Otherbound

41

Mom and Dad didn’t give a damn what he and Pat had talked about. “Don’t be ridiculous,” Dad said that evening. “You’re going to eat something, and you’re going to that play. This is important to her.”

“Pat said it was OK.” Nolan pushed himself upright too fast, the mattress squeaking underneath him, and he blinked a couple of times to adjust. His head felt light.

“Did you get any rest?” Dad frowned.

Nolan had crawled into bed to be around for the conversation with Ilanne, but he didn’t exactly feel rested. “Sort of.” He plucked sweaty sheets from his legs. His heart raced. He talked too fast. “I meant to. It probably wasn’t enough. I should nap more.”

“Nice trick,” Mom said. She’d been rushing back and forth through the hallway, talking on the phone to Grandma Pérez, but now stepped into his room. She slipped her phone into her back pocket. “You’ll avoid sleeping except when you’re expected at your little sister’s play?” She jammed a skinny index finger at his wardrobe door. “I’m not picking out clothes for you. If you can’t do it yourself within one minute, you’ll go to the school in your underwear. Got it?”

It looked as if Mom had finally taken Grandma Pérez’s parenting advice. She didn’t look happy about it. Her stern expression was just the slightest bit off.

Nolan wanted to argue. “Yes,” he said, thinking of her at the Walgreens, thinking of the pills they couldn’t afford flushed down the toilet by Nadi.

At least Amara was still OK. She and Ilanne were gathering the other mages, which meant she was relatively safe, but being back in Bedam brought her far too close to Nadi and Jorn for Nolan to feel even the slightest bit comfortable about leaving her alone.

Forty minutes later he trailed after his parents into Pat’s middle school, wearing his prosthesis for the first time in days. It itched with sweat.

Out of habit, he smiled teacher-smiles at his old art and social studies teachers, who waited outside the gymnasium, fanning themselves in the evening sun. The heat inside wasn’t much better. Had the AC broken down? Was it just him? His heart was still going a hundred miles an hour. He needed his pills.

Without a word, he stripped off his pinstriped shirt, happy to go with only the undershirt. It didn’t help against the heat.

Bored-looking kids Pat’s age milled around, grumpy at spending their evening back at school, while parents sat in too-small folding chairs and fiddled with their phones and camcorders. Underneath it all was the stench of old sweat and gym clothes and that muffled, artificial gym smell. Rubber? Vinyl? He didn’t know, but the tarp did nothing to hide it—

—Amara was sitting on dewy grass, absorbing the cool morning sunlight and watching Ilanne hover over a glass pane, the same as when Jorn had talked to Ruudde. Nolan wished he could lend her some of the Arizona heat. She’d probably faint—

—he had to get out of here. He couldn’t be at a damn middle school while going through withdrawal and—and everything going on with Amara.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He wormed free from the crowd, shuffling toward the stage. The folding chairs gave way to low gym benches, probably reserved for the younger kids. He fished out his phone, which showed a new text from Pat.

Am backstage. I’m gonna screw this up!!!

At least that gave Nolan an excuse to move away from the crowd. He nodded at another teacher, though he didn’t recognize this one, then at someone else who waved at him. It took him a second to recognize her: Sarah Schneider. Her hair looked different than at school. When she noticed him looking, her waves grew more enthusiastic, and her eyebrows rose in a hopeful question. Was she waving him over to sit with her? She must have a younger sibling in the play, too. Nolan swallowed an expletive at her timing, sped up, and belatedly realized he should’ve waved back. He moved around the stage taking up a third of the gym and ducked behind a black sheet, then up a small, portable set of stairs.

“You shouldn’t be back here,” a friend of Pat’s—Claudia?—said, blocking his path.

Nolan just showed her his phone.

Claudia read the text and stepped aside with an exaggerated flourish. “Now Pat starts caring?”

The backstage area was cramped, but at least it had a massive fan providing relief. Nolan didn’t pause to bask in the breeze, searching for Pat and mumbling apologies to oddly dressed preteens in his path. The one teacher backstage didn’t care half as much about his presence as Claudia did. Finally, Nolan spotted Pat near the stage, wearing an ill-fitting white uniform, her hair in an uncharacteristic bun.

