Page 15

CHAPTER 15

All You Never Say

C armen left the next day. I’d barely had a chance to speak with James’s aunt before Tye was suddenly driving her to the airport. Did she not want to stay and watch the memories like him? When I asked, Tye said only that Carmen had known Ruhaven for long enough.

But with her gone, it was one less Ruhaven I’d have to lie to.

“Roe?”

At the Gate, James waited as I inhaled a last breath of dirt and worms, then joined him where he bent, unloading a knapsack. It’d be my first time seeing Ruhaven since I returned, and my stomach fluttered between nerves and sweet anticipation. Like a drug addict—was that what I’d eventually become? Someone like Bryn, who was so addicted, James had exiled him from Naruka.

“You’re sure it’s safe?” I asked. Safe for someone who wasn’t in the Ledger ? Maybe the last few times were a fluke.

“Aye, of course,” James replied gamely, unraveling a wool blanket that had seen the turn of the century. “I’ll only leave ye in for a few minutes or so, as ye need time to get used to the transition.”

Sweat cooled in the small of my back. I was really going to do this, going to try to live Willow’s life. “How long can you stay in?”

“Perhaps ninety minutes, though I try to keep meself to an hour.” He patted his flat stomach. “Ye can get a bit nauseous if ye push it.” He rifled through his knapsack before taking out a canister of tea, two wooden cups, and a banana. “For when ye wake,” he explained, arranging them so well that any passerby—though there’d be none up here—would think we’d set out for a romantic picnic. “Ye need to keep yer blood sugar up, especially when ye eventually stay in longer.”

“What am I looking for?” My toes brushed the edge of the blanket. “Bryn didn’t explain what the Inquitate looked like.” Hadn’t said more than two words to me this last week, and those had been, “ coffee? ” and “ gate ”.

“Ye won’t be in long enough to see much of anything right now,” James said, grabbing another blanket as I laid down. Blades of grass nipped at my calves. “But ye can start building up the ol’ tolerance now.”

“What about side effects?” I asked. “Should I stop eating meat?”

James kneeled beside me, one shoelace untied and dragging in mud. “It’ll be a while yet before it comes to that.” Above his head, a lantern swung on a creeping rope suspended between trees. Rusted hooks were screwed into two of them for the canopy James hung up when it rained.

“What about that glimmer , as you called it, that piece of Bryn’s Mark I saw?”

James wiggled his fingers. “What, now yer worried ye’ll get superpowers?”

It hadn’t looked so much like a superpower as a curse. “I’m worried it’ll change me.”

Behind dew-soaked glasses, his eyes smoked to coal. “Of that, I’ve no doubt.”

I exhaled a slow breath, willing my body to calm, to relax. “And what if—I don’t know—something happens?” Like Ruhaven exorcising me from Willow’s life.

“Ye can feel pain, love, and all the rest, but I’ll be watching ye here. Yer body will react if there’s anything amiss and I’ll pull ye out,” James repeated, then patted my hand. “Now, last thing. When we move between Naruka and the memories, there’s a space ye’ll enter we call the Prayama . ‘Tis only temporary, but it looks a wee bit different for all of us. It’s just a cushion yer mind makes for ye to accept what’s to come. Mine looks like an auld kitchen, and sure I don’t even know where it’s from.”

I think I’d already seen mine—that empty room with the trickling water.

So I folded one hand over my stomach and tried to relax, to let the Gate take me again, praying that if it did reject me, it wasn’t too painful.

After five unsuccessful minutes, I was shaking, feeling every bumpy ridge, every washed-out divot beneath the blanket, every twig that’d blown into the clearing since the last storm.

Then I felt it.

A sharp yank on the inside of my ribs like hell had thrown a harpoon through the dirt.

I opened my eyes.

Except I didn’t. Couldn’t.

And then…

Then I started the fall.

I exhaled a slow breath.

It rose in a glittering cloud, like mist on a winter’s day in L’Ardoise, except the tiny particles sparkled under Ruhaven’s indigo light.

How my memory must have shivered at the intrusion, knowing I was just some thieving toad crouching in a mind that didn’t belong to me, witnessing events I had no business seeing. My own skin all but crawled with the feeling.

