Rose surfaced a short distance away. Kieran seemed lifeless in her arms. “Take him,” she said, swimming to me.
Before I could ask where the others were, she was gone again. I figured it meant that someone was still underwater. I grabbed Kieran’s tunic just as I’d taken Dennis’s. The water level was below my armpits now, and I was able to stand. Occasionally I’d touch the two boys, and even though I was so weak I could barely keep moving, they would moan in response. I couldn’t let go of them, though. In the darkness, with unpredictable currents, there was no guarantee I’d ever find them again.
A voice cut through the night: “Kieran?” It was the boy’s father, calling from the direction of the wrecked ship.
“He’s here,” I called back.
Slowly, painfully, we made our way toward each other. He was helping Alice. She was conscious, but weak.
Rose swam toward us. Nyla had her arms clamped around Rose’s neck, which meant that almost everyone was accounted for.
“Does Marin have Ananias?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Rose. “Marin was mostly worried about Griffin.”
So that was why Rose looked well—because Griffin had cured her. But at what cost to himself? And if Marin didn’t have Ananias with her, where was he? He was a strong swimmer, but if he was in the same state as Alice or Dennis, that might not be enough.
“Ananias,” I called. No response. “We need light, Alice. I can’t see.”
She raised her hand, and lowered it again. “Please,” she begged. “Just give me a moment.”
I reached out. One simple touch and I could conjure a flame, whether Alice wanted me to or not. I’d used that power already, and seen what I could accomplish with it. But Alice had seen the power too, and there was no mistaking the look on her face. She was afraid of me. Afraid of what I might do to her.
If I stole her element from her now, how would she ever trust me again?
I bowed my head and stayed back. I needed Alice to see that I wasn’t like Jossi or Dare.
A moment later, she produced a flame and the hideous scene became clearer. The tidal wave had carried the dead rats away, but now the carcasses floated back toward us, mingled with the cremated remains of the pirates who had chosen to stay and fight. I told myself that we hadn’t started this battle. We’d been defending ourselves. I’d been trying to save lives. But seeing so many charred bodies, it was impossible to ignore that I had taken over everyone’s element. I’d taken a precise wall of flame and turned it into an uncontrollable fireball. Who apart from Jossi would have allowed so much destruction to occur?
And what about the other people who had been on the street a short time before? Tarn and my mother had been kneeling on the ground, tending to Jerren. Then they’d moved to the side to escape the wave of rats. But what had happened after that?
My chest tightened. For at least a hundred yards down the street the buildings were blackened shells. Even beyond that they bore the scars of the devastation I’d rained down on Skeleton Town. The clan folk had taken refuge on roofs beyond that, but how had they fared in the heat? Were they choking to death on the smoke?
No one spoke. There was nothing to say.
I waded through the water as the level dropped to my ankles. When Kieran’s tunic slipped out from between my fingers, I didn’t help him up. He wouldn’t drown anymore, and besides, only one thought consumed me—the bleakest reality of all.
I’d killed my mother. And Tarn. And Jerren. And Ananias was gone too.
I staggered along the street, blinded by darkness, stumbling over dead rats and sharp debris. “Ananias,” I called out.
Nobody answered.
“Tarn!” Strange that hers should be the name I chose next, but I couldn’t seem to make my mouth produce the word mother. Better not to say the word at all if she was dead so soon after reentering our lives.
“Jerren!” Still no answer. The water was almost at street level now, and I moved faster, quick enough that I fell hard as I tripped over a large dark object lying in front of me.
I struck the ground with the force and grace of a toppled tree. I wasn’t able to brace myself, so my nose and forehead made contact with the inch-deep puddle and the cracked street. I tilted my head to the side to breathe, but I didn’t move. It was time to stop. Time to rest.
Something shifted under my foot. I figured it was a rat, or a piece of driftwood brought in on Rose’s massive wave. Then it moved again. And moaned.