“Look,” he said. “You rocked those rehearsals. You’ll be fine.”

“Look,” Pat said back. “I found fabric scissors.” She held them up. They flashed in the bare bulbs of the lights backstage.

Pat no longer looked nervous.

A girl Nolan didn’t know maneuvered past them to get to a stack of hats, and he barely noticed, too rooted to the floor to do anything but stare at the gleaming metal in his sister’s gloved hands. She’d lost one of her spikes. But even right before going onstage, even in her white nurse’s outfit, Pat stuck with her gloves.

“Amara’s on her way back,” Nolan whispered.

He couldn’t make himself look at Nadi wearing his sister’s eyes. He needed to focus on Pat’s gloves, her hands, and what they held. The scissors might move if he looked away. Near the scissors, his sister’s chest moved with controlled breaths. Too near.

“Amara is back in Bedam,” he said. “I’m making her come back already. Please.”

The scissors moved a fraction of an inch away from Pat’s chest. He saw muscles loosen in her hands. He dared take a breath but couldn’t move yet.

“Amara contacted the mages? And you helped her?” Pat—Nadi—said. Only then did Nolan’s eyes flicker from her hands to her face.

Of course Nadi could dig through Pat’s memories when Nolan couldn’t even touch Amara’s. Nadi must know all about how they’d hunted through the notebooks for clues.

“She’s coming back. I promise. I just wanted to know about Cilla—but talking to the mages didn’t work and Amara was being stupid and she didn’t care about Pat, and—she’s coming back. I can still control her. I’m sorry. She’s in Bedam! She’ll be at the palace by noon. Sooner. Within the hour. I promise!”

Nadi tapped the flat points of the scissors against Pat’s shut eyelids. “I know you do.”

“Please,” Nolan rasped.

“You’re sweating a lot, Nolan. You’re shaking. Is your control wearing off yet? What do you think will happen if you miss your deadline? Do you think I’ll go, Oh, it’s not like Nolan can do anything about it anymore, so I might as well forget about that family of his? ’Cause you’re wrong.” It was as if Nadi was trying to sound like Pat instead of herself now, so much that it raised the hairs on the back of Nolan’s neck. “I have a question for you: If you’re making Amara turn back, how come you’re here with me?”

She ran the scissors lightly along Pat’s arm. She pricked, once, in the hollow of her elbow. The scissors were too blunt to poke through. She applied more pressure. The skin turned yellow.

“You might want to hurry back before Amara turns around, hey?”

“I … Please don’t …”

“Go while you can, and your sister will be fine,” Nadi said.

“Pat!” Claudia shouted from a couple of feet away, over the heads of a rehearsing set of identically dressed patients. “Mr. Lopez wants to see you! We’re starting in five minutes!”

“Be there in a sec!” Nadi shouted. She looked back at Nolan and smiled Pat’s toothy grin. “I’ll see you soon.”

Nolan fought his way through the crowd, his eyes trained on the exit.

“Nolan!” Sarah Schneider said brightly. “I didn’t know you—”

Not now, he wanted to say, but the exit called to him, and the words didn’t come. He shoved past her, his eyes on that door, his mind back with Pat, and Sarah’s voice barely registered.

He’d meant to sneak by his parents. Sarah’s interruption had caught their attention, though. “Who was that girl? How’s Pat doing?” Mom touched Nolan’s shoulder as he passed. “We have seats over there.”

“I need to use the bathroom.”

“You’re going in the wrong direction. Are you having a seizure?”

“No—could you just—give me a minute?”

“Now? Can’t you wait until the break?” Some of the lights had gone out. A voice announced that the play was about to begin, and requested that everyone take their seats. A screech of the speakers caused the crowd to collectively wince, then laugh, because they were in a middle-school gym getting ready to watch a middle-school play, and the sun was shining, and they were in such good moods it hurt.

Nolan gripped fistfuls of his hair. He had to bring Amara to the palace. Now. Any moment, Nadi might peek at the crowd and see him lingering next to Mom.

