He Who Breaks the Earth (The Gods-Touched Duology)

Knox’s connection to Anwei felt gray at the edges, shadows misting across his skin eating away at it. Willow was everywhere, her growls tearing through the prison. “The sword was right there. It was right there,” Willow hissed. “He could have taken it. Why didn’t he take it?” Her little-girl voice tore at the edges, contorting into the dark hunger waiting all around her. “We’ll get into Mateo and make him take it. If we switch places—”

“I can’t let you push me into Mateo.” Willow suddenly shrank down, flickering and contorting. Her voice was her own again, not the hiss of a thousand monsters hiding in the dark. She was losing her battle without Knox’s body holding her like an anchor to the world. “If Knox dies, Mateo will die, and the opening will snap shut,” she pled. “You’ll never get out again.”

“Knox is dying.” Her voice changed again to the one of teeth and hate, her body swelling up larger. “There’s almost nothing left. But if we kill them in the right order, we’ll be free.”

Knox stared down at the shadow wafting up from the puncture in his side and closed his eyes. The bond seemed to flutter and twinge, as if the hole that let him into this place was twisting smaller every second. Please, Anwei. Whatever you are doing, you need to do it faster.

Willow’s head pressed out from the shadow toward him, and he could feel an echoing press inside him where shadows had wormed their way out from his wound and were eating away at him from the inside. He bowed his head, reaching for Calsta, for Anwei, for anything. All I wanted was to get my sister out.

Please.

Anwei didn’t like being dead. She’d only done it once before when a crime boss over in the Elantin port had followed a trail of very sick minions to her doorstep and she’d had to do something drastic. Dying seemed to fit the bill. She’d shipped her own limp body out of the port city before he managed to murder her in whatever fabulously grisly way he’d planned to show what happened to people who crossed him. Even if he hadn’t been satisfied with the outcome exactly, he’d let her go. A lifeless person nailed into a box being shipped north was much less fun to stab than a live one, and that was without considering what would happen if he had risked crossing the mail carriers to get her. Few were unintelligent enough to do that. Anwei hadn’t much liked the part where she’d been there one moment, then gone the next, waking up days later to shiver over what could have happened to her while she had been sleeping so deeply.

Death, however, was required sometimes. And facing down a shapeshifter who would happily provide a proper death if you did not bring your own was one such case. She forced her eyes open, the stone around her smelling of a shapeshifter’s touch.

Mateo had done it, then. Followed the plan.

Anwei and Lia had sat together whispering over the unopened packet of Sleeping Death for hours before calling him out of the camp, carefully making the little packets for each of their crew to hold in their mouths, ready to bite down the moment Mateo pretended to kill them one by one. Anwei had seen it work for Noa and Altahn as Mateo opened the floors beneath their feet. Tual Montanne could feel the tick of humors like a Basist and see auras like a Devoted, so both had needed to be stopped. Sleeping Death had fixed hearts and lungs, and the aura-cancelling stones had done for the other. The very picture of a quick death.

But there were tunnels under the island. Unlike the one lined with graves, the tunnel Mateo had dropped them into was stirring with life. Anwei could hear Noa laughing, Altahn grumbling, both of them trying to shake off the tiny dose Anwei had given them.

A voice, so tiny and weak, broke through the cotton stuffing her head. Help.

Anwei tried to sit up, her muscles water and her mouth made from sand. A hand gripped her shoulder, Noa’s face appearing overhead. “Are you awake?” she asked. “Because you didn’t warn me that coming back from the dead would involve wishing Mateo had just gone through with it.”

Help. The voice broke, like shattered bone and burning hair. The bond. It was the bond, Knox’s voice breaking through like it had that very first day in Chaol, panic like a fire inside him.

“Noa!” she croaked. “I have to get to Knox on the boat. Something’s wrong—help me up.”

Noa took both her hands to help her stand. “I’ll come with you.”

Anwei wobbled down the tunnel with Noa’s help, the sickly, flushed smell of sugar beet paste sticky in her hair making her stomach turn as if it had been real blood. She forced her legs to move up the passage faster and faster until she was running, trying not to think of what she must have looked like, her death lingering enough for Tual to believe, with only Lia to protect her if Mateo went wrong.

