Page 298 of The Mortal Trials

Shimmering like a prism, my sister ground pepper for the soup. A knot forms in my throat. I notice her dress. How she’d styled her hair. I smell the spicy scent of her perfume as she moves around the room.

I look at August. “Do you see her?”

He nods. “I see her and see through her.”

As Abuela stirred the ground peppercorns into the pozole, Carina set the table. “Are you coming to eat with us, Cal?” she yelled to me.

I mouth the word No in time with my past answer to her. I’d been lying in bed. In addition to penning conscriptions during my convalescence, Morrigan had given me a schedule, solely focused on getting me out of my head and up and moving. On that day, I’d done fine on the morning walk and even managed a short jog, but when I tried to run, I ate the desert dust. My pride, and hope, were scuffed, to say the least.

“Come on,” she begged. “I’m running in to work for a little while, but I want to see you before I go.”

“I’m not hungry!” I yelled from my bedroom.

“Why do you have to go in so late in the day? I thought you took the day off,” Abuela asked.

Abuela’s version of lowering her voice is whisper yelling, which meant I could hear every word and Carina knew it.

My sister placed two glasses of water on the table. “A very wise woman once told me that sometimes you have to do what you must.”

August reaches out to grip my arm as a sob tears from my throat.

It’s the single piece of advice Hermes offered us all at the start of these horrid trials, and he’d taken it from her. I heard her say it, but in the past months, I’d forgotten.

The two ate in silence, broken only by the snap of a tostada or occasional clang of spoon against bowl. Until Abuela pushed to know what was so pressing at work.

Carina assured her it was nothing to worry about. She said she wouldn’t be gone long, and Abuela dropped the matter.

When they were finished eating, our grandmother cleaned up while Carina ladled soup into a bowl for me and placed it on a tray with two crackers, a spoon, and a glass of water, then carried it down the hall.

I cry as she walks past me and August.

She had that look in her eye. Determination and a gods damned inferno as she shouldered my door open.

August and I follow her, watching from the doorway.

She set the tray down on the small table beside my bed. The mattress sank as she sat next to me. “You got back up today,” Carina praised, brushing my hair back. “It’s easy to focus on the fall, but it’s the rising that matters, Callalie.”

I’d rolled my eyes at her.

Tears stream down my cheeks, splashing onto the tile floor. I can’t contain the sobs that crawl out of the crevice in my chest that’s shaped like my sister.

Carina stared at me in the bed for a long moment. She lingered because she knew this would be the last time she saw me in this life. She’d accepted it then, when I still haven’t.

My sister told me, “I love you more than all the stars in the sky, Cal.”

And gods, how she loved them all. She knew the names other people had given them and any she didn’t know, she’d named herself.

“I love you back,” I’d groused, finally sitting up to hug her.

Thank the gods I’d hugged her.

I’d give anything to be able to do it now.

My feet carry me into the room.

I reach a hand toward the back of Carina’s head, but it slips right through. No matter how real I want this to be or how much I want to go back to this moment and stop her, to warn her of what will happen if she goes forward, I can’t.

“We shouldn’t have stopped here,” I croak to Aymes.