Otherbound

5

Nolan had separated the whites and darks just like he’d always seen Mom do, keeping the patterns he wasn’t sure about to one side, and tossed the whites into the washing machine. While that ran, he’d pulled up yesterday’s laundry from the clothesline in the stairwell. Still moist. That couldn’t hurt, could it?

He sat on his parents’ bed—better AC in this room—and tried to fold carefully, like Mom, but his movements came anxious and fast, resulting in uneven folds and sleeves that stuck out the wrong way. The faster Nolan moved, maybe the faster Amara would run through the inn, too. The faster she’d be safe.

Downstairs, Dad talked on the phone—

—Amara disappeared. From one moment to the next, she was gone, and—

—Nolan grasped an undershirt tightly. This was the second time Amara had blacked out in the space of a few minutes. First in the hallway, now here, by the outhouse doors—

—Nolan always got more of Amara’s thoughts the longer he stayed, until he forgot there was a Nolan at all. But even when he was there for just a blink, kept his eyes shut for under half a second, he sensed her.

Not now.

Nolan still saw the outhouse doors through her eyes, still felt the chilly, rusted metal of the door handles. Still smelled the stench. Still saw Cilla moving closer. Her hand fell from Amara’s, leaving behind cool air on clammy skin.

But Amara wasn’t there. Her mind was empty.

Move! he wanted to shout.

For three full seconds, she stayed at the doors, thoughts beyond reach. Then, as quickly as she’d left, she blossomed back into the vacuum at the edge of Nolan’s mind.

Amara blinked rapidly, looked at Cilla, then at her now-empty hand. Her confusion didn’t last long. She threw open the doors, and they fled, cold blasting inside—

—Nolan stared at the crumpled undershirt in his hands. Shakily, he spread it on the sheets. He could do nothing for Amara, anyway. He watched. He dealt. End of story.

Fold the sides in. Fold it double. He pressed the fabric flat, hoping to get out the wrinkles as he watched flashes of Amara running through the streets, dragging Cilla along, their boots slamming into painted cobblestones—

—we can go inland, Amara was thinking, lose them in the streets like Jorn always says, hope he finds us soon. But if she led the mages west, toward the dunes, Cilla could flee into the local carecenter. A carecenter meant healing spells. The mages might lose track of Cilla’s curse in all the magic swarming around the area.

Amara tugged at Cilla’s arm. A moment later, they dove into an alley on their left, narrow enough that no one had bothered painting the pavement. Laundry hung from beams suspended between high-up windows. Sheets flapped in the wind and blocked the afternoon sun, choking the alley in darkness, as if night had fallen in the space of a second.

They hadn’t ducked into the alley in time. Pain flared in Amara’s shoulder—

—Nolan jerked back. He reached for his shoulder, intact under his shirt. The pain faded into a memory. It wouldn’t stay that way. Already, his eyes were dry enough to sting.

He dropped flat on the bed until he could reach his backpack, fishing out the notebook and pen he carried with him no matter where he went. He blinked. Kept in a scream. But he had to see what happened—

—Amara ran, clutching her shoulder. Blood seeped through her topscarf and into the gaps between her fingers. The arrow had only scraped her. Could’ve been worse. If it’d hit her spine, she’d be down for the count. But the cut was deep. It’d take at least twenty seconds to heal—twenty more than she could afford, especially with no other alleys in sight, nowhere to escape.

“Get—in front—” Amara tried to sign, hoping Cilla could see her hands. Cilla didn’t run fast enough. She lagged behind. Amara needed to shield her in case the mages let loose another arrow.

Normally, they’d simply fire raw magic they drew from the spirits, as the ministers had when they took over Cilla’s palace all those years ago. These mages couldn’t afford to. You didn’t enchant something—or someone—twice. Ever. That was why Jorn deactivated his boundary detection spell whenever they needed to cross it—it might interact with Cilla’s curse or Amara’s healing.

Sometimes, mixed magic flared tenfold. A single bolt could destroy the whole street. Other times, spells canceled each other out. Hitting Cilla with a bolt could mean the mages sabotaged their own curse and the bolt fizzled into nothing before even breaking her skin.

The wind slapped the laundry overhead into brick walls. Not far ahead, a girl Amara’s age reached out the window to adjust her clothes. She shouted something in a language Amara didn’t recognize. Before that, Amara hadn’t even noticed the silence. The alley was locked away from the world. Just the wind and too-shallow breaths and endless footslams that reverberated throughout her body.

