I am kneeling on the pitching boat before Bianka while Theo traps a marble under a cup. My voice is thick with unshed tears: “I’d die before letting anything happen to him again. I swear to you, I’d die first.” And she reaches for my hand.
Pia takes Theo from my arms, shuts the door in my face, and I am standing in the hall with a bag of silver.
I take the book off the shelf in Professor Baranyi’s study—Legends of the Xianren I—and open the heavy tome in my lap.
I fire the gun and the Gethin falls. Mrs. Och is bleeding against the wall. I crawl over her wings to finish him off.
The fire is warm, the coffee is good, and Gregor says to me: “When the client wants to see you, I’ll let you know.”
A blur of images and memories rushes through me, spills out of me, like my life flashing before my eyes, slowing down for certain scenes and then speeding up, racing by. A flood of color, a bright burst of laughter, a scream, my heart racing—I think I will burst with feeling it all at once—my bare feet on the cobblestones, the moon rising over Mount Heriot, music pouring out of the temple, honey on my tongue, a hand on my cheek, waking with the morning light, all the lost moments returned to me and snatched away again in the space of half a breath.
And then it stops.
I am sitting on the steps up to our flat above the laundry, eating an apple I’ve stolen. My mother was taken the night before, and I do not know what to do. I am horribly aware of my heart in my chest, its relentless thud-thud-thud. Dek and I had been to stare at the outer walls of the great prison, Hostorak, but we were just children—what could we do? My father stumbles down the stairs past me, a scarecrow in his raggedy clothes, his hair unkempt, his face ruined by opium. He looks back at me, but barely, half a glance over his shoulder, not meeting my eyes. “Forgive me,” he mumbles, and then he is gone, and that is the last time I see him.
Again the blur of sensation and emotion, my life speeding backward, and halting years earlier:
I am shouting for my brother, and he comes, he always does. Two older boys have caught a cat and shut it in a box. They are looking for tinder to burn it, and the cat is howling in the box like it knows what they have in mind. When I tried to free the cat, one of them hit me right in the nose with his fist, and now my nose is bleeding all over my mouth and chin and pinafore. When Dek sees me, he is ablaze with fury. I tell him in a great sobbing jumble what is happening. Oh, the splendor of him striding down that street, the way he knocks those boys’ heads together—never mind that they are both a year older than him—the way he sends them scurrying. He lets the cat out and tries to pat it, but it scratches him across the face. We come home bleeding but triumphant, and our mother looks at us and sighs. More laundry.
And back, and back:
They are quarreling, my ma and pa. He is searching the room, tearing it apart, and she is shouting at him, and Dek is shouting at both of them, but Pa is simply fixed on pulling open cupboards, looking in the kettle, pulling the mattress off the little bed, leaving our small home a ruin. He is looking for money. My mother grabs his arm and he shakes her off, and Dek lunges at him, roaring, and he gets knocked aside too. I am about two years old. I am crying, but nobody hears me, and then it is too awful for crying and I draw myself away from them. I hadn’t known I could do it, but suddenly they are all a bit blurred, muted. I feel safe. My father goes storming off, and my mother and Dek are righting things about the flat when Dek says, “Where’s Julia gone?” She looks around, her eyes moving right past me, and the same with him. They look and look but they do not see me sitting right there against the wall, still as a mouse, holding my breath. It seems obvious to me that they should not be able to see me. It seems like I have always known this hiding place in plain view was there for me and me alone. I watch them search for me, and my ma sends Dek running to look about the neighborhood, and then she looks so lost that I pity her, and I go and throw myself into her arms. I expect her to embrace me, to be relieved and happy, but she pulls me off her, holding me at arm’s length and searching my face, her eyes wide and amazed, looking at me hard, like the answer might be there, and I am crying again—I just want her to hug me, to tell me it’s all right, it’s going to be all right.
It is all wanting and terror and joy, the world huge and bright, and then a darkness unlike anything I’ve ever known, a rushing and roaring in my ears. I emerge again, but this is different:
I am kneeling on the red earth with my mother, Ammi. But it is not me—I am not her child. A rocky crag looms over us, a little black house at the top of it. Far behind us and below us, the world is like a moving painting of itself, half real. She holds in her hands a small clay pot, almost like a teapot but with two spouts, one on either side of it.
“I have it,” she says to me.
“We are almost ready,” she says to me.
“Can I trust you?” she says to me.
Her dark eyes, her pretty mouth. I see her so clearly, and she seems to pulse with life. I envy it, I am hungry for it, and I will do anything, anything at all.