The Devoted had taken her hand before going to get Mateo. I will not let him take you. Anwei had flinched at the sound of the words, because they were her own once, and she had not been able to fulfill them when Lia had needed her. But Lia hadn’t blinked. I don’t think he will hurt you, she’d said, but I am prepared to stop him if he tries.

It hurt, planning to be the distraction. The sparkle, when all Anwei’s life she’d been the hands that did what needed to be done. The last moments of pure rage and nothing she’d seen in Mateo’s eyes before her mind had gone blank rippled through her like the memory of a knife in her mother’s hand.

They are not what make you. The nameless god’s voice was almost annoyed. Not any more than I am. Their choices don’t make yours or Mateo’s or anyone else’s. You make your own. The last words grumbled out, barely there. That’s the only reason we had a chance to fix any of this, you know. Hoping you little humans would finally listen to us and choose things that would help everybody, even if it hurt you for a little while.

Anwei ignored him as she stumbled past a monument, her skirt catching a little statue of a cat curled at the base. She was almost glad to have him poke at her though, despite the way her scars still twinged.

You make your own choices.

Like her family on the beach. Her town, twisted in roots and branches. Like Knox, breathing when he should have been dead, even as the lash of her magic killed Shale in the tunnels. Decisions made in panic and without help, with outcomes she was both grateful for and would always regret.

Her scars were a testament to what could happen when people lost control to fear, anger, and hate.

Mateo had done some of what he’d promised—he hadn’t struck Anwei down with the sword when Lia had brought it into the hall. He’d dropped her through the floor along with everyone else.

He’d chosen, just like Lia said he could. But now—

By the time Anwei pushed open the secret door into the tower’s main floor, Knox had stopped crying out for help, nothing but a frantic pulse inside her. Her arms and legs began to shake with the feel of it; part of her was draining away with each burst of light. Desperate, she flung open the tower doors, ignoring the shapes of fallen Devoted on the paving stones, their eyes empty as they stared up toward their goddess.

She could hardly spare a look for Tual Montanne’s house to wonder if it would be him waiting for her at Noa’s boat where Gilesh and Bane had left it tethered on the little beach. The two Trib were nothing but breaks in the earth where Mateo must have dropped them through to the tunnels below. Out of breath, tears running down her cheeks at the pain in her chest and the frantic silence inside her, Anwei waded out to the boat, her skirts dragging as she crawled over the rail and flopped onto the deck.

But when she stumbled down the ramp leading to the hold, she found him instead.

Mateo. His cheeks too thin, his eyes shadowed, and a pockmarked sword in his hands. Knox’s body lay behind him, so, so still in the canoe where they’d placed him just in case they had to abandon the boat.

Knox’s life thumped a rhythm in Anwei’s head, like a heart on its last beats.

Mateo’s fingers gripped the sword so tightly that blood was dripping onto the deck where he held the blade. It looked slick, oily in his hands, just like when Abendiza had appeared in the tent the night before carrying it.

She’d pulled Anwei away from all the others, a worried eye on the tent where Mateo sat alone. “Using Mateo Montanne is unsafe. It’s insanity, child.”

“We don’t have another choice—” Anwei started to reach for the sword and had to pause, her stomach turning at the sight of it.

“You don’t think the threat of dying will be enough to control Mateo?” Lia pushed between them, eyeing the sword with curiosity.

“This thing is unstable,” Abendiza hissed, jerking it away from Lia when she reached for it, then immediately looking contrite. Swallowing, the old woman closed her eyes and held the sword out toward Anwei. Every movement was pained and mechanical, as if offering it was taking all the concentration she had. “We should destroy it here. Now.”

Anwei forced herself to reach for the sword, taking its awful weight in her hands. It smelled like death, like pain, like rage, like nothing. “You didn’t seem anxious to get rid of it before.”

“I didn’t realize just how far out the broken souls could come. They took Mateo.”

“That’s not normal? She’s done that to Knox lots of times.” Anwei walked back over to Altahn, Gilesh, and Bane as they went over the map traced into the dirt and set the sword down on top of her medicine bag.

“No, it’s not normal. They used Mateo to attack you.”

“She’s used Knox to attack me more than once.”

