My teeth throb. Emmaline’s pain claws and slithers, clings with a ferocity I can’t bear. Her tenderness, too, is desperate, terrifying in its sincerity. She’s overcome by emotion, hot and cold, fueled by rage and devastation.
She’s been looking for me, all this time.
In these last couple of days Emmaline has been searching the conscious world for my mind, trying to find safe harbor, a place to rest.
A place to die.
Emmaline, I say. Please—
Sister.
Something tightens in my mind, squeezes. Fear propels through me, punctures organs. I’m wheezing. I smell earth and damp, decomposing leaves and I feel the stars staring at my skin, wind pushing through darkness like an anxious parent. My mouth is open, catching moths. I am on the ground.
Where?
No longer in my bed, I realize, no longer in my tent, I realize, no longer protected.
But when did I walk?
Who moved my feet? Who pushed my body?
How far?
I try to look around but I’m blind, my head trapped in a vise, my neck reduced to fraying sinew. My breaths fill my ears, harsh and loud, harsh and loud, rough rough gasping efforts my head
swings
My fists unclench, nails scraping as my fingers uncurl, palms flattening, I smell heat, taste wind, hear dirt.
Dirt under my hands, in my mouth, under my fingernails. I’m screaming, I realize. Someone is touching me and I’m screaming.
Stop, I scream. Please, Emmaline— Please don’t do this—
Lonely, she says.
l o n e l y
And with a sudden, ferocious agony—
I am displaced.
It feels weird to call it luck.
It feels weird, but in some perverse, twisted way, this is luck. Luck that I’m standing in the middle of damp, freezing woodlands before the sun’s bothered to lift its head. Luck that my bare upper body is half-numb from cold.
Luck that Nazeera’s with me.
We pulled on our invisibility almost instantly, so she and I are at least temporarily safe here, in the half-mile stretch of untouched wilderness between regulated and unregulated territories. The Sanctuary was built on a couple of acres of unregulated land not far from where I’m standing, and it’s masterfully hidden in plain sight only because of Nouria’s unnatural talent for bending and manipulating light. Within Nouria’s jurisdiction, the climate is somehow more temperate, the weather more predictable. But out here in the wild, the winds are relentless and combative. The temperatures are dangerous.
Still— We’re lucky to be here at all.
Nazeera and I had been out of bed for a while, racing through the dark in an attempt at murdering one another. In the end it all turned out to be a complicated misunderstanding, but it was also a kind of kismet: If Nazeera hadn’t snuck into my room at three o’clock in the morning and nearly killed me, I wouldn’t have chased her through the forest, beyond the sight and soundproof protections of the Sanctuary. If we hadn’t been so far from the Sanctuary, we never would’ve heard the distant, echoing screams of citizens crying out in terror. If we hadn’t heard those cries, we never would’ve rushed toward the source. And if we hadn’t done any of that, I never would’ve seen my best friend screaming her way into dawn.
I would’ve missed this. This:
J on her knees in the cold dirt, Warner crouched down beside her, both of them looking like death while the clouds literally melt out of the sky above them. The two of them are parked right outside the entrance to the Sanctuary, straddling the untouched stretch of forest that serves as a buffer between our camp and the heart of the nearest sector, number 241.
Why?
I froze when I saw them there, two broken figures entwined, limbs planted in the ground. I was paralyzed by confusion, then fear, then disbelief, all while the trees bent sideways and the wind snapped at my body, cruelly reminding me that I’d never had a chance to put on a shirt.
If my night had gone differently, I might’ve had that chance.
If my night had gone differently, I might’ve enjoyed, for the first time in my life, a romantic sunrise and an overdue reconciliation with a beautiful girl. Nazeera and I would’ve laughed about how she’d kicked me in the back and almost killed me, and how afterward I almost shot her for it. After that I would’ve taken a long shower, slept until noon, and eaten my weight in breakfast foods.
I had a plan for today: take it easy.
I wanted a little more time to heal after my most recent near-death experience, and I didn’t think I was asking for much. I thought that, maybe, after everything I’d been through, the world might finally cut me some slack. Let me breathe between tragedies.
Nah.
Instead, I’m here, dying of frostbite and horror, watching the world fall to pieces around me. The sky, swinging wildly between horizontal and vertical horizons. The air, puncturing at random. Trees, sinking into the ground. Leaves, tap-dancing around me. I’m seeing it—I’m actively witnessing it—and still I can’t believe it.
But I’m choosing to call it luck.
Luck that I’m seeing this, luck that I feel like I might throw up, luck that I ran all this way in my still-ill, injured body just in time to score a front-row seat to the end of the world.
Luck, fate, coincidence, serendipity—
I’ll call this sick, sinking feeling in my gut a fucking magic trick