Chapter 66 Chapter 66

Chapter 66 Chapter 66

Isla's POV 

I had been waiting for the right moment for two days and I was running out of patience.

It wasn't like me. I was usually the one who could wait the longest, who could sit with something uncomfortable and not move until the timing was right. Twilight was the one who acted on instinct and I was the one who planned. That was how we worked. But something about watching that face, Isma's face, moving around our camp every day and eating with us and sleeping beside us was doing something to my ability to stay still and quiet about it.

I chose the morning of the third day.

We had stopped to eat and Devonye had gone to find water and Twilight was checking the map again for the fourth time that morning, her finger tracing routes that somehow never got us anywhere closer. Isma was sitting across from me sharpening a blade she had picked up somewhere and I watched her hands and thought about what I was going to do.

I was going to give her a memory.

Not just any memory. The kind that only Isma and I shared, the kind that had never been spoken out loud to anyone else, not even our closest friends, the kind that lived in the space between two people who grew up side by side and knew each other the way you only knew someone when you had seen them at their worst and stayed anyway.
"Do you remember the river?" I said.

She looked up at me. "What river?"

"You know which one." I said, keeping my voice light, keeping everything about me easy and unthreatening. 

"The one behind the east wall when we were children. You and me and nobody else."

Something moved across her face. Calculation. Quick and subtle but I had been watching her for days now and I caught it.

"Of course." She said. "We used to go there when things got bad."

I nodded slowly. "What did we call it."

She didn't answer immediately and that pause, that small fraction of a second where her eyes went somewhere else, was the only answer I needed.

"Our place." She said, her face filled with something I couldn't lay my hands on.

I looked at her.

Our place was not what we called it. What we called it was something stupid and small and ours, a word we made up when we were nine years old that meant nothing to anyone who hadn't been there the day we made it up and everything to the two of us ever since.

I had never told another living person what that word was. Not once.

She got it wrong.

I kept my face completely still.

"Right." I said. "Our place."

I stood up slowly and stretched like I was just getting up to move around and then I walked around the fire toward where Twilight was crouched over the map and I crouched down beside her and kept my voice low enough that it didn't carry.

"She got it wrong." I said.

Twilight looked up at me.

"The memory I gave her. She got it wrong." I said. 

"I know for certain now. That is not my sister."

Twilight held my gaze for a long moment and I watched something shift behind her eyes, the last of whatever she had been holding onto finally letting go. She nodded once. Small and tight.

"Okay." She said quietly. "Okay. What do we do."

"We need to know what's inside her." I said. "And there's only one way to find that out."

Twilight looked past me to where Isma was sitting and then back at me. "Isla."

"I know."

"If we push her and she decides she's done pretending—"

"I know Twilight." I said. "But we can't keep walking in circles. We are never going to find the egg like this and you know it."

She was quiet for a second and then she said "let me get Devonye back first."

Devonye came back ten minutes later with water and one look at both our faces and she put the water down and said "what happened."

"We're going to confront her." I said.

Devonye looked at Isma and then back at me. 

"Right now?” She asked.

"Right now."

"Okay." She said simply. That was Devonye. No long debate, no list of reasons why it was a bad idea. Just okay and then she was ready. I had never appreciated that about her more than I did at that moment.

We walked back toward the fire together, the three of us, and Isma looked up when we approached and something in her expression changed. Not dramatically, not in a way that would have been obvious to anyone who hadn't been studying her face for days, but it changed. Her hands stilled on the blade she was sharpening and her eyes moved across the three of us and I could see her reading the situation the way a person did when they realised the thing they had been managing had shifted without their permission.

"We need to talk." I said.

"We talk every day." She said.

"Not like this."

She looked at me for a long moment and then she set the blade down on the ground beside her, carefully, and folded her hands in her lap. 

"Alright." She said. "Talk."

I sat down across from her and looked at her face and thought about my sister, the real one, the one who used to pull me out of bad dreams when we were small and sit with me until the shaking stopped. The one who knew every single one of my fears without me ever having to list them out loud. The one who was gone.

"Who are you." I said.

The silence that followed was a particular kind of silence. The kind that confirmed things.

"Isla." She said carefully. "I'm your sister."

"You're not." I said. "And I think you've known that I know for longer than you've been letting on."

Something shifted in her face then. Subtle at first and then less subtle, like a mask that had been held in place by effort finally getting too heavy to keep up. Her eyes changed, the warmth in them cooling in a way that happened too fast to be natural, and when she looked at me again she was looking at me differently. Not like family. Not even like someone who had ever pretended to be.

"You're smarter than I expected." She said, and her voice had changed too, just slightly, just enough.
Devonye moved to the left without being asked, cutting off that angle. Twilight moved right. I stayed where I was.

"Where is my sister." I said.

"Your sister." She said, and the smile that came onto that familiar face was so wrong on it that my stomach turned. "Your sister is exactly where she has always been Isla. I keep telling you people, why do you search for what is not lost."

My blood went cold, what if it was Isma and she's just wanted me to believe she was not her.

Those words. The council had said those exact words to me and now they were coming out of this mouth and that meant something I didn't have the full shape of yet but I could feel the edges of it and they were sharp.

"What does that mean?" I said. "Say it plainly. 
Where is she?"

"Closer than you think." She said. "And further than you can reach. For now."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting from me." She said pleasantly, like we were talking about something small, like the weather or the road ahead.
Twilight stepped forward and her hand was on her nyx blade and her voice was very quiet and very controlled. 

"Then let's talk about the egg. You've been keeping us away from it. Both of us know that now. So either you tell us where it actually is or this conversation ends in a way you won't enjoy."

Something interesting happened then.

For the first time since she had walked through that curtain in the druid settlement, something behind those stolen eyes looked uncertain. Just for a second. Just a flicker that came and went so fast I almost missed it.

But I didn't miss it.

And neither did Twilight because I saw her notice it too.

"You need us." I said slowly, working it out as I said it. "That's why we're still alive. That's why the torches drove us in circles instead of closing in completely. You need us to get to the egg and you can't do it without us."

She said nothing and that nothing was as loud as a confession.

"So here is what is going to happen." Twilight said, stepping closer until she was standing right over her, nyx blade drawn and held loosely at her side in that way she had that looked relaxed and was anything but. "You are going to take us to where the egg actually is. Not the circles you've been walking us in. The real place. And when we get there we are going to have a much longer conversation about what exactly you are and what you did with her sister."

The thing wearing Isma's face looked up at Twilight and then at me and then back at Twilight and the smile it gave was slow and unbothered and deeply unsettling. I was so sure that that wasn't my sister.

"Fine." It said.

Just that. Fine.

And the ease of it, the complete lack of resistance, scared me more than anything that had happened in the past four days.

Because something that agreed that easily had already decided how things were going to go on the other end.