He hadn’t meant to say it like that.Desperately.The admission pings off the walls of his room. I need her. Ineedher. The smell of blood is making him twitch. He drags the flat of his hand along the nape of his neck, feeling half mad. He thinks of the envoy: He knows exactly where to push to make you break.
“Here’s a scenario for you—you’re Paris Keeling. You want me to submit. How would you make me do it?”
Asher is too quiet, sighting him like a hunter. “I’d go after something important.”
“Exactly.”
Lysander has him by the throat. He canfeelit. It isn’t just that Asher Thorley will do anything for Shea, it’s that he’ll do whatever it takes to keep her out of the hands of the devil. Lysander tips back against the mantel, cool as ice. Inside, he’s coiled tight enough to snap.
“From here on out,” he says, “assume we’re being watched. Keep close to her. Be seen with her. It doesn’t have to be real, it just has to be believable.”
The great irony of Shea Parker’s existence is that she prefers the silence.
If it were up to her, she’d live in it forever. She’s learned—out of necessity, or else over time—to slot the noises into place. The brain is a funny thing. It adapts. It attributes meaning to dissonance, makes sense of the clicks and creaks and scrapes. It forgets what things used to sound like, before the sound went away.
When she was young, there was a clinic in town. Her parents upended the last of their savings to get her fitted for silicone molds. It took months after that for the hearing aids to arrive. In that time, she and her parents subsisted on boiled root vegetables and watery broth. It felt like a cruel joke, that she had to starve for sound, when she didn’t even want it. Crueler still that her parents starved with her, when she’d have been perfectly happy in the quiet.
Silence hadn’t been an option. The rest of the world wasn’t as hospitable as home. No one at school spoke with their hands. No one in town knew what to do with her. As she grew, so did the stakes, until her looming graduation began to feel like an expiration date. There was no place in Little Hill for the childless, the unemployed, and the unenlisted. Those who ate up resources without giving something back tended to disappear. They became just another face on a poster. Missing. Lost. Gone.
Useless.
For a long time, her parents did whatever they could to shield her from the truth. When the clinic shut its doors, her father left town in search of batteries. He went to the city to pawn what he could—his father’s favorite watch, his mother’s wedding ring. Carving up the remains of his family. Shea paid him back for his sacrifice with tantrums. Slammed doors and angry tears, her hearing aids off and her eyes shut.I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!
Sometimes, when he first left, she thought maybe he’d done so because he was sick of bleeding himself dry for her sake. She thought maybe if she’d been more grateful, more tolerably behaved, he’d have stayed.
That maybe if she hadn’t squandered everything he’d worked for, he wouldn’t be gone.
She bleeds herself dry now.
She microdoses silence in the space between.
If she Turns, the rest of the world will be at her mercy. She won’t be forced to capitulate to its whims. She won’t have to play by its rules—to cut herself down to size. She won’t have to empty out her veins over and over for a life she never even wanted.
She spends the day thinking it over, shut away in a room with a view of the mountain. There’s a little balcony on the other side of the glass, the prim white railing sponged in moss. The bed is broad and plush and piled in pillows. The walls are plaid, pastoral and charming.
Perhaps most surprisingly, the room comes with an attached bath. It’s small and neat, containing a single, deep tub and a pedestal sink. An old painting of Mercy Mountain hangs on the wall, slopes demarcated in colored runs. Several clean, dry towels have been left atop the toilet seat.
She can’t remember the last time someone left towels out for her. It makes her think of her mother—of being wrapped up after a bath, her fingers pruning. She used to wriggle and writhe and gnash her teeth whenever her mother brushed her hair.You’re a great wild thing, her mother would laugh, combing loose the tangles one by one,and so you have great wild hair.
The memory has ground sharp, over the years. It hurts to try to hold it.
By the time the red haze of a dusk settles over the mountain, she’s made up her mind. When she tugs open the door to track down Lys, it’s to find Asher standing on the other side, his fist poised to knock. For several seconds, they blink at each other in surprise.
Finally, he asks, “Can I come in?”
The question jars her into action. She shuts the door so hard she feels it in her teeth.
“Parker, come on” drifts Asher’s voice through the wood. “Open the door.”
She doesn’t.
“Look,” he says, muffled, “I know you’re upset—”
She wrenches the door wide with a vehemence that ruffles her skirt. He stands with both hands braced against the frame, his left eye swollen shut.
“Hi.”
“Upset?”