I breathed out, in, and again felt that wrongness when my chest expanded to twice its normal capacity, tasting every fleck of jasmine floating in the honeyed air as though my lungs had tastebuds.

I was still in the wild forest. Still walking on the pearly dirt, the beads swelling between my toes. Still ducking massive foliage that seemed more mammal than plant, thick enough for its protruding veins to carry blood through furry stems.

If I’d been in my own body, my palms would have been sweaty, that old anxiety would squeeze my chest. But I felt none of that here, the mind and body entirely separate from each other.

Our skirt shifted around our legs as we walked, but her arms were longer—my fingertips brushing farther down my thighs than they should have. Even my touch felt different, the sensation of skin on skin softer than velvet.

I was her and she was me.

And right now, she was searching for something.

My clawed hand peeled back a slimy stem. Was she looking for food? I hadn’t experienced her eating yet, and at this point, just hoped we had a mouth.

Something shot out of the bushes.

I jumped back as a foot-tall toothy sprite buzzed in front of me. No, not a sprite, a creature, like me, like the demon whose arm I’d seen before. Except besides the teeth, this one wasn’t nearly as intimidating. Burgundy hair stood at all angles, like she’d been woken with the worst case of bed hair I’d ever seen. Massive bug eyes consumed half her face as she glared at me.

Ouch .

I grasped the cheek she flicked with her wing. We had a quick back and forth that started with me apologizing, and ended with my memory threatening to saw her wings from the sprite’s body if the dagger I now held was any indication.

But eventually, she zoomed off, emitting a litany of snorts as she disappeared into the woods.

Weird. Absolutely, impossibly weird .

But she hadn’t been what I’d been searching for.

We moved on, the long-haired trees replaced by lizard-looking ones with giant squid arms. No suction cups. Its skin was smooth and cool as a frog’s belly when we pushed it aside and stepped under the shade of the tree.

She peered around a tentacle, tilted her head back, then squinted at something above.

Suddenly, our vision shot forward, propelled on an imaginary slingshot. We zoomed through the leaves, phosphorescent foliage a blur of color, eyes flickering over the tiniest speckle of dust. Our sight dove through a shimmering crack in the trees to find the gears turning slowly, mesmerizing in the atmosphere, but she dwelled on them as much as I bothered with clouds.

Searching for something else.

When her claws tightened on the tentacle, it jerked as if in pain. She murmured softly and our vocal cords ping-pinged like a harp in my throat. Apologizing? It felt like it. But the words were tinkering bells.

With a laugh—more bells—she tilted her head back, continued zooming through the trees.

There .

A shadow passed behind the glowing canopy of flowers and vines and mushrooms that made up the foliage. Something hunting us? Or were we hunting it?

My body throbbed with awareness, with an extra sense I couldn’t identify that told her exactly who or what this was.

The same creature, I think, that we’d encountered before Oslo. The one with the tattooed arm that had grabbed her and flung us into the skies.

Her eyes tracked its movement, following the male to where the foliage thinned. The pulse at her throat hiccuped, then dived into a racing heartbeat that finally reached the tempo of a human’s.

I caught a flash of feathers, then a glimmer of gold, and—

Something tugged on my wrists.

My vision blurred.

No, no, not now . Let me just see what was—

But James yanked again, harder, and my mind spun out of the memory, into the room with the emptiness and the trickling water.

J ames sat back, arms draped over his knees, a hangdog smile on his face. “Well? Wasn’t so bad, right?”

It was better than I remembered, better than I’d dreamed. “I forgot how real it all is, but it seemed short?”

“I left ye in for seven minutes like we agreed. Any longer, ye’d be sick.” James helped me up, then quickly rolled up the blanket he’d laid out and extinguished the candle. “When I first went in as a child, it took me a while to build up some stamina too. Funnily enough, I always thought I’d find what I saw in Ruhaven here, and when I couldn’t, ‘twas a bit like finding out Santa wasn’t real.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets with a sheepish expression.

And how I could picture him as that young boy for a heartbeat. “Can we live in the Gate?”

Dried leaves from last autumn crinkled under our feet. Wild foxgloves sprung up along a ruined fence, so bursts of deep violet added color to the green.

