Otherbound

13

It worked.

Until Jorn entered and the shock launched Nolan back to himself, he’d pulled it off. He wasn’t worthless. He could move—walk—laugh. He wasn’t trapped behind Amara’s eyes anymore.

At dinner he was nauseated and jittery, more concerned with picking out Amara’s thoughts than anything else. He’d scared her. He’d assumed she’d been gone, but her thoughts now made it clear he’d been wrong. How did that work? How could he sense her normally but not when he steered her body?

Amara was a mess as she worked and ate. Nolan’s name cropped up in her thoughts every few seconds, sometimes as signs and sometimes as sounds. The word sounded odd in her mind—the syllables too choppy—but it was his name. She’d never thought his name before.

Nolan hardly touched dinner, giving half-there answers and disappearing for too-long blinks that had his parents exchanging knowing looks. The pills aren’t working, they had to be thinking, and, for once, they were wrong.

After dinner, he found himself scrubbing even the bottom of the dinner plates twice. He kept the dishes low in the sink in case they slid from his hands. The Dunelands startled him too often for him to take risks holding anything fragile.

Scrub, rinse, stack. The water soaked into his fingers. Soap bubbles covered everything, popping open with the scent of lemon.

Nolan hadn’t meant to freak out Amara. When she’d first drawn him in, she’d been away from her family and working at the Bedam palace—Drudo palace, now—for only a few months. Nolan had been five; Amara must’ve been around the same age. The years worked differently there, and so did the days. Amara’s were longer by over an hour. It made time hard to calculate.

At first Amara’s magic had pulled him in only while he slept, then also when he consciously closed his eyes. Within months they’d reached the here-and-now point of every last blink. He’d never stopped being scared it would progress further. He’d ended up in a coma twice before, when he was nine and thirteen and had given up on fighting to stay in his own body. At some point, he knew it might not matter how much he fought.

He remembered the first time Amara had pulled him in during the day, when he’d hidden in the school bathroom, pressing his eyes shut and suddenly unable to move, suddenly trapped in that other body. In that world people shepherded him—Amara—left and right, teaching her to cut vegetables and sew and carry the horse-fuzz after stable servants sheared Elig horses. Nolan hadn’t even been able to wrinkle his nose when she scooped up the manure.

So he understood Amara’s fear at being controlled. He shouldn’t take over like that. He’d only meant to let her know about him. Still, the thought—oh, the thought of finally balling those hands into fists, or pointing her eyes where he wanted to look … Was he supposed to go back to spending half his life trapped? Pretending he wasn’t there?

From the living room, Pat shouted, “Nolan! You done? Want to watch a movie?” Some murmurs followed. “Or do you need help washing up?” She sounded less excited now, although Nolan didn’t need to hear that to figure out Dad was behind the addendum. He must’ve made her ask in the first place, too. Pat knew too well what answer to expect.

“Thanks. I’ve got homework.” Actually, Amara had asked Jorn for permission to nap after dinner, and Nolan could use the quiet of her sleep to think.

“You sure? The main actress has huge boobs!” Pat tried nobly not to giggle. Nolan imagined joining them—Dad ribbing Pat while he worked, Pat faking annoyance because she was watching the movie—then a stab of unease from Amara caught his attention. He lowered another glass to the counter and—

—Amara’s grip on her topscarf tightened. She stood by her bedroll, exhausted, unable to convince herself to pull her scarf out of its intricate folds. She wasn’t a prude; servants couldn’t afford to be. Even if she were, Maart was washing in the creek, and had already seen far more than her shoulders, and Jorn and Cilla sat around the corner, reading. Paper rustled. Amara tried to kill the rage that shot up unbidden. It took them seconds to read those pages—seconds.

She still didn’t pull off her scarf. It wasn’t about modesty. It was about this being … hers. Her hands dropped from the scarf’s edges. She stepped away from the bedroll, her footfalls quiet without her boots. She felt a sting in her heel, but it passed a second later.

She stopped at a tall window at one end of the building. The world past the glass was so dark that Amara barely saw beyond her own reflection: the ashy shade of her skin, the worn brown of her winterwear, the topscarf in mottled gray and beige.

Nolan studied the sight of her. Amara rarely faced her reflection for long.

She might be his age, but she looked younger. She was slim and hard and hovered on boyish, down to her short lashes and sharp nose. Nolan couldn’t think of her as beautiful. Not because of how she looked; if she were anyone else, she’d be pretty enough.

But when she moved her hands, they felt like his. When her stomach rumbled, or when her feet ached, the sensations mingled with his own. Sometimes Amara felt simply like another version of him, a life he led in a world he couldn’t touch, and not like a girl for him to fantasize about. They’d never see each other face-to-face.

He’d thought about it, anyway. When she undressed. When she touched herself. When Maart did. He had no way of escaping those images—or the guilt that came with them. He’d learned to live with it.

But now Amara knew about him.

“Are you watching this?” Amara’s signs moved so slowly Nolan almost didn’t notice them. He felt her hands, though, and saw their mirrored image in the glass. “Is it true? Are you watching this?”

Her hands went up. They yanked at her scarf. Fabric slid past fabric, untangling, unwrapping, until it glided past her shoulders. She tugged the scarf loose and stared at her reflection, at bunched muscles in her shoulders and at eyes squinted nearly shut. At the slight indentation between her breasts visible above the winterwear that hid the rest.

She flung the scarf at the glass. It dropped in a heap. “Are you always watching?”

Her hands struck the window, palms thunking off, then slammed again, and moved back for a third time, but she stopped there, her arms pulled back and tense. The sound of flicking pages had stopped. Jorn might’ve heard.

She stood there, shuddering, for too long.

Finally she crouched to gather her scarf. She clasped it so tightly her hands ached from the effort. Go away, she thought, angry and broken and so far beyond anything Nolan could name he almost choked on it.

Amara turned. She walked back to her bedroll, stiff with hate. The flutter of pages nearby resumed. She tossed her scarf next to her bed and sank down without taking off her wear. Quietly, with small, restrained signs, she said, “I don’t know what I’m doing to keep you here.” Then: “Go away.”

And something clicked and—

—then the world was black. Nolan’s eyes flew open. The first thing he saw: his own water-wrinkled hands. The first thing he smelled: dish soap, sharp lemon.

His eyes shut, turning the world black. They opened again. Shut, open, shut, open, and black every time. Nolan’s black, not Amara’s black.

He darted away from the sink, sending suds dancing through the air. Of course. Of course! The problem had always been that Amara didn’t know she pulled him in. Nolan had thought she’d need a mage’s help to kick him out—but she’d just needed to be aware.

She could control it.

Nolan closed his eyes again for good measure, just for a moment, just to revel in the black. He felt dizzy. He wanted to—oh, he could sleep now, sleep without feeling her blanket on her skin and her irises against her eyelids, he could close his eyes and hear only his own breathing, he could—

Nolan turned, almost walking into Dad. “Whoa. Do you need to lie down? I know dinner went badly.”

And then Nolan couldn’t contain his smile, wide enough to hurt his cheeks. Just like the smile he’d made on Amara’s face. Just like the smile he often saw on Pat’s and could never imitate.

Surprised, Dad smiled back just as broadly.

“I want to watch that movie,” Nolan said.