He closes his eyes, his head slumping. “You have everything you need to fix it.”
“But Phineas—?I don’t want to fix it.” I lay my hand on top of his shriveled one. “I’ve found a way to make it useful. The Curse is your legacy. It’s going to take care of me.”
Even after you’re gone.
I tighten my fingers around the vials in my pocket. The Curse will keep on taking, each time breeding more despair. Making people desperate for the kind of Peace that only I can provide.
Phineas starts coughing so much that he can barely speak. But he’s trying to tell me something, so I grab a piece of paper and pen from his desk, knocking everything else to the floor in my haste. I place the paper in front of him, and he writes in a spasming hand, so jagged I can hardly read it,
“The Curse is not my legacy, Stefen,” he writes. “You are.”
I bury Phineas myself. Under the birdfeeders I’d strung along the house, in the loamy soil he loved. Next to the cliffs where we had sat and watched the ocean. A place I will never need a map to find.
For the first time, I am giving something precious back to the earth rather than taking it out.
When the sun rises harsh and glaring in the sky, I stand under the shower and let the scalding hot water wash the dirt of his grave from my skin. Some of it remains under my fingernails. I leave it there.
I pack my carved wooden bird with a new syringe, several empty vials, my pouches of Hypnosis and Tempest Variants, and the gun I find in Phineas’s drawer. The Stone can no longer save Phineas. Now I will get it for me.
The train horn calls to me as I near the station. The sound of something ending, something else about to begin.
“Where to?” the ticket agent asks.
“Sterling,” I say. I push a handful of folded bills toward him. “I’m going home.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Sisters Tournament—?Opening Day
March 6, 1943
Why, I wonder as I look out at the endless, undulating faces of the tournament crowd, had I ever thought this would be a good idea?
The first day of the tournament is blue and warm, with the promise of spring. Everything seems loud and alive after the muffled stillness of winter. I shield my eyes from the sun and pull at the bottom of my uniform shirt. It’s a crisp white, with a single silver and red patch embroidered over my heart. I skipped the opening ceremonies to warm up, and Beas came to find me, brandishing a kohl liner.
“Good,” she’d said, lining my eyes. “Now they look like steel.”
I step out onto the grass before my event and look for her. She’s halfway up the stands, sitting next to George. She lifts her fingers to her mouth and whistles. I resist the urge to feel the knot of my ugly ear and instead wipe my palms inside the pockets of my uniform.
The school band plays a medley of the Sisters’ fight songs under a dusting of Variants as I make my way to the center of the field, fervently hoping that Genevieve’s good-luck breakfast doesn’t make a second appearance. I’m fairly sure the only thing worse than crashing and burning at my event would be upchucking in front of the greater population of three towns.
Sterling applauds for me, its first Stars competitor in years, and my eyes flit through the stands. George gives me a deadpan salute. Eliza is in the front row, clapping politely without a smile. Will is a few rows behind her, sitting with Carter and Chase. I flush beet red, remembering the feel of his mouth on mine, and quickly look away from him. I spot Mrs. Mackelroy, wearing dark glasses and weakly clapping while she sips a bottle of Coca-Cola. It’s strange how quickly these faces have become so familiar. The Fitzpatricks. The Foggs. Members of the Council.
When I find Dr. and Mrs. Cliffton and Miles, I wave, and my eye suddenly catches a mark on my arm: a small heart, drawn with Miles’s sure hand, just inside the crook of my elbow.
I stare at that heart for long enough until I remember how to breathe again.
My competitors flank me on the field: Shirley Beaudry from Sheffield, and Margeaux Templeton, who enters to the most raucous applause of all. Her uniform matches mine except that her patch is threaded with gold and purple. She wears a headband covered with tiny sparkling golden stars, and she seems shorter than I remembered from the Harvest Fair. She waves dutifully at her section of the stands, but she steals a few nervous glances at the Sterling crowd. At my friends. Almost exactly where Beas and George are sitting.
I narrow my eyes, instantly on guard. I watch Margeaux more closely as she takes her place on the field. She sneaks another glance. Why does she keep looking there? What could possibly be drawing her attention back, again and again?
And suddenly, in the bright sunlight, under the watchful eyes of almost everyone in Sterling, I understand what George doesn’t. It’s the way Margeaux’s hand subconsciously finds her hair, the way she looks up without trying to appear that she is doing it, the studied nonchalance I’ve seen in Will when he is trying to hide the fact that something is hurting him.
Despite my nerves, I fight the urge to burst out laughing. George has completely misread the reason behind Margeaux Templeton’s glares at the Harvest Fair. She doesn’t hate him—?it’s the opposite.
The trouble is how difficult it can be to tell the difference sometimes.
But there is no more time to consider this. “Competitors,” the announcer says, “take your places.”
I steal one last glance at my ink heart and step up to the throwing line.
Shirley and I go first. Within five minutes we’ve each zipped our three Stars through the air. I watch her and she watches me, and by the end of the first round it’s clear that we are a fairly even match.
Then there is Margeaux.
Her Stars are custom cast in Corrander gold and purple, and they sing through the air, cutting a path directly to the target and leaving a metallic echo in their wake. My second throws are solid, but my Stars seem to hang heavily by comparison. They all find the target except for the last—?an outlier that feels wild leaving my hand. It bounces from the target rather than sticking and drops me even further behind Margeaux’s established thirty-point lead.
I look up at the scoreboard and force myself to take a deep breath. Shirley leads me by ten points, a slim margin to hold for the final round. But Margeaux’s score is fifty points beyond that, and I have only three more chances to catch her. My blood courses with adrenaline. I’ve spent too many hours practicing, sweating, aching, dreaming, to lose like this. I have one more chance to make those months of work worth it.