Her hand on my face. The warmth of her.
“You won’t fail me.”
It is a statement, not a question. She is fearless and lovely. Leaving me with my longing, she wades into a river of mud and disappears into the world. A gurgling voice above me says, “You need to go back. They are waiting for you.”
And I wonder what I will tell them. I wonder if I will really betray them. But I know the answer to that. Her eyes, her skin, her beating heart, those little buildings far below, the whole story of human existence unfolding all at once, all the time—fear is nothing, loyalty nothing, next to my desire to be whole.
I open my eyes and am vaguely surprised that I have eyes to open. I am sprawled numbly at the center of everything that has ever happened to me, all of it spread out to be examined by this witch’s nimble fingers—except that last one, which is not my memory at all but someone else’s, of somewhere I’ve never been or dreamed of. The witch is squatting on my chest and I can hardly breathe. Her tattooed hands work through the threads around me and all over me—or are those ribbons, or what are they?
Then I remember the thought that eluded me before: I can disappear. But the effort it would require feels quite beyond me. I watch the witch, so preoccupied with her task, and I notice the little knife strapped to her wrist.
I can’t move my arm in the world, but I can pull it out of the world—just that part of me, just past the edge of things, far enough to be free of the spell paralyzing me. I vanish my arm, then swing it up and snatch her little knife. I stick the blade into her arm. She squawks. It’s a stupid thing to do. The knife is tiny, can make no more than a small puncture, and she has me immobile on the edge of a cliff.
She takes hold of a fistful of my hair and knocks my head against the rock. Suddenly I can hear a lot of talking, and it seems to me that maybe this noise has been going on for a long time. She gives my head another bang. Fan Ming is standing a few feet away, shouting. He is pressed against some invisible barrier in the air, trying to reach us, and there is Frederick behind him, also shouting. The witch ignores them and bends over my face. She bites my cheek, hard. The pain clears my head, and I pull my whole body back, blurring the world, freeing myself of whatever binds me. I shove her off me with all the strength I have. She sprawls on her back, grinning, my blood on her lips.
I make a desperate scramble toward Fan Ming and Frederick, feeling that surely this is all a dream, a nightmare. I find myself in Frederick’s arms, and his voice, which is both too loud and oddly far away, is asking me if I am all right. Fan Ming is gesticulating wildly now, shouting at the witch. She raises her arms up above her head, fingers working. I whisper, “Run,” but none of us move, and then small winged shapes are diving down from the ceiling of the cavern, filling the air. Bats. Frederick shoves my head into his jacket and we are on the ground, me gasping for breath inside his coat, my face close to the rock. I feel a few vicious pinprick bites on my back, my legs. I thrash and yell in the darkness of Frederick’s coat and then they are gone.
Frederick helps me to my feet. He is trembling and white-faced and the arm he shielded me with is bleeding. The witch is walking off among the standing stones. I try to make words, but my mouth feels thick and furry, my mind too heavy. I lean against Frederick and think about my mother, how clear she was in the memories the witch pulled out of me—a clearer picture than I’ve had in years—but that last one wasn’t my memory, so whose was it? I’d half forgotten her face, its lively expression, the warmth of her gaze, the humor of her mouth. Ma, the luminous center of my world until she was gone—and it seems to me now that everything has been askew and all wrong ever since then, including me.
I wonder later if I fainted, but I’m too embarrassed to ask. Frederick carries me back to the painted cave below, where Professor Baranyi is standing at the shelf making notes and Gregor is pretending, not very convincingly, to be absorbed in a book.
Esme sees us first. Her face doesn’t change, but the pistol Dek got her seems to leap from the holster at her side into her hand—she is pointing it straight at Fan Ming’s forehead.
He blanches, raises his hands, and says in a rush: “A witch attacked Miss Heriday. Not one of the Tama-shan librarian-witches—I do not know who she is. I am sorry, but we must leave immediately. It is not safe, and I have no authority here.”
“He’s right,” says Frederick. Esme lowers the gun slowly but does not holster it. I notice then, with some relief, that Fan Ming is holding the rolled-up stele rubbing he made for me. I thought I might have dropped it off the cliff when the witch appeared.
“A little more time—” begins Professor Baranyi, but Esme shuts him down.
“We’re leaving now.”
Professor Baranyi begged to prolong our stay, then asked for a private word with me, but Fan Ming and our witch escort, Bao Wei, were firm in ejecting us quickly from the library, and they flanked me the whole way out. With Esme on their side, the professor gave up, and now he looks very glum and unhappy on his horse.
