CHAPTER
9
Lily fell out of the sky.
“Catch her!” Rowan shouted.
Caleb was closest and managed to get under Lily before she hit the ground. He made a basket out of his thick arms and Lily landed with much less of a smack than she would have without him. He went to stand her on her own two feet, but picked her back up as soon as he saw how wobbly she was.
“Tired?” Caleb guessed.
Lily nodded, and the world swayed uneasily. But at least it was her world.
“Where are we?” Caleb asked.
“My backyard,” Lily answered. She dropped her head on his shoulder and let out a long sigh. “It worked.”
“Lily?” Juliet called.
Lily picked her head up and saw her sister’s anxious face poking out of an upstairs window.
“Juliet,” Rowan said, cutting her off before she could ask questions. “We need to come inside.”
“Yes, of course. Holy crap.” There was a thump as Juliet bumped into something in her haste, and the window closed. Lily could hear her sister scrambling down the steps as she raced to meet them. The coven trudged to the side door. Now that Lily wasn’t fueling them, the minor injuries they’d incurred and general fatigue from the fight were catching up with them.
“Get in, get in,” Juliet said urgently, holding open the door and waving them through. “Are you okay? What happened? How did you get here so fast?” Juliet asked in a rush.
Lily burst into tears and wrapped her arms around her sister’s neck. Juliet startled and then went with it.
“I’m guessing there’s a story here,” she said, smoothing Lily’s hair.
They went into the kitchen and sat down. Una and Breakfast took it in turns to explain what had happened. Lily tried to calm herself down, but the tears kept silently leaking from her eyes no matter how many times she brushed them away. A half dozen times she reached out for her sister’s hand and squeezed it to reassure herself.
Juliet handled the news of her death by deciding not to try to wrap her head around it just yet, and in turn brought the coven up to speed on what had been going on in this world since they had left.
“They’re calling it ‘The Black Magic Murders.’ It’s a media circus,” she said bitterly. Juliet remembered something and addressed Tristan. “No matter what you hear about your parents, don’t go home. They’ll turn you over.”
Tristan’s face went blank with confusion, and then pinched with an awkward apology. “Wrong Tristan,” he said.
“Where is he?” Juliet asked, looking at Lily. She pulled in a small gasp. “No. Not him, too?”
Lily nodded numbly. “He’s dead,” she said, just to make it real.
Juliet sat back in her chair as if she’d been slapped. She covered her mouth with a hand, her eyes far away. “I can’t—oh my God,” she mumbled. “I don’t believe it.”
“He’s dead,” Lily repeated, and for the first time she accepted it.
She put her head down on the table. It was the same table where she had sat down with Tristan a thousand times to eat, to play, to talk, and to argue. The memories swam up out of the wood—Tristan dealing cards, puffing on a bubble gum cigar. The two of them switching chairs to put together an impossible puzzle with a picture of a pile of red candy hearts on the front. Tristan eating a hot dog with grape jelly. Doing homework together. Doing nothing together. Lily let herself cry until she felt a hand on her back.
“It’s okay, Lillian,” Samantha said.
Lily raised her head and turned to bury it in her mother’s stomach. “It’s my fault,” she sobbed. “I’m the reason he’s dead. I’m the reason they’re all dead.”
“Oh no, sweetie,” her mother said. She tilted Lily’s head back and wiped away her tears. “You had no control over what happened to Tristan or your father.” She tittered anxiously, and Lily saw the mad light of a million other universes burn in her eyes. “That’s scarier, which is why most people choose to feel guilty rather than helpless when someone they love dies. But the truth is you had no control.”
Samantha smiled at Lily like what she had just said made it all better—and Lily had stopped crying, but it wasn’t because she was comforted. Far from it, actually.
Samantha pulled away and turned to Rowan. “You should tell her all of it,” she said. “What happened when she was unconscious in your tent? Tell her.”
“Tell me what?” Lily asked. Samantha wandered away, humming a few notes to herself. Lily turned to Rowan. “Tell me what?” she demanded.
Rowan’s face was blank. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“She’s worse,” Juliet interjected. She was watching Samantha tackle the stairs with a worried frown. “The cameras, the police, the pressure to keep the story straight when she can’t even remember which world she’s in more often than not. It’s too much.”
Lily really looked at Juliet. She’d lost weight and there were dark circles under her eyes. “Are you okay?” she asked. “How’s school?”
