The Secret World of Briar Rose(52)

Corin took a step back, reeling in shock, as if Briar had cut her open. But of course Briar had seen it. If the ocean revealed the worst night of Amelia’s life, then Corin’s would have been on full display in return. In the underwater depths, their open wounds existed, gaping at one another.

“Don’t,” Corin said, bristling at the edge of her words. “Don’t you dare judge me for that. You don’t know everything.”

“I would never judge you,” Briar whispered, her voice so gentle it made Corin’s heart crack. As if the girl sensed the fracture, she placed a hand on Corin’s chest, filling it with warmth at her touch. “You and Elly can be happy here. After everything you two have been through, isn’t that enough?”

Corin could no longer meet Briar’s eyes. The girl saw too much, excavating her bones and unearthing her sorrows without permission. How could Briar have heard what Corin told Elly and believe Corin still deserved happiness? Corin glanced upward, fighting back tears, and fixated on the apricots hanging from a tree. A tiny punch of sour hit her tongue, as if she could taste the fruit. Orange paint filled her vision, a bright round orb that dripped to the bottom of a canvas, her mother’s hand steadying hers over a brush.

You just made the sun, her mother had said. As if Corin really did have that kind of magic in her hands.

But she was not a girl who held magic. She was only a thief with bitter words, nothing more.

“This isn’t real,” Corin insisted, her voice close to breaking.

Briar’s stare seemed to trace the curve of Corin’s face, unearthing her shame and accepting it anyway. “And what if it’s not?”

Corin shook her head. “I can’t do that to El. Or Harlow. Or anyone.” Her voice trembled. “It’s not fair.”

Not after what I did.

Corin heard Elly shouting from the other side of the foliage, her voice breaking their reverie. The sound made Corin’s heart leap out of her chest and jolted her forward. Her limbs thrashed the thick grass surrounding them as she charged through tangled vines to find her sister. In the open clearing, Elly and Malicine had both turned in the same direction, gazes caught by a wild fox behind the bushes. Corin recognized the brown fur and beady eyes in the dappled sunlight. Even when the fox turned to run, she knew he had been following her.

Mud spat in the air as Elly charged after the fox’s blurry tail, leaving the group behind. Panic overtook Corin’s pounding heart again.

“El, wait!”

Elly didn’t listen and disappeared into the foliage. Corin chased her through a winding path of thick trees and sliding boulders. She cut through woody vines and fallen fruit, yelling for Elly to come back. She didn’t want Elly to find out.

Find out what?

Corin didn’t know. No, not that—she didn’t want to remember.

She slowed down to an open area in the middle of the jungle, where clusters of trees wrapped around them like a bowl. In the center, Elly knelt in front of a limp figure, hunched over in grief. Her back looked so small. What she held, even smaller.

Corin approached them from the side, even though she already knew what was in Elly’s hands. The fox had shrunk since Corin last saw him in Winterland. His tail drooped lifelessly over Elly’s arm, his head buried in her lap. Tangled clumps of dirt matted his coat. Elly picked through his fur, as if to inspect for wounds. She only found cracks in his skin, lengthening around his face and torso, his flesh split so far open it bled in clay. Her tears stained his porcelain coat as she kept piecing him together. Each shard sliced Elly’s skin while phantom pain coursed through Corin’s hands, her fists clenching to ignore it.

Fixing him was useless. Every time she fiddled with the pieces, they left cracks, evidence of it breaking apart.

“Don’t you understand?” Corin said. “We can’t put him back together again.”

Elly placed him gently to the ground, where he separated into pieces. She turned to Corin, tears slicking the dark pools of her eyes.

“Then why did you break him?”

Elly’s tears flashed in Corin’s memory. She gasped on Gyldan’s thick air, nearly choked on it. She didn’t want the anger and desolation to return—their year in that house, walls cracked and peeling, floorboards groaning under each step, as if the building had resigned itself to ruin. Elly had hated this home. She despised its protective isolation, craving instead to return to the commune’s shared tents, a place that rang with laughter and not secrets whispered through broken beams.

It didn’t matter that Corin had told her sister that their friends were gone. Elly was too na?ve to believe in the permanence of death. “Harlow wouldn’t have been caught so easily,” her sister had argued that night, fueling Corin’s irritation.

Corin paced around the muddy ground of the jungle, but the dreamscape morphed to the memory as if it were happening in real time. Tall trees melted into gray walls. Tangled vines transformed to leaking pipes. Bark turned to burlap, fruit and foliage to tattered sheets and dust and mold. The familiar flare of anger coursed through her veins, where any sound her sister made would set Corin off like a bomb.

She was cold and tired and hungry. The lease was meant to be a new beginning, yet the decrepit house was far from the home she’d thought it would be. She’d sworn to herself that stealing from the commune would be the last time, and a steady job would be enough, as if playing by the rules would make life fair. But she grew tired of tightening her wallet, rationing bites, screaming in the middle of the night from nightmares of raining bullets and dead friends. Sleep came to her only in fragments, for Corin refused to close her eyes and dream, terrified that she would see Harlow and the others bleeding before her every night.