As soon as we are back on the road in the forest, me slumped on a horse in front of Frederick, I feel better. When I sit up straighter, he says, “All right?”
“Yes,” I say, relieved to find I can speak easily again. “I don’t know what that blasted witch did to me.”
His voice is low, close to my ear. “Fan Ming brought me up to the forest of stele, and you were…I don’t know how to explain it…you were tied up on the ground, but the knots and bindings were not of any earthly matter. It was as if you were tied up by darkness, and all around you pieces of light and shadow were moving across the ground, and that witch was stirring through it all with her fingers.”
I don’t dare tell him what I saw, what I remembered. Not until I understand it a little better myself.
“Nameless only knows what she was doing. I hope you found something worth almost dying for in that place.”
He gives a shaky laugh and says, “I think when all this is over, I’m going to get a nice, quiet job at some obscure, second-rate university somewhere.”
“You won’t,” I say. “You’ll keep on doing horrifically dangerous and difficult things for Mrs. Och.”
He laughs properly this time. “You’re probably right,” he says. And then, more gently: “What about you? What will you do when this is over?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I reckon that depends.”
“On what?”
“On how things turn out.”
There is a heavy pause, full of all the terrible ways this might turn out. But even if we succeed, the truth is that the future terrifies me. Say we find Ko Dan. Say he fixes all this, and Theo is safe. Can I go back to Spira City? And if I can, then what? Back to a life of crime in the Twist? Or turn my back on that old life and become a barmaid, fending off desperate old coots night after night? I can’t imagine a future for myself, a grown-up life I’d be glad to inhabit.
And beyond all that, it depends…it depends on what it means that I can disappear, that the world’s edges are porous, but only to me.
“Why did you insist on coming with me in the library?” he asks.
I tell him the truth: “I overheard Mrs. Och asking you to research me. I want to know the answers too.”
He is quiet for a bit. At last he says, “It is unusual for her to encounter something she cannot explain. I think it worries her.”
“It worries me too,” I say. “I thought it was all a great lark, a piece of brilliant luck, my vanishing trick, until I stumbled into Kahge. If that’s what it is.”
“Well, perhaps you can tell me…how it feels, what you see?” He’s been dying to ask, I can tell—held back only by Mrs. Och wanting to keep me away from my own secrets.
I do trust Frederick, but it is hard to find words for how it feels. I tell him what I can—the steps of vanishing, the way it feels to lose contact with my body, how I am different in Kahge, Spira City aflame. And haltingly, I tell him about the creatures at the side of the river, screeching the name Lidari. Lidari, one of the Gethin, Marike’s prize general thousands of years ago.
“I know that witch in the library said that the creatures in Kahge don’t have bodies, but they did,” I say. “They didn’t look like the Gethin, though. What happened to Lidari, anyway?”
“He served Marike for centuries,” replies Frederick. “Mrs. Och would be better able to tell you about her. Marike was the first real threat to the authority of the Xianren. Before that, every human empire had at least made a pretense of obedience to them. The Eshriki Empire was the beginning of the end of Xianren rule. Indeed, at one point, at the height of her power, she even imprisoned them and tried to reassemble The Book of Disruption herself.”
“I remember reading about that in Professor Baranyi’s study,” I say. I hadn’t understood what I was reading at the time. “She couldn’t read the Book, though, could she?”
“No. Only the Xianren could read it and reassemble it. They outlived her empire, of course. The story is that Casimir hunted down Lidari, executed him, and sent his head to Marike. However, these legends are rarely the whole truth of the matter.”
“So why would those…creatures in Kahge be shouting Lidari’s name?”
“I’ve no idea,” says Frederick, sounding ridiculously cheerful. He loves having baffling questions to dig into. “I hope that the transcriptions I made will be revealing once I translate them all.”
I think again of the little pot my mother was holding in the vision I saw—like the little pot Marike held in the painting on the library wall. I don’t dare ask about that—not yet.
“And you’ll tell me what you find,” I say. “No matter what Mrs. Och says.”
A long pause, and then he says, “I’ll tell you.”
The cool forest passes by us, Tama-shan receding as the city walls approach. I try to take comfort in being myself, in my own body, safe among friends—more or less safe, more or less friends. But my skin is still crawling with residual fear as I think of what I saw in the cave, that other self, not me, whispering with my mother, plotting and longing…for what?