“What school? I dropped out to take care of Mom.” Juliet rubbed a hand over her face. “Not that I could have stayed anyway, with reporters ambushing me outside of every class.”
“I ruined your life,” Lily said, shaking her head.
Juliet mustered a smile. “Didn’t you hear Mom?”
“It’s not my fault?” Lily guessed.
“Exactly.” Juliet glanced around the table, noticing the state of everyone. “You all look like hell,” she said, earning a round of rueful laughs. She turned to Breakfast, who was cradling one arm in his other hand. “What happened to you, Breakfast?”
“I got shot,” he said, showing them a large red-purple-and-blue welt on his arm. “The bullet didn’t go through, though. It sort of bounced off. But, you know, hard.”
“Why didn’t you get out of the way?” Una asked angrily.
Breakfast rolled his eyes. “I’m fond of the color ouch.”
Tristan hiked up his shirt to show Breakfast a nasty welt on his ribs. “Mine’s better,” he said, and then grimaced at the pain and dropped his shirt.
“That’s incredible. You’re all bulletproof?” Juliet asked.
“Not usually,” Rowan replied. He looked at Lily, eyes narrowed. “What did you do to us?”
Lily cupped both her hands in front of her and wiggled her fingers. “It’s like a field thing, you know?”
“No,” Rowan said, shaking his head.
“I mean a force field,” Lily said, feeling silly.
“Like in that movie Star Wars you made me watch?” Rowan asked, confused.
“That’s the Force. A force field is more Star Trek,” Breakfast corrected. “Big difference.”
“You did it to us before,” Una said. “It kept the Workers from stinging us when we fought the Hive. I’d say you’re getting better at it, though, Lil.”
“You’ve never seen that done?” Lily asked lightly, like it was no big deal.
“I taught you all I know about field magic,” Rowan said. “And I know it isn’t strong enough to repel bullets. You did something different. I felt it for a moment.”
“Well, it’s not actually field magic,” she said, backtracking. “Instead of just putting energy into your willstones, like making a deposit, I use them to transmute energy directly. You’re enveloped in a flow of energy that’s strong enough to repel bullets. For a little while, anyway.”
“You’re controlling our willstones?” Tristan asked uncomfortably. He shifted in his seat. “Are you controlling us when you do it?”
In the heat of battle, none of them had ever been able to tell the difference. It was such a subtle thing that Lily started to resent that line in the sand. So what if she had to possess them to do it? It had kept them alive.
“I only did it for a few moments when they were shooting at you.” Lily made an exasperated sound and turned to Rowan. “It’s the first thing you ever taught me. Remember how you had me heal my ankle through your willstone that first night I was in your world? Or when we fought the Woven in the cabin? I didn’t have a willstone then so I used yours to transmute the energy we needed. That’s all I’m doing.” She looked around at her coven’s unsettled faces, feeling defensive. “You’ve always known this, Rowan. When I have to, I can use any of my claimed’s willstone like I would use my own. Is it such a big deal I had to possess you for one second in order to save your lives?”
Lily overheard the whisper of his thoughts. I did this, he said to himself. His mouth went slack and he stared at her as a memory slipped through his head, unbidden.
. . . Tristan sits across from me, jealous and angry. Lily is still in my bed, and I know he thinks something happened between us. Something did happen. I let her claim me, and now I’ve given her willstones—the tools to become a true witch. I’m such an idiot. Why don’t I just start hanging people myself and get it over with?
“Whatever happened to keeping her out of your head?” Tristan asks me.
“I didn’t have any other choice,” I reply, glad that this conversation isn’t taking place in mindspeak. I did have another choice. I could have run and let her die. Why can’t I just let her go? “Believe me. I’m regretting it,” I say.
“What even gave you the idea?” Tristan asks.
He’s not angry anymore. He knows I’m sick. Afflicted. Addicted. Why is she the only woman I’ve ever been able to love? Something’s wrong with me.
“I thought about how she’d healed her ankle,” I say. “It was a long shot, but I figured she’d already transmuted energy inside herself using my stone, and it was only one step farther to then pour it back into me.”
“That’s one hell of a step, though.” Tristan looks scared. He should be. I am. His voice drops. “Do you think she could invade a stone? Take it over without permission . . .”
The memory flash ended and Lily found herself looking at a leaner, longer-haired version of the Rowan in the memory. One thing was the same, though. He was still scared of her.
“What does that mean—invade a stone?” she asked him. She could feel the rest of the coven’s confusion and curiosity.
