Magisterium (23 page)

Kevin found a rock with the toe of his boot and kicked it into the dark. Glenn noticed bits of ash and waxy-looking burn marks on his cheeks.

“Kevin?”

“What does it feel like?” he asked. “To be able to do things like that?”

Glenn shuddered, remembering the mad rush of power.

“It’s like I’m not … me anymore,” she said. “I don’t know who I am, but I’m not me. I’m just … gone.”

Kevin stared at the rocky ground and slowly shook his head.

“You can’t destroy that bracelet,” he said quietly.

“Kevin —”

“If you use it then maybe what happened to these people, what happened to Cort, won’t happen to anyone else. Let Opal teach you how to control your Affinity —”

“So that’s why you followed me?” Glenn asked. “To take me

back to Opal?”

“I followed you because I woke up and you were gone,” Kevin said, raising his voice. “And you should be glad I did!”

“So it was all for me?” Glenn whipped his coat aside, exposing the gold dagger around his neck. “It wasn’t for your new friends?

‘Death to the Magistra.’ That’s what you said, isn’t it? I heard you plotting with your friends, Kevin. You’re not him. You’re not Cort!”

“I know that!” Kevin shouted. Then he glanced at the family behind them and stepped closer to Glenn, dropping his voice low and intense. “But I felt him die on that scaffold, Glenn. I
remember
it. I remember the walk to the gallows and how the rope felt on my neck and the sound of Felix crying and this feeling like …” Kevin struggled for purchase as his words slipped away. They were just inches from each other. Glenn could feel the heat radiating off him. “In all the time we’ve known each other, I’ve spent every minute of every day thinking about myself, about school, about some stupid band, and I’m sick of it.

There are other things in the world, important things, and I want to think about them for once in my life. We can’t let her keep hurting people, Glenn. We have to stop her.”

“Kill her?”

Kevin paused, flames from the campfire washing over the planes of his face.

“Isn’t that what she deserves?”

The cave dropped into an aching quiet. Cort was no mere ghost inside him now. The person in front of her, even though he had Kevin’s eyes and lips and the sharp angles of his face, wasn’t Kevin Kapoor.

Kevin was gone.

Glenn took a cautious step away. How could she tell him the truth about who the Magistra was? Would he even care now that he was more Cort Whitley than Kevin Kapoor? Worse, would he turn on her as well?

“Look,” he said. “We can cross the border tomorrow morning

and you can give me the bracelet. All of this can be over for you. I know that’s all you really want.”

“All I want is for us to get our lives back. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. My father is sitting alone in some prison because of me, Kevin.

You were almost killed! I’m just trying to put things back the way they were.”

Kevin’s eyes sharpened on her. “Do you really think that if you destroy the bracelet Sturges will pat us on the head and send us back to school?” he asked. “That’s a fantasy, Glenn. And even if he did, I don’t
want
that life back. I’m not going to waste another year dangling from your string while you figure out how to get as far away from me as humanly possible.”

Glenn felt a sting in her chest. Her eyes burned. “I never meant to …”

“Do you know why I came to talk to you that day at my dad’s

office?” he asked. “I saw you on the train one morning. You were surrounded by everyone we went to school with and all of them were running around like they always do, and in the middle of all that was you. Sitting there with your tablet, ignoring it all, reading about the stars. I thought, this is someone who knows who she is. You were just
you
and I thought that was so amazing, but now … that whole time, you were just scared.”

Before Glenn could say anything, Kevin turned from her and

swept out of the cave. Glenn stood and watched his silhouette leap from rock to rock down the trail until the night consumed him.

A sound woke Glenn late that night. Her eyes snapped open, but she lay still. The fire had fallen to a reddish glow, barely illuminating the cave. Tommy and his parents were asleep in their places, but Margaret was gone.

Glenn sat up in time to see a figure slip toward the mouth of the cave.

“Margaret?” she whispered.

The dark form paused, then stepped out of the cave and vanished.

Glenn forced herself up. She was hungry and tired, and her body ached from lying on the rock, but she dug her feet into her boots and pulled on her coat before stumbling outside.

As soon as Glenn left the halo of the fire, the cold rushed at her.

She jerked her coat closed and buttoned it up, cursing as she squinted into the dark for some sign of movement.

A jumble of black on black hills was crowded all around, like a surrounding army. The canyon floor, hundreds of feet below, was invisible.

“Margaret!” Glenn called.

Nothing.

Glenn was about to turn back. If Margaret couldn’t sleep and needed to get out, so be it, but then there was a tumble of rocks and dirt above her head. Glenn saw Margaret’s leg slip up over the edge of the hill, onto the stone landing they’d been on earlier that night. There was a glimmer of moonlight, but a girl like Margaret, as confused as she was, shouldn’t be stumbling around up there, no matter how used to it she might be.

Glenn found the narrow path up the hill and stayed low, feeling her way along as it snaked up the cliff face. After several minutes of painful climbing, Glenn threw her arms over the top.

She was at the turn of the path that led to where they had first encountered Margaret and her family. Now, higher up, the wind swirled around her, cold and knifelike. She couldn’t stay up here long.

“Margaret!” she called, but her voice was scattered in the wind, disappearing inches from her mouth.

