I was aware of the chaos behind me as if I were listening to it from underwater. The men shouting, crowing, laughing. Isabelle was silent. The fear was so thick now, like a bad dream, like being chased by an unseen beast that paralyzed with its presence alone. What had Isabelle thought would happen? She was rage-addled, grief-muddled. Cate was a force that could put things back together, not tear them apart. Isabelle was too small to take on all these men. And I was useless: my power thwarted by something as simple as a blindfold.
We needed them all. I saw that now. We needed Soo-jin’s wild, world-rending scream, Bonnie’s ability to fade into the world itself. Emily’s foresight. We needed Delilah and Gina, raised from the dead. We needed Fiona. But there were just the three of us, separated and alone.
Cate screamed and groaned. “Stop,” I yelled, my voice not my own. “You fucking—”
A boot to my belly, a dull thud of pain that exploded slowly outward. I keened in pain.
Isabelle’s sudden sharp scream.
This was where it would end for us. For me, Isabelle, and Cate. Cate. By the time Cate was forming a flickering pulse inside her mother’s body, I was already out in the world, running wild. I’d pressed my ear to Tonya’s stomach to listen to the watery echo and to feel the soft, impossible kick of her heel against me. Like stars forming at different reaches of the universe. She’d brought me back to life, but I couldn’t protect her in turn.
Birds were singing. The insects’ wail rose and ebbed, rose and ebbed.
“Stop,” I said again. My voice was thin now, and defeated. Panic beat weakly at my temples, my body chilled with a slick of sweat.
There was so much noise. I couldn’t tell what was happening where. There were screams, groans, the men laughing, calling to each other. Isabelle’s voice. Cate’s voice. The memory of that night brought back. I waited for the shock of pain, the warm, creeping wetness of the wound. Nothing. But Isabelle was crying, somewhere not far, the sound ragged and small. If they realized how much power she held in her hands and found a way to stunt that—and we were helpless now, my powers blinded, Isabelle hurting and hopeless, Cate—
We weren’t the trap. We’d walked into one willingly.
I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. It took me a second to identify it: I missed my mother, the way I had as a child. Her warm, strong presence. Her assurance that it would all be okay. Something I’d carried with me my whole life, even when I was angry, even when I took everything about her for granted.
I’d never see my mother again. I’d come so close to finding her, but at the last minute I’d failed. That loss was unimaginable. I couldn’t believe I’d ever accepted my mother as a simple person, somebody to move beyond and outgrow. A woman so one-dimensional and explicable that I could tuck her into the background of my own ambitions. Now, wherever she was, I’d never be able to tell her that I finally knew her.
That message on the Strouds’ answering machine, a lonely echo playing to a house where no one lived anymore. It would be the last time I heard her. I remembered standing there in that abandoned home and realizing for the first time how much my mother sounded like me. How much I sounded like her. Her voice still lived inside me. Everything I’d ever said held an echo of her, hidden there, whether I heard it or not.
I drew on that. My mother’s voice, wound throughout mine. “Stop,” I said, and this time, the weakness left my voice: it rang clear and pure as a struck bell.
But the noise kept on around me, murky and thick, penning me in. Isabelle screamed. Heavy breathing—whose? The violence around us took on a new shape, a roughness that made my belly clench. I was too aware of our three bodies, powerless and hurting.
My mother’s face. My mother’s voice. Standing on the bright brink of the future. I’d held on to Bellanger’s letters for so long, but there’d been a time before my memory was formed when she held me for the first time, my skin damp and waxy, skin designed for another world. And she leaned down to whisper into my ear, Welcome to the world, my daughter.
“Stop,” I called. “Now.”
And the world halted. The rest of the noise ceased and stilled. It was such a relief to be in the quiet that I just lay there, panting, for a small lifetime. I mentally mapped out the pain in my body. The tender softness in my belly, as bruised and soupy as a dropped piece of fruit. The sharper pain at my wrists where they’d been tied together. A hot, raw scrape of pain where I’d fallen onto the ground, my cheek cut by stones or the jutting, delicate bones of a bird.