“It means you don’t have to touch a willstone to claim it,” Rowan replied, like there was no point in trying to avoid the inevitable anymore. “You can just take any willstone you want as long as another witch hasn’t already claimed it.” His brow furrowed in thought as something occurred to him. “And maybe you could even steal a willstone from another witch. You’d have to fight her, but I can’t imagine there are many witches who would have a shot at withstanding you.”
“I can think of one,” Lily murmured, remembering the sensation she’d felt when she’d tried to touch the Queen’s willstone.
“Grace?” Rowan guessed.
“She’s been claiming the Woven remotely through the speaking stones for decades,” Lily said. “So she can invade a willstone, too. And she’s strong. If Grace has physically touched a willstone to claim it, I don’t think I can take it over. But if she hasn’t touched it, and she’s only used the speaking stones to claim, I know I can muscle her out.”
“How do you know that?” Tristan asked.
“Because I’ve done it.” Lily felt their stares, and she knew she had to tell them all of it no matter how disturbed some of them might become. “I’ve claimed a Woven I call Pale One. She used to belong to Grace, but I touched her willstone and now she’s mine.”
“The coyote Woven who attacked you outside Baltimore?” Tristan said, knowing the answer. “So that’s why she followed us.”
Lily nodded, an uncertain look on her face. “The other Tristan told you?”
“He showed me that time you and he were sitting up against the tree, talking about how to study the Woven. You told him to leave her be. That she wasn’t going to harm us,” Tristan admitted. He looked down at the table and ran his hands over it as if he recognized it. “We showed each other pretty much everything during the crossing.”
Seeing the shape of his hands and the cast of his features in the familiar light of home, Lily could almost imagine that this Tristan was her Tristan, but stopped herself. If she started allowing herself to think that they were the same, and that her Tristan lived on in him, then his death would mean nothing.
“So, not only are you possessing us, you’re claiming Woven on top of it?” Caleb asked, the words sticking in his throat. “Are we expected to become stone kin with Pale One? Share our memories and mindspeak? Oh, sorry—what would you call it with a coyote? Mindbarking?” His mouth was pressed thin in disgust.
Lily looked at Rowan and saw him watching her with a guarded expression. She realized that he was trying to keep his distaste in check.
“See, this is why I didn’t tell you,” she said, throwing up her hands. “The Woven are intelligent—they have thoughts and feelings like we do. Did you know that Pale One saved us? She’s the one who jumped on Grace, giving Carrick enough time—”
“All she has to do is jump on someone and that makes her intelligent?” Caleb fired back, rising to his feet. “I suppose we have to accept Carrick now, too, because he struck the match?”
“No, that’s not . . . I didn’t say that,” Lily stammered, breathless. “The Woven . . . Carrick . . . they’re not the same.”
“Maybe not to you,” Caleb said with a deep scowl twisting his face. Tristan stood and placed a hand on his shoulder. Caleb shook him off. “Don’t tell me to be calm.” He looked at Rowan. “You know exactly why I’m so angry.”
Rowan nodded and looked down at his hands as a frustrated silence spread out between them.
“Lillian? Is everyone ready to go yet?” Samantha asked, interrupting the tension.
They turned to see Samantha, dressed in street clothes for the first time in ages and carrying a packed suitcase. A hand fluttered up nervously to her bushy hair.
“It’s just that some of the other versions of us have left already, so I figured this version of us would have to go soon, too,” Samantha said by way of explaining. She shifted from foot to foot like a child.
“What do you mean, Mom?” Juliet asked patiently.
“We’ve got to go back to that world, Juliet, because you and I are the only ones who can convince the other Lillian and that Alaric fellow to join forces with each other.” Samantha turned to Lily, squaring her shoulders and looking surprisingly sane. “You’ve got a lot of work to do, Lillian, so we’d better light you on fire and get to it.”
Stunned, the coven forgot they were fighting with one another and stared at Samantha.
“Can you, like, see the future?” Breakfast asked.
“No,” Samantha said, and gave a breathy laugh. “In another universe you didn’t have that argument you just had, which saved a lot of time. A few versions of us are already on to the next thing, which is Lily convincing Juliet and me to come back with you.” She thought about it. “I wouldn’t really call that the future. Just a slightly different time line.”
The stares only lasted a moment more, and then Rowan cleared his throat. “I think we should all eat and rest first. It’ll be dark soon. We’ll start building the pyre then,” he said.
Caleb swung out of the room, still angry. Rowan stood to go after him, but Tristan stopped him.
