Chapter Thirty-Eight

The Seven take me away from my sister, and an escort of five Guardians keeps watch as I walk. I should be flattered that they think they need steel to keep me in line, but my stomach does a better job. It churns and complains as if it wants to be sick. My mouth is sour, and I smell like I took a bath in bleach.

I try to hold my head up, as I imagine Astar might, but I take only two steps before I trip on a crack in the stone and curse. The Guardians snicker, and even Arisa doesn’t bother to hide her amusement. I spend the rest of the long walk glaring at the floor. I need to be Astar right now, but I cannot seem to stop being my awkward self.

The door to Astar’s room flies wide open at Arisa’s touch, and it falls off its hinges from the force of it. Nothing has changed since the Demon—Teloh’s—attack. Even in that form of shadow and darkness, I realize now that he recognized me. I still don’t know what to make of it or him. Everything has changed, but nothing has. I should fear him, and yet I don’t.

Shattered shelves litter the room, and roots lay in tangles upon the floor, but no one says a word.

With a quick murmured incantation, the window shutters crack open and let a flood of light into the room. The roots of Arisa’s hair gleam white in the brightness. Any other evidence of how often she’s tasted the Heavens’ power must be hidden with black dye.

“Datu Senil, please conduct the tests. You are the keeper of Tigang’s knowledge and of our people’s history. You knew the previous Astar, did you not?” Arisa asks the Archivist.

Senil’s eyebrows knit together as if this pains him. Kalena, Omu’s pet, watches us closely. Every movement the Interpreter makes is deliberate, and she only speaks when necessary. I cannot tell what is hidden behind her mask of calm. She chose her benefactor, Omu, well.

“I did know her,” the old man says. “But only briefly. I was only a novice then. She and I rarely crossed paths.”

“And what do you remember?” Arisa glows. Her face softens for him, as if he is an elderly uncle instead of someone who might stand in her way.

“She was very serious. I don’t think she ever laughed in my presence.” He meets my gaze, and a tremor of fear runs through me. “I always thought she was quite sad.”

Arisa is not sad. Serious, maybe, but I can’t imagine her shedding a tear for anyone. She apologizes for nothing. I wish I felt her confidence for just one day of my life: to live without worrying that I might ruin things for everyone, just by existing.

“But an old man’s recollections mean nothing. Only the tests are proof,” Senil says with sympathy in his eyes. “There are three tests that Astar must pass.”

I lift my head and stand as tall as my height allows.

Senil walks to the bookshelf and lifts the model of the glass fortress from the shelf. He sets it gently in the center of the floor. He also fetches a chipped wooden dog and a silk scarf from the ironwood chest. The scarf is stiff with age, but it is painted with yellow flowers that look freshly bloomed.

Arisa’s smug look tells me that she knows the answers to the test before the questions have been given.

The Archivist gazes at me long and hard. “For three hundred years, we have found our true Astar through this test. If you are her, you have nothing to fear.”

If this is supposed to reassure me, I do not feel it. My ghosts remain worryingly silent. I throw a smile Arisa’s way and pretend confidence.

“One of these items did not belong to Astar. Which one?” Senil sits down on an offered chair with a wince. “Take your time. You may touch them if you like.”

This is a test designed for guileless children, not adults. I crouch on the floor and pick up the model fortress. I have touched it once before, and it feels much like the walls that surround me. It was made by the same hand: Astar’s.

I stroke the silk of the scarf under my fingers, and it softens under my caress. It’s frayed at the edges and stained in places. It is something I would wear, not unlike the scarf I lost, only made with better care and materials. I lift the silk up to my nose and sniff, but if a scent once lingered, the ocean air and old wood floated it away. I detect nothing.

I turn to the wooden dog and chew my lips. The paint is chipped, and layers of paint are visible beneath. Its eye is misshapen, as if it was painted by a child. The wheels squeak when I tug it across the floor. It’s ugly, but someone loved it once. No memories flash through me, but I can imagine a tiny Astar, tucked away from the world with every expensive toy available at her request, loving this one best because it was a gift from her parents. How could a baby understand being ripped from her parents? Who came when the Astar cried? Did she miss her family? Homesickness floods through me, but I dare not think of my mother or I will cry. I set the toy carefully back on the floor.

