17
Darkness, and then light. A force breaks her from the dirt. Air rushes at her face and she gasps in great lungfuls of it.
Blue-green eyes drink her in.
Aura.
Aura drops her on the ground, hard enough for stars to sparkle across her eyes. When her vision clears, Aura is all she can see.
“I should have let you suffocate,” Aura says, her voice low and terrible. She yanks Heather up by the shoulder and stares her in the face. “I almost,” and she squeezes Heather’s shoulder so hard she gasps, “didn’t get here in time. I almost didn’t come here at all! If Estajfan hadn’t told me to check on you—Heather. A few more seconds and you would have been gone. The ground was already smoothing over. There was almost no sign of you at all.”
“I just—” Heather stares, her teeth chattering. “I just—wanted—to be different. I wanted my life to be—different.”
“You are different,” Aura says, and she lets Heather’s arm drop. Heather backs up until she’s leaning against the willow again. She feels the ground rumble and then go silent.
But she’s not different—she’s the same, Heather realizes. Covered in dirt—dirt in her clothes, stuffed in her ears, gritty in her mouth—but every bit the same. Her own two legs. Her own fragile human body. The baby kicks, fierce and alive. She bends over her belly and sobs.
“You can’t trust the mountain,” Aura says. “If the mountain can birth a centaur, it can birth all other kinds of lies.”
“But it made your father different,” she whispers.
“My father was already halfway into another world. You don’t want that—you just want the world to know who you are.”
Heather shuts her eyes and leans back against the tree. “There’s no one left to know who I am,” she says. “Everyone is gone.”
“Not everyone,” Aura says. When Heather looks at her, the moonlight shines behind her head like a halo. “You and Estajfan—” Aura makes a gesture with her arms, a half-circle—“I see you in his face. In the way he moves. I don’t think even he understands it. The way our father kept seeing our mother long after he’d left the village and come back to the mountain. Your bond marks you both in ways that even the mountain does not understand.”
There’s another rumble beneath Heather’s hands. She thinks it’s the mountain, disagreeing, but then the rumble resolves into hooves striking the ground. Petrolio bursts from the trees, his face full of terror.
“Estajfan!” he cries.
“What?” Heather pushes herself up and stumbles to Aura.
“He’s in trouble,” Aura says, knowing instantly what Petrolio means. “The mountain”—her voice drops low—“the mountain won’t let me see anything else.”
Heather goes to the three willows and places her hand against a trunk, looks out across the land that stretches on and on into the dark. Foothills and flatlands and the ruins of so many cities. Far beyond that, the sea.
She couldn’t see him on the mountain, but she can see him now. Below them, back down in the world that she knows.
“He’s by the water,” she says. “Or close to it.”
“Is he hurt?” Aura and Petrolio cry together.
She closes her eyes and feels a darkened space, shadows skittering over the windows. The floor cold against her cheek. Against his cheek. The glint of metal. A rifle in the corner.
“People.” It’s the first thing she can say.
“What?” Petrolio grabs her free arm hard.
“He’s alive.” Dark silence, pressure against Estajfan’s wrists and legs. He can’t move. He’s hurt. Around him, the reek of bodies that haven’t been washed.
“Heather,” Petrolio says, and she opens her eyes.
“He’s in a truck,” she says. “There are people with him. I think they’re heading this way, but I’m not sure.” She grabs Petrolio’s hand. “We’ll find him. I can help you find him. But we have to go down.”
“Estajfan chose to go down.” A new voice behind them. They stiffen in surprise, then turn to see a mountain centaur, tall and stern. Behind him, others in the trees. How long have they been watching? “Centaurs do not belong off the mountain. No one is to go down except for the human.”
“I’m not abandoning my brother!” Petrolio cries, his eyes wild.
The centaur only watches him. “Then you make the same choice he made,” he says. “And the mountain will dismiss you too.”
Aura offers a hand to Heather, who takes it and scrambles up onto Aura’s back. She wraps her arms around Aura’s slender torso, then buries her face in Aura’s hair.
Then Aura’s hooves leave the ground, and they are running.
When they reach the bottom of the mountain, Aura pauses for the tiniest of seconds.
“Where is he?” Aura shouts back to her. “Where do we need to go?”
The warm smell of metal; the tang of fear and fire inside her mouth. He still can’t move, but they are moving. Heading north, toward the mountains. She was right.
“They’re on the road,” Heather says. “Turn south, and we’ll meet them.”
They run for what feels like hours—through the dawn and into the morning. When the road is blocked by sudden mounds of tangled vines—a buried car or two or three—Aura leaps over them, Heather clutching hard in panic, Petrolio at their heels.
As they get closer to Estajfan, a wave of pain rises behind Heather’s eyes. She can feel him moving against his restraints, his fingers curling, his body flexing, getting ready.
The humans don’t see it. They have no idea.