“We thought it was so he could turn into a shapeshifter—” Lia followed her, reaching out to touch the sword, her finger trailing along the groove running the length of the blade. “All Willow ever wanted was to be fed. Souls. Energy. Knox couldn’t take from other people, so she had to feed on him, and it wasn’t enough. She took from Mateo too, and it still wasn’t enough. But if she killed Anwei, the Basist Knox was bonded to—”

Abendiza was already shaking her head. “The dead souls shouldn’t have so much control. I’ve never seen anything like this before, the dead reaching out to control the living. They whisper, they justify, they ask to be sustained in exchange for their advice and greater knowledge….” Abendiza shuddered, pushing out of the tent to stand where she couldn’t see the weapon as if it was still calling to her. Anwei set the sword down next to the map and followed, Lia close behind her. “But they don’t take. Yet they chose to kill Anwei today, and that doesn’t make sense. What would killing Anwei accomplish? The goal was always to kill you, young lady.” She raised an eyebrow at Lia, who frowned. “And you were there, right in front of him. But he attacked her.” She jabbed a finger at Anwei.

“Well, we aren’t bonded, and he didn’t have the sword….” Lia began to tick the reasons off on her fingers.

“But why go after Anwei at all? They see the opportunity—they see how unstable the opening to their world is. I think they mean to destroy the sword too. To kill all of us holding the way between our planes open—but I think they plan to do it while they’re in Mateo.” She looked up at the sky as if there were something up there to appeal to for help, some combination of Castor, Jaxom, Calsta, and all the gods, all their magic and expertise, to stop what she could see happening. “If Willow comes out with all of them attached, we’ll have something worse than the shapeshifters of old—Mateo would become a hungrier monster than the Commonwealth has ever seen. Hundreds of broken souls all taking from others. The victims are no better than the murderers after all these years. All they know is hunger. He would destroy everything in this country. In this world.”

Anwei scrubbed at her palm where it had been touching the sword, the nothing still clinging to her hands like a foul itch. She’d seen Mateo’s empty eyes. She could see the possibility of that future.

“How much of that is a choice?” Lia interjected. “Bonds are a choice. Oaths are a choice. Loving someone is a choice. So is killing someone. Mateo doesn’t even remember who Anwei is. He’s frightened of her.”

“Knox was able to snap out of his episodes when I talked to him. More than once, actually.” Anwei thought of the day in Knox’s room when he’d been so frightened of Devoted finding him, then down in the tunnels the first time they’d gone into the dig.

And again when he’d fought Lia, trying to get to Anwei with Tual looking on. It had been his bond with Anwei that had saved them both, allowing Knox to push past Willow and retake control.

“We are outside of any researched conclusions.” Abendiza wiped her hands on her long robes, looking toward the Devoted camp. “But Mateo is not a strong enough person that I’d be willing to trust him with my soul. Why do you think I brought the sword to you?” Her head swung toward Anwei. “You’ll destroy it because what you want most is to bring Knox out.”

“You still haven’t told us how exactly we’re supposed to do that,” Anwei pointed out.

“Caprenum is at its weakest when it is in transition. You’ve seen it before—the way it melts when it’s tearing a soul.”

“You mean we have to kill someone with it.” Lia’s voice went flat.

Anwei’s stomach twinged at Abendiza’s matter-of-fact nod. “Not just someone. You have to kill one of you connected to it. While it’s in that in-between state, we should be able to spread it out. Isolate the pieces so it can’t re-form. Destroy the openings in the barrier for good.” She pressed her hands to her chest. “It might let out those of us who still have a body and a life to come back to.”

She was being very careful in the way she spoke. Anwei matched her matter-of-fact tone. “Or it might kill all of us?”

The old shapeshifter’s mouth spread to a wide grin. “I suppose mincing words would be pointless. It’s a better fate than being trapped inside the sword, child. How much are you willing to risk to save this boy you love?”

Anwei traced the feel of Knox inside her, his light guttering smaller for some reason. She reached toward him, wishing she could hear his voice. All she’d felt were rushes of panic, as if he were clinging to her like a rope suspended over an abyss.

She clung back, as she always had.

Sacrifice is power. That’s what love is, after all, the nameless god whispered. Knox won’t live without you here. But there is great power in giving up yourself for those you love. That is what oaths are. “We have everything we need right here to destroy the sword.” Abendiza turned back to the tent, her sightless gaze fixed about where Anwei had left it inside. “I don’t care about your fascination with Tual Montanne—let someone else go up against him. We need to take care of this now before Willow comes crawling out of the sword to trap us all inside and slam the door behind us.”

