The drift was sudden and urgent. I was back in the streets again, with the tile hot against my feet, the smell of roasting meat and woodsmoke filling my senses. I was deeper than I’d ever been in a drift.
I was seeing it through Samira’s eyes, and I knew what she knew. I felt what she felt, and the line between our thoughts blurred.
Salernum. I knew the name of the city. The air was heavy with rain that beckoned steam from the torches.
Railius was next to me then, as I’d seen him before. His hair was damp. His cloak was thick and deep purple, his steps decisive as we wound through the streets. He reached out and took my hand in his. We walked faster, keeping close to vendors selling eel fried in olive oil and mulsum—honeyed wine. They shouted at us as we passed, but I kept my head down. I was wearing silk lined with gold trim, my feet laced in sandals.
I knew we were supposed to meet Adelaide in the square to go to the docks. Adelaide, who’d taught me how to skin a rabbit and paint my lips with berry juice.
Railius stopped, pulling me to the side so a merchant with a wide cart of dates piled high in red clay jugs could pass through.
I looked over at him.
There was hope on his face, and I understood the weird feeling in my chest when he met my eyes.
Railius, who’d become Samira’s best friend over the five years. While Adelaide had taught her how to sharpen a blade, Railius had taught her how to stitch a wound and tell a joke.
She trusted him. When he said they would get through the town undetected, meet Adelaide at the docks, and leave the peninsula forever, she trusted him. Even though this is where her Wounded lived, if he said she would be fine, then she would be fine.
We kept the hoods over our heads.
The worry was thick and real in my chest.
We would only be there for a few more minutes. We’d meet Adelaide in the square and we’d be free.
Men with leather-plated armor walked past us, and one with a skinny face and thick lips looked twice at me. Shouts sounded from somewhere deep in the square, and Railius stopped as three more soldiers turned the corner and walked toward us.
Railius pulled me into a thin walkway, barely enough to walk through, and I pressed my back to the wall. He covered me, and I ducked my head against his shoulder.
It will be over soon, he said.
I wanted to agree, but the Pull was like someone had flipped a switch in my chest. It was like wires were in between my skin and muscle, bending in the direction I was supposed to go. Samira’s Wounded was an alchemist. She was to tell him what the emperor had learned before he died. The Pull hurt. It burned and bent, like someone was brushing a torch against my chest.
I sucked air through my teeth. My hands found the side of his head.
Think of something else, he told me, his voice tightening at the sight of my pain.
Maybe it was fear. Maybe adrenaline. Or maybe just five years’ worth of looks and laughs and firelight talks. Either way, the kiss happened.
I lifted my head. My lips brushed against his chin and then found his mouth.
He leaned his head down and met my lips, and it was like I’d opened a furnace.
It was the kiss I’d seen in the drift before, and it was as deep, as disarming, and as exposing as it seemed.
This was a cutout of a time and place, a memory that stained deep into the paper but didn’t roll over the edges, so I surrendered to it. I fell further into the drift as I fell deeper into the kiss, as though it was grounding me.
It was holding me to the earth. Anchoring me.
The shouts grew louder, and I pulled away, looking over his shoulder.
I took him by the hand and followed the alleyway.
I didn’t know what the commotion was, but we needed to find Adelaide. Quickly.
We turned a corner, pushing past a woman who was dying fabric with deep, black berries, and found ourselves staring into a line of soldiers.
“Come with us. The council would like to have a word with you both,” a portly guard with a sweaty upper lip said.
I looked back at Railius, but I knew there was no way around it.
He nodded.
“We’re just travelers. They take people aside and question them all the time. It is routine,” he whispered in my ear as we walked.
He came up alongside me, lacing his fingers through mine.
As we emptied out onto the main courtyard, I knew he was wrong.
“What happened?” I yelled as I looked out at the crowd gathering in front of the council steps.
My foot slipped on a stone step, and he caught me with one arm.
