We walked. The predictable sharp turn. Another long stretch of alleyway, the backs of buildings, the lonely desert. This was Fiona’s daily exercise. Looking out at the same barren stretch of the desert that held her captive, day after day after day. I imagined her in Freshwater, looking around at the wide, wide world, understanding her place in it, and lashing out, stretching into the sky and stopping all those flutter-quick pulses.
“Maybe Bellanger isn’t helping you control yourself at all,” I said. “Maybe he’s holding you back—”
“Holding me back?” Fiona interrupted. Anger and fear compressing her voice into a tight near-whisper. “You have no idea who I am now, do you? I’m—wait.”
She turned around abruptly, yanking at my wrist. Mathias paused, caught midstride. He looked from one of us to the other, searching, but Fiona was imperious. “Leave us. Now.”
The sudden authority in her voice gave me a prickle of discomfort.
Mathias made a tentative protest. “Dr. Bellanger instructed me to—”
“Do you answer to Dr. Bellanger, or to me? Leave us now, or I can make things very difficult for you.”
He hesitated, then stood firm. “My duty is to stay here. For your safety.”
Fiona turned away from him. “You need to see,” she said to me, a manic light in her eyes. “Of course you don’t appreciate what Father’s done when you haven’t seen proof.”
“What are you saying?”
In response, Fiona stepped toward Mathias. Her face changed. Her eyes slid upward, irises vanishing, to reveal a waiting blankness, slippery and fish-belly pale in her face. That picture on the altar, the empty-eyed goddess. Mathias made a small movement, like he was starting to run. All the times I’d let this man rule my imagination, haunt my every move, and now we stood here under the desert sun and he was completely helpless.
Then I was sinking—down, down, into the sand, and Mathias was a dark spot hovering above me. The soles, the heavy black soles of his boot. Fiona was rooted to the spot, head tilted upward. Mathias was rising into the air, a balloon released from a child’s hand.
I remembered what Cate’s mother had told her: A girl who didn’t have to use her hands the way people did, because her hands were in the air all around her. Mathias was suspended above us, blank-faced, not fighting. Ten, twelve feet above the ground. Part of the landscape. A fly hanging invisible inside a spiderweb.
A guilty part of me wanted to see what came next. I wanted to see how she’d grown since she was a little girl crying for her mother. But I forced myself to speak. “Fiona, I already know that you’re powerful. There’s no need for this.”
“He tried to kill you,” Fiona said. “What do you care what happens to him?”
I couldn’t answer. Something was happening now. A small flame, a bright spark shimmering on his shoulder. It looked like a reflection of the sun, a pale dot. But quickly, too quickly, it spread along the seams of his clothing, a blaze hot enough that I stepped back, the warmth touching my skin. Fire. It wreathed his arm, twisting. She was controlling it, a live wire that she was playing with. Then she let go, and the fire spread.
He screamed, an animal cry that wrenched something in me, nausea pushing up my throat. Hanging there, he was as bright as a planet. A star. I thought of that bird, evaporating into nothingness. Into ashes. Mathias’s screams were low and keening, outside of his control.
“Fiona, you don’t have to do this,” I said. The fire that night in Arkansas seemed so long ago now. Ancient, meaningless history. I didn’t have any desire to see this man punished, not now. Not standing here on the property of the man who’d kidnapped my mother, stolen my youngest sister, and lied to me.
Fiona didn’t seem to hear. “Please,” I said. “Please.” Then her eyes slid back into place, her pupils startling and wet inside her face, and she blinked several times.
Mathias fell from the sky, the laws of physics returning. He landed with an animal thump, the dull pop of submerged injuries. Bones cracking. But the fire was still spreading, eating away at his arm, crawling up his shoulder. It no longer had that delicate, twisting quality, the visible marker of Fiona’s control. It was an ordinary blaze now, hungry and indiscriminate.
“Put it out,” I yelled to Fiona. “He’s going to die. Put it out—just—control it.”
“I can’t,” she said, looking at me like I’d suggested something ridiculous.