“I got this one,” Tristan said, and followed his stone kin outside.
Una and Breakfast started pulling food and drinks out of the refrigerator. Juliet stood up from the table, looking nervous.
“You really need me to go back with you?” she asked.
“Yes,” Lily replied, sorry and scared for her sister. “It’s dangerous, but I wouldn’t ask unless I thought you could save thousands of lives.”
“How can I say no to that?” Juliet asked, sighing. “You will explain this to me at some point, won’t you?”
“Of course.” Lily and Juliet shared a smile. “And you could still say no.”
“No I couldn’t. I’ll just assume that in another universe I heard all the reasons why and got properly convinced.” Juliet sighed. “Not like my life here is going great, anyway.” Juliet stood. “I’d better get a few things together.”
“Pack light,” Rowan said. “We don’t know what kind of situation we’ll be entering when we worldjump. We may have to hit the ground running.”
Juliet nodded and went to Samantha. “Come on, Mom. Let’s see what you put in there.” She took her mother’s bag and shook it. It jingled. Juliet raised an eyebrow.
“Just some toys for the cat,” Samantha said sheepishly.
“We don’t have a cat,” Lily and Juliet said at the same time.
“Oh, good!” Samantha said, relieved. “That would have been terrible.”
Lily’s eyes followed her mother and Juliet as they went upstairs. “You know, in some universe we’ve got a cat,” she said, recalling that her mother had said something similar before. “And something really bad happens.”
“But to you or to the cat—that’s the question,” Rowan said.
Lily shrugged and looked at him. They were left relatively alone at the table while Una and Breakfast busied themselves making sandwiches for everyone at the counter.
“Tell me all of what?” she asked. She hadn’t forgotten what her mother had said to him.
Rowan buried a regretful smile and shook his head. “I can’t.” He cut Lily off before she could argue and took her hand to remove some of the sting from his words. “Just leave it alone, okay?”
She watched him tentatively run his thumb around the whorls of her knuckle, up the side of her finger, and back down again. He was waiting for her to stop him, and she knew eventually she would, but for just a moment she let herself pretend she didn’t understand what it meant. She heard his breath deepen and felt the air between them spark with electricity. She noticed the table again, the same table where she and Tristan had sat together so many times, and thought that if Rowan had been there when they fought the Hive, Tristan would be sitting at it right now. She took her hand from his. If he was hurt, he didn’t show it. They were both starting to get used to this stumbling back and forth as they danced around what they felt and tripped over things that couldn’t be undone.
“Your mother is going to need a willstone to worldjump,” Rowan said.
“Right,” Lily gasped, remembering. “What do we do?”
“I grew far more than we needed when we were last here, and I stored them,” he said. He stood and briefly ran the back of his fingers across her cheek. “I’ll take care of it.” He went upstairs after Samantha and Juliet.
Lily heard the dull thunk of an ax hitting wood and looked out the window. It wasn’t quite dark yet, but Caleb had already started cutting down a tree for Lily’s pyre. Tristan came back inside, shrugging at Lily and following Rowan upstairs.
“Eat,” Una said, putting a container of hummus and a bag of pita chips in front of her.
“Yeah, don’t worry about Caleb,” Breakfast added, sliding a jar of pickles across the table to join the hummus. “He just needs to blow off some steam.”
Lily knew it was more than that. “Do you two have anything you want to say to me?” she asked as she started in on her food.
They shared a look, and Breakfast decided to go first. “It would have been nice for you to tell us what you were doing, rather than letting us find out this way,” he said, keeping the reproach in his voice to a minimum.
“We understand that you did it to protect us,” Una began.
“I didn’t even know I was doing it against the Hive,” Lily interjected. “I swear, it just sort of happened.”
“And we appreciate that,” Una continued, “but you still should have said something once you did know.”
Lily stirred her hummus with a chip, watching the swirl pattern rather than meet their eyes. She thought of what it meant to make a mind mosaic, and how Rowan had said that witches did it all the time. “You guys are making a big deal out of nothing. It’s not like I’m using you for fun, or rifling through your minds, looking for secrets,” she said. “There are so many thing witches do to their claimed that are way worse than what I did to protect you.”
“Yeah, but we’d never stay the claimed of that kind of witch,” Breakfast said, giving her the subtlest of warnings.
“Are you saying you don’t want me to do it again?” Lily said. She watched them share another look, and this one was more troubled.
