Gods,the Indigo, it suddenly occurs to me that I didn’t even ask her name.
Good luck getting it now. I flinch as, beyond the wall, her torment rises in pitch. The extraction won’t kill her—unlike Hues, full-bloods have enough magic to survive the drain, and so long as Chase doesn’t take too much, her power will regenerate—but right at this moment, she’s probably wishing for death. Or at least, she’s probably wishing that we’d never met, or that she’d handed me over to the trackers while she still had the chance.
I wasn’t helping you; I was helping me. Getting to the bottom of a future they can’t predict.
I didn’t get the sense that she was lying when she said that, but it does raise the question of: why does an acolyte believe that she saw something no one else did? That no one elsecould? I mean, if the future truly has seen its own end—if it wants to prevent it—then why would it send that vision to one girl instead of an entire guild?
That’s her problem, not yours. I shake the sea of whys from my head. The only thing I need to do is help the others flee Sarotuza so that we can go our separate ways, live to see another city.
An eternity seems to pass before the Indigo’s screams begin to abate, the torture stretching endlessly, until at long last, Chase emerges, looking not one bit ashamed. He’s spent his whole lifelearning to live with the cost of his power; he’s beyond feeling pity for a crying Shade.
You should be beyond it, too.I swallow down the bile and will the nausea to go away. The last Shade I was forced to work with was a monster, and this one was all too happy to corral me with threats. They’re the bad guys. Always have been. So why should we feel guilty for surviving in whatever way we can? The trackers hunt, we evade them, they catch us, we die an agonizing death in a cell—or in a court chamber—and no matter how small we make ourselves, how quiet, the Council’s soldiers still come knocking in the end. They keep pushing metal to its breaking point then acting all surprised when it breaks.
“I don’t suppose you have any tips for using her magic properly?” Chase asks, drawing me out of my malaise.
“Tips? Why?” I blink at him. “You’ve cast seeing spells before.” Wasn’t that the whole point of doing this in the first place? Of inflicting such a mountain of pain?
“Yeah, and they’re always a bit temperamental,” he says, brow furrowing to a deep vee. “But I guess I’m mostly wondering why she seemed so adamant that it wouldn’t work for me—that it isn’t even working for her?”
“You were about to take her magic, Chase.” I shrug, since as far as mysteries go, this one basically solves itself. “Maybe she thought that would stop you.”
“Maybe.” He doesn’t look or sound convinced. “It’s more the way that she said it, like she was . . . I don’t know, confessing to something she didn’t want to admit. Something real.”
Except it can’t be real because Isawher using it. As we were working to escape the tavern, she was communing with the future every step of the way—and in a pretty intense fashion, falling in and out of the trance more readily than my mother ever did.
“Well, you’ve taken it now, so you may as well try to use it,” I say, unwilling to let all that ill-gotten color go to waste. “Just remember that premonition is question-based. The more specific your phrasing, the more reliable the vision.”
“So, if I ask where the trackers are heading, will it show us which parts of the city to avoid?”
“It should—in theory.” Though in practice, who the hell knows what answer we might get. Mom always said the future was intractable.
“Then let’s test the theory.” Chase closes his eyes, his face clouding with concentration as he reaches for the Indigo’s magic and begins to wrestle with the fates.
A few long seconds go by.
A few more.
A minute.
And then—right as I start to wonder if maybe the Indigo wasn’t lying, after all, if maybe her magic really is broken and we just tortured her for no reason—the future descends on him with a vengeance.
Chase’s head jerks back, his spine arching, his skin paling white as the cliffs. A strangled howl of fear escapes him, wild with hurt, and shock, and broken pieces of destiny so violent they send him crashing to his knees, his hands flying up to cup his temples.
“Chase?” Cemmy barrels up the stairs to meet his panic. “What the hells happened, Ez? What did you do?”
“I didn’tdoanything,” I say as she drops to his side. “He was trying to use the Indigo’s power and then he suddenly just . . . freaked out.” And not in a way I’ve ever seen before. My mother’s visions were calm, temperate things. Noticeable, yes, but never vicious. Never punishing enough to cause her pain.
“Chase.” Cemmy puts a gentle hand to his cheek. “Chase, can you hear me?”
With a sharp exhale, he snaps out of the future, the storm in his eyes clearing, the bloom of Indigo around his irises dulling violet until it fades.
“Hey—hey, look at me,” Cemmy urges, softly coaxing him back to speech. “What is it? What did you see?”
“The Gray,” he breathes, low and frantic. “I saw it dying, I—I saw the magic dying.” His fingers instantly close around the scry at hisneck, the one bonded to Magdalena, his Amber sister who recently came within an inch of causing that very thing herself.
“Mags, is she—?”
“She’s fine.” The tension in his body instantly deflates. “She says she’s safe and hidden. Whatever this is, it isn’t her.”