“Nolan, just sit down,” Mom said, sounding stern now. “Oh, what are you doing to your hair ? It’s all messed up now—never mind. Grandma Pérez wanted to talk to you. Did you bring your report card like she asked?”

Anger bubbled up, the same way he’d felt it do so often in Amara’s body. It felt hot. Untamed. He couldn’t let it out. Couldn’t.

Walgreens, he told himself, but guilt no longer helped.

“It’s not like the play is that long,” Mom went on. “We’ll be home before you know it.”

Nolan shook his head, trying to think of a way out, trying to … He blinked. The world turned green, like Amara’s, and he saw a glimpse of Ilanne’s hunched form on the grass.

He hadn’t meant to do that. The pills were wearing off.

The headmaster walked onstage to test the microphone.

“Nolan!” Dad leaned toward him from his seat. “Sit down!”

Another blink, another flash of Amara’s world, and the second he was back in his own, the words spilled from his lips: “Leave me alone!” Too loud. People were watching. His parents, Grandma Pérez, Sarah. “Just—shut—up! For once!”

The headmaster fell silent. A couple of heads turned.

Mom reached for his arm, but he yanked it away, and with his head spinning and hot, Nolan stalked past the audience, out of the gym, and back into the sun.

Nolan didn’t have to announce himself to the palace guards. They took one look, saw the small Elig servant that Ruudde must’ve told them to be on the lookout for, and restrained his arms.

He let them. The faster Nadi saw that he’d returned, the better. He couldn’t let Pat down. He couldn’t let the pills wear off. On Earth, he’d walked straight to the pool—a five-minute walk from Pat’s school—and shut himself into a private changing room.

On the way there, he’d seen involuntary glimpses of Amara’s world over half a dozen times. Fractions of a second. Snippets of noise.

Just when he’d started to forget what it felt like.

“I hate that it had to come to this, Mr. Santiago,” Nadi said. She—and even seeing her in Ruudde’s body, it was so easy thinking of Ruudde as a she, now that Nolan knew—met Nolan in the courtyard. “I don’t like threatening people. It just seems to be the only thing that works.”

“You’re good at it,” Nolan said flatly once the guards released him. If he didn’t play the part of the beaten-down victim well enough, Nadi might suspect something.

It wasn’t hard. He felt beaten down plenty.

“Do I have to put you in a cell this time?”

“If you want to,” Nolan said.

Nadi thumped his shoulder. “You’re learning.”

They put Nolan in the guest room where he’d talked to Nadi for the first time, around the corner from the cell block. They wanted him close to Cilla.

A handful of dusty books lay on the windowsill. Amara studied them while Nolan lingered in the background. Every time he heard steps that might be Nadi’s or Jorn’s, he snapped into control. He couldn’t let them open the door to see Amara and no one else directing her movements. Amara had asked Nolan to do exactly that, since it’d keep up appearances that he was on Nadi’s side, but Nolan sensed her rage and helplessness every time. He could only sign a million apologies that helped her not one bit.

He wanted to go home to check on Pat—

—but he only dared sneak out for a few seconds at a time, standing up from the changing-room bench with shaky legs, taking his phone, deleting the missed calls, checking the texts. There were several, even though no one had followed him from the gym.

The oldest message was Dad’s. Nolan read it in between unwanted blinks to Amara’s world. Pat saw you run. She cried onstage. Come back, Nolan.

Then another one, sent ten minutes later. Tell us you’re all right.

Five minutes after that, Mom had sent one, too. Nolan, where are you?? We’re not angry. We’re worried. Please come back. We’ll call Dr. Campbell, Ok?

He texted them that he was safe, then texted Pat, I’m sorry about the play. And everything. Are you Ok? He wanted to explain what was happening, but his fingers hovered uselessly over the phone. Nadi might take over again and know exactly what he told Pat—

—so he went back. He clung to Amara’s world with all his might, from the books in her hands to the storm cover over the window. The pool would close soon, and he couldn’t afford to be woken up.

He’d never thought he’d try to get sucked in again.

Hours after his arrival at the palace, Nolan heard two short, sharp wails in the distance. The sign Amara and Ilanne had agreed on. The mages were ready to attack.