“Who did you want me to kill so that you can live?” Anwei whispered.

Abendiza flinched. “I’ve lived on borrowed power for so many years that I doubt I’ll survive. Besides, I’m an outside point on the web—hardly connected to any of you. A sure solution would be to—”

“To kill Knox? Or Mateo… or me.” Anwei’s palms began to sweat. “And whoever dies will likely end up trapped inside the sword because they won’t be connected to this world anymore. They’ll be dead. Like all the others inside there.”

“Ideally that person won’t be trapped for long—” Abendiza countered. “And if you were to choose Mateo, he’d probably count it as a boon.”

“We are not killing Mateo,” Lia whispered. “He’s the only one who knows where my sister is.”

“That’s true enough,” Abendiza snorted.

Anwei reached out and took Lia’s hand. “I’m not going to kill anyone. Killing has been the answer people keep reaching for over and over, and it hasn’t served any of us very well. Shapeshifters. The Warlords. Tual. You. Abendiza. Me.” She shook her head. “We can find another way to destroy the sword.”

Abendiza’s lips curled back, her hands in fists. “You will doom us all.” But she turned and walked away into the forest, control tight across her shoulders as she melted into the darkness. Not willing to destroy anyone else even if it meant she might be able to go free.

Noa’s head peeked out from the tent. “She scares me very much.”

Anwei let Noa pull her back into the tent, her mind running. If the sword was so unstable, maybe she could brew and burn and magic the sword into pieces with the nameless god’s help. But he didn’t say anything, his words from before echoing back. Sacrifice is power.

Lia’s hand in Anwei’s squeezed as they walked back toward Altahn and the others to finalize their plans. “Mateo has done the right thing over and over. He’s stronger than you think.”

Noa settled between Altahn and Gilesh to trace a little flower next to the little rock that represented their boat on the map. “Runs in the family.”

Anwei flinched, almost as if Noa had accused her of something. She’d been so focused on what she wanted that she’d somehow tried to let go of the things she loved to get it.

“He is a lot like you, Anwei.” Lia moved to pick up the sword, Altahn, Gilesh, and Bane looking up as she tested the balance, then pulled off the empty sheath at her back and slid the sword inside. When she looked back at Anwei, her eyes were hard. “You really think that old creature is telling the truth? That you can get Knox out of here?”

Choices. What she wanted. What she loved. They all mattered. Anwei pressed her hands to her chest, feeling the steady tick, tick, tick of her own heart. If it came to it, she knew what she was willing to give up. So she nodded.

“What about Mateo? Can you get the part of him that’s stuck in there out?”

“I don’t know,” Anwei whispered. But she thought of the boy she’d been so angry over for the last eight years, the boy with braids, his face smeared with purple frosting.

For that little boy, she’d do anything, though she wasn’t so sure about what he’d become.

Lia set the sword back down and went to the tent flap. “I’ll go talk to him then. Anwei.” She paused, looking back. “I won’t let him take you.”

The words still hurt. But as Lia snuck out into the darkness, Noa pulled Anwei back into the tent to look at the maps again. Huddled between Altahn and Noa, Anwei felt as if both her feet were on solid ground instead of crumbling through to the rushing water beneath. Maybe for the first time since standing on that beach with blood running down her arms.

Because that was what she’d hated the snake-tooth man for taking from her. Love.

And now, back at the boat as she faced her brother, she felt the weight of Lia, wherever she was, of Knox mostly dead where he’d been placed in the canoe to protect him while they rowed, of Noa and Altahn, even Gilesh and Bane, all there because of one another.

The words echoed in her mind as Anwei walked toward Mateo. His face, his voice, all so familiar except for those long, terrible fingers made from stolen souls.

Mateo is a lot like you.

Anwei hoped not.

Slowly, painfully, Mateo set the sword onto the deck. “If you make me wait, I’ll get bored and go order a new coat or something.” His face contorted with pain, and his fingers began to stretch. Mateo clenched his eyes shut, hunching over the sword. “Please. I can’t hold on to her much longer. I know how this thing gets broken. And I know what’s holding it together: I am. We are.”

“You’re stopping Willow from taking you,” Anwei breathed. “You stopped her when I had Patenga’s sword. Why?”

