I turn to run, though by now my naked feet feel raw.
And that’s when a silver car squeals into Xand’s driveway, so fast that it nearly rear-ends his parents’ SUV.
My mom, her gaze bright with longing, her usual composure replaced by a disordered blend of fear and outrage. Of course she would look for me here. Why won’t she understand the desperate necessity of getting far away, of saving whatever she can?
There’s a line of woods behind Xand’s house, and I could run for it again, if only it weren’t for her car’s other passenger. He’s on the car’s roof, and I’m nearly positive she has no idea what’s up there. A cloud-horse, its legs splayed slightly, hooves skidding awkwardly on the metallic surface. And on the horse, a rider.
Joshua Korensky.
“Hey, Lexi,” he says, far too casually for someone who’s helped leave a trail of corpses scattered through our town. This is what they’ve done to him: he can’t feel the reality of other people anymore. It’s as if they’ve severed the nerves that reach to connect with all the rest of humanity, that receive living waves of emotion. Xand was a friend of his, but if Josh knows Xand is dead—if he authorized Xand’s murder, the way my double said—then he clearly doesn’t care in the slightest.
Josh notices the hat, still brim-up in my hands, its black bowl turned to the sky. “Ugh. You know that thing is dangerous, right? You should give it to me.”
“I’ll give it back to Ksenia,” I snap. “Just as soon as I see her. And anyway, it’s a hat. How can it be dangerous?”
“It’s not just a hat anymore, though. Not after everything. It’s like a gun that shoots changes instead of bullets, Lexi. And you don’t even know what it’s loaded with.” He reaches for it again, and I ignore him.
If it’s really some kind of weapon, then obviously surrendering it would be ridiculous.
Why hasn’t my mother leapt out of her car yet? I can see her leaning over behind the window, clearly tugging hard at the handle. The door doesn’t seem to be yielding, and her face is tense with suppressed fear. I can’t bear it, and I run to open the door from the outside.
“That won’t work, Lexi,” Josh says. He’s looming over me, his hair a slanting cascade as he bends above my head. “I’m keeping her in there for now, okay? She’ll just be in the way.”
I try to stay calm. “You will let her out this instant.” My mom is banging on the glass, gesturing to me, but Josh is right; I’m yanking on the door, and it doesn’t budge.
“Yeah, no. I really won’t. Trying to smash the windows won’t work, either. Jesus, Lexi, do you even get that all of this is your fault? You’re messing with Prince, which you should seriously know better than to even think of doing. You’ve made yourself into a problem, when you could have just left us alone. So what do you expect us to do? Just take it, because you feel so righteous about dishing it out? It doesn’t work like that.”
Us. So he sees himself as truly one of them, now. I used to be ready to share the responsibility for the disaster that’s overtaken us. But while Josh keeps talking, I feel that change.
Yes, I said things that set Josh off, and he was fragile and hurt and desperate beyond my comprehension. He’s suffered so much loss that the thought of losing Ksenia too was enough to unbalance him. And I shouldn’t have spoken for Ksenia. I’ll own that much. But Josh’s descent into cruelty, and the fact that he thought kidnapping Ksenia to another world was a reasonable response to his pain: those acts are not mine, and I refuse to take on the faintest breath of guilt.
“So why don’t we just ask Ksenia what she wants?” I say. The words fill me with lightness, with a sense of liberation. “We’ll go together. If she says she wants to stay in that nothing of a place forever, I’ll respect that.”
That doesn’t address the problem of the stolen children, of course, or of Xand. I can’t avoid the dreadful recognition, either, that it will be almost impossible for Ksenia to bring herself to the point of abandoning him, no matter how utterly he deserves it. It does nothing to help the dead, or ease the grief of their families. But it strikes me as being a proposal that Josh will find hard to ignore. Even now, after all that’s happened, his love for her remains his justification for everything.
And maybe, just maybe, I can persuade Ksenia to put herself first for once in her life. To honor her own potential, her own future, and leave Josh to the fate he’s made for himself.
Josh gapes. He wavers, perched high up on his misty horse, but his expression now reminds me of a frightened child.
“We both wanted to find a way to stay together, Lexi! That was the whole point. So we had this huge problem, and I’m the one who solved it. I honestly don’t see why you think you get to criticize that.”