“Ye mean for days? Not really, only as long as it takes for us to need to eat, drink, and all the other necessities. It doesn’t count for sleep either, as we’re fully awake, even if our bodies are lying in the Gate. Ye want more tea?” he asked, offering me the canister.

“No, I’m fine, thanks.”

“Sandwich? I’ve some packed in this bag.”

I shook my head.

“Ah, I see I’m worse than me own mammy.”

“James, you said before that each of us has a Mark , that yours is a spirit handler .”

“Aye, that’s right. In Ruhaven, it’s called a Kalista. We can bond with things.” He plucked an ash leaf off the tree. “Like this.”

I looked at the sodden leaf doubtfully. “You can bond with a leaf ?”

He chuckled, low and deep. “Yera, could be anything really. If it was a leaf, I might fall in love with a tree.”

“You’re joking.”

“Only a wee bit. I’d more likely have an affinity for sunlight, be able to photosynthesize, produce oxygen, and so on.” He let it flutter into the muck. “But as Essie is me bonded spirit, and she’s a female grown from a type of rock, I’ve a good ability to sense the mineral levels in soil. Even here, I find I’ve quite the green thumb.”

“Grown,” I repeated slowly, “from a type of rock .”

“Sure, the spirit ye bond with may be a blade of grass, a memory, an animal, or a song! Though in me own case, because me mate is me spirit as well, I’d not be so happy if she was a tune.”

No, no, I suppose not.

He clapped my shoulder. “Maybe ‘tis too soon for all this. We’ll have to see what yer own Mark is.”

Curiosity burned a tiny hole in my gut. “Do you think it could be zooming vision? She can see really far away and—”

James laughed. “Ah, no, we can all do that so.”

Oh.

I kicked back a thorny, twisting bramble from our path. I wouldn’t mind being bonded to a blackberry bush. Maybe I’d always smell like blackberries if I did, or I’d have a scone recipe to rival James’s.

“So Essie’s your bonded spirit, something you only get because you’re a Kalista Mark. But I thought you said she was your mate?”

“Aye, she’s both for me, as it happens. That’s not unusual for Kalistas, for the spirit ye bond with to be close, but I suppose I am glad she’s a woman and not that leaf.”

It was so ridiculous, I burst out laughing.

By the time we crossed the river and James tightened his grip on mine, I was well and truly committed to a bonding with blackberries as long as they didn’t end up being my mate.

“So ye didn’t see anyone else? Besides the sprite…?” James prompted.

When I shook my head, he looked almost disappointed.

“Is everything alright?” I asked, stepping into the tack room that led to the kitchen.

He patted my hand absently, and said, “I’m just glad ye decided to stay.”

I was now at ten minutes. Ten. Whole. Minutes.

Not long enough to catch sight of more than a few tiny creatures, but long enough for Bryn to ask me about it. I had very little to tell him, and a part of me wondered if he just asked to make me confess how little I’d seen. Woods, a white lake, more forest. A butterfly humanoid-looking thing, a male with deer legs, with the latter more shocking until the butterfly had pulled back its gums and revealed rows of glittering teeth.

But with such a poor endurance in the Gate and no sign of my Mark yet, I had no lack of time for studying how the memories worked.

If it was the preservation of energy that allowed our souls to be reborn, then the process was scientific, not magical. Science—that I could deal with. Magic—less so.

If the Inquitate were sentient, then they’d come through the Gate like us. But they weren’t Ruhaven, and Drachaut didn’t make the crossing, and why was that? Weren’t their souls preserved too?

Something to ask James.

If it was science, maybe they were a side effect of the crossing. Chemical reactions released energy—that was how combustion engines ran. Fuel was injected into a carburetor, the narrow passage forcing it through quickly, and then a spark ignited.

Pop . The piston fired.

What if there was something in our crossing that released a similar energy? What if it—

“Roe!”

A baseball slapped into my glove, inches from my nose.

“Damn, girl,” Tye admonished. “You used to be able to catch. Ruhaven’s got your head in the clouds.”

Or in the gears that grew there. I scrubbed at my face, wincing at the salty sweat of the glove. I was terrible at baseball, but it was an excuse to be with Tye now that he spent most of his weekdays exercising the horses at a farm in town.