“Listen to what I am saying. I can’t—” His hands, those long fingers that were claws and then fingers and then… not, shrinking down as if there were nothing there. “I remember you. Not very much, but I…. understand now why you followed me so long. And I wish I’d known so I could have… I was scared. I was angry. And my father loved me, so I just… didn’t look back. And I wish I had.” Tears were running down his cheeks. “I wish I had, because even if he loved me, it wasn’t fair to separate us.”

Anwei’s throat was like a vise, holding her voice fast.

“We both know—” The words came out in spurts, his fingers growing long again. “We both know it needs to be destroyed. And that to do it, someone has to die.” When he opened his eyes, they were the wrong color, the pupils stretching to slits. But she could still see him, the boy who had tied her last braid. “I want you to live.”

He kicked the sword toward her.

Stronger than you think. The words pulsed in Anwei’s mind alongside Knox’s. Please, Anwei.

And the nameless god. Sacrifice is power.

Mateo’s arms had begun to stretch, his teeth curving down to press into his lip, blood running down his chin. “Do it.” The pockmarked blade was there at her feet, absorbing sunlight instead of reflecting. Mateo’s coat was streaked with burns.

He looked hollow, as if every last bit of what made him up had already gone. But it wasn’t. The sword stinking of nothing nothing nothing, reached out for him as it always had with Knox, but Mateo was reaching for her too. That’s what bonds were made of. Choices.

“Just… do it,” Mateo’s voice croaked. “I know there isn’t enough soul left for me and Knox both. You don’t need to pretend you came here for anything else. Please. Just do it. This is my gift to you. My recompense.”

Recompense. Just like Anwei had always wanted. For her not believing anyone would love her enough to stay. For not being worth remembering when all she’d ever been able to do was remember, stuck in that one awful moment where everything went wrong. Knox’s connection to Anwei pulsed like acid and corta and calistet and poison and hopes and dreams and terrible nightmares. She grabbed hold of the sword.

One of us will have to die, Abendiza said.

One of us.

Anwei couldn’t believe it. The old woman thought in calculations of souls on a scale, moving grains between the dishes to even them out. But all this had come about through killing—the sword hadn’t even melted when it had taken Knox. It had sat there, firm between her shoulder blades, as if every breath it took now made it more solid.

Killing only made everything worse.

The thought sat inside Anwei even as her hands gripped the sword, Knox still as death. I need him. I want him back. I have to fix him. Her hand twitched toward Mateo, sitting there with his throat bared.

He hadn’t forgotten her on purpose. Arun hadn’t become Mateo to spite her or leave her behind. He’d done it because he had been led, following in the footsteps of a monster who professed to love him more than Anwei could.

But that was a lie.

Inside her, she could feel the truth of it, the burning image of Arun, who she’d wanted so badly to save. Because somehow it would have saved her, too.

But killing Tual Montanne never would have changed what had happened to the people she loved. It would have just been more blood spilled.

Anwei grabbed hold of Knox with one hand, focusing on the sick beat of nothing coming from the bond in time with his light dying in her head. Setting the sword down next to him in the canoe, she offered Mateo her hand. “Help me,” she rasped.

Mateo’s hands twitched forward as if he wanted to take it. “Help you?” he moaned. “I’m trying to help you. Is my life not enough?”

“No.” Her voice broke, her hand shaking as she held out the sword. “You betrayed me, you forgot me, and you left me to die.” She couldn’t stop her voice from whittling down. “I shouldn’t have to help you fix things now! I want to live, so something has to change. What is it you want, Mateo?” She grabbed his hand, linking her fingers through his, warmth spreading up her arm as she realized how familiar it felt. “Lia says you’re stronger than we think. Stronger than you think. I didn’t believe her before, but I want to now. I have to. Help me save Knox instead of giving up. You owe me more than that.”

Mateo looked at their hands joined together, his face panicked.

“Remember who you are,” Anwei demanded. “Who you were before and… and the good parts of who you’ve become. Who you want to be.”

She took Knox’s limp hand, Knox only a shadow in her mind. Please, she thought she heard his voice say. Please.

Mateo started to shake, and Anwei could feel the shape of the ghost inside him, of the unfairness, of wanting to live. Willow pressed out through his skin, swapping between Knox and Mateo, Knox and Mateo, the energy running faster, hotter, building up inside Mateo to stretch his fingers long, the ends blacking to claws.

She reached out and covered one of his hands on the blade, hope a razor inside her. “Your name was Arun Ruezi.”