“You’re asking us to choose between our freedom and our safety, but there’s a middle ground here,” Una said. “Ask our consent first.”
“I was busy saving your lives. I didn’t have time to stop and ask if that was okay with you,” Lily snapped acidly.
“Lily, there are a lot of things that you can justify when you say you’re doing it to save lives,” Breakfast replied in an uncharacteristically harsh tone. “It starts with the little stuff. Going through emails— the people don’t even notice, right? Like we didn’t notice when you possessed us. But that’s the start of a long and slippery slope. Are you sure you want to go down it?”
Given a moral equivalent from her world, Lily couldn’t maintain the illusion that she was right anymore. She shook her head and dropped her chip. “Do you think Caleb will forgive me?”
“I don’t know,” Una answered. “You haven’t lost him yet, but you might if you don’t knock it off. Got it?”
“I got it,” Lily said.
“Good.” Una relaxed and smiled at Lily. “And thanks for saving our lives.”
Lily smiled back, a lump forming in her throat. “I can’t lose anyone else,” she said. “I can’t. That’s why I did it.” Her voice was high and thin. “I’m sorry.”
“Let us deal with Caleb,” Breakfast said.
Lily agreed and finally tucked into her food. After eating she went upstairs for a long shower and a change of clothes. Her bedroom smelled like other people. The police had searched her things and most of her stuff was in boxes. Lily stood in her towel and looked around like a guest, wondering if she could sit down on the bedspread. She wasn’t angry or upset that some faceless stranger had read through her eighth grade homework, or touched her collection of snipped hospital wristbands from her sickly childhood. She was too numb to be insulted and she’d been through too much to mourn any one particular loss properly. And she knew there was more loss to come.
Despite what she’d said to Una and Breakfast about not being able to lose anyone else, she knew that if she faced the Hive, the chances of them all surviving were slim. And yet she was still going back and taking them with her.
Lily opened her dresser and pulled out a stack of her T-shirts that implored anyone who crossed her path to save the children, save the whales, save the world. She used to think she was a crusader—the good guy in the white hat. She had no idea what that meant anymore. Lily put the T-shirts back and closed the drawer.
She heard someone tap lightly on her door.
“Yes?”
“Lily, do you have a second to talk?” Tristan pushed the door open and saw that she was only wearing a towel. He dropped his eyes. “Sorry, I’ll come back.”
“Seriously?” she said, brows raised. “You see me stark naked practically every other day for some kind of ritual. What is it?”
He wavered in the doorway, half in and half out of her room. “It’s Rowan. There’s something—” He broke of f and turned.
“Samantha’s getting anxious,” Rowan said, appearing at Tristan’s side. “She says you should claim her quickly so we can leave right away.”
“Did she say why?” Lily asked. Rowan shook his head. He waited for Tristan to leave first, and then closed the door so Lily could get dressed.
She came downstairs in a gauzy dress that lay open at the throat to display all three of her willstones. Her mother was dithering about, wringing her hands, and unable to focus her eyes on anything for more than a moment.
“We should really go, Lillian,” she said.
“Why? What’s going on?” Lily asked, trying not to sound too frustrated. Usually when her mother acted like this Lily couldn’t get a decipherable answer out of her, but this time was different.
“She’s coming,” Samantha said. “Or is she here?”
“Who? Who’s here?”
“Simms.”
Rowan ran to the window and looked out. “Everyone outside,” he rasped. “Quick, get Lily on the pyre!”
Lily felt Tristan’s hand on the small of her back, urging her forward. “Come on, Mom!” Lily yelled, worried that she would get left behind. She saw that Juliet grabbed Samantha’s hand and pulled, when something occurred to her. She hadn’t claimed her mother yet.
They scrambled outside to see cars had already surrounded the house silently in the dark. Floodlights burst on, blinding them, but Lily could still hear feet pounding against the ground and the huffs and gasps of men running. Caleb made it to the pyre first and threw a lighter on it. Flames exploded up and out of the wood and the dizzy smell of gasoline hit Lily in a wave with the heat.
“Rowan!” yelled a voice that made Lily’s skin crawl. She didn’t mean to stop running, she just froze when she heard Carrick.
He said something to Rowan and Rowan growled something back. It was so strange to hear Rowan speaking in his native tongue that it took a moment for it to register in Lily’s mind. Carrick spoke again, and Rowan attacked him.
