He rolled his eyes a little. “Are you going to revolt on me, little creation?”
“I’ll tell you a story. Just a little story, so that you understand the consequences of what you’re doing and what you’ve already done, since you seem to think that you’re exempt from the natural order of things. There are many creators in the world: from those who tend to their gardens and bake in their kitchens, to those who build and paint and sing. There isn’t any doubt that these people create, but there is speculation about the quality, the rightness of their creations. The one thing a creator must always learn is that, while living things can be controlled, the outcome of those manipulations cannot be. You can bend people and force people and manipulate them as much as you want, but you can’t control the result; or the resulting person. That isn’t in your power. Maybe you think torturing your son is a good way to determine who is bonded to him, but by torturing him, you created a person who doesn’t care about consequences when it comes to himself.
“Now, because of you, there isn’t much that Silas won’t do, to protect the people he cares about—especially from you. If he cares at all about his Atmá, you can be sure that he will die trying to keep her away from you: that’s on you, Weston. That’s your fault.”
He pulled a deep breath into his lungs as I finished talking, his chest expanding and his eyes narrowing. For a moment, I was afraid that I had said too much, but eventually, he leaned forward, resting his forearms over his knees.
“There isn’t anything that you can tell me about Silas that I don’t already know, Miss Black. But you… you’re a different story. Do you think I’m creating a monster out of you, hmm? Is that it?”
I stopped to think about it, but found that it was almost impossible to be that objective about myself. I simply didn’t know. I didn’t know whether I had been changed beyond repair by all of Weston’s games, and I didn’t know if any of the changes were good or not. I also didn’t know what to attribute to Weston, and what to attribute to the messenger.
“What do you expect me to do, Weston?” I was suddenly very tired. “I left your sons, they can’t keep me away from you anymore, I went to the Komnata, I’ve done everything you asked, and with a bomb around my neck no less. So, what do you want?”
“What?” He made to shoot off the seat before remembering that he was in a car, resulting in him perching on the very edge, tension lining his limbs. “What bomb?”
I sat back and ran my fingers over the collar, lighting up the word. “My stalker is back. He told me to get out of Maple Falls.”
Weston frowned, sitting back in his seat. He was looking right at my collar, but I had a feeling that he had slipped into thoughts of something beyond us.
“The Klovoda have had agents attempting to track this person down for months now,” he admitted, narrowing his eyes even more. “It’s almost as though he doesn’t actually exist.”
“He does,” I insisted. “He’s…” It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Weston that the messenger was my twin, but if there was one thing that I had learned in the last year, it was to keep my secrets to myself unless I was sure of their reception. “He’s… very real,” I said instead.
Weston continued frowning, but eventually he pulled his phone out and dialed a number.
“Jack? We need you for something…”
I turned my head into my hands as Weston spoke, my headache returning with a vicious shove that almost knocked me back into the seat. I gathered from the conversation that Jack’s Atmá power could somehow help with preventing my head from going boom, but I was finding it hard to concentrate on eavesdropping properly. Weston must have understood that my headache was back, for he didn’t resume our conversation after his phone call. We drove the rest of the way in silence, pulling off the main roads into sprawling country lanes as the civilisation around us seemed to fade away once again. I was now convinced that the Klovoda or Weston bought up the plots of land surrounding their most important landmarks so that they could enjoy seclusion.