He quieted when we reached a rocky place. Massive boulders rose from the ground like the knobby fists of giants. There was something as hallowed about this place as there was in our cavernous workroom at the House of Industry.
It was old. Impossibly old.
“Why did you think I was asking if you were afraid of me?” Ezra asked, startling me out of my hushed reverence.
“It would make sense for me to fear you. You’re little more than a stranger. You’re … well, you do have wild magic, after all. And we’re alone in an unfamiliar place. But I’m not afraid of you.” I could feel myself babbling, yet I was no more able to stop it than I was able to stop the flow of the river. “And Ainsley doesn’t seem to think you’re dangerous, if that makes you feel better.”
“It was foolish of her to say that,” he said, abruptly brittle.
A small frustrated knot formed in my throat. “Well, which is it?ShouldI be afraid of you?” I found myself cross with him—and cross with myself for letting the tone of his voice hurt me.
“All magic is wild, Josephine. Yours. Mine. We’d be fools to think we can control anything, let alone the magic within us.”
“Radiance isn’tmagic,” I spat, shaken by how he’d articulated my greatest fear as if he could see directly into my heart. What if, at the true core of me, I was ungovernable?
“So the bolts of lightning that shoot out of your hands are what, exactly?”
“I—I don’t … shoot lightning,” I sputtered. “Using radiance like a weapon is forbidden unless you’re a highly trained Transistor. And it’s still not lightning!”
He crossed his arms, looking oddly smug, and I had a feeling I was missing something—which only made me angrier. I wondered how he’d feel if I snapped a branch off the sapling beside us and thwacked him on the head with it.
“Let me see if I understand all this.” I felt prickly and let my voice show it. “I should be afraid of you because you’re an Animator, and that’s dangerous. But I shouldn’treallybe afraid of you because you know which plants are good and you saved my life and Ainsley said you’re not dangerous. And we’re both exactly the same. And we’re both terribly dangerous. So maybe I should be afraid of myself, too. Is that all of it?”
His lips twisted into something between a scowl and a grin. “You don’t have to make it so complicated.”
I wasn’t ready for him to make a face like that. A face that made me want to touch his mouth.
Those kinds of thoughts wouldn’t do me any good when bigger, more terrible thoughts were creeping through me like marching ants. I tried to tell myself I was capable of learning self-control. I’d spent over a decade practicing discipline. Rigor. Compliance.
But that word.
Wild.
It kindled something in me. Something that didn’t want to be caged. I’d wanted Ezra to teach me how to control my radiance, but being near him made me feel as if I’d never be tamed. It made me wonder how it would feel to stop trying to contain myself. My curiosity. My anger.
My … the part of me that wanted to touch him.
“Why are we here?” I demanded, eager for anything to make me stop thinking. Anything to make me stop wondering if I knew myself at all.
“So we won’t be seen,” Ezra said, as if I’d asked an ignorant question.
“That’s exactly what a person who was about to murder me in the woods would say.”
His gaze raked over my hands. “I believe you’d stop me, with great efficacy, if I attempted to murder you.”
“Then what do you want to do in such great secrecy?” I snapped, shoving my hands into my pockets.
A smile lit his face like the sunrise. “This.”
His magic smelled like jasmine.
When he finally finished, my cheeks were wet with tears. I breathed raggedly and found myself on my knees in the mossy soil with no idea when I’d fallen.
Flowers of every kind circled me—vivid-yellow and dusty-pink and sky-blue petals formed a curtain around me finer than any silk. I touched newborn leaves, shocked at how green and delicate they were. Vines wound around my feet, not grasping but nudging, as if the plants themselves wanted to say hello. As if, I thought foolishly, they cared about me.
A broken sob tore through the silence. I realized I’d been the origin of the sound and felt my cheeks heat.
Ezra crouched, concern and confusion written across his face. He handed me a kerchief with a hole in it. “Josephine. Take a slow breath. I didn’t think it would frighten you.”