Time seems to stretch as I consider the scarf and the toy. I don’t know. No memories come to me, though I hoped they might appear when I needed them. I wonder if everyone has made a mistake about me. I halt, unsure, and think.

The room was locked and dusty the first time I came here. No one had tread its dusty floor in years. I choose reason over my unreliable instincts and curse my ghosts for their uselessness.

“They’re all Astar’s,” I say.

Motes of dust dance in the silence, and no one tells me if my guess was right or wrong. Reshar peels himself from the wall and tightens the belt on his robe.

“I will administer the second test. I will put you in a trance, and you must answer my questions.”

He removes a brass gong from his shoulder and hammers it hard. My head tunes itself to the vibration of the metal. Even my toenails buzz. I am a human tuning fork.

“What is your name?”

“Narra Jal.”

“What name were you given on your first name day?”

“Astar,” I answer. “My mother kept me a secret.” I pluck answers from my memories instead of my heart because my ghosts seem to have hidden away in a dark room and locked the door.

“Think back. Do you see darkness? Before you were born, before you were Narra Jal.”

An image winks in and out of existence, and all I am left with is a feeling.

“It was warm and dark. I was alone.”

“You are safe,” Reshar says. His voice makes a soothing contrast to the vibrating metal. “The darkness is only temporary.”

I try to focus. I float in the dark, and the sky brightens around me. A bright moon bathes everything around me in a shade of blue, and a dribble of sweet lychee juice courses down my chin. Sand slides beneath my bare toes, and the cool dampness of the ocean licks around them. It is a memory, but it flickers just out of reach, like a fish darting through the water.

“What came before the darkness?” he asks. “Who were you before you were known as Narra Jal?”

There are shadows around me, as close as a lover.

Don’t look at it, my ghosts warn. Don’t look.

“Look back,” Reshar commands.

I try to ignore my ghosts, but they squeeze at my heart and make it impossible to breathe. The image dims as I gasp for air.

“I can’t.” I tremble as a wave of guilt crashes into me, because I don’t truly want the answer. Teloh was right. I am at war with myself, and I am bound to lose.

“LOOK.”

Reshar’s word forces my gaze around as if he’s turned my neck with his hands. The darkness waits as I turn, forming and reforming into a shape that is vaguely human but has no body to contain it.

“Narra.” Reshar shakes me back to the present. “What do you see?”

I sink into another vision. I drag Teloh’s body across the dirt. Blood weeps from the orasyon carved into his skin, but I have no time to stop and bandage it. The sky grows as dark as night as plumes of smoke blot out the sun over our home, Arawan. The earth shakes beneath our feet, and I stumble, but I don’t stop. Volcanoes spit black rocks that destroy everything they touch, but the worst is yet to come.

“Get up,” I plead, but Teloh doesn’t open his eyes. He’s a dead weight, and I’m not even sure he’s alive. I wipe tears from eyes that sting with smoke as we pass a woman’s body, her head crushed by a black stone. Screams echo through the city as our people flee toward the water, carrying all that they can on their backs. The remnants of a typhoon still swirl above the largest volcano, fanning its flames and crackling with lightning.

An old man drags a cart to me from a nearby home and helps me lift Teloh into it. I sag with relief. “Thank you, po!” I gasp. “You must go to the boats. Everyone must leave. There’s no time.”

He shakes his head and returns to the steps of his nipa hut. “I am not leaving, child. I was born here, and I will die here. There is nowhere else for me.” Water fills my eyes again, but we are short on time, and I cannot force him. I bow my head and shove my awkward load toward the mass of people boarding the boats on the shore. Drums are beaten to warn the other isles as we take to our boats as Omu instructed.

Teloh groans, and his eyes flick open. They are unnaturally blue-black now, when once I could have sworn they were brown. He screams and thrashes so wildly that I bash his head with a coconut I swipe from the ground. He falls limp again, and this time I’m the one who screams. I haul him forward in the cart, sweating and slipping against the soft sand, as the world falls apart around me.