Nolan knocked on the door, then creaked it open. In the hallway outside his room, an unfamiliar guard looked up from her solitary card game. One hand went to her baton.

“May I talk to Ruudde?” Nolan signed.

“I’ll pass on a message. Anything else?”

Nolan shut the door. He counted on Nadi considering him a top priority. He was right: within minutes, Nadi stood in the doorway. “If you or Amara have another brilliant escape plan, don’t bother. I’ve placed a ward around the palace. No one crosses without my knowing about it.”

Nolan masked his reaction. Wards would make the mages’ job harder. Distracting Nadi just became even more important.

“So, what is it?” She straightened her topscarf. “I do have a job aside from babysitting you, kid.”

“Can you explain what we’re waiting for? I thought you wanted us gone as soon as possible.”

“We’re arranging a boat. Storms over the Gray Sea are slowing us down.”

Backlash. Or Ilanne buying time to gather the other mages. Judging by the signal from before, she’d been successful. Now Nolan just needed to keep Nadi busy while the mages infiltrated the palace. He needed to give Ilanne as much time as possible with Cilla.

“Is Cilla all right?” He didn’t have to feign his concern.

“Of course she is,” Nadi said irritably. “We’d need you if she weren’t.”

Nolan nodded, and he wondered how those movements came across now. Were they his or Amara’s? He’d never controlled her body this long. He didn’t know if he was becoming more like himself or more like her. Then—

—then Amara’s body sagged. Just for a moment. Just long enough for her breath to be delayed by a half second. Just long enough for Nolan to know he was running out of time.

Their roles were shifting.

When he regained control, his head felt light and the world alien. He grasped at straying thoughts and bundled them together. He had to keep going and keep up his part of the distraction. “Is Cilla eating?” he asked in a burst of signs.

“We’re not giving her much choice,” Nadi said. “Your pills are fading, aren’t they?”

What did “not much choice” mean? A third spell on top of the curse and anchor, massive spells to begin with, was unthinkable. Nadi had to be threatening her. Her favorite weapon.

“May I see her? It’ll help her to know Amara’s here.”

Nadi sighed. “You’ll see her when you leave together. But it might help, and it’s better to do it while you’re still in control.”

Nolan followed her to the cells, where Gacco stood guard. How long had it been? Did Gacco know anything beyond “keep the cursed girl alive at all costs”? If Nolan told the guards about Cilla, that could be another way to distract Nadi.

Those thoughts faded once Nolan saw Cilla in her cell. She sat on her mattress, reading a thin book. Her face looked slimmer, her normally round cheeks sunken closer to the bone. Her eyes looked deeper and darker. Her arms had thinned, too, traces of knobs visible around her wrist and elbows.

Nadi had said Cilla was eating. It couldn’t be much.

Nolan lost control for another second. It wouldn’t be long now.

“You brought her back,” Cilla said. The book slid from her hands. Next to Amara, Nadi shot forward, but the book landed safely next to Cilla’s feet. “You made a promise.” Cilla’s voice was weaker than before, but no less accusatory. “You said you wouldn’t—”

“Things change.” The words nauseated him, but he needed to stall. Jorn always took too long to notice his wards when he was in the inns, drinking his beer and cheering at long-legged dancers, so maybe if Nolan kept Nadi busy enough, she wouldn’t notice the mages intruding, either.

“Happy?” Nadi said.

Nolan spun. “You threatened my sister,” he said, flat and quick. He didn’t say it just for the sake of a distraction. He needed Cilla to see he’d had no choice. He shouldn’t care what she thought of him, but he couldn’t spend a lifetime in Amara’s body and not share her love and hate and more. “Of course I’m not happy. But I’ll do what I need to.”

“Wonderful.” Nadi seemed ready to leave.

“After I saw you that night, I kept reading my journals. I discovered something.” He took a deep breath, filling Amara’s lungs. “Your family is running out of money. They can’t keep up with the medical bills to keep you on life support.”

Nadi took a moment to let that sink in. “Nicely played. So you think I’ll go back to Earth to try to keep myself alive longer, and then you can—”

“No, no, no.” Nolan’s hands flapped at the air. “I talked to your family.”

