The feathers on her cloak grow into long blades of kelp, the braid becomes a serpent around her ankles.
“You are like him, my jailer,” she says now. “More powerful than you know. Insignificant, to be sure, but determination makes up for a lot. And you are also unlike him. You lack his passion and drive, the ugly glut of ambition. The women in your line pass their magic down like a mutation, and beside it, their fear like a disease. But fear is a quality I rather appreciate in a person.” Her eyes shine across the water, despite the terrible black pits at their centers. “That other one is sadly lacking it.”
“Arla.”
She nods. “You may have all been her pawns, but she has been mine.”
Hadn’t I considered as much? “You know my family?”
“I’ve smelled your line before,” she answers. “Like the last breath of a dying flower passing on the wind. The gifts you were given that you’ve named a curse, as if creation and destruction are different. Power is power. Magic is magic. Though it’s all wasted on your kind, if you ask me. I suppose I should be grateful onlyremnants remain, vestigial traces squirreled away in one DNA sequence or another.”
“You’re talking about our magic,” I whisper.
“Magic, dear girl, is like any other trait. Recessive in some, dominant in others. How much one gets may vary even from sibling to sibling. How it is expressed, what you do with it, that is entirely up to you.”
“But it’s too much,” I argue. “There are too many stories where it’s gone wrong.”
She looks out over the water. “Yes, well, magic is chaos and creation. You can’t have one without the other. But there are other things in you, too—goodness, wisdom, compassion. Used rightly, those can be a guide, a way to harness and channel the power.Ifyou listen.”
The voice.I realize that she’s describing my experience of that thing I trusted within myself when I could trust no one else. That I manifested out of sheer loneliness and longing. The best parts of me that I stopped believing in, stopped listening to, after the fire.
“I have a question,” I tell her.
“I imagine you have many,” she responds.
“Why did my power come back after meeting the circle? Why is it stronger now, easier to control?”
She clasps her hands behind her back. “The answer to that is one part law of proximity—the closer you stand to the fire, the hotter you become.”
“And the other part?” I ask, nodding.
“The other part is radiation. You related to the people in the circle you belonged to. It hacked your belief circuit. Your magic returned because you believed it’s what connected you to one another, and you wanted so desperately to belong to anyone.” She looks down. When her eyes land on me again, they are Dara’s through and through. “In a way, the same thing happened with your family. Stories of magic and misfortune were seeded in each successive generation, breeding only more of the same. Connecting with adifferent group of people with different experiences of their power gave you hope for a different outcome.”
It’s upsetting to learn that the women of my family in some part doomed themselves. Not because they wanted terrible things to happen, but because they believed it was all they were made for.
“I admired him, you know,” the Fathom says as she stands before me in Dara’s body. “Myopic as he was. At least he reached for something. At least he saw beyond his own shadow. So few do anymore.”
“You’re talking about Edward Rudzitin.”
She sighs. “In the end, I consumed him,” she says. “As I will each of you until I am released. It’s my nature. Fire burns if you get too close.”
The breath dies in my chest. “That’s what I’m afraid of. What happens if we let you go? Can you promise you won’t destroy the city a second time?”
“I cannot be less than I am.” Her smile is almost sad. “We shaped this planet, my kind. Shaped the very curve of your brow. Set you to it like cattle to a field to graze. And we have watched you forget. Forget your origins and who made you. Forget your magic and your power. Forgetusand our capacity. We gave you this place, and you have turned your backs on us.”
“What will you do?” I ask her.
She stares through me. “Take it back.”
I inhale sharply.
“I can give you this much,” she bargains. “Free me and it will go easier than if you don’t.”
I swallow and bow my head. “Tell me what I have to do.”
“You have to break the binding,” she says simply.
“But how?”
