Glenn found herself hundreds of feet in the air high above the treetops and shooting ever higher. Opal’s house was barely visible as an amber glow slipping away from her. Panic turned like a wheel inside Glenn, faster and faster as the earth retreated. She was in a nightmare.
It had to be a nightmare. Glenn flipped over and reached for the ground, but her fingers could only claw at the air.
At the same time, it was as if everything around her — the wind, the stars, the forest and all its animals — had a voice and they were all screaming at once. Glenn could feel the stalking heat of every animal in the woods folded into the stately calm of the trees and the cold turn of the river. It seemed like every rock, every tree, every gust of wind was a transmitter, beaming some part of its essence out into the air, where it swirled with all the others, forming a vast web. Glenn was trapped in the middle of it, unable to process the chaos that crashed into her from every side. Glenn buried her head in her arms, wishing the voices away, but they only blared louder. The air grew thin as she rose and the temperature plummeted. The ground … she had to get back to the ground. Glenn imagined herself reaching out to solid earth, and to her surprise, the eddies of force drawing her upward thickened and she slowed and slowed, and then she stopped.
She had to be nearly a mile up in a cloudless sky, floating over the Magisterium. She had seen the land on her side of the border from skiffs or on videos any number of times. It was like a mirror of the stars above, a constellation of streetlights and train lights and house lights.
Here, the land stretched out vast and dark, punctuated only by the towns and cities that bloomed with the collected heat of their inhabitants. The river was a slate gray ribbon, cold, but teeming with life beneath its surface. Now that she was farther up the thousand voices were muted somewhat and Glenn hung there, weak with awe.
It didn’t last long, though. Glenn gasped as she slipped and started to fall, tumbling down until she hit some current and was drawn west. She tried to slow herself down, but the lines of force slipped through her fingers. The landscape shot by — fields, then trees, then houses, then water. Suddenly there was a wide pasture below with a jumble of lighter, moving shadows: a herd of sheep, hundreds of them, huddled together. As Glenn drew near, she could feel them murmuring to one another, not in words but in images: thick grass, cool water, the sun, a farmer’s rough hand on their backs, a new, unsteady lamb being added to the fold.
It was like the mass of their thoughts had a gravity of its own and it began to pull her down. Panicked, Glenn stretched upward, but she sank farther as the pulse of the animals grew louder. They seemed to be everywhere, crowding around her, grasping at her, dragging her down to melt in amongst them.
Glenn scrabbled at the air, the thoughts of the animals booming in her head, crowding out everything else. Glenn tried to find a handhold, something to grasp on to — the stars, her father’s face, the sound of Kevin’s voice — but it was all rushing away from her too fast, leaving a space that was filled with a yearning for food and water and sleep.
Her body hit the ground amidst animal stink. She lay there, still, as the sheep huddled around her. Green grass. Blue water. Rough hands.
An ewe nuzzled at her arm. Glenn was desperate to call out for help …
but to whom? She had friends nearby, she was sure of it. So why couldn’t she see their faces? Why couldn’t she remember their names?
Glenn opened her mouth, but all that escaped was a strangled gasp.
I have a name
, she thought, but it was like a wind rushing past her. She couldn’t grab hold.
I am …
I am …
But there was nothing there. She had no name. She was not man.
She was green grass. She was blue water. She was rough hands. She was earth.
A hand shot down through the bodies and grabbed her. Glenn
struggled, just as all of those around her did, but the hand grasped harder and pulled. Glenn screamed. She knew what happened when one of her number was chosen. The blade to the neck. The blood. She had seen it before. Glenn struggled against it, but the hand was stronger. It pulled her to her feet and shook her, pulling her out of the herd. Glenn thrashed, but she felt herself stumbling across the grass, away from her brothers and sisters. Soon it was not grass under her feet but fallen leaves and twigs. She tripped and fell into the woods, terrified, waiting for the blade. The loss of the herd was like a dark hole inside her.
Her cheek stung with a slap. “Wake up!” It was a woman’s voice.
“Wake up! You are Glennora Morgan! You are Glennora Morgan!”
