Otherbound (17 page)

Her arms. Why was that first gash still bleeding? Shallow cuts usually healed fast.

She rolled onto her side, her hands pressed to her stomach. Another slash. The edges of the cut stood apart the width of a fingernail. Bright blood sputtered up and dripped over the edges, like water spilling from a sluice. Her mangled legs thrashed, sending stained sand up in clouds. Grass blades dug into her, but more slowly now. Enough of her own blood had spilled to confuse the curse.

But her cuts weren't healing. None of them. The cuts from her lips sent copper spilling into her mouth, sticking to her teeth and the stump of her tongue and the back of her throat.

“What's—what's happening, what's—” Cilla's words crashed into each other.

Amara's arms wrapped around her stomach. Apply pressure. Just as Cilla always did. Apply pressure. But she didn't have enough arms for that. Her stomach bled and her legs bled and her breasts bled and her face bled.

Another voice joined Cilla's. Jorn's. He was running toward them across the dunes, swearing. That was never good, never, ever good.

“Curse ended?” Two words only. Amara tried to answer, but the question was probably meant for Cilla. She should turn her head and make sure, but—

“What's happening? Why—why isn't she—” Cilla said.

The slashing of the dune grass had turned to tickling. That hurt, too. Or maybe everything hurt. Her clothes felt sticky and too warm. Why wasn't she healing? She should focus. Use her magic like a proper mage. But she didn't know what to focus on beyond pressing her hands to her stomach.

Maybe the spirits had stopped favoring her.

Jorn worked his arms underneath her, lifting her up with no effort at all. Her head rolled back. She tried to keep her eyes open. Apparently her eyes bled, too. Everything was red. She blinked as if that would make it stop. Everything just turned redder. Of course. She'd been cleaning blood for years and years and forever. That was how it worked. It spread and thinned, and then you got rid of it, though now it wasn't thinning, so maybe she was doing something wrong.

Jorn would punish her. Or he would let her die. Without her healing, she had no purpose.

“You alive?” he asked, looking down at her. Her legs swung back and forth with every step of Jorn's. He was moving fast, his arms digging into the cuts on her back. They stepped into the sun, higher up now, and the chatter of the market rushed back over her.

She tried to say something, but her hands needed to stay on her stomach. Maybe she could try her lips. They didn't feel right, though. They hurt.

“Where are we going? Can't you heal her?” Cilla sounded distant. Amara couldn't see her. The world was upside down, anyway, and bobbed weirdly, and it was still red.

Did pain really last this long?

“No magic. Her own healing might come back. Do you want to repeat that lightning show?”

“I only meant—”

“Get her topscarf off,” Jorn instructed. “Press it to her stomach.”

Amara let out a moan. No. Cilla couldn't do that. Cilla needed her hands to compress her own wound, or they'd have to start all over again.

“But—I—” Cilla's voice got louder as she caught up to Jorn.

Jorn swore again. “You can't. Then open the door to that pub. Now!”

Amara could just catch a glimpse of Cilla rushing ahead.

Jorn never let Cilla go ahead alone. Not in places this busy. One bump and she might drop her scarf and then the stones would crush her just like that. That'd happened a couple of months ago, and a year before that, and years before that, and it hurt every time, and Amara's hands and feet always looked weird afterward. Formless. Battered. Like nothing that should be attached to her body.

Drowning was better. It hurt less.

She smelled metal.

“Towels!” Jorn shouted. “Clean towels—sheets—everything!”

Inside was darker, safe, the way she liked it. Sometimes she liked the outside, too, with the beach sand ugly and gray and filled with bugs and dried jellyfish and dirt, and the water just as ugly and just as gray. The diggers made up for all that. Their funny legs and pointy noses. In the north of the Continent, the Jélis had white beaches and blue water but no diggers. Amara had seen paintings. It looked pretty but fake, as if someone had used too much pigment in their paint.

A table pushed into her back. Her legs dangled from the edge. She moaned without wanting to. She was far gone, farther than she'd ever been. Was this what happened when you got hurt? Really hurt? Maybe she'd run out of healing. Poof. Maybe Nolan had screwed with it. Maybe Nolan had broken it. Maybe Nolan had broken her.

She hated him. She didn't know him. But the hate stayed.

“That's runaway palace scum,” a deep-voiced man said.

Palace scum.
That meant he saw her tattoo. The way she lay on the table, her hair was probably pooled under her head. Amara would peel her skin to the bone if the tattoo wouldn't simply return five minutes later.

Sometimes, five ink-free minutes seemed like enough.

“Did she get injured in the magic blow-up?” someone else asked.

“She's not a runaway. We're here on … an assignment,” Jorn said. “Help her!”

“Hey—you, I'd help,” the first man said. He must be talking to Cilla. It didn't matter to Amara, since
you
wasn't
her
, and right now she really needed help. Jorn was pressing on her stomach to keep the deepest wound shut, and she was shivering with cold or pain or something else, and every movement pulled open a different cut. She tried to help Jorn apply pressure to her stomach, but her hands didn't listen.