There were hundreds of people, and they parted as we passed through them, led by guards.
Monster, someone hissed. Another person spat, just missing my foot.
Railius was confused now, too, and he rested his hand close to his hip, where I knew he kept a blade. Not that it would do us any good here, with hundreds of people and dozens of soldiers surrounding us.
The Ghost of Adrenian Pass, someone else whispered.
We passed the center of the courtyard where a bronze statue stood, its shoulders back, arms raised aloft.
As we passed it, I froze.
Several men and women, dressed in the finest silk, stood on the steps leading into the bathhouse. One stood in the very back, his mouth twisted in a sneer.
The alchemist. Samira’s Wounded. The Pull buckled within me, searing my bones.
I stopped, and Railius stopped with me. He saw the man on the steps and understood.
“Keep moving,” the soldier behind me said.
“Railius,” I whispered, and my voice was hers, lower and filled with panic.
I’d never told him what the secret was. I never needed to, until now.
Panic rose in my chest as the words floated into my mouth like bile. They filled my nose and mouth, and it was like I was going to choke on the absolute destruction they could bring.
I was going to tell him. This evil man who was in my periphery as a boy, drowning a childhood rival in a creek after a ball game had turned sour.
The words rose in my throat.
I pulled on Railius’s hand.
The closer I got, the stronger it became.
Samira was going to tell this man how to ruin the world, and I could feel her panic, because I’d just felt it minutes before in Dr. Davie’s lab.
“Please,” I said, and Railius stopped. I pulled him close and whispered into his ear.
“If I tell him, he will know how to pull secrets out of people while they still live. It’s what the emperor did not live long enough to accomplish.”
Railius pulled back and looked at me, and his eyes reflected my terror.
That’s what Samira knew. How to pull Hushed out of people while they were still alive.
“Freedom will die, and terror will reign for our kind and theirs,” I finished.
Fear stretched across Railius’s face.
“Keep moving,” the soldier ordered.
I reached down and grabbed Railius’s blade.
“Please,” Samira’s voice begged.
The alchemist started walking down the steps.
Railius shook his head, a resolute no. “Adelaide will be here,” he said, but I shook my head and pulled the knife closer.
“Please. I’m going to die anyway. Please don’t let him win like this.”
Railius was horrified, but I wrapped my hand around his hand lifted the blade.
I whispered please please please and took a deep breath as the last of her resistance failed. The alchemist was within earshot.
“He knew how to—” I started, and Railius pulled the blade above his head.
He screamed and brought the blade down as hard as he could.
It sunk into my chest, and everything shattered.
I screamed. It was raw, and Samira’s voice mixed with mine, reverberating until they sounded like one.
Until they were one.
Railius pulled the knife from my chest, but something else ran me through.
The pain was unbearable. It was an epicenter, and little fissures and cracks ran from it, slipping under my skin.
Because this wasn’t a drift. It was a memory.
I saw everything unfolding before me like a map, finally making connections on roads that could never have been reached before. Ink writhed into the corners, filling things in. Terror and understanding bloomed in my chest where the knife had been buried. I fell to the ground, my vision flickering.
One of the last things I saw was a silhouette on the ledge of the wall surrounding the courtyard.
The woman in a white cloak.
Adelaide.
I could finally see her face.
It was Rory.
As my vision whited out, I saw her smile and wave.
Everything went black, and I felt the prison floor under me as I wavered between the drift and reality.
I knew what the emperor wanted the alchemist to know: the same thing Dr. Davie had discovered in the lab on 3B. The emperor had brought us forth through magic. Dr. Davie used what he called science, but the result was the same.
It was crazy, and my mind clawed at it, biting and pulling back as hard as it could as the realization bubbled to my mind.
It was the same secret. Born once of alchemy, and reborn through science centuries later.
I was Samira. I was the green-eyed girl, and I know how to create Hushed. I know how we all came to be.
I had a new body and a new name, but I was her.
I was Exhumed.