Page 193 of Daughter of No Worlds

And then I turned her face and pressed my mouth against hers — because I was desperate, because it was the only thing I could think to do — and I prayed to any god that was listening that it was not a kiss goodbye.

Chapter Seventy-Six

Tisaanah

My mother’s face became a desecrated corpse, Serel’s screamed into Vos’s disfigured features, Esmaris’s rose and melted into a demon in the shadows. The scars on my back multiplied and opened and seeped and healed and split, over and over and over again.

I watched my family being whipped to death in the mines. I watched Serel crumble beneath falling marble, just as that boy had at the slaving hub. I watched Max’s perfect face dissolve into ugly decay under my touch.

The silver threads of my mind wrapped tighter and tighter around me, binding me in my ugly past and my ugly future like a fly caught in a spider’s web.

You could never do this. You brought death to everyone that you’ve ever loved. You let them sacrifice for you and you repay them this way?

I didn’t know if it was Reshaye’s voice or my own.

I saw only flashes of what was happening out there — flashes of blue and orange and flames and rot. With each glimmer of sight, I desperately tried to free myself, only to be pulled back even deeper than before.

The web of my mind was going dim, consumed by that blue fire.

It was all going to hell. It was going to end this way. With Reshaye, using my body to kill, to destroy. And all I could think, between the terror and the nightmares, was that I hoped Max would kill me before it happened.

Then, I saw another flash. An image — a memory, though not one that belonged to me — skittered through my head. A little girl with long black hair holding out a butterfly in a jar.

Did you know that when caterpillars make a cocoon, their bodies totally dissolve?Kira. Max’s sister.

They become nothing, before they become something else.

And all at once, the idea hit me. I was fighting and fighting to getoutof my own head, but Reshaye livedwithinme. It pulled from a deeper level of magic. And some part of that was inside of me, even if it was buried far beneath my consciousness. Even if I had to claw through the pits of darkness to get to it.

The threads pulled tighter, calling me, strangling me.

It will kill you!a part of me screamed.

But I didn’t give myself time to listen to my fear. When the next wave of terror came for me, I hurled myself into the darkness.

* * *

I openedmy eyes to a vat of dust-scattered ink and pain so intense that my vision throbbed.

The world solidified. Split. A sky. And a ground. And a horizon line.

Plains, I realized. I stood in the center of silent plains, miles and miles of nothing but faintly waving grass. Moonlight cast silver shadows across their wheat-frayed tips and wildflower petals. Their movements were odd, choppy, like the breeze was skipping and lurching. The flowers bloomed and wilted and died in strange succession, backwards, forwards, again and again.

I looked down at my hands to see that they, too, were changing. Like the boundaries between my form and the world were strange, ill-defined. I was naked, but my skin bled out into the sky like the translucent flesh of a jellyfish.

All around me, bleeding threads of light reached from the ground into the sky.

Only one, far in the distance, was searing violet, plunging all the way through the ground through a vicious weeping tear. One pure streak of magic.

Max.

I knew it immediately. The only other person who would be drawing from magic so deep. And beyond that, I felt him — an echo of a presence that, by now, I knew as well as my own.

And then, looming over me, I felt another presence that I knew too well.

I lifted my chin, up to the sky. Realized that there was a stream of light pouring fromme, too. But mine clotted above me into a cloud of bloody crimson.

And it hadeyes.

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