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I’m surrounded by a crowd of strangers and every single one of them is staring.
I reach up to smooth my mask with trembling fingers. It’s not there—I haven’t worn one for ages—but right now, I long for the bland anonymity of Refuge’s uniforms. Every other face in this crowd is uncovered, but exposing my own bare, grimy skin still feels wrong.
Longing to run back inside and hide behind Ash shudders through me. Instead, I straighten my spine and glare back at the unfamiliar faces. I survived Refuge. I fought the Mara and won. What were mere humans going to do?
“This way.” The tall woman with braids—my grandmother—touches my shoulder. She must have followed us out. She curls one arm behind me and nudges me down the path, ignoring the crowd. Most of the people obligingly stumble out of the way, still staring, but one boy—slight, perhaps a couple years younger than I am, brown-skinned, with dark hair and features that are almost too pretty—darts closer.
“So you’re her, huh?” he says, striking an ostentatiously thoughtful pose, and then pulling a face. “Disappointing, if you ask me.”
An older boy with shockingly orange hair jostles him. “Don’t be rude, Rei. What if Cady doesn’t remember you? What’ll you do if she doesn’t know you’re joking?” He winks. “As you can see, nothing’s changed around here. Welcome home anyhow.”
The young giant behind him nods and makes a rumbling sound I can’t interpret, while a tall girl with long braids standing just to his left gives me a hard look.
“Aleya’s teaching right now,” a girl with medium-brown hair in a springy cloud around her head says. “And Mogwai got called away, but—”
“Away with you all.” The old woman makes a shooing motion. “Give the poor girl some time to get settled before you descend like a cloud of horseflies.”
Their names are familiar, and they obviously expect me to know them—friends of Cadence’s, maybe?
“Ash’s squad,” she says helpfully. “Or most of it. Those are their code names they’re using, though. Threw me for a minute, or I’d’ve said hi. Banshee is the one with the braids, in case you were wondering.”
Though the large one has to drag the small, comically hyper one—Rei—by the back of his shirt, they all melt into the crowd as ordered and leave us in peace, for which I’m grateful. It’s bad enough the way a fog of whispers scratches at me from every side: can’t be—look at her face!—returned—alone?—where are the parents?—the Cole girl—Cadence Cole—Cadence—Cadence! Having to deal with Cadence’s old friends, the ones Ash deserted to come after me, is more than I can face right now.
Our path winds through low hills and vegetation, forcing the crowd to thin. Children chase up and down alongside us for a better look until they are scolded to stay off the roofs—the rolling landscape hides dozens of homes. Windows and doors peek from amidst the greenery, often marked by an extra cluster of colourful flowering plants.
The effect is not unpleasant, visually speaking, but being surrounded by so much nature—ugh. The air is full of flying things—some buzzingly alive, others seemingly inanimate floaters. I bat at the stuff that gets too close before I catch myself, conscious of the alarmingly attentive audience.
Though I keep sneaking hopeful glances at the fantastical towers hugging the city walls, our path ends in front of a weathered door with a carved handle below its little round window. The warm, variegated browns of the door set into the side of the hill remind me of Ash’s eyes in those quiet moments when he pushes the mist away and lets me see the boy underneath the power.
My breath hitches. I glance back, hoping to see him catching up to us.
No such luck—only strangers return my stare.
“Come inside.” The old woman—I can’t adjust to calling her grandmother, I just can’t—stands in the open doorway. She peers past me. “What are you all looking at? Back to work, the lot of you.”
She ducks around me and yanks the door shut as soon as I cross the deep threshold.
The interior is unexpectedly bright. Windows show glimpses of sunshine and purple blossoms. Walls curl into ceiling, painted a soft blue between the raw wood beams radiating from a ringed opening in the middle of the roof. I feel like I’ve climbed inside the heart of a tree. The counters and shelves lining the walls above wide-planked floors, the doors on the facing wall, the table ringed with upright chairs, and even the two larger chairs in the center of the room are all made of the same warm-toned wood.
Green, purple, and blue fabrics offer a cool splash of contrast in cushions and woven rugs and draped blankets and painted vessels. Baskets hold piles of unidentifiable plant-life; other weedy-looking things are heaped on the counters or hanging from the beams. The smell is . . . is . . .
“Welcome home,” she says.
My face flushes and my eyes prickle, welling up and making my nose itch. There’s something about the smell of all these plants indoors that’s getting to me. It’s somehow familiar—and deeply upsetting.
My chest is tight. It’s hard to breathe. I pluck the fabric of my shirt away from damp skin and feel behind me for the door. I have to get out—
“What’s wrong? Cady?” The woman puts a hand to my forehead. “Are you sick?”
I jolt away, shaking my head.
“Oh, your hair . . .” she flutters one hand at the ragged locks straggling past my ears. Her lips twist unhappily. “Don’t worry. It’ll grow.”
Cadence is silent for once—and just when I could use her help, too.
“I don’t—I’m not—” This is ridiculous. I’ve been in far worse situations before and handled it. Nothing to do but move forward. “Cole. Not Cady. Please.”
She blinks rapidly, rocking back on her heels. “Cole—? Cady, you don’t—? Sorry, I think I’d better attend after all—”
Mist swells from beneath her skin, silvering her brown wrinkles, dripping down her long braids and clouding over her eyes. She goes very still, so still I’m afraid she’s stopped breathing.
I wave a hand in front of her. She doesn’t react. I move it toward her mouth to feel for breaths, but encounter resistance a few inches from her skin, as if the mist has gone solid. Like poking a mattress. I can press in a bit, but it pushes back.
I circle, testing the barrier. It’s more than whatever Ash had done to keep insects at bay, more like full-body armour—I can’t believe Cadence and Ash never mentioned they could do this.