CHAPTER 35
I rolled over. Crawled on all fours to the body that lay crumpled at my feet. I couldn’t make out anything—skin or clothes—so I patted the person to the left and then to the right until I felt the head. Beneath my fingertips the skin felt like dried clay, but with a sticky coating that I was certain was blood.
“Over here.” I tried to shout, but it came out as a wheeze.
Alice was first to reach me. She crouched down and produced a flickering flame. In the weak light I saw a man’s face, but I couldn’t identify him. His clothes were burned. The explosion had blasted part of his face away. Swathes of skin had been scorched.
It wasn’t until he smiled that I knew it was Dare. There was a time that smile had chilled me, but I wasn’t frightened anymore. I couldn’t even bring myself to hate the man. Whatever he’d done was in the past, unchangeable. He’d helped to save Ananias and Alice and Jerren. He was going to pay for it with his life too.
Maybe there was another reason I forgave him so quickly. I’d been afraid that the body was Ananias’s. But Ananias couldn’t have been so badly burned when he was on the tower with us.
Alice leaned closer. Trembling, she placed her palm gently on what was left of Dare’s cheek, and regarded her father silently. He must have been in agony, but showed no sign of it.
“My whole life . . .” Alice blinked. Tears traced lines down her dirty cheeks, and she didn’t wipe them away. “I always knew. Always . . . that there was something else . . . something missing.”
Dare didn’t move a muscle, but his smile seemed frozen now, something he needed to maintain no matter what was churning inside of him.
“You could’ve shown me the world,” she said.
Finally he flinched. Was it pain? Or the realization that he’d have no more part in her future than he’d had in her past?
“Ananias is over here!” Rose’s voice cut through the silence. “But he’s . . .” Her voice fell at the end, a tiny shift with an enormous effect. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
As I pushed to a stand, Dare inhaled sharply. “Griffin,” he mumbled. “Must . . . draw me.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t care. If Ananias was in trouble, there was no time to waste.
He grasped my ankle. “Griffin must draw me.” His voice had the same quiet desperation as Tessa’s when she’d warned us, solution is death. “Draw me!”
I didn’t want to disrespect Dare or Alice, but these were the ramblings of a dying man. As I pulled my foot free, he cried “No,” but I didn’t stop, and I didn’t turn around. Ananias was nearby, and he needed my help.
“Thomas?” Rose called out to me.
I ran the last few yards and took my place beside her. Nearby, Marin was helping Griffin to join us too. I wanted to hug Griffin, to tell him how happy I was that he was alive, and to thank him for saving Rose. But one look at Ananias and I forgot everything else.
“I can’t feel his heartbeat,” said Rose. She pressed a finger against his neck. “He was breathing just a moment ago. When I called to you, he was still breathing. I swear!”
Marin sank to her knees and pressed Ananias’s chest, trying to restart his heart. Rose breathed for him. I just stared at my older brother, unable to make sense of what was happening.
Griffin clapped his hands to get my attention. Who. Dead? he asked, pointing at
where Alice was crouching.
Dare. I signed in a daze. Not. Dead. Yet. My hands moved slowly, as if they were unusually heavy. He. Want. You. Draw. Him.
Griffin looked away sharply. Countless conflicting emotions played across his face. Then he stared at Ananias again, and finally at me.
That’s when everything came together.
Griffin had the worn, wizened expression of someone who knew this day would come—when I’d look beyond coincidence and see what was there all along. How on the day that he’d foreseen our father’s death, Griffin had drawn a portrait of Guardian Lora, and watched her die instead. How he’d foreseen Nyla’s death on Sumter, only for Chief to die instead, another of Griffin’s portraits tucked in his pocket.
Now Dare was begging for release. Would the exchange be made too late?
Please, I signed. You. Can. Save. Ananias.
Griffin shook his head. Too. Late.
You. Must. Try.
He began to cry. I. Kill. Other, he replied, reminding me that the exchange wasn’t without a cost.