“And how did you do that?”

“Nadia Trudeau.” It took a long time to spell the name, but Nolan finished it, down to the closest Dit version of the e-a-u letters that’d trip up every last person in this palace. He kept his eyes on Nadi.

“There’s no way for you to—”

“I talked to your son,” Nolan lied. “Jermaine misses you. It’s been over a decade since you left.”

Expressions flitted over Nadi’s face, too faint for Nolan to pin down. Nadi had said this world was worth leaving her family for, but that didn’t mean she didn’t miss them—or her life. She’d renamed her palace for a reason.

“He lives in Cape Town.” A guess. The article never mentioned it. But it meant more to talk about, more names to spell, and every second counted. “He has a daughter. Simona.”

“My sister.” Nadi still couldn’t settle on an expression. She stared at the ground, jaw set, eyes blank. “They were always close. He named her after my sister.”

“Simona’s two now. She likes”—what did two-year-olds like? The website gave him only so much to work with. Nolan thought back to seeing Pat grow up—“playing with plastic planes.” There was no word for planes in servant signs or Dit. P-L-EE-N-S, he tried, using the phonetic spelling, and said it out loud as best he could.

Gacco watched, confused and trying not to show it. Nolan glimpsed a key ring on his belt. Once Ilanne arrived, they could make a grab for it.

“Planes,” Nadi repeated. The word sounded odd from her mouth. Then, clipped: “Are you threatening them? I swear, if you’re threatening them—”

“I’m not!” Nolan stepped back. “I’m not. I just thought you might want to know.”

At least Nolan was used to lying through his teeth. Years of I’m not hallucinating anymore and No, this is different from the pain I used to have, these are just seizures and Yes, Dad, I’m feeling much better and Of course I don’t mind, do whatever makes you happy paid off.

“I wanted to remind you of your original offer.” Nolan tried to smile. He was used to that, too. “It’s not a threat. It’s a bribe. You’ve seen my life. I couldn’t get to South Africa even if I wanted. I just … if you could time Amara’s sleep so I can get some rest back home, make life a little easier for us …”

He felt his control torn away again, felt Amara’s body slump. The metal bars of Cilla’s cell pressed hard into her back. Amara was hesitantly settling back into her own limbs and mind, her thoughts creeping in at the edges of Nolan’s, but he pushed past them, snatched control again, and tried not to flinch at Nadi’s scrutiny. She stood, unmoving. Had he made things worse? If he’d screwed up—if he’d endangered Pat even more—but Nolan couldn’t grasp the thought. It shattered in his mind the moment he tried to contain it.

“If you have questions, I could talk to your family. Then you can visit Pat, and I’ll tell you what they said.” He was reaching now, the signs like filth on his hands. If Nadi wanted to talk to her family, she’d do it as herself or as Pat; she didn’t need Nolan as a go-between. But it didn’t matter. He needed to keep talking. “I’ll be your messenger. A trade. OK? Lorres said you made good deals. You’re reasonable.”

He didn’t think she saw his last words. Nadi’s head snapped up, and she stared past Nolan at a blank wall.

He recognized the look from Jorn’s face. Nadi had detected the mages.

Nolan had bought them a few minutes. But if Nadi figured out he’d been stalling, there was no place for Pat to hide. Nadi could possess her anytime, anywhere. He watched her with burning eyes. Please, please …

“Gacco. Cell keys.” Nadi extended her hand.

Gacco didn’t get up from his bench fast enough.

“The keys!” she shouted. Gacco tossed them, and Nolan watched them flicker and spin in the gaslight. Nadi snatched them from the air. “Whatever happens, stay here,” she said, already backing away. “Get the servant back to the guest room. And guard the girl!” She pointed the keys at Cilla.

“What’s going on?” Cilla said with a voice so flat Nolan doubted she expected to be acknowledged, let alone answered.

Nadi was already running down the hall, her boots smacking hard stone, her gemstones clanging together. She’d detected the mages too soon. The cell keys were out of reach. No sign of Ilanne.

Already, things were going wrong.