“Because consent doesn’t count if you don’t know what you’re agreeing to,” I say. It’s only an intuition, of course, but I’m nearly certain that Ksenia didn’t grasp what Josh was up to. She must have gone through the process the false Xand described, and it’s easy to imagine how she could have been coaxed into saying something that would count as pledging herself. She must have eaten their food, but did she understand what doing that would mean? It’s not as if Josh warned me, when he tried to trap me there. “And it doesn’t count if you have no way to change your mind. If you really love her, Josh, why don’t you give her a chance to do that?”
The glass mutes her voice, but still, faintly, horribly, I can hear my mother shouting inside her car. I press my hands on the pane, so she’ll feel that I’m with her.
But that’s all I can do for the moment, because something in Josh is weakening under the impact of my words. His enchanted numbness wavers visibly, splits, like rents spreading through a veil. And behind it I see such grief that, in spite of myself, I nearly reach out a hand to him. “Josh…” I say.
And then it’s over. A distant coldness seizes his face again, with such brutal abruptness that I can hardly accept he’s still the same person. He glances down, bending over to scowl at my mother’s frantic face, and tugs on the glittering reins; I hadn’t taken them in before, bright ropes of crystalline tears with nothing supporting them. The horse taps the car’s roof sharply, and my mother slumps against the glass, eyelids fluttering shut. But her chest still rises and falls; Josh really has enough power now to bring on a magical sleep?
As long as it’s temporary, it’s better for her than helpless terror.
“You just want Kezzer for yourself,” Josh snarls. “You think I don’t know that? You’ll trick her into thinking she’s in love with you, and then you’ll move on to your fabulous life without her, and she’ll be completely destroyed!”
I can’t even react at first. Where on earth did he get this idea? Or—does he have an actual reason for suspecting that Ksenia might have feelings for me? It’s a startling thought, though I can’t rule it out—not when I remember the soft fervor I felt in her kiss on my cheek.
But if Ksenia’s sexuality has always seemed more than a shade ambiguous, mine is supposed to be simple, straightforward. I’m supposed to like boys. It’s only now, hearing Josh’s accusation, that I realize Ksenia Adderley’s existence might represent a complication for me. The truth is, her poised androgyny has always struck me as a very beautiful and compelling way of being.
But it’s hardly the moment to wonder about this. “I want Ksenia to choose the direction of her own life, whatever that is. I want her to have—the full range of possibilities. And if you don’t want those possibilities for her, I’d say your love isn’t worth much.”
Another rip in the veil. They’ve murdered his empathy for everyone else, it seems, but where Ksenia is concerned he still has a residue of conscience. On some repressed level, he knows perfectly well what he’s done to her.
Something in what I’m saying hits home.
“Alexandra is without understanding you, dear Joshua.” That grating voice, like a rusty chain dragged across a church bell; it comes from a spot to my right, but higher up. “Nothing of great matter to her, has she ever lost. Even her Alexander dies on the tipsy of a fingernail, and does she weep? So how can she feel for one like you, who loves to the core of your being?”
Unselle. I don’t see her, but I can tell from the piercing turn of Josh’s gaze that he does. She doesn’t have to be visible. Bile still rises in my mouth as her image wafts into my mind: a cloud-white girl with cheekbones like broken ice, with lips like spilled blood, and with a snarling, snapping beast in place of her heart.
“Lexi and I were so close,” Josh complains in her direction. “Like, maybe I shouldn’t care so much, but it still eats me up that she just doesn’t get it. How can I get her to understand that what she’s asking me to do—that it’s way too horrible?”
“If you wish Alexandra to understand, then she must lose as you have lost.” A single, delicate hand appears in midair, high enough that I know Unselle must still be on horseback. From her fanned-out white fingers to the frill of her cuff I can see her, but the rest of her is still invisible. Those long fingers squeeze shut all at once, with a wringing motion as if she were snapping a bird’s neck. “I grant you the power, Joshua. You are still enough human that I can slip the magic through you, to do what I cannot. Make it so.”
I don’t understand what the gesture means, but Josh clearly does, because his eyes go wide. He looks down at my mother’s car, and back to Unselle.
She must lose as you have lost. Understanding comes as if I’d inhaled fire.
Josh’s parents were crushed to death inside their car.