Rowan wasn’t being fueled by Lily yet, but his hands flew to the silver knives on his belt so fast it was difficult to see them. He dropped down on a knee, wove past Carrick’s block, and slashed back to hamstring his half brother. Carrick did something like a handspring, narrowly avoided losing his leg, and bounded forward again with a knife in one hand and an ax in the other.
Carrick spoke again and swung at Rowan with a weaving, flowing motion, and then they started to exchange blows in earnest. They stabbed and blocked, darting in and out, trying to get inside the other’s guard.
Lily felt herself being lifted up and saw Tristan’s hands circling her waist. “Get us out of here, Lily!” he screamed.
The lawn was filling with officers. Three helicopters appeared in the sky around the house, one spotlight on the pyre and another on the knife fight. Tristan threw Lily on the pyre and ran to help Rowan.
Lily tumbled inside the fire as the glowing logs slipped under her hands. She finally righted herself as the heat started to eat into her skin. She pulled herself onto her knees and threw her arms out wide while screams tore from her throat. She saw Simms’s shocked, chalky face as she ran to the pyre. She saw her mother looking at her and she had no idea how to get to her. She was burning, but she wouldn’t transmute the energy and worldjump her coven without her mother. She couldn’t leave Samantha behind.
“Mom,” Lily screamed, “you have to come to me.”
Samantha startled as if waking from a dream and jogged in her loping way to the side of the fire. In agony now, Lily reached through the flames and grabbed at the willstone resting on her mother’s outstretched palm.
“I’m sorry,” her mother yelled through the roar of the fire.
Lily had no idea why her mother was apologizing, but then her hand touched her mother’s willstone, and she understood.
A thousand moments almost exactly like the moment she was in, but each subtly different, stretched out in Lily’s mind like pearls on a string—she was touching the willstone, she was still reaching for the willstone, she had touched the willstone, she knocked the willstone to the ground accidentally, she caught the willstone before it hit the ground, she touched the willstone with her other hand—the possibilities refracted inside her mind, zipping through like cards shuffling in a never-ending deck.
“Don’t try to take it all in, Lillian!” Samantha yelled. Lily realized she was making a keening sound but she didn’t know how to stop. Samantha reached into the fire with her other hand and slapped Lily across the face.
A thousand variations on a slap hit her, and it took all of them to stun Lily into releasing her mother’s willstone and focusing on the here and now.
Rowan’s shirt was slashed and blood flowed freely down his side. Caleb and Tristan wrestled Carrick to the ground. Simms stepped up and took on Tristan. She was a good fighter—strong as an ox and twice as tenacious. Breakfast and Una were on the other side of the pyre, fending off the officers who were swarming across the lawn in riot gear. Hiding behind their shields, the officers pulled out their clubs and beat Una and Breakfast. Just behind the line of officers, Lily saw Miller’s face—a desperate mask among the black helmets. He was shouting and trying to get to her.
Lillian. I need you to guide me across the worldfoam, Lily called out in mindspeak.
I’m here. Hurry. You’re already badly burned.
Lily breathed in, and her witch wind screeched like a living thing. By the time she let her breath out again, she and her coven were in Lillian’s world.
Lily heard someone who loved her say her name. And then the pain began.
Toshi was surprised he was still allowed to come and go in the restricted zone.
After what had happened with Lily and the Hive, he would have thought that Grace would lock him up, but she hadn’t. As Toshi passed under the whips of the Warrior Sisters at the checkpoint to get back into Bower City, he understood why. By allowing him all the freedoms he’d enjoyed before, Grace was showing him not only that she wasn’t afraid of him, but that he’d never been free.
Toshi eyed a Warrior Sister as she moved aside to let him pass. He still didn’t know if Grace could see everything the Hive saw, or if they just filled her in on the things they considered important. Again, the strangeness of the Hive struck him. What did a Warrior Sister consider important? Did they have a language, or did they simply pass along images to Grace? And if they passed on only images without language, how effective was the Hive at spying for her?
He had been forbidden to tell anyone that Grace controlled the Hive, although when she’d come to his rooms after losing Lily in the woods, she hadn’t seemed too worried that he would. She’d wanted to talk about how Lily and her coven had simply disappeared, but Toshi didn’t have a clue. When she finally believed that he was ignorant, Toshi had steered the conversation back to what really concerned him.
“Why the lie, Grace? Why even bother pretending that the Hive is in control?” Toshi had asked her.
