Chapter 58—Terra

We leave the room and make it down the hall before Jesse stumbles and almost falls.

“I'm glad you're coming,” I tell Kahn. “I’m going to need a hand.”

Kahn and I each step underneath one of Jesse's arms. Together, we walk out of the castle proper, through the courtyard, and to the front wall. Once the guards lower the drawbridge, we walk through the gate, and down the steps. Several dozen men follow us through with crates, as I requested, but once they place them on the ground behind me, they practically sprint back into the courtyard.

I stop a few dozen paces in front of the drawbridge, which is already rising behind us.

I call out. “Devlin!”

Silence.

“Devlin! I'm here to respond to your offer. Come out and face me.”

We wait.

Seconds turn into minutes, and then those minutes pile up.

Sweat pours down Jesse's face where he sags against Kahn. I'm about to apply some pressure—I’m not sure how much time Jesse has—when Devlin appears. The ranks of soldiers shift as he walks toward us. He looks very small from this far away, but it's definitely him. Here on Terra, Devlin has longer hair, pulled back into a knot, but his eyes and his mouth and everything else are the same—he’s every bit as imposing.

“Duncan sent you.” Devlin rubs the bristle on his chin. “I'm surprised. It was the right move, which he so rarely makes.”

“Are you planning to kill me?” I ask. “That's what my father believes.”

Devlin steps back, his brows drawn in confusion. “Why would I kill you? You can't fulfill that prophecy until you know everything. I doubt you've even seen the original. I think I have the only copy.”

“Why are you the only one who has it?”

“I trained with your father, you know. I courted your mother before she ever clapped eyes on him. This exordium thing is infuriating. You can't fight it, you can't do anything about it. You might have been my child, had things gone differently, had the laws not been what they are.”

I shudder at that thought.

“You don't like me, and that's okay. You don't have to like me as long as you fulfill your purpose.”

I'm getting sick of people telling me what I need to do, and if I hear the word prophecy one more time. . . “Go ahead, then. Tell me.”

Devlin opens his mouth to talk, but Jesse cries out at the same time. “Alora!”

I turn back to look at him, but he's lying slack, and Kahn lowers him gently to the ground.

“What's going on, Kahn?”

He shakes his head. “I don't know. I think he passed out.”

I rush to Jesse's side, feeling for a pulse. I can't find one, so I reach out with another sense. I close my eyes again and feel for his heartbeat. I've done this before, and it didn't go well, but this time it's different. This time, Jesse's different. It's faint, but his heart still beats. On Earth, I felt his physical body and his heart. Here, I feel his consciousness, but it's surrounded by energy filaments, like a spider's web that holds together the pieces of who he is.

I open my eyes and look up at Kahn, and then I turn to face Devlin. He glances at Jesse with pity.

“Your brother's not doing well. I'd say he has an hour left at most.”

I reach out with my newfound senses for Devlin, a bundle of red thoughts and black feelings. His spiderweb of energy looks and feels different than Jesse’s, different than Kahn’s. I push beyond, to the mass of people behind Devlin, many of them holding weapons pointed in my direction. I feel my father's men standing behind the gate. I feel the strands of power, spun together to make the drawbridge and the moat. I pull on the energy around Devlin and I realize that I can unwind him as easily as the bushes or blades of grass beside his boot. I could pull him apart in pieces and the world would be rid of him, once and for all.

I want to do it, but something distracts me.

Jesse's filaments are unwinding on their own. That’s the Wasting—a slow unwinding of someone’s filaments, the energy signature that holds them together, that makes them who and what they are. It takes time, but it begins to unravel once the person dies on Earth, and then. . . they’re gone. Forever.

Which means I'm all out of time.

I take a deep breath and step back. I place one hand on Kahn and one on Jesse. “This might be scary. Try to hang on.”

I turn back toward Devlin and I Lift all ten thousand of the barbed metal shafts the blacksmiths worked through the night to manufacture. I think of the nails, the bed frames, everything that went into these, and I realize that they wasted their time, because everything here is pure energy. All the objects were a lie holding me back. I Lift a piece of rock from the ground and slowly remold it into a metal shaft. I feel the smile on my lips, but Kahn's watching, and his expression isn't a smile.