Her head was filled with a thick fog, but suddenly there seemed to be a crack in it, like a door opening.
Glennora Morgan.
Glenn.
She opened her eyes. There was an old woman huddled over her, her hands on Glenn’s shoulders. Her eyes were blank. Glenn was sure she knew her, but no name came to mind. She knocked the old woman’s hands away and sat up. Out past the trees she could see the huddled shadows of the herd. Sadness tugged at her from being separated from them, but soon even that felt strange and distant.
“Did she talk to you?” The woman had her hand clamped around Glenn’s arm. Her voice was sharp and urgent.
“What? No, I —”
“A woman’s voice? Think!”
“No!”
“Stupid girl. Going off by yourself like that.” The woman turned her head, listening to the wind, deliberating. “Perhaps we were lucky.
Perhaps she was looking the other way.”
“Who?”
Opal — her name dropped into Glenn’s mind from nowhere —
lifted her up off the ground. “Come,” she said. “We have to get you inside before anyone sees. Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Good; then we won’t need the nightshade.”
“The what?”
Opal took Glenn’s arm and led her through the woods, moving fast, picking out the way easily despite her clouded eyes. The trees pulsed with life, a low and steady hum. Glenn could feel the animals all around her, darting through the brush and treetops.
Glenn was out of breath when they left the woods. She could feel Kevin and Aamon sleeping — small, banked fires. As soon as Opal opened the door, Glenn pushed past her, feeling through the darkness until she reached her room. She snatched the bracelet off the toy chest’s wooden top. The blare of the forest and the animals and Opal and Aamon and Kevin beat at her. Glenn fumbled with the bracelet, nearly dropping it before she was able to force it onto her wrist, relishing the scrape against her skin.
Glenn expected it to be like a door slamming shut, but instead it was as if the voices were all slowly turned down, one or two disappearing at a time until, finally, there was quiet. She took a long breath and let it rattle out of her. As it did, her body grew solid once more, a barricade against the world outside.
“How” — Glenn stumbled over her words, overwhelmed —
“how is any of this possible?”
Glenn turned to find Opal standing motionless in the doorway.
“There are stories,” she said. “But all we know for sure is that our part of the world used to be just like yours until one day the earth shook and there was a blinding light in the sky. Millions died as the machines they had come to rely on failed. Millions more in the chaos that followed. The ones that survived found that while much had been taken from us, a greater gift had been left in its place.”
“Affinity.”
Opal inclined her head.
“What is it?”
“It’s … a way of experiencing the world,” Opal said. “Your body, the air, the water, the floor beneath your feet — they appear to be different things. Separate things. Affinity exposes that as a lie. It allows you to experience the world as it truly is, a single piece of fabric woven from an infinite number of threads.”
Glenn lowered herself to the edge of the bed. She still felt herself tumbling through the sky.
“How do you stand it?”
“My gifts are modest,” Opal said. “Most of us who possess an Affinity have it for one thing or another. Fire. Stone. The wind. Mine is for this place. This forest. But for people like you, whose Affinities connect them to the entire world, it’s as if you’re standing in the middle of a crowded room and everyone is talking at once. At first it’s overwhelming, but with practice you learn to control it, to hear the voices you want to hear and ignore the rest. Once you do then you and the voices can work together.”
“Work to do what?”
“When I was a girl there was talk of people who could walk from world to world like they were moving through rooms in a house.”
“And if you can’t learn to control it?”
Opal drifted farther into the room. “When the Magistra returned to us,” she said, “she was very much like you. Her Affinities were vast but she was untrained. When she found her mother and father, the previous Magister and Magistra, dead at the hands of Merrin Farrick, her anger and grief were so great that she couldn’t keep the voices at bay. They warped her into what she is now.”
“What is she?”
“A monster,” Opal said. “Even after she crushed Farrick’s
revolution she saw traitors everywhere. She decided that to keep the peace there could be no power in the Magisterium but her. She imprisoned the Miel Pan. She destroyed the guilds and the royal houses.
In the end, when the people turned to their gods for relief, she burned the temples and unleashed the Menagerie to slaughter anyone with an Affinity. Only a very few of us survived and we’re scattered.
