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MY MOUTH OPENS and closes like a fish. I want to lie to her, but where are the words? There just aren’t any. No words to explain what happened to me tonight. What I chose tonight.

Horror dawns over Alice’s face. “Did someone do this to you?”

I shake my head. No. No one did this to me. No one human, at least.

“You can tell me if something happened.” She grabs both of my hands, tears welling up behind her glasses. “I’ll believe you.”

Alice has known me for half my life. We are sleepovers and skinned knees and first crushes and always making sure our lockers are side by side.

Her tears break me.

The sob I’ve been holding back since the woods finally bursts out.

“I can call someone. The campus cops, the—”

“No!” I shout, mind flashing to Norris, the dean. “It—it isn’t like that. I promise.”

“Okay,” she says, her eyes darting back and forth as she processes. “If you—okay.”

Once I’m satisfied she won’t call on a Vassal without realizing, my head thunks against the wood.

Alice rubs my forearms. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

As with William, I let her guide me outside our room to the communal hall bathroom, my shower caddy tucked under her arm. When we enter, a girl washing her hands at one of the sinks gives us a funny look.

Once we’re next to the row of empty showers, Alice tugs on the bottom of my shirt. “You’ll feel better after a shower. Do you need help?”

She’s speaking quietly and clearly, like you do when someone is so freaked out they can’t handle complex sentences and you’re trying to calm them down. I realize what she’s doing, but I let her do it anyway. It’s working.

“I got it,” I mumble, and lift my T-shirt over my shoulders. She’s right about the rips. Three thin cuts cross the fabric where the uchel’s claws held me.

The door bangs open and closed, leaving us alone. Alice leans into one of the stall showers and turns the tap on. While she tests the water, I slip back to the other side to look at myself in the mirror.

No wonder she cursed.

I look wrecked.

My “cute bun” from earlier is long past cute. It’s mostly intact, but ruined with the uchel’s muck. Dark globs have plastered escaped curls to my forehead and the nape of my neck. Glossy eyes, puffy cheeks, bits of dirt on my nose. Most of the slime was on my shirt, but some of it’s caked on my arms and caught in my inner elbow. A long red bruise follows the line of my rib cage. I tug my bra down to hide it. Nick’s coin glints on my sternum. I take the necklace off and stuff it in my pocket.

“Water’s ready, shower stuff’s inside.” Alice comes around to stare at me in the mirror. Opens her mouth to ask another question, but thinks better of it, whatever it was. “I’ll be outside if you need anything.”

Once she’s gone, I undress as quickly as my rib will allow and step into the shower. The water pressure here is weak, but at least the stream’s hot. Uchel stench wafts around me in a noxious steam until vanilla body wash chases it away.

My brain tries to piece together the next steps of a shower—and comes up blank.

This used to happen at home. In the weeks after my mom died, I’d manage the first step of some mundane task—get naked and into the shower, open the fridge and set out the deli meat, dump a load of laundry into the washing machine—and the next step would elude me. Like an old mill, my mind would wheel around and around until it picked up the next directive.

Hair. My hair is dirty. Yes. I can handle that.

I hadn’t planned on even getting my hair wet for at least another week or so, but I can’t avoid washing my curls tonight. Not when they smell like sick and swamp. They’ll be clean and gorgeous tomorrow, but the unexpected added time makes me groan. That’s another hour and a half at least before I can really climb into bed, even if I skip deep conditioning and styling and throw everything up into a wet pineapple.

Alice returns as I part my thick damp hair into sections.

“Okay in there?”

“Yeah. Just realized I need to wash my hair.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah.”

Silence. She doesn’t leave. I’m okay with that, because I want her company. Not just anyone’s. Alice’s.

She must be thinking the same thing, because from the other side of the shower curtain I hear her say, “Okay if I chill in here? You seem pretty rattled.”

“I had the same idea.”

“Jinx, then.”

I rinse my hair out and start on conditioner, proud that I know the next step without having to think about it.

There’s another step I need to take tonight too.

“Hey, Alice?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry. About the Quarry. On some level, I knew you’d go if I wanted to go and I guess I just decided that was okay. I know the dean called your parents, and I can’t imagine what they said. I’m just… sorry for my part in it and sorry that I yelled at you and”—tears well up in my eyes, and my hands are too sudsy to wipe them, damnit—“said those things. That was unfair and wrong.”

Alice sighs. “I’m sorry too. It was my decision to go to the Quarry, not yours. I shouldn’t have jumped on you about your classes and about being here. I was just angry and worried.” A pause. “Which is what I am right now, by the way. Worried on the way to terrified.”

I dunk my head under the faucet. Pull water through my clumpy curls with shaking fingers. Section again, apply shampoo.

“You gonna tell me what happened tonight?”

I knew she’d ask, but the question still rocks me. I have to press both hands against the shower tile to stop the tremors. I’m clean, in the physical sense. But I still feel dirty.

“Bree?”

I squeeze my eyes shut, but the images I’d tried to bury flash by too quickly: the sharp rise of Nick’s chest when William pushed aether into his body; Sel, in a dark, bitter rage, ripping the arms and legs off the dead uchel and throwing them into the woods; the way the hounds’ bodies just… dissolved after a while. The memories threaten to suffocate me, just like the ones from the night my mother died.

“ I can’t.”

Another pause. The shampoo runs into my eyes. Stings.

“Trust me. Please?” I ask, so quietly I’m not sure she can hear it over the water. It gets harder to breathe. The hot tears of After-Bree burn behind my eyes.

“Fine.” She doesn’t sound angry, but she leaves without saying goodbye or good night.

The door clicks shut, and that something inside me breaks again. A rush of air leaves my lungs, like I’ve been holding my breath for hours and hours.

Then, my skin bursts into flames.

I slap my hands against the walls, the tile floor, but nothing stops the bloom of red climbing my fingers to my elbows. Bloodred fire ignites at the tips of my fingers and races to my elbows in a loud whoosh. Even under the water, the blaze grows brighter and wraps around my elbows like glowing vines.

The fire scalds my skin without burning, flickers over my nose like wild butterflies.

Spots in my vision bleed from tiny black dots into swirling obsidian pools. I fall to my knees, hand splayed across the tiles, heart pounding against my rib cage.

Mage flame.

That’s what this is.

It’s not silver-blue like Sel’s or the Legendborns’, or green like the hounds’, but it’s still mage flame.

Knowing what it is doesn’t explain why it’s here.

Why it’s the sickening, raw color of a fresh wound.

Why the flame feels like it’s coming from inside me.

The only beings I’ve seen leak flame from their bodies are demons. Sel already thinks I’m Shadowborn. If he sees me like this—

“Oh God,” I whimper.

There must be other explanations: It’s my body’s delayed reaction to the Oath. It’s Sel’s aether still lingering on my skin, turned sour from my resistance. It’s something the uchel put in me when he opened me up. Any could be true, or none. The bottom line is the same: If I can’t explain what’s happening, then I have to find a way to control it, because if I can’t control it…

You know I will, don’t you? Kill you. And you know I can.

I squeeze my eyes shut. Find my barrier. Shape it into every image I’ve ever used to contain After-Bree and her explosive, dangerous rage—and then some.

A wall made of brick. Made of steel. With bolts the size of my fist.

A blockade a mile high.

Tall enough to contain a giant, strong enough to hold back a god.

A bank vault with two-foot-thick bulletproof doors.

Unbreakable metals, uncrackable surfaces, unscalable heights.

I push all of me behind all of them.

No fissures, no seams, no way in or out.

I shove and heave and cry until I’m safe behind my wall.

And when I open my eyes, the flames are gone.