Everything is wrong. And I don’t know what is right anymore. My heart breaks and breaks, in one life and the next and the next.

“Who are you?” Reshar asks again, but the image has faded, and now I am only sore and small.

“Astar,” I say because he expects it, not because I believe it.

“This proves nothing. She is a storyteller, therefore a liar, and this version of events is in none of our histories.” Arisa scoffs. “We are wasting time, Reshar.”

For once, I agree with her. I rub water from my eyes. I’ve sprung a leak like a ship.

“What’s the last test?” I ask. I still taste smoke, and I suck in deep breaths of air to clean my lungs.

“Bring it.”

I turn to the door, and my attention orients itself unconsciously to the body that walks in. Teloh stares at me wide-eyed. His body shakes because Chaos rattles at its cage. He pleads with his eyes because his jaws remain clamped, as though they’ve been forced shut.

I rush toward him and take his shoulders in my hands. “Teloh.” My voice wavers. He flinches away as though my touch pains him, and I drop them to my sides, because I realize he is all bruises beneath his tunic. They hurt him, and I can do nothing. My fingers twitch, and his expression softens.

“Demon, tell us now. Is this girl our Astar?” Kalena asks. None of the other Datus even flinch. They all knew what he was.

His eyes meet mine, and he does not look away. He doesn’t have to say anything. I read the regret and the sorrow in them. Teloh fights against some magical compulsion, but his mouth parts slowly. A trace of dark bruises wicks up the line of his jaw. They look like they were made with fists. Arisa glares at him as if her eyes alone might control him, but I do not smell her flower scent. I smell nothing but growing things, green mosses and curled ferns, because he is here, and he feeds my greedy senses.

“No.” His voice is barely audible, but it is my doom.

“And who is the true Astar?” Arisa asks.

“You, my—” He rubs at his arms as if his body chafes, and he screams out. Kalena clenches her wrists as she tugs his invisible strings, and he goes still at the force of Omu’s magic. “Astar.”

“Expel this impostor from the Sundo. She is no one of importance.” Arisa waves a hand. She smiles at Teloh as if he is a great dog who has retrieved a bone. Then she grins and leans close to my ear. “I will find you and destroy you. I’ll throw your sister in the dungeons for safekeeping.”

“You promised to release Kuran!”

“I did not say when.” She smirks. Perhaps she believes she is justified and that power is her birthright. And I see what I might have been: corrupted and entitled.

Before Reshar can protest, or perhaps because there is nothing he can do to stop it, rough hands dig into my bruises. I am strong, but unlike Teloh, I am only human.

Guardians drag me into the courtyard, and I look up at the darkening sky. The air is thick with the promise of another storm. Teloh races after me and pulls me free. He crushes me hard against his chest, despite the hurt he’s in. For a moment, everything disappears and we are the only two people in the world. No matter who I am and who he is, being with him feels right and true.

His forehead presses against mine as Guardians wield canes against his back. They want to subdue him, not wreck him. He growls and spins me around in his arms, away from them. He does not cry out as his body absorbs the beating. “Arisa will unleash me and destroy Bato-Ko to bring Omu into this world. Get away from here before the Sundo is done—”

But he is only a human in this form. There are too many Guardians. They drive him back, and he tosses one against the gates.

All the Sundo’s tests are finished. That means I have only hours left to warn everyone.

“Wait, no!” I shout and kick at the Guardians swarming him like black ants.

Metal flashes in Teloh’s hands, but the nearest Guardian grabs me from behind. I kick hard at the Guardian’s shins, but I can’t break free, and whatever possessed me on the rooftop refuses to come to me now. The Guardian shoves me through the gate. The moment my feet touch the ground in Bato-Ko, the orasyon carved into my hand erupts with pain.

I take another breath because I cannot fight my body’s demands. Magic spreads up my arm and threatens to burn every memory away.

I have failed everyone I love.

And I am undone.