BUT WE MUST go backward, briefly: we must go back to a girl running, running, running across the vast sprawl of the Moors with her heart in her throat and her lungs achingly full of unfamiliar air. Air has never been her harbor, never been her home, and this air is less hers than most. This air burns. And still she keeps running, racing toward the shadow of the sea.
That’s what called her, of course. The sea, the sea, the sea. A sea, not the strawberry soda of Confection, not the muddy turtle pond that kept her from drying out at school. She missed the depths so much some days that she couldn’t concentrate on anything except how much she wanted to go home. The other students would talk longingly about endless skies and forests filled with talking flowers, but none of them understood, because they’d always been air-breathers. They’d gone from one world filled with wind and light and gravity to another, and they didn’t know how much she’d lost.
In the Trenches, “up” and “down” had been a matter of consensus. Oh, the surface and the bottom existed, but they were inconsequential things. The people of the Trenches measured by depths and shallows, and they danced their way from one side of the ocean to the other. They breathed the living sea, and the sea rewarded them by keeping them as safe as she was able—which wasn’t very, because the water was filled with countless dangers, and none of them mattered in the face of the absolute, indisputable fact that the water was home.
When Cora’s door had tossed her unceremoniously back into the world of her birth, she hadn’t only lost adventure. She’d lost weightlessness, freedom, flight. She’d lost her entire native environment. She ran, as caught as any fish snared by a fisherman’s lure, and wondered distantly whether she was going to throw herself off the first cliff she saw, convinced all the way to the bottom of her bones that she’d transform as soon as she struck the sea.
She wondered whether it was going to hurt.
She wondered whether she was going to care.
Behind her—far behind her, for she had always been the more athletic of the pair, the more equipped for the rigors of heroism—Kade struggled to keep up. The bracken and briars that seemed inclined to let her pass unhindered snagged at the hems of his jeans. Holes opened beneath his feet, and he stumbled, he staggered, he swore. But he kept running. Sometimes, after all, that’s what must be said to make a hero: the willingness to keep running even after it becomes clear that the entire exercise is doomed to failure. Sometimes heroism is pressing on when the ending is already preordained.
Cora ran, and Kade pursued, until the windmill was a speck in the distance, until it disappeared altogether, and there was only the Moors, and the glaring red eye of the moon, and the vast, alien darkness of the sea.
When Cora reached the cliff she stopped, wobbling at the very edge, chest heaving with the effort of breathing in the unforgiving air. Kade, gasping, staggered to a stop some fifteen yards behind her. He couldn’t run any farther, and he tried to tell himself it was exhaustion, and he knew that he was lying, and he knew he was afraid.
“Wait,” he wheezed, the word half-swallowed by his gasped attempts to breathe. “Cora, wait.”
There was no way she could possibly have heard him. But she turned, and smiled, and it was the most beautiful expression he had ever seen. Heroes would have gone to war for that smile, would have died for even a shadow of its grace.
“It’s all right,” she said, and the wind carried her voice to him, each syllable polished and perfect as a pearl. “Can’t you hear them? They’ve been waiting so long for me to come home. Tell Jack thank you, and that I forgive her. Tell her not to look for me.”
“Cora, don’t do this.” Kade staggered forward, one step, then another, trying to reach her before she did anything that couldn’t be taken back.
“I’m home,” she said, and stepped backward, over the edge, toward the welcoming sea. Her expression faltered—only for an instant, but long enough for Kade to see the terror in her eyes, shining through the glazed, artificial serenity.
He found he had the strength to run after all.
“Cora!” he howled, and dove toward the edge of the cliff. Too late, too late, too late.
She was already gone.