Mateo’s hands were on the sword, and the world was going dark. Willow was hunched in the darkness, squeezing tighter and tighter around him, only it wasn’t just her; it was hundreds, thousands of eyes and hands, their skeleton fingers pressing out through his skin until he thought he would break, each one trying to grab hold of the sword. But Anwei’s hands were on his as if she knew he didn’t have the strength to do it alone any longer. “Your name,” she whispered, “was Arun Ruezi.”

And in the storm of bones and death and nothing inside him, Mateo could see her face looking up at him from his memories.

Her voice shook. “We took turns taking the blame when Father got mad because something wasn’t clean enough, or ground fine enough, or the right color.”

The memory of her was like an eye in the terrible hurricane of magic and hatred and wanting. Darkness peeled back from her voice, Mateo breathing through their rage that was his own. Of unfairness, of a world that didn’t want him to exist, of death waiting inside him and the bridge Tual had built time and time again to let him wander back into life.

He pulled back, because the bridge was made of bones, made of compromises, made from death and hurt. The bridge was made from those who’d had as much right to live as he did.

The ghost inside him was desire, it was hate, it was power taken for reasons that could be explained away and reasons that couldn’t, its roots strong in the places left hollow by the things Mateo had thought should be his.

But Anwei’s voice brought a new calm up through the places the ghost had claimed.

“You earned your hundredth braid six months before I did. I didn’t understand that I was different until you were gone,” she whispered, her fingers pressing hard against his, and she didn’t let go, not even when blood ran from his claws and dribbled onto Knox’s shirt. “You gloated about it every single day until my ceremony was scheduled. We were going to open an apothecary that sold cupcakes. You were an artist, and the things you made were beautiful.” She took in a shuddering breath, so quiet and yet louder than the winds battering him like a storm off the sea.

The boy she remembered wasn’t who he was.

It was too late for him.

But when he opened his eyes, Anwei was looking at him as if she understood, the color of her eyes the deepest brown he’d only found in raw umber and squid ink. “You were saved by a man who loved you, and he named you Mateo.”

The ghosts’ howling inside him seemed to quiet just a little. Not because they had stopped trying to steal his soul, but because she could see him too.

“You are still the boy I knew with all the colors in the world flowing from you.” Her voice broke like the cracks inside him, the ghosts swirling larger as they tried to take him over to destroy this girl who spoke the truths they didn’t know how to twist. “You just lost your father, who you love, and it isn’t fair. You hurt people, and it wasn’t fair. But that doesn’t mean you wanted it to happen. You still deserve to live.”

Mateo sagged, his hands around the sword going tight. And it began to bubble and melt between his fingers in a black mass, the liquid streams of it running down the front of his coat, because he didn’t want Willow anymore.

What is it you want, son? Tual had asked.

Mateo wanted himself back, and he could feel his own truth there inside the sword. The last dregs of Aria rolled inside him, straining to go free. He could feel the things he’d been so willing to take as long as it let him keep going.

He remembered the life he’d thought he wanted. Of Lia, and how easy it had been to plan her death in exchange for his continued existence. The dull certainty that his father must be right if it meant Mateo could have what he wanted. And the unfairness that he shouldn’t have had to choose between himself and everyone else. Mateo thought of what he could remember of the life he’d had before, the tiny dregs he could bring back. Of Lia and her smile. Of Aria, wanting nothing more than to make an adventure out of a terrible injustice, and how he’d let Willow take her. She hadn’t had to ask, because he’d already made the decision to live.

He’d let her do it.

The ghosts, with their terrible claws and teeth, told him to take. To take was to live.

And Mateo let them all go.

Anwei refused to let go of Arun, of Mateo because that’s who he’d become, refused to give up, even as metal melted between her fingers, burning her skin. She could feel the ghosts inside her brother showing him the terrible picture of all his wrongs and tried to give him the good she remembered instead, tried to remind him of his soul that half belonged to her the same way she’d belonged to him.

She thought of Knox taking the sword and holding it, protecting it to keep his sister from being lost, even when it had hurt him. Holding fast to the oaths he’d made even as Willow grew heavier and heavier on his shoulders.

They were the web Abendiza had described, she and Knox, she and Mateo, Mateo and Willow, and Willow and Knox, but instead of tearing a hole open to darkness, she stood firm, holding the darkness back.

