“Why did Tila send me to you, Mia?” I ask again. “Did Tila tell you anything? I need to know. If you care even a little for us, please, please tell me, or we’re both good as dead.”
“She found the link,” the figure of Tila says, twisting her torso back and forth, child-like, the green sequins on her dress twinkling. “The link that no one is to know. He is the red one, the fair one, the handsome one. From Earth, and now he goes back to the Earth. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Changing faces like kaleidoscopes.” My false sister laughs, high and insane. It’s almost exactly what Sal said Tila said in Zenith, just after he found her with Vuk’s body.
As I recall the crime scene, it starts to blossom around the figure of my sister. Blood seeps up from the floorboards, the coffee table grows like a mushroom, the broken glass scatters. The colors are so bright and saturated, the real world seems a pale echo. Tila reaches her hands up to cover her ears, rocking back and forth, her mouth open in a silent scream.
“This is you, too,” Mia whispers, watching it with awe.
“Go away!” I shout at the blood and glass. It stays, feeding on my anger.
Nothing happens. The anger and fear threaten to choke me.
I have to push them away.
I let out a breath and close my eyes. I try to let go of the urge for violence. I manage to find that small center for self Mana-ma always pushed us toward. I thrust all emotion away. Slowly, so slowly, the crime scene fades and disappears. I feel the briefest flash of triumph before I turn my attention to Mia. I no longer have the same desire to hurt her. Thank God.
“Tila’s words make no sense,” I tell her. False Tila quoted from the Bible, not Mana-ma’s Good Book. Once, that would have offended me. Now I grind my teeth in frustration, gripping Mia’s shoulder harder, until if this were reality she’d bruise.
“Who’s that man you were talking about?”
Mia starts to shudder. She’s taken control of her Vervescape again, but she’s unstable and it reflects in the world around us. The ground cracks and shudders. Lightning blasts outside the glass window. Thorned trees grow from the cracks in the concrete, slinking along the ground and up toward the ceiling. The trees bear fruit, but in horror, I realize they’re small humans, like thorny mandrakes. They reach their barbed hands toward us, dark mouths open in silent screams. Little red lights pulse from the bottoms of their throats, as red as Mia’s anger. I try to push them back, but they’re too strong.
The scalpel disappears from my hand, and Mia wriggles away from my grasp. False Tila is trapped by looping roots. She twists and turns, trying to free herself.
“Taema!” Her eyes bore right into me, and I can’t help but think that she is my actual sister, here somehow in this nightmare.
The demons grasp Tila, their wooden roots digging into her flesh. Black blood seeps from her wounds. Next to me, Mia cackles. She’s euphoric, fully caught in the throes of the drug.
I struggle on the floor to free my sister—even though rationally I know she’s not real, I can’t leave her. My hands are soon slick with dark blood. Mia attacks the mandrake-demons, plunging knives deep into their bellies until the lights in their throats go out.
The faces of the figures are changing and with a sickening drop of my stomach, I realize that many of them are the faces of the men and women from Mana’s Hearth. Changing faces like kaleidoscopes. Is this what Mia meant? She still hates so many people there, all these years later. She never told us why she left the Hearth, and it was never spoken of while we were growing up in the redwood grove. We’d thought it rude to ask.
I’ve seen the darkness that threatened to overwhelm Mia, as she tried to escape Zeal only for its tendrils to delve deep into her again. Now Verve has her in its grasp, and it’s worse. Will she wake up, angry and enraged, still thirsting for blood?
Clutching the facsimile of my twin, I can’t help but fear that maybe I missed the darkness in her, too. Or in myself, because aren’t we the same?
Mia comes back to herself, just a little. “You should thank your sister.”
“Why?”
“She’s protecting you. Or trying to.”
“I don’t need protecting.” Even though it’s a dream, my body reacts as it would in the real world. My ears feel like I’m going through a tunnel at high speed, and my vision darkens to a little point. I am filled with more rage than I’ve ever felt. I want to hurt Mia with that same, shocking intensity I felt before. My sister came to her, confided in her, and Mia ratted her out to someone. If it’s the Ratel, then my cover is blown before it’s even begun. If it’s not the Ratel, then we have someone else to worry about. Perhaps it was Vuk, and that’s why my sister killed him. To keep him silent.
I know nothing.