Nelly curled onto her side. Dragging her blanket up under her chin, she used it as a shield as she watched his expression closely.You can do this.
“I’m… not a greenwitch.”
Clark blinked owlishly. “What?”
“I know that’s what everyone thinks.”Because it’s what my ID says.“But it’s not true. Well, not completely true. It’s my secondary ability.”
Perhapssecondary abilitywasn’t quite the right way to explain it, either. The ability to communicate with plants had always gone hand in hand with her other skills.
She wasn’treallya greenwitch. Not in the way most people would think, but her skills made it so she could fake it. She could determine the needs of plants when she touched them because she could see their entire life cycle. Her expertise came from careful study and observation, not an inherent ability tounderstandplants in the way a greenwitch could.
Understanding dawned slowly on Clark’s face. His hand dropped. Inching closer, he rested his cheek on a pillow and gripped one of her throw blankets in a tight fist. “What’s your primary ability?”
“Psychometry.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means that I can sense memories in objects and people.” She plucked at her blanket. “When I first touch something like this blanket with my bare hands, I can learn its entire history in a second. Everyone who touched it, where it came from, who made it, where the fibers came from, howtheywere made. The more contact I have with an object, the more my brain automatically filters out that information. I’ve also trained myself to mostly filter out things I really don’t want to see — like violence or, um,personalstuff.”
Unfortunately,thatparticular skill had taken decades to mature, which meant she’d been exposed to a great many things she never needed to see when she was far too young to understand what that meant. At least in that trauma, she had Clementine to lean on. Her sister had suffered much the same way.
Except worse, because she couldn’t escape it like I could.
Clark sucked in a breath. “The gloves.”
She nodded, her tongue too heavy in her mouth to reply.
“And if you touchpeople,you…”
“Same thing, except a thousand times worse. Imagine learning everything a person had ever done or said in aninstant.”She burrowed her mouth and nose under her blanket, as if it could shield her from the vulnerability she was exposing. “I spent most of my childhood getting a grip on psychic barriers so that it’s not so bad, but no shield is perfect. Something always gets through.”
She could see him working through everything that meant. Slowly, Clark’s eyes widened. “Fuck, that must be torture.”
“It could have been worse.” She knew it was lame even as she said it.Like I haven’t spent my entire life wishing I was born anything, anyone else.
He inched just a little closer. Despite her better judgment, Nelly found herself doing the same.
“Is that why you hide it? Because it’s hard on you?”
“No. I hide it because that’s the way we were raised.” When he gave her a questioning look, she explained, “My parents are nonconformists. They hate the government in general and theyreallyhate being told what to do in particular. When they had Clementine and then me in the Coven Collective, they knew that we’d be shuttled into special programs to train us to use our abilities. We’d be encouraged to join the military, or do research for the government, orberesearched. We’d become useful to the government one way or another. They didn’t want that for us.”
The Coven Collective was the smallest territory in the UTA. By rights, it shouldn’t have been able to exist at all, seeing as it was bordered by titans — the Elvish Protectorate, the Orclind, and the wild Northern Territories. The first and only witch-controlled territory in the world, the Collective hadn’t survived as long as it had by not making use of its dense magically gifted population for defense and prestige.
And there was plenty of use for a superpowered telepath and psychometric like Clementine and Nelly.
When they were young, their parents had joined a nonconformist movement after the end of the Great War, the conflict that had torn apart the North American continent over the course of a century. They were activists who’d led protests and passed out fliers decrying increasing government intrusion into their lives before they ended up meeting at a rally.
When the movement’s fire died down, her parents settled into their careers but never lost their distrust and outright distaste for what they called “reaching hands”. That feeling metastasized into outright fear when Clementine was born and immediately began to show signs of debilitating psychic power.
Clark frowned. “But wouldn’t the training have helped you? It’s against the Peace Charter to compel anyone into service, magical or otherwise. You could have still chosen your own path as an adult.”
It was a question she and her sister had grappled with for decades.
The Collective might have paid too much attention to the sisters, but it also had some of the most advanced programs and schools for magically gifted people in the entire world. They had an entire branch of the government dedicated to cultivating and protecting magical talent, as well as a fleet of social workers trained in assisting the families of children born with abilities classified as extreme.
Were their parents right for yanking them away from government support in favor of their complete independence?
For all that she’d hated aspects of her childhood, Nelly was grateful for the life she had, one full of natural wonder and laughter and connection with her family. She knew Clementine was, too. They were loved unconditionally by their parents and raised with respect by two people who did their best.