Lying on a blanket between Tye and I, James snored loudly in the Gate. But since Tye couldn’t sit still when he anchored, and I was visiting the Gate after James, he’d asked me to throw the ball with him over the Irishman’s unconscious body.

And my aim wasn’t good.

“When do you think Bryn is going to find something I can use about the Inquitate?”

Tye arched a long brow. “Hun, that guy is catching up on two years out of Ruhaven. He ain’t gonna be doing much else except visiting the Gate and rejoicing with all the females in there.”

I nearly missed the ball again. Was that why he’d wanted to return so badly? To be with women in Ruhaven?

I threw the ball back with more force than necessary, the smack of it in Tye’s glove echoing in the woods. “You don’t know each other in the Gate, do you?” Like James and Kazie did.

Would I ever meet them? It’d be weird knowing they were witnessing everything my memory said and did.

“No, praise Jesus, I do not.”

I nodded in understanding.

“You gonna throw that?” When I did, Tye dove and snagged it with an ice cream cone catch. “Ha!” Sweat glistened on his brow from the number of times he’d dived for my throw, his lungs puffing with exhilaration.

“Do Ruhavens breathe oxygen?” I asked. “It seems thicker.”

“Dunno.”

“Gravity?”

Tye drew his brows together, motioned for the ball. “Hun, I really am just a Montana farmer, so I ain’t gonna be able to explain gravity and space memory travel to ya. What I do know is this...” He caught the ball. “We died. We crossed. We were reborn. Now we got these memories. It’s that simple.”

“But why us? Why not the people from the other country, Drachaut?”

“Not everyone makes this crossing when they die,” he said simply.

“Why not?”

“‘Cause they didn’t drink the magic potion?”

I felt my lips twitch. But for the next twenty minutes, Tye let me ping him with questions, some that sounded intelligent only until they rolled off my tongue and he burst into laughter. Still, he made the whole thing easy, as if we were discussing farming techniques or horseback riding.

“Do you think we’ll ever meet in Ruhaven?”

The wind picked up, tossing Tye’s now-curly locks across his forehead. “Yeah, ‘course we’ll meet. How we gonna eventually make the crossing so close together and not meet? Could be years though.”

“How will I recognize you? I mean, are you a man or a woman or…?”

Tye cocked a slow eyebrow. “Me? A woman? Honey, there ain’t no life I ever lived that didn’t bless me with what would make other men jealous and you blush.” His dimple made an appearance when I did just that.

Whatever Tye looked like in the Gate, it couldn’t be better than him here, with his dark eyelashes framing eyes greener than Ireland.

This time, I caught the ball with a hair’s breadth to spare.

“So how does that work if—”

A sudden low moan cut me off. James?

Feet away, still asleep at the Gate with his arms and legs in an almost comical sprawl, he whimpered again.

Concerned, I tossed off the baseball glove, stepped toward him.

Sweat beaded on his temples as color blossomed up his neck and cheeks. He flinched, his fingers curling in on themselves as a sudden fear struck me.

“Tye, you’ve got to wake him,” I said quickly, hurrying to James’s side. His forehead was hot and sticky against the back of my hand, his breathing ragged.

“Huh? Why?” Tye replied, tossing the ball away.

The wind picked up, stirring dead leaves that gathered on the edges of the worn blanket. “He warned me about this,” I explained as Tye strode over. “That if something happened in the Gate, he’d feel it here.” I called his name, shaking him by the shoulders. How did you wake someone from the Gate? “Tye, please.”

When Tye said nothing, I looked up to find an amused smirk curling his lips. “Oh, I’d say he’s feeling it alright.”

“Can you be serious for once ?”

Laughter crinkled his emerald eyes now. “Darling—and I do so regret to say this—I am.”

“You’re…” Then I caught his meaning.

With deliberate slowness, I peeled my gaze from Tye, forced it back to James, looked down…

I dropped his hand and scrambled back so hard, I landed in a pile of stinging nettles.

Tye absolutely hooted with laughter.

I ran my hands down my face, massaging the image out of my eyeballs. Then tore them away again, wiping both vigorously on my thighs while Tye burst into a fresh round of cackling laughter. And still, it wasn’t enough to wake James.