Glenn hunched over, hands crammed deep in her pockets, and

started down the path, following it until the low rock walls at her sides fell away. The gusts were even greater once she was out in the open.

Glenn raised the flat of her hand to shield her eyes from the wind as she scanned the hilltop.

“Margaret! Margaret, where are you? You have to come down!”

Glenn swept her eyes across the plain. A figure stood dead center on the hill out by the edge.
Great
, Glenn thought.
I’m going to freeze to death because she misses the view.

As Glenn fought her way forward, she could see it was definitely Margaret, standing with her back to Glenn, her arms hanging limp at her sides.

“Hey, it’s freezing out here! We have to go back. We —”

Glenn took another step and was starting to reach out when she saw that Margaret was standing with her toes at the very knife’s edge of the cliff. There was nothing in front of her but air. A bad turn of the wind and she’d be gone. Vertigo swam through Glenn, imagining it, and she eased back.

“Margaret? You have to take a step back, okay? It’s not safe.”

Margaret just stared out into the dark air. Glenn wanted to reach out to her but was too afraid she might startle her and send her over.

“Look,” Glenn said, doing everything she could to calm the

shakes in her voice. “Listen to me. Okay? You can’t be up here now.

You have to take a step back, for me. Just a little one.”

Margaret didn’t say anything. She didn’t move.

“Margaret …” Glenn said, softening. “I know … I know it seems like things are all messed up right now, but you need some time.

Things will get back to the way they were before this all happened.

Okay? Things will be fine.”

Margaret shook her head.

“Of course they will!” Glenn said, fighting the rising gusts of wind. “Look, your parents are down below. And your brother. Why don’t we go sit in front of the fire. We’ll get you something to eat and we’ll all talk. We’ll talk all night if you want, until things are better.

Then tomorrow you guys will head home and this will all be over.

Would you like that? Margaret? Things will be back the way they were.”

Margaret turned so that her profile was etched across the starry night behind her.

“You can’t make a tree not a tree,” she said. “You can’t take it back.”

Glenn swallowed hard. Her heart was racing now, but she had to keep calm. She took a half step, slow, and reached out to the girl.

“Maybe not,” she said. “But take a step back and we’ll get you on the road home.”

There was a gust of wind and Margaret’s hair snapped like a flag.

Her eyes were dark and huge and clear.

“There is no road home.”

Glenn made a grab for Margaret’s shoulder, but the girl took a single step forward and it was as if the darkness and the earth below reached up, desperate to snatch her away.

Margaret didn’t make a sound as she fell.

As the night deepened, the cold and the wind took Glenn in both hands and shook, but she didn’t leave her place at the edge of the cliff.

She imagined she was an outcropping of rock or a lone growth of mountain pine, twisted and hard, invisible amongst the others.

The moon led the stars down into the horizon, and then the first watery traces of sunlight spread across the mountains. At some point that morning, Margaret’s parents and brother appeared on the cliff behind her. They stood there a long time, their ragged clothes flapping in the wind. Their bodies gray and indistinct, like ghostly smudges on a pane of glass.

Glenn told them what Margaret had done, then turned away and watched the sun rise. They said nothing. Eventually, there was a sound behind her like dry leaves skittering across the rock and they were gone.

There was a flash of green as the sun crested the forest in the distance and for a moment Glenn imagined she was on 813, millions of miles away from the Magisterium and the Colloquium. Alone in the quiet. Her heart longed for it, missing another distant place she had never been.

As the sun crept up into the mountains, a winding path, lighter gray than the rock around it, shone. And at the vanishing end of her vision sat a jumble of small red-roofed buildings.
Bethany.
The name had once echoed in her head like a wish. Get there and this would all be over. Get there and things could go back to the way they were.

Glenn shook her head, disgusted with herself at the thought.

Whatever else Kevin said, she knew he was right about that. The idea that she could destroy the bracelet and they would all waltz into their old life was a fantasy. Go back to school? To the Academy? Free her father? It was laughable. Sturges would never allow it.

Unless …

Bethany was a small collection of buildings and streets, and on the other side of it, towering like a dark green castle wall, was the edge of the border forest. She could be in Bethany by that afternoon; walking straight through it and coming out the other side would be the work of a few minutes. And then …

Glenn pulled her sleeve aside, exposing the dull gray of the bracelet. It was true that Sturges would never give Glenn her old life back. But maybe she could purchase it.

The pieces of a plan began to snap together. The bracelet for her life. After all, who was she protecting? Her mother? A monster who had abandoned her years ago? Kevin, who was so transformed she barely recognized him anymore?

Aamon?

Glenn’s heart ached at the thought of him. But no matter what else Aamon had done, no matter who he had been, he had been lying to her this whole time. Without him her mother never would have left, never would have become what she was now. Glenn had to face it. Just like Kevin and her mother, Hopkins was gone, swallowed up by the Magisterium.

Glenn forced herself up and stood teetering at the edge of the cliff, the wind lashing her, the jagged rocks and endless land sprawled out below.

“There is no road home.”

The words were like hands reaching up from a grave to pull her down, just as they had pulled down her mother and father and Kevin and Aamon and Margaret. Glenn turned away from the edge and crossed the windswept stone.