That night, we slept in the forest between the roots of an enormous tree, the biggest I'd ever seen. Link's knee was bandaged in my spare T-shirt, and his arm was in a sling made from part of my Jackson sweatshirt. Ridley lay on the opposite side of the tree with her eyes wide open, staring up at the sky. I wondered if she was staring at the Mortal sky now. She looked exhausted, but I didn't think she was going to get any sleep.
I wondered what she was thinking, if she regretted helping us. Had Ridley really lost her powers?
How would it feel to be Mortal when you had always been something else, something more? When you had never felt the “powerlessness of human existence,” as Mrs. English had said in class last year. She had been talking about H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, but right now Ridley seemed just as invisible.
Could you be happy if you woke up and suddenly you were no one special?
Could Lena? Is that what life with me would feel like? Hadn't Lena suffered enough for me already?
Like Ridley, I couldn't fall asleep, but I didn't want to stare at the sky. I wanted to see what was in Lena's notebook. A part of me knew it was an invasion of her privacy, but I also knew there might be something in those crumpled pages that could help us. After about an hour, I convinced myself reading her notebook was for the greater good, and I opened it.
At first it was hard to read, since my cell phone was my only light source. After my eyes adjusted, Lena's handwriting stared back at me from between the blue lines. I had seen the familiar print often enough in the months since her birthday, but I didn't think I would ever get used to it. It was such a sharp contrast to the girly script she wrote in before that night. It surprised me even more to see actual writing, after so many months of headstone photographs and black designs. Dark Caster designs, like the ones on her hands, were scribbled in the margins. But the first few entries were dated only days after Macon's death, when she was still writing.
emptycrowded daynights all the same (more or less) fear (less and more) afraid waiting for truth to strangle me in my sleep / if i ever slept
Fear (less and more) afraid. I understood the words, because that's how she had acted. Fearless and more afraid. Like she had nothing to lose but was afraid to lose it.
I flipped ahead and stopped when a date caught my eye. June 12th. The last day of school.
darkness hides and i think i can hold her / smother her in the palm of my hand but when i look my hands are empty quiet as her fingers fold around me
I read it over and over. She was describing the day at the lake, the day she had taken things too far. The day she could have killed me. Who was the “her”? Sarafine?
How long had she been fighting it? When did it start? The night Macon died? When she started wearing his clothes?
I knew I should close the notebook, but I couldn't. Reading her words was almost like hearing her thoughts again. I hadn't known them in such a long time, and I wanted to so badly. I turned each page, looking for the days that haunted me.
Like the day of the fair —
mortal hearts and mortal fears / something they can share i untie him like a sparrow
Freedom — that's what sparrows meant to a Caster.
All along I thought she was trying to be free from me, but really she was trying to set me free. As if loving her was a cage I couldn't escape.
I closed the notebook. It hurt too much to read it, especially when Lena was so far away, in all the ways that mattered.
A few feet away, Ridley was still staring blankly into the Mortal stars. For the first time, we saw the same sky.
Liv was wedged between two roots, with me on one side and Link on the other. After I found out the truth about what happened on Lena's birthday, I guess I expected my feelings for Liv to disappear. But even now I found myself wondering. If things were different, if I had never met Lena, if I had never met Liv …
I spent the next few hours watching Liv. When she slept, she looked peaceful, beautiful. Not Lena's kind of beautiful, something different. She looked content — like a sunny day, a cold glass of milk, an unopened book before you cracked the binding. There was nothing tortured about her. She looked the way I wanted to feel.
Mortal. Hopeful. Alive.
When I finally drifted off, I felt that way, just for a minute….
Lena was shaking me. “Wake up, Sleepyhead. We have to talk.” I smiled and pulled her into my arms. I tried to kiss her, but she laughed and ducked away. “This isn't that kind of a dream.”
I sat up and looked around. We were in Macon's bed in the Tunnels. “All my dreams are that kind of dream, L. I'm almost seventeen.”
“This is my dream, not yours. And I've only been sixteen for four months.”
“Won't Macon be mad if we're here?”