“I’m going,” I muttered, rising to my feet. Ears burning, throat itchy, the hot embarrassment of it all had me sweating in the autumn chill.

“Hell no,” Tye said, catching my arm. “You’re goin’ in the Gate when he’s done.”

James punctuated Tye’s words with a breathy moan.

I tried to yank loose, but he held on. “Just—just wake him early. Please .”

“What, right at the good part?” Tye released me to swing his arms at James in a gesture of male solidarity. “You got any idea how long he’s probably waited for—”

A long, low groan thundered through the clearing, burning my cheeks to cinders.

“I’m. Begging. You.”

Tye patted an invisible laundry pile. “Alright, alright, but only ‘cause you’re such a prude. Though I’ll warn ya, he ain’t gonna be happy.”

Crouching, Tye bent and braced a hand on James’s shoulder.

I inched closer, careful to keep Tye blocking the worst of it from view. Was he grasping his hand? For a moment, there was no movement at all, no moans, no breathy gasps, not even bird calls. Then Tye spoke quietly, calmly, and James’s left leg kicked out. His right hand bunched into a fist and released as he—

“ What the bleedin’ hell are ye trying to do to me! ” James swore, scattering crows. “Do ye not feckin’ see I’m a wee bit busy in here? And yet here ye are, yanking me away from me mate.”

Both heads turned in my direction—Tye’s amused, James’s in comical frustration.

“Sorry, James,” I muttered, stuffing my hands in my pockets, and maybe I did feel a little guilty. “It’s weird.”

He patted his cheeks. “Yer the absolute devil woman, ye know that? I’ve a mind to wait until yer in the throes yerself and rip ye out at the bloody peak.”

My cheeks burned another degree. That wasn’t possible, was it? Surely, nothing I’d encountered so far could even be capable of sex. I pictured the walking mushroom with antennas and shuddered.

Tye winked at me. “Don’t worry, I’ll leave ya in like a gentleman.”

“Please don’t.”

James exhaled a long sigh before getting up with the blanket over him—thank god—and stumbling to a knapsack. He gulped back whiskey like his life depended on it, then said, “Tye, ye can head back now. There’s some leftovers in the fridge.”

Just the thought of food had Tye perking up, then he frowned. “It ain’t the casserole, is it?”

“No one made you eat it,” I retorted, a bit put out.

He grinned at me. “Well then, if you ain’t gonna be puttin’ on such an entertaining performance as James, I’m gonna find my way back home.” He tapped his cap, then sauntered off with a whistle.

I watched him go, the jeans pulling tight over the backs of his thighs—

“Ye ready, Roe?”

I bit my bottom lip as I caught the flicker of amusement on James’s face, and something else too.

He pointed to the rumpled blanket he’d been lying on. “I’ve not got cooties. Just lay down.”

Probably true. Still, it felt weird.

“And I’ll be hoping ye stumble upon a little fun yerself so I can repay ye.”

My horror must have shown because James rolled his eyes. “Ye’ve nothing to worry about yet.” And just how would he know?

“You don’t know me in Ruhaven, do you?” I asked warily, kneeling on the blanket, still warm from where he’d lain.

He scratched at his temple. “I don’t know. Ye’ve not told me enough of yer memories to know who or what ye are.”

I slipped off my boots—I could never get comfortable with them on—and wiggled my sock feet in the crisp air. “James, when we returned after Norway, and you went in the house, I saw Bryn start into the woods, toward the Gate.” Burning blue eyes, face a mask of simmering restraint, the heat that punched through me.

“Yeah, and what about it?” James asked, unwrapping a sandwich from a cheesecloth.

“Well, I thought you said everyone needed an anchor. But Bryn didn’t have anyone with him when he left for the Gate. So how does he wake from the memories?”

James pursed his lips, all signs of his earlier annoyance vanishing in the first bite of his cheese and onion sandwich. “Ah, ‘tis true what I told ye—don’t ye ever come here without an anchor—but Bryn’s always been an exception. He’s a connection to the Gate that even me mum didn’t understand, and there wasn’t much she didn’t know.”

Yes—Bryn the golden child, the PhD, and I couldn’t wait to see him walk on water too.