His eyes widen with fear, and his jaw drops. “What did you do?”

I shake my head. “No time to explain.”

I cast about for the lives of the soldiers. I can’t thoroughly search the intentions of every one of them, but I can sense which are dark and which are light. I can sense which tangles of thought and combinations of feelings are good and which are dark and twisty. I isolate the bad ones easily, and suddenly I'm ready.

Devlin's eyes fill with fear when he looks at the ten thousand projectiles I've Lifted. The more I probe at him, the less I understand. While his intentions are dark, those strands are entwined with light ones. He's not entirely evil, but he'll try to stop me, and I won't let a half-light and half-dark man prevent me from saving my brother.

“Wait.” Devlin jogs toward me, his hands out. “You don't understand what you're doing.”

“Oh, I think I do.” I hurl those shafts at every dark man in front of me and feel them pierce almost every heart. I hurl a dozen of them at Devlin to be safe.

He blocks them all.

I gnash my teeth, but I don’t have time to deal with him right now.

It’s time for me to go back to Earth, but not by sleeping. Not this time.

I need to go back wide awake.

When I try to tug backward, when I try to fall away from this place, everything on Terra resists. I crouch down and pull Jesse over against my chest, close to my heart. I pull his bundle of light thoughts, good intentions, and shining light against me, and then for the first time ever, instead of going to sleep, I intentionally shift away from Terra. At first, I feel as though I've merely stepped away from a room. I see the people that surrounded me, gasping at the empty space where I used to be. Everyone's face fills with shock, fear, and confusion when I disappear.

Everyone except Kahn.

He sees me, even here, on an invisible pathway leading away from Terra.

Now that I'm not standing next to him, I see that a bright, pulsing light fills Kahn, a light I couldn't possibly contain myself. I don't want to leave him, so I tug on the filaments that are Kahn, but it feels like pulling on a semi-truck, or a dumpster full of concrete. Reluctantly, I release him, because Earth beckons.

I let myself go and fall backward. I realize that I've done this a million times without being aware of the journey. Every night when I go to sleep, I travel the same path. My mind knows what to do, but this time, there’s something dragging against me, a resistance that increases as I move toward Earth.

It must be Kahn, fighting my plan to take Jesse.

But when I glance back, it’s clear that Kahn’s following me—on his own. He isn't pulling on me, or even connected to me.

So what's the difficulty? I look around, but everywhere I look, there’s only blank space. Empty nothingness. Except for my arms. In my arms, I'm carrying Jesse. His soul in my arms weighs an eternity and pulls like a mountain. Bringing him along feels like trying to contain the ocean. He’s trying to collapse, his filaments and threads dissolving into raw energy.

I know I ought to let his energy flow into me like it keeps trying to do, but I can't.

He's dead on Earth. If this energy dissipates, Jesse's gone, so I funnel more energy into him from my core, and I brace myself.

The farther I travel, the harder it becomes to bring Jesse along. His filaments curl and twist. His thoughts and feelings tug and writhe. I wrap the energy from myself around him like a cocoon to shelter him, and I shove harder. I don't care what it takes. I can do it. As Earth draws near, Kahn veers off. I try calling to him, but my voice doesn't work here. Also, the resistance changes and I forget Kahn entirely as I face a new challenge.

Jesse's body bucks and kicks and I shake with the effort of funneling enough energy into him to keep him from dissolving. My muscles contract painfully, my skin melts and reforms. I pull harder and my own filaments strain, my body beginning to unwind as I span the last bit of space separating me from Earth. In the end, I need more energy—I need more power. So I reach out into the void and I pull.

Like drinking a milkshake, the energy responds to my demand. Lights on Earth, lights all around me, flicker in response to my tugging, but they don’t blink out. And then finally, I reach my destination. I’m back home. On Earth.

I'm terrified to look down into my arms, not sure what I'll see.

But when I finally do, it's Jesse. He looks fine, normal even. His hair is long, but it’s shiny and smooth and just as it was on Terra.

I sigh and collapse, releasing Jesse, and open my eyes. I close my eyes and reopen them—but nothing changes. I've done it.

Jesse lies next to me, smack in the middle of John’s king-size bed.