“You know what I’ve learned in all my years of building and growing this city?” she asked in return. Toshi shrugged, not interested in playing guessing games. “Ninety-nine percent don’t care how the lights get turned on or how the water gets cleaned or how we make the streets safe—just as long as everything works.” She smiled at him, almost wistfully, and Toshi was reminded of one night over thirty years ago when they’d stood and talked under the stars. He couldn’t really say who had kissed whom, but he remembered being happy for a while. It hadn’t lasted long. “The lie is for the other one percent who couldn’t bear to live under a human dictator. It’s a mercy, really.” Her eyes hardened in the same way that had driven him to break things off with her all those years ago. “The lie is so I don’t have to kill that one percent.”
“Grace the Merciful,” he said bitterly.
Half her face pinched into a condescending smile. “No one mysteriously disappears in Bower City. People aren’t being bullied or silenced. They have jobs, rights, wealth, and great schooling for their kids. There’s no crime, no poverty, and no sickness. No one wants that to change. They don’t want to know the truth, and if you told them, what I’d be forced to do to quell any uprising would be your fault.” She brushed his shoulder like the lover she used to be, and he recoiled. She dropped her hand. “Leave the lie alone, Toshi.”
When she left she didn’t even bother to close the door behind her. And why should she? Privacy was an illusion.
Toshi hadn’t wanted to believe her. He thought that there had to be malcontents—people who wouldn’t be bought out by the perks of perfect living. So far, he hadn’t found anyone. After two days of talking in code with family and friends, he was leaving the restricted zone more frustrated than when he’d entered it. He’d thought that if ever there were a place to find rebels, it would be there. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
The people in the restricted zone didn’t care one way or the other if the Hive controlled the city or if Grace controlled the city by controlling the Hive. They just wanted to be a part of it.
His father’s advice was given in Japanese. The closest equivalent in English was “don’t rock the boat.”
Toshi spent a day in his family’s apothecary shop, trying to feel out customers to see who would rise up if they knew that Grace, and not the inscrutable and invincible Hive, had kept them poor and sickly. He’d asked hypothetical questions that were met with blank stares and embarrassed laughs. They lived in a world where it was acceptable, even normal, to curse the Hive, but beyond curses all anyone seemed to want was to be accepted by them—to be ushered past the checkpoints and into the shining city by the sea.
At night, Toshi sat with his dying mother. He could see the cancer in her growing by the second, thinking how easily he could pluck it from her body. Like picking spilled seeds off the floor. But he wasn’t allowed to do that.
Toshi asked his mother why she didn’t want change. She placed her shriveled hand next to his smooth one and smiled up into his eternally young face. “You are not sick. You will never be sick,” she said.
And that was enough for her. It seemed to be enough for most in the restricted zone. As long as they had the hope that their children would live charmed lives in Bower City, they didn’t want change.
Toshi jumped a trolley and hung from the bar, glaring hopelessly out the window. The clean streets glittered at him smugly and the legions of fit people mocked him with their healthy bodies and pretty, smiling faces.
Grace was right. They would probably fight him—not her—if Toshi tried to change anything. That was the genius of what Grace had done. Her victims were far away and somebody else’s problem. The punishment was to be locked out of Bower City, and so everyone wanted in.
He got off the trolley and walked the last few blocks to the Governor’s Villa. Grace hadn’t even hinted that she was going to throw him out or demote him in any way. Still, Toshi was certain now that he had no hope of ever learning how to grow willstones. Grace would never trust him with that. If the formula for growing willstones was ever leaked it would end Bower City’s stranglehold on magic and therefore its dominance in the world.
But, as Toshi considered it, he realized that he’d never had a chance of becoming Ivan’s second. Grace had stopped trusting him enough for that when he saw the hardness in her eyes and ended their brief romance. She knew that if he didn’t love her she couldn’t control him, and Grace would never allow anyone she couldn’t control to know the secret of willstones. He wondered what Grace had on Ivan.
Toshi went inside, but he didn’t go up to his rooms. Instead, he went to find Ivan. He wove through the myriad rooms and down passageways that led to other buildings. The façades of these buildings were made to look like they were separate, but behind them, nearly all the buildings in the governing area were connected. They all led back to Grace.
Toshi found Ivan in the power relays. The windy, stadium-size room was humming with the electricity being generated by the three dozen crucibles and witches who were transmuting energy for the city. They each stood in their niche in the marble walls, suspended in a gentle column of witch wind, their faces underlit by their glowing willstones. They looked like lovely floating statues. The mechanics grouped below them and monitored their bodies, making sure they didn’t transmute to the point of taxing themselves. Salt and herbs were strewn on the floor. A banquet of food was ready in a niche to refuel them when they had completed their shift. Out of respect, the food was always presented spilling out of a cornucopia.