Cadence hums. “If you weren’t resisting so hard, you’d remember in the first place. She’s off dreamwalking, that’s all. You’re freaking her out, so she’s probably gone to demand answers from Ash.”
I could argue, but I have better things to do with this unexpected opportunity to explore. I circle the room, picking up objects from the shelves and counters and trying to guess what they’re for.
Some are probably food. These past few days on the road with Ash have introduced a number of new food sources, both plant-based and decidedly not. Quite a number of the unfamiliar foodstuffs have been dried into a form that seems very unpleasant for chewing. I try a bite of a lumpy green thing and spit it out immediately, my tongue working to scrape away the acrid sourness flooding my mouth.
Berries I recognize—and commandeer, cramming handfuls into my mouth as I explore. The first two doors on the far wall lead to smaller, darker rooms, each with a bed, several pegs with colourful woven clothes hanging from them, and a few shelves. Behind the third door I find what I really want but, glancing back to find the old woman still shrouded in silver, I’m not sure I should pass up this opportunity to explore unsupervised.
I make another circuit of the cozy space, this time lingering to handle more of the objects on the shelves and cupboards, though it’s still painful to pick things up and that makes me clumsier than usual. I manage to cut myself more than once on the edges of new-to-me tools. I use my forearms for balance on the angled ladder in the middle of the room and work my way carefully up and through the roof to the top of the small hill that shelters the little house.
At first, I’m struck by how beautiful it is—warm and bright, colourful blossoms all mixed in with the wind-swayed grasses. Then I take another step up the ladder and look out over the grass—to a dozen or more curious faces staring back.
I miss a few rungs on my hasty way back down and have to take a moment to let the throbbing pain in my shins and elbows subside.
I wander back to the still figure frozen on one side of the main room. She hasn’t moved, the silver mist radiating from her just as thick as ever. Her blank gaze doesn’t flicker when I step in front of her. Worried, I move to one side and watch for the rise and fall of her chest.
It’s slight, and not nearly as frequent as it should be, but she appears to be breathing. Under the swirling barrier, her colour seems healthy. As healthy as you can be when you’ve lived as long as she has, at least.
She’s a little darker than me, but with the same kind of warm, reddish tone to her skin. Lines crease her forehead and frame her mouth and eyes. Her hair is thick and long, the deep brown strands twined with grey. Fuzzy bits curl out of her braids and spring in an unruly halo around her face. I push my rough-cropped hair back, wondering if it feels the same. If my mother’s was like that too—or my father’s, for that matter. I search her face as if I’d have any way to recognize either one of them reflected in it. Or even myself.
How many years would it take to look like her? I can’t imagine living that long. Although . . . I don’t know. I guess I’ve never really thought about my future that way. Never pictured myself as an adult, growing, changing, getting old.
I peer into the old woman’s face and trace lines on my own, making faces and trying to feel where the skin might crease over the years.
Her eyes snap open. The mist sucks back under her skin.
I stumble backward and knock into the shelves, sending things I don’t know the name for or use of crashing to the floor. Her gaze never flickers from my face. Her intensity—I kneel and fumble through the broken mess to escape.
She slowly lowers herself beside me.
“You can call me Susan,” she says.
My nightmare flashes behind my eyes. Suzie.
Something bites my finger, a sharp nip from the shard of a broken dish drawing me back. Susan captures my hands and pulls me free of the fragments.
“Ash just finished giving his report.” She tilts my hand to examine the shallow new cut—and the deeper, older damage. So many layers of hurt. “I think I understand now. Is Cadence there, too?”
We both wait for her response, but apparently she’s childishly choosing to ignore us.
After a few moments of uncomfortable silence, Susan sighs. “Well, we can come back to that. And to this mess. The council wants to see you again, now that Ash has explained. But first, let’s get you cleaned up.
“You were . . . with the council? And Ash?”
Susan closes her eyes for a moment, as if in pain. “You really don’t remember, then. Ash said—well, never mind. Hurry and wash up first. I’ll get us something to eat, and then it’s back to the House of Nine for the both of us.”
She bustles about as she speaks, reaching into a bedroom for an armful of clothes, pushing open the door to the bathroom and starting water running.
“These might not fit, but at least they’re clean. Gracie won’t mind. Soap’s on the edge there. You can use it on your hair too.” Her hand flutters over the mess on my head, and she sighs again. “Right, lots to do. Better get started. Unless you need help?”
She catches my wrist in a gentler grasp than her brisk tone had led me to expect and examines it again, the wrinkles in her forehead cutting deeper. Her power swells in a halo around her. She holds her free hand out from her body, tapping and twisting the air to no discernable rhythm.
I gasp. My hands come alive with a strange buzzing. It’s almost, but not quite, painful. My cuts knit closed and the bruising fades. I make a fist, marveling at the ease. And then I sob, finally realizing what’s happening, what her dancing fingers and my vanishing wounds mean.
She’s a healer. A dreamweaver, like I . . . was—and yet not alike. She’s not slicing into monsters and dragging people around by their deepest desires. She’s simply putting broken things to rights.
She’s what I could have been. What I was meant to be.
Suddenly I’m horrified. If she’s like me—like I was—then she can see everything. All that I am. My deepest desires, things I don’t even let myself see.
When I fight to escape, she lets me extract myself from her grip without protest. I hesitate, waiting for her to comment on what she’s seen. The moment she opens her mouth, I’m gone. I’ll be out the door and away before she finishes the first sentence.
But she just steps past me to turn off the running tap. Then she turns and hands me a towel, all in silence. My skin itches and the promise of a clean change of clothes is enough to send me into the bath without another word.