Impotent.”
“You said the Magistra returned,” Glenn said. “Where was she?”
Opal hesitated. “When Farrick’s revolution seemed about to
succeed,” she said. “Aamon Marta fought his way out of the
Magisterium to bring the Magistra back from across the border.”
The room, the house, the wind outside, fell into stillness.
“She was in the Colloquium.”
“Yes,” Opal said quietly. “For many years.”
The room seemed to grow dimmer around her. Glenn felt it again
— that feeling of being stalked from out in the darkness. Faint voices whispered in her ear. Glenn hefted the bracelet in one hand. Once again, she felt herself standing in front of a closed door, only this time she couldn’t stop herself from turning the handle and stepping through.
“When did she return?”
Glenn turned at Opal’s silence. In her gray dress, standing half in and half out of the thin light, the old woman seemed like an apparition.
“The Magistra returned to us ten years ago.”
The shadow that had been pursuing Glenn all these years fell upon her, its cold weight sinking into her bones.
Ten years.
The bed shifted beside Glenn as Opal sat down.
“An amazing thing,” she said, drawing one thin finger across the bracelet’s jewel. “Until you took it off I had no idea that you were her daughter.”
Glenn closed her eyes, but when she did all she saw was a boy lying dead in Haymarket and another mounting a gallows with his two friends.
“I’m not,” Glenn said. “She can’t be …”
Opal’s hand, dry and warm, fell on Glenn’s arm.
“I’d like to be alone.”
“Glenn,” Opal said. “If that piece of metal was on her wrist rather than yours … you could free a world from madness.”
Glenn pulled her arm out of the old woman’s grasp. “It’s not my world,” she said.
The air between them seemed to go thick and oppressive. There was a pause and the mattress lifted beside Glenn. Opal’s hand brushed Glenn’s shoulder as she walked to the door.
“Some people aren’t separate from us,” Opal said. “No matter how much we might like them to be. Over time, we merge. When Cort died, I sat there drinking my tea and building my fire, but I was an outline. A sketch in the sand. I can’t be whole without him.”
“I don’t need anyone else to be whole.”
“Yes,” Opal said. “Of course.”
The hush of her footsteps disappeared into the darkness down the hall, and Glenn was alone. The house settled with small aching sighs.
Glenn shut her eyes and draped her arm over them, but it was useless.
She wouldn’t sleep. Not that night. Glenn tore herself off the bed and went outside to stand in the chilly air.
Above the trees a billion stars sparkled, so many of them and so clear that Glenn’s eyes ached as she went from one to the next. She hunted through the clutter of light until she was able to find Orion.
Alnitak. Alnilam. Mintaka.
Glenn savored the words’ rounded tones in her head, even though she could hardly make out their namesakes amongst the bright noise of the Magisterium’s sky.
As Glenn stood there, the rush of the river near her became the gentle swish of a lake’s tide in her ears. She almost thought she could hear the sound of the summer crickets chirping far out on a distant shore.
It was April. Glenn was five and her mother had planned a
girls-only getaway to a nearby lake.
When they arrived, the sun was casting bright stitches along the lake’s surface. Its waters were packed with swimmers and, farther out, the crisscrossing wakes of motorboats and skiers. The beach was alive with families, their winter bodies spread out on the sand to soak up the warmth. Storm fronts of teenagers roamed about, laughing and screeching. Glenn flinched at all the bustle and noise. Her mom set her hand on Glenn’s shoulder and led her to a shady and quiet spot out at the edge of the beach.
Mom stripped off her shorts and T-shirt, leaving her in a red two-piece that stood out against her pale skin and black hair. Mom would be covered in freckles by the end of the day, but she didn’t seem to care. She leaned forward into the day as if she was trying to open up every part of herself and take it all in.
But as beautiful as the day was, it was only prelude to their secret plans. Glenn and her mother waited until long after the sun went down, when everyone had gone and the rippled lake became a pane of black glass. A frogs’ chorus began in the trees, and the fireflies flitted here and there.
“Okay,” Mom said. “Ready?”