Mateo pitched forward into the canoe, taking her with him.

Please, she whispered toward the nameless god as everything tangled together. Burning metal, Knox’s shirt, Mateo’s blood, her braids. Please. In her chest she could feel the violence of magic wanting to take control, vines waiting to strangle and crush, trees, flowers, bushes, seeds ready to crack open the ground. Breathing in deep and slow, she didn’t have to let go of the rage and anger that had lurked in her heart, because they were somehow already gone. Instead, she felt the nameless god flex inside her like another support under her feet. Not a weapon, but a part of who she was, if she wanted. Please, she thought. I don’t know how to fix this. But you probably do, right?

Knox felt something stab through him, and the air began to warm, his connection to Anwei like vines growing into his stomach and up through his chest, only they were on fire.

The blackness leaking out from him in a terrible cord wrenched one way, then another, and suddenly began to spool out of him like a fishing line being reeled in. Willow reared up from just outside the web of darkness, her tears like little flickering flames. “Don’t—” she cried. “Don’t leave me!”

Knox crashed through the darkness and grabbed hold of her even as the shadows surged around them both, hammering against his skin and hers. Anwei pulsed brighter and brighter inside him as he tore claws and teeth and bones away from his sister’s skin, holding her close even as darkness burrowed into him. Anwei’s bond to him turned hot, and the gray line of connection between him and Willow sparked in the black haze churning around them. Knox’s body grew and shrank and twisted and broke, and Willow was crying because of the shadows in her own skin and bones. The air around him seemed to condense, pressure hard in his ears and his eyes blinded—

But then he was lying in a boat, his arms gripped tight around something bright and warm that bled away, like a sigh of relief, then was gone.

He lay there, heart hammering, feeling around for Willow inside his head. The line of connection between them sparked one last time, then evaporated in a flare of light.

It is done, Calsta said. She is free.

Knox’s arms and hands flailed to touch his own body, once again made from skin and bone and muscle. There was a wooden floor hard beneath his back and a fist twisted into his tunic, Anwei’s Still holding onto him as if she was the only anchor he had. The bond hung like a question between them—a question he could somehow say yes or no to, power hanging over them in a haze.

But when he opened his eyes, she wasn’t looking at him, her other fist gripping a fancy coat. A boy with freckles like Anwei’s, his skin a shade lighter and his hair in messy curls. And for a split second, he could feel something like a web of bonds, as if he were connected to the boy too.

The boy collapsed onto the ground, his fingers ending in gristly, bloody ends, his aura streaming up toward the sky. Knox sat up, tears on Anwei’s cheeks as she screamed out, not letting go of Mateo’s coat. “Stay here! You already left me once!”

Knox grabbed her hand, the bond between them like liquid gold, her eyes full of auras and her muscles full of his strength, his nose full of herbs and the sharp obsidian jab of broken humors. Everything between them was a mix of color.

The boards under their feet groaned, knots and branches sprouting from the old wood and growing up to circle Mateo as Anwei concentrated. Knox felt her borrowing from him as she burrowed into Mateo, asking him to grow like a plea instead of the command that had given Knox the scar on his side and broken the tomb.

A hand touched his shoulder, and suddenly Lia was there too, though her aura had diminished down to a calm glimmer at the edges. Her other hand touched Mateo, and somehow she was a part of their circle too, her soul, untarnished by the sword, a connecting force that completed them as she gave herself over to finish the pattern of purple, gold, and white settling over Mateo. Lending herself to their bonds because she loved them all too.

After a moment, the growing stopped, and everything was far, far too quiet. Knox gripped Anwei’s hand, not able to move.

Lia slowly extracted herself and gently knelt next to Mateo. She grabbed hold of his ridiculous lapels and wrenched him up from the bottom of the boat. “Where is Aria?”

Mateo’s eyelids flickered, not quite opening.

She hauled him up from the deck. “Where is she?”

“Abendiza said…” His head lolled back. “Some of her was still inside of me.”

“You ate her?!”

“It was my fault,” his voice croaked. “And I didn’t want to believe she was gone, so I didn’t. Until I made myself face it. Made myself go look. But now I’m… letting… her go.”

“I pretended to stab myself to stop your father like you asked, and now you’re telling me that you killed my sister?”

“I wish—” He gasped. “I wish it were different.” And he crumpled into the canoe as if he were made of ash. One last breath sighed out between his lips, and his chest went still.