Griffin didn’t know that Father was dead. Or that our mother hadn’t reappeared. I pitied him, I really did, but I couldn’t let Ananias go without a fight.
I reached across, grabbed Griffin’s arm, and pulled him up. Dragged him, hobbling, to Dare.
The pirate stared at Griffin with glassy eyes. He couldn’t speak anymore, and Griffin wouldn’t have heard him anyway. But Dare looked peaceful. He looked ready.
Griffin scanned the ground. There was nothing but dirt and puddles. How. Draw? he asked.
I stripped off my shredded tunic and handed it to him. While he straightened it out on his lap I found a piece of broken glass on the street. It didn’t even hurt as I sliced it along my forearm.
I held my arm out to Griffin as blood trickled from the wound. He didn’t ask me what I was doing. He’d seen Dare too now, and from his expression I was sure he realized he wasn’t stealing a life. He was stealing a man’s final moments. Perhaps these were just mind games, telling ourselves whatever we needed to hear to assuage the pain and guilt. Didn’t matter. Griffin dipped his finger in my blood and smeared it across my tunic.
He kept his eyes fixed on Dare the whole time. But watching Griffin, I had the feeling he wasn’t looking at Dare at all. He had the distant expression of someone whose mind is wandering to something completely different. Or someone. I didn’t need to ask if that person was Ananias.
The portrait didn’t resemble Dare. It was barely recognizable as a face. But Griffin knew what he was doing, and he seemed determined to do the best job of it he could, as if it were a mark of respect for the person whose life he was ending.
“Let him see it,” said Alice.
I eased the tunic from Griffin’s fingers and held it up for Dare to see. He didn’t react at all, but his eyes were open, taking everything in. The portrait was probably meaningless to him, though; the artist was all that mattered. With his last breath, and after years of searching, Dare had momentarily ensnared the solution.
I’d accused Dare of being a tyrant. A killer. But his final act was to save another. He’d told me that every person has to decide what’s worth dying for. This was his choice.
Even though he was gone, Alice held Dare’s hand, her thumb gliding back and forth, rhythmic and calming. It was a gesture of love. Forgiveness too, most likely.
“He’s breathing!” Rose’s voice pulled me around. She was standing over Ananias, hand raised triumphantly. “Marin and me—we saved him.”
She obviously expected us to join her. In her mind, she’d returned our brother from the dead. How could we not celebrate this miracle with her? But Alice was still hand in hand with Dare, grieving the father she’d never known, and I didn’t have the heart to leave either of them.
I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth shut and touched her sleeve, just so that she’d know I was there for her. Eyes fixed on her father, Alice raised her pinky finger until we were skin to skin. Friends. Cousins. Survivors.
And we weren’t alone. As Alice broke contact and stood to leave, three figures emerged from a building fifty yards up the street: Jerren, Tarn, and Skya, the mother I’d been certain I would never see again.
CHAPTER 36
Tarn, Jerren, and my mother looked just as injured as the rest of us. Jerren was leaning heavily on Tarn. They took small but laborious steps, heads bowed low as if they didn’t have the energy to look up at us. I caught glimpses of the whites of Tarn’s eyes, though, and knew that she was watching us too. From the way I was kneeling, she must have realized that someone lay dying or dead beside me, and she was about to find out that it was Dare—a man she had once loved.
My mother walked slowly behind them. She was going to be reunited with my brothers and me, but our father was gone. Thirteen years ago, she’d been taken away from him before he could say good-bye. Now she was the one left behind.
Alice and I met them halfway. She slid under Jerren’s free arm and they supported each other. “I thought you were dead,” she whispered.
“We would’ve been,” he replied. “But Skya told us to move inside the building. There was a storage room. She sealed the door with pieces of cloth. After that, everything was just noise.”