“You're lying, though,” the man went on. “She must've run. Her hair's too long.”

He had to be Alinean. Few others would notice her hair, and none would dare call her palace scum. No one else had the money or connections to get away with it. That was what Maart always said.

Maart would be so upset. He would be so upset when he found out.

“I'll pay you!” Jorn shouted. “Get some damned towels!”

“Listen—”

“You listen.” Cilla was still here. She'd been so quiet. Amara heard her footsteps on the floor. She stepped into Amara's view. She was hard to see from this angle, and in the dark, and with everything red. Cilla still kept her scarf pressed to the side of her mouth, and she lifted her head higher, her hair falling away from her face. She was pretty like that. Even upside down. Even when red.

“Don't!” Jorn snarled, but he couldn't stop her with his hands pressed to Amara's stomach.

Cilla couldn't do this again. Not after that mage had just—didn't she see the
danger
?

Cilla's free hand went to her scarf. Most of the fabric was already wadded up, so she pulled the rest loose easily. The scarf drooped over her arms, exposing bare shoulders, the beginning swell of her breasts, and that single mark right in the center of her chest. The tattoo's glow pulsed with her heartbeat.

That tattoo was pretty, too. Even when Amara hated it. And she always hated it.

The pub fell silent.

Someone barked an order about getting towels, and the world went away.

at didn't realize he was there.

Nolan had taken up a quiet spot at the other end of the middle-school gym, leaning on a vaulting horse to watch Pat and her classmates rehearse. They wore their regular clothes and didn't use many props, but when Nolan imagined them in fake hospital gear, with clipboards in their hands, he had to admit the scene might work. Pat was doing a good job. Her biggest problem was waiting for others to finish before she blurted out her lines. No one seemed to mind, though. Their biggest problem seemed to be remembering their lines in the first place.

After twenty minutes, Pat noticed him. She squeaked an apology to her drama teacher and crossed the room. “Nolan! What're you doing here?”

“I was thinking about the movie from last night.” Nolan stayed by the vaulting horse. It was weird being back in this gym—though his leg meant he'd never spent much time here to begin with. “That actress was good.”

“You just liked her boobs.”

“That, too,” he said, mainly to get a laugh or cringe out of her. Not that she was wrong. “But her expression when she
saw that train explode … I was impressed.” He nodded slowly, casually. A simple conversation with his sister shouldn't make his heart race like this.

The thing was, they'd never
had
a simple conversation. Even the times when Amara slept were weighed down by her dreams.

“I know, right?” Pat said. “Did you see what she did with her lips? Just that little quirk at the end—it's so subtle, you know? People online say she was flat, but—” She looked at her classmates and lowered her voice. “What're you doing here?”

“Wanted to see you rehearse.”

“Did you walk all the way? It's 108 degrees out!”

“Seemed like a good idea,” Nolan said, though his shirt was drenched and he must smell worse than the dressing rooms nearby. “So, you want to be an actress.”

“What? No.” She paused. “Yes. It's stupid, I know, but—”

“It's not stupid.”

“It is,” she said heatedly. “Whatever. I want it, anyway.” She tilted her head, and it took Nolan a second to realize she was redirecting his attention to the kids at the other end of the gym. “Claudia, over there? She's got a big part, and her cousin is coming over from LA to watch. He's mostly done ads and this one dumb reenactment, but Claud says he just got a part on a
CSI
-type show. I figure, if he sees me, and I'm good … maybe he can give me some advice?”

“Maybe.” Nolan tried not to laugh. That'd be one way to
get Pat mad at him real quick. Today, though, not laughing was a real challenge. He was in his own world. When he shut his eyes, he still heard Pat and still smelled the stale sweat of the gym, the old leather of the vaulting horse under his elbows. He straightened out his smile. “Do you still need volunteers?”

“You have time to watch the movie? You're sure?” Nolan asked Mom the next evening, halfway up the stairs. “I'll get the laptop!”

“It's that superhero movie, right?” Mom called. “Super-heroes are
cool
.”

“That's why I downloaded it.” He returned to the top of the stairs with the laptop bag around his shoulders and hopped carefully down the steep steps.

This would be his third movie in as many days. He'd spent Tuesday and today doing more than he'd ever thought possible. He was nauseated from the increased dose of medication, yeah, but he'd rehearsed with Pat, who'd learned to get her eyebrows under control; volunteered with her drama teacher; done homework; flirted with Sarah at school—clumsily, though she seemed not to mind—and at the end of the day he still had energy left for TV, swimming, chores.

Maybe he could get superhero comics from the library and see if Mom liked those, too. Maybe he'd finally get to study Nahuatl alongside Dad and Patli; he knew how important
Mexica pride was to Dad and how important it was becoming to Pat. To feel that kind of passion about who you were and weren't … Maybe Nolan could learn. Maybe he could understand. God, he wanted to understand.