Anwei’s hand crushed so hard around Knox’s fingers that tears sprang to his eyes. She grabbed hold of Mateo, but her brother began to sink into the slick oily black coating the bottom of the canoe. It felt like shadows, like the empty places the sword had punched through Knox, leaving a hole for the darkness to reach through. They’d taken and taken and taken, and he could feel the same gaps in Mateo, but the sword, the holes, the nothing sucking away at him were all gone, the feel of the life he’d always clenched so tight in his fists suddenly a miraculous thing of beauty he didn’t need to clasp so tightly.

Anwei was calm itself, her eyes shut as a tree’s branches grew up over the boat’s rail. A branch circled them with the canoe, gently lifting them up from the deck. Knox gulped as the trunk beneath them thickened, roots fingering out into the water and down into the sand. The light from Calsta burned too hot in Knox’s chest, and even Lia was beginning to gasp and sweat, but all of them stayed still, the branches high above the beach, casting everything in light of blues and greens.

Finally, Knox felt Anwei release, her aura of ropes and nets and webs and swirls slipping down from around her like sand. The roots had grown up over the canoe’s edge, new-sprouted flowers waving in the breeze to touch Mateo’s cheeks and forehead, the last of the oily slick of shadows beneath him finally gone.

Only, Mateo was gone too.

Lia let go of Mateo, the last hope in her like a fizzling wire. She climbed down from the new-formed branches and ran up the beach and across the courtyard. Noa and Altahn dragging Gilesh out from the kitchen. She ran past a Devoted up to his waist in rock still trying to reach his sword. Her heart raced faster than Calsta had ever let her run, faster than the clouds in the sky or lightning blasts because that was all she could see or feel on this awful blue day. She ran because there was nothing left she could do. If Aria was gone—

As her feet hit the bridge, something out in the middle unfolded. A pinkish beast with broken horns and long, cracked teeth. Rosie’s mane was a snarl where there should have been jaunty braids and her rosy hide stained with mud and blood. The creature raised her head up with a bottomless keen that echoed through Lia like the nothing Anwei had spoken of in whispers.

The auroshe struggled up to her feet and limped toward the tower. Lia didn’t move until Rosie gave a blistering screech and charged the doors, butting through them. Running after her, Lia leaped stair after stair until they were at the very top of the tower, Rosie nosing her way into the room where Lia had found Aria hiding with Mateo.

But it had been a trick. A fake aura. A belief Tual had managed to turn into a fantasy of Aria alive in Lia’s brain.

Steeling herself, Lia followed the auroshe into the room, Rosie snaking forward to bite at the bedclothes. The window had been covered, and the bits of glass and wood Lia had broken had been brushed off the bed and floor into a neat pile. And there, sitting at the head of the bed, was Abendiza. Aria’s shock of red curls burned like fire against the old woman’s skin as it went slack, dripping and crumbling even as Lia watched.

“What are you—” Lia started forward, Rosie’s hackles rising, but Abendiza hummed out a long tone, almost like a lullaby, that filled the air.

The old woman faded, her aura draining like Calsta gathering a sunbeam back up to her bosom even as Abendiza cradled Aria’s head. “He asked me to take her out of him,” the shapeshifter crooned. “The last little seeds of her were inside him, not enough to bring her back. There’s not enough of him, either, or he wouldn’t have let Willow take her. But as for me… I took so much life to fill the emptiness where my soul was, more than I ever needed.” Her voice dulled to a whisper. “It made me wonder if, after so much breaking, I could fix something instead. Seeds grow if you plant them. And energy given freely is different from what we steal….”

Abendiza melted with the words, her hair unknitting to fall in clumps onto the bedcovers, her cheeks and chin puffing away in a cloud of dust. Though Lia’s aurasight was gone, she could feel the burn of energy sparking out from Abendiza, but instead of pouring up toward the sky like every other death Lia had seen, this energy lanced down, branching into a fork, half striking Aria and the other half lancing out the window toward the beaches.

Lia leapt forward to catch her sister’s head as the last of Abendiza’s energy dissipated, and the woman with it. She crawled up onto the bed, cradling Aria close, her sister’s skin cold, her body limp…

Until she felt the faint rumble in Aria’s chest, a stolen heartbeat put back where it belonged. Tick… tick…

Tick.