My mother and I stood facing each other, but a few yards apart. If she’d known to take shelter in that room, had she also foreseen that our father would die? And Tessa? Was this part of some inexplicable trade: her husband’s and mother’s lives in return for her children’s? I knew I ought to be relieved—the battle was finally over, and we were embarking on a new future, free of rats and Plague. But would things truly be different this time? How could we coexist with the non-elementals now, when we’d failed so badly in the past? When they’d been forced to huddle on a distant rooftop and watch us decimate the town?
I looked past my mother at the bodies scattered across the ground—pirates and clan folk, wounded or dead. In the distance, other clan folk descended from the roofs where they’d been sheltering. They hurried to tend to their fallen relatives. Faced with so much carnage, children wailed, while parents mourned their loved ones in desolate silence. I didn’t want to look too closely at the bodies myself. They hadn’t died of the Plague, or gunshot wounds. They’d been burned to death in the moment I took over everyone’s elements. Without me, they’d still be alive.
Ananias and Griffin joined me, one on each side. We stood in a line, facing our mother. She stepped forward and regarded each of our faces in turn, eyes narrowed as if she were filling in thirteen years of growth and change. Raising her hand, she brushed her fingers across Griffin’s cheek. He closed his eyes and savored the kind of touch he’d never known.
Ananias stepped across and hugged her then. It was stiff and unnatural, more like something he knew he ought to do than something he wanted to do. But Mother hugged him back, and pulled Griffin in tightly too.
Finally she turned her attention to me again. She tilted her head to the side and watched me with a quizzical expression. Had she forgotten what I could do? How much it would hurt her to touch me? I felt like a child, desperate to be held and angry at being overlooked. But I also didn’t want her to flinch, or pull away from me suddenly. I didn’t want to hear her apologize to me, to assure me that it wasn’t my fault, and that it would take time for me to harness my element, just as it had for my father before me. Father’s power was nothing compared to mine, after all. That’s why, as Mother reached up to touch me too, I leaned away. Better to accept our limits now than to risk hurting her and driving her away.
She continued to watch me for a moment, and lowered her hand purposefully. Then she looked behind her at the clan folk. I looked too.
At least half of them were watching us. Even though they had injured friends and relatives to attend to, they studied us instead, wondering if the devastation was over, or if this was just the eye of the
storm, the lure of perfect calm before we wreaked havoc again. The fifty yards of street that separated us from them was a no-man’s-land.
Griffin tapped my arm and nodded in the direction of the clan folk, as if he wanted me to cross the divide with him.
Dangerous, I signed.
He mulled over this, and signed back, They. Need. Help.
I was still unsure, but as Nyla joined Griffin and they began the slow, awkward march along the street, I knew I had no choice. For years, Griffin’s life had been as mundane as mine. Now he was the solution, and he was determined to save.
We stopped several yards from a group of three men. They stood shoulder to shoulder, flexing their fingers, anxious not to start a fight but unwilling to back down.
I kept my voice clear and straight. “Do you have Plague?”
The men hesitated. “Why do you ask?” demanded the largest of them, a tall man with a straggly beard.
“Because we can cure it.”
This announcement was greeted by muted chatter that circulated to the far reaches of the group. Meanwhile, the men confided in whispers.
“Will it hurt?” he asked.
“Not much,” Nyla answered. “But Plague sure does.”
Once again they talked. Reluctantly, they waved us over to an old man lying on the ground. He looked frail, but his Plague was no more advanced than Dennis’s had been. Surely there were more hopeless cases than him?
Test, signed Griffin, watching me. They. Not. Trust. Us.
I fought back the urge to plead with the clan folk. Now wasn’t the time for a test. Griffin’s element was too precious and fragile for that. We were weak. We couldn’t guarantee how many lives would be saved. Or if some might be lost by waiting.
But Griffin wasn’t in the mood to argue. Kneeling, he placed his hands palm-down against the old man’s chest. Nyla laced her fingers with Griffin’s right hand, while I laid mine on his left. When I reached my free arm around his back, I was surprised to find Nyla’s hand waiting for me. We linked, and the flow of energy between us and through Griffin became steady and uniform.