The only things that marred the hypnotic beauty of the relays were the thick cables that carried the electricity out to the city, but since they were the whole point, the cables were regrettably unavoidable. Ivan made sure they were kept out of the way nonetheless. A serene witch was a productive witch, and it just made sense to keep the generators of the city’s power happy.
Ivan was checking an output gauge when Toshi came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and smiled when he saw his protégé.
“I didn’t see you on the schedule today,” Ivan said, his smile falling as he took note of Toshi’s expression.
“Can we talk?” Toshi asked.
Ivan waved someone over to take his place. They went down a corridor and through some back doors in silence until they got to Ivan’s laboratory. Unlike the grand and stately space of the relays, Ivan’s laboratory was a cramped, untidy room full of glass beakers and tiny crystal vials of strange potions.
There were few places in the world where Toshi felt as comfortable as he did here. It was filled with memories of his childhood. After being chosen by the Hive and the subsequent commotion of bonding with such a large and impressive willstone, Ivan’s laboratory was the only place that reminded Toshi of his parents’ apothecary shop. It was unheard of for Toshi to wish himself back to the restricted zone, or to even speak of it, and so Ivan’s acrid-smelling, usually sticky, and occasionally explosive laboratory became the only place Toshi could go as a boy to ease the homesickness he was told he shouldn’t feel.
Pickled creatures, half created before they were destroyed, yellowed in their chemical baths along one wall. Each shelf was a trial and error in a series of experiments carried out on the Woven ages ago.
Toshi had asked Ivan once what they were for, and Ivan had replied, “To remind me of what not to do.”
“What’s troubling you?” Ivan asked, bringing Toshi back to the present with a small jump. Ivan perched on the edge of his scorch-marked desk and placed his hands properly in his lap, waiting with the same kindly patience he’d always given Toshi, even when he didn’t deserve it.
“Did you create the Hive for Grace?”
The question brought an end to the decades of good memories Toshi had of that room and, like a bad smell lingering close to good food, tainted all of them.
Ivan looked down and let out a long, tired breath. “How did you find out?” he asked.
“You are the master of kitchen magic. And it’s the only thing I could think of that she could use to keep you silent. You would have had to have done it in order to want to keep it hidden for so long,” Toshi answered. “What about the rest of the Woven?”
“I can’t claim full responsibility for them, but I was a part of it.” He swallowed. “A large part. I made Grace the kitchen, as it were, for her to make the Woven.” He swiped his hands over his face, his eyes older in an instant. “Bower City was just an outlawed trading post, scared to death that Salem would find out we existed and kill us all. We couldn’t stand against the Eastern Covens. Then Grace had this idea about the Woven. I was young and angry and, I swear to you, I never thought the wild Woven would last more than a generation or two. I certainly never considered that she would learn how to make them grow willstones inside their bodies so she could control them. That’s no excuse, but it’s the only one I have.”
“How many other people know?” Toshi asked.
“They’re all long dead,” Ivan said. “Like I should be.”
The irony of it was suffocating. Ivan was the one who created the soap that slowed aging to a crawl, which Toshi had improved until aging and the slow decline of the body into decrepitude were essentially stopped, but you didn’t have to use that soap if you wanted to grow old and die.
“Why aren’t you?” he asked, cruelty flaring inside of him.
Ivan smiled down at his folded hands, accepting Toshi’s anger and feelings of betrayal. “I knew I could never make up for what I’d done, but if I helped enough people, maybe my life wouldn’t be a complete travesty.” Ivan laughed softly. “Why aren’t I dead yet? Because I have so many sins to repent before I die, I just might have to live forever.”
The two of them watched a Worker crawl across Ivan’s thigh. Toshi saw the loathing in Ivan that he never dared show before, and he just knew.
They had worked together as teacher and student for over fifty years, so it was easy for Toshi to read the subtle shift in Ivan, a shift that signaled he wanted to get to work. Over the years they had cured the incurable, mended the irrevocably broken, and essentially ended the need for people to grow old and die. That much time working together solving the biggest biological problems gave them an advantage over the myriad eyes that watched them.
Without even changing the attitude of their bodies, Toshi and Ivan agreed to solve this together. Toshi stood up, took off his jacket, and went to get a lab coat. They were going to find a way to exterminate the Hive.