The carecenter was another minute away. Exhaustion in her legs and lungs joined the pain in her shoulder, which bored deep and sharp and hot, even as she felt her skin stitching up—

—Nolan favored his shoulder without thinking as he wrote. About the news sheet. Amara’s resolve to keep reading. Jorn’s drinking. Cilla in the niche, the mages in the doorway. His handwriting turned crooked. He checked his shoulder again, knowing he wouldn’t find anything.

Breathe. In, out. He was fine. Amara’s pain was not his. Still, her exhaustion seeped into him, weighing heavier with each blink. He focused on keeping his writing legible, and took his pen off the paper whenever he closed his eyes, wanting to avoid ink blotches. That was a good thing—

—because when the next arrow hit, it wasn’t Amara’s shoulder, and it wasn’t a scrape. It hit her low, between pelvis and spine. The arrow didn’t feel sharp. It felt blunt, like a punch. Amara’s legs gave out. She went flying to the pavement, shredding her palms on the stones. She gave it a second, two seconds, three, unable to do anything but lie there and wheeze. The world shrank to that spot in her back.

Get up! Nolan wanted to scream. Get up! Get up!

The mages were coming closer. Nolan heard their footsteps and saw Cilla’s boots scrape to a halt and turn to Amara, limp on the stones. Blood trickled down her back, and for one bewildering moment, Amara mistook the laundry flapping overhead for birds, great big herons bearing down on her, a fish splashing on dry land. She even heard squawking, not far off now.

No, not herons. Seagulls. They were close to the dunes.

With a shaky hand, Amara reached back for the arrow. She pulled, swallowed a scream, and let the arrow clatter to the stones. The sound was light. Harmless. Something that made a sound so harmless shouldn’t be able to hurt so much. She pushed herself up, and in the corner of Amara’s eye, Nolan saw the shapes of the mages approaching and people pulling in their laundry and shutting their windows.

Then—Amara disappeared. For the third time, blackness swept over her, pulling her out of reach. Her body thumped back to the ground, lifeless—

—Nolan’s eyes shot open. He looked around in a daze, at the glow coming in through thick curtains, at stacks of laundry surrounding him in blacks and browns, at the old-school TV set bolted to the wall. Through the wall came the muffled rattle of the washing machine.

Amara had a theory about how she could die: hit fast, hit hard. The mages following her through that alley would be eager to oblige. Taking out Amara would mean taking out the princess’s last defense.

And then? Maybe whatever magic of Amara’s that pulled Nolan into her world would disappear. He’d live out his life in his own world and his own body, a concept he could barely grasp.

Or he’d die, too. Nolan’s life was secondary to Amara’s. That much he’d always known. He was the hanger-on, the badly made copy, the hazy mirror image in this alter-ego life they led together. Maybe whatever connection Amara had forged with him was strong enough that he’d experience her death along with her pain.

He couldn’t stop it, either way. And either way, Amara would die. On cold, unpainted cobblestones with fingernails that hadn’t grown back all the way.

He hated her. Amara had taken his life and locked it into hers, and he hated her more than anything in the world for that. But he didn’t want her to die. Nolan closed his eyes—

—and felt the wound healing, despite Amara’s absence. If she’d just come back as she had before, if her mind was just here, she’d be running again in seconds. It’d hurt, but she’d have no choice. They’d been in worse situations, and—all she needed to do was come back like before, crawl upright and run, and—

Her arms convulsed as if a pulse went through them.

“Come on!” Fear made Cilla’s voice crack. She grabbed Amara’s hands to pull her up, but Amara’s mind was still absent. Nolan had never felt her mind this far gone, not even when she slept. Run, he pleaded. Run.

Amara’s hands tightened around Cilla’s. She let herself be pulled onto unsteady feet, then away, in a stumble that turned into a run. An arrow slashed past her ear.

Amara moved, yes, but where were her thoughts?

The hospital still lay—what?—half a minute off? Nolan needed to know how far behind the mages were and if Amara and Cilla had any chance of making it. Amara’s head turned. Enough to catch a glimpse of the Elig mage rearming himself, the Dit mage still running. Nolan looked back in front of him, at Cilla dashing around a corner—

He looked back in front of him. He. He.

He exploded into a sprint, but his legs moved on autopilot. He clenched his hands—Amara’s hands—and guided her eyes, and opened her mouth, and pursed her lips. His breath—Amara’s breath?—came in too-short spurts.

He was doing this. These movements couldn’t be a coincidence. Couldn’t be. “Nolan,” he tried to say with unfamiliar lips. The n’s were lost, and so was the l, his name unrecognizable except to him. Owwa, it sounded like. But it was close enough.

“What?” Cilla shouted. The wind turned her voice frail.

Nolan was steering Amara’s body. He could—he was really doing this—