He pushed me again, and he laughed as I fell again. “Well, they seem to fail you a little bit, my dear.”
The girl whimpered. She was pale now, and the amount of blood in the bowl was growing.
“She controls air,” Calix told me. “I have found many powers of water, and air, and a few of fire. You’re the first earth. I wonder if that is the limit of these powers, or if there are more.” He looked at me like he expected me to answer and shrugged. “No matter. I’ll discover eventually.”
“You are a monster,” I whispered, shaking my head as I looked at the girl. “She’s not even a person to you anymore. She’s an insect whose wings you tear off.”
“I am a god,” he growled at me. “And this—unlocking the secrets of this damnation—will not only please the God but it will prevent my enemies from coming for me. I will stop them all, Shalia. I will have all the power, and no one will question my reign again.”
“You are making your enemies,” I told him. “And losing your soul in the process. You don’t see what you’ve done? You killed our—you are making your own prophecy come true. Your god will never forgive the torture of innocents. Do you think Danae will, when she finds out? What about your mother? She would be ashamed—”
“Do not mention my mother with your filthy mouth!” he roared, and everyone in the room jumped. “You know nothing about her!” he screamed, hurling his finger at me but not touching me.
The sounds of harsh, fast breathing filled the room, and I turned back to the girl. Her skin was disturbingly pale, and she was breathing hard, sweat breaking out on her gray forehead.
“Calix, she’s dying,” I told him. “Stop!”
“What?” she whined. She looked to the quaesitori, and blood kept flowing out of her arm, dripping into the bowl. “No! No, please!”
Tears rushed out of me as I reached for my power, but it wasn’t there. I tried to think of my family and Galen, but every good memory was stained with heartbreak, and I couldn’t call my power to my hands.
No one moved, and within moments her confusion and anxiety melted away. Her eyes went half lidded, and her breathing was still too rapid, like a tiny, frightened animal.
“Calix, stop,” I begged.
He turned to me, wiping tears from my cheeks. “Your power, not your tears, will save her life, Shalia.”
Her body went limp, and still several minutes passed before the blood stopped dripping.
Calix lifted his shoulders. “Too late, it seems.” He pointed to the blood, and one of the quaesitori picked the bowl up and brought it down the hallway. Two guards came forward and took her body away.
Calix followed the quaesitori down the hallway, and I was left there, chained and staring at the table where they had murdered a girl without thought or care, like blowing out a candle just to see the trail of smoke it would leave.
Alive
The next time the guards let us go down to the river to bathe, I could barely hold myself up. I stumbled, and Iona caught me, wrapping her arm around my waist and pulling my arm around her neck.
The contact rushed through me, and I looked at her. “Did you feel that?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Has that happened before?” I whispered.
She shook her head.
As we walked, I felt stronger, her healing power just like Kata’s. The cuts on my wrist scabbed over, and she held her hand forward. The redness in the stumps was gone. “Healing?” she whispered.
I showed her my wrist. “Yes. If you can control your powers,” I whispered, “and heal some of us to do the same, we might be able to get out of here.”
She pulled out from under my arm. “Don’t say that. They’ll hear you.”
“Iona—”
“No,” she said vehemently. “I can’t. Don’t ever ask me to.”
I wanted to change her mind, to convince her that her power could save us all. But I knew I couldn’t guarantee her safety. How could I justify her risk? So I said, “Very well. But thank you, for what you did.”
She moved farther from me, putting her head down.
As we took our clothes off and went into the water, I cleaned myself and saw no new blood coming from me.
I went still in the river, shivering and staring at the cloth, without any red stripes on it. “No,” I gasped, and cleaned harder. Still, no new blood came from me, and I slipped to my knees in the shallow water, clutching the cloth to me.
I felt the weight of stares on me, but I didn’t pay attention until Iona knelt in front of me. I was rocking now, moving back and forth, trying to find some way to breathe around the horrible, huge pain in my chest. Iona touched my arm, and with the rush of healing, something broke inside me.
Curling around my knees until I almost drowned myself, I sobbed. She was gone. Nothing was left of her, not even a little trail of blood between my legs.
I had lost my daughter, my family, my whole heart. My faith, and my way.
The guards didn’t take me from my room for a long time, and I had no way of knowing how much time had passed. They fed us, but either the intervals were irregular or I was losing my understanding of time. There were no new screams. There were murmured words about how the blood hadn’t worked, and the quaesitori suggesting solutions that I barely understood, something about the freshness of the blood, a way to bind vein to vein.
The next time the guards took me to bathe, I didn’t see Calix anywhere. I hadn’t heard his voice either, and as they sent me back to my cell untouched, I wondered if he had left.
They stopped feeding me and gave me only water. I had no idea how many days passed, only that my power didn’t return and they didn’t hurt me. Locked in my cell, I heard Dara as they continued to test her, making her scream until the room blazed full of light and fire.
One morning Iona came to me while we were bathing, catching my hand in her own. My body drank in her power, giving me strength where I had none. “I can’t heal the others,” she whispered to me. “I’ve tried. You pull it from me, but I don’t know how to do it on my own.” She met my eyes. “But he said—he said you took down a mountain. Is that true?”
I shook my head. “In a way. But I can’t even feel my power anymore. It’s not just that I’m hurt; it’s gone.”
She jumped away from me, looking at her hand and frowning, then shaking it.
“What is it?” I asked.
She looked at her hand for a moment more. “I don’t know. When I was touching you, something … jumped. Do you know what that is?”
I felt broken, and weary, and empty. “No,” I told her. “I know almost nothing about these powers.”
“But—”
“If I knew, my family wouldn’t be dead. My baby wouldn’t be—” I halted, shaking my head. I moved away from her. “I don’t know anything about these powers, Iona.”
She sighed, and left me alone.