Chapter 13 — The Emerald City (Part III)

Cinza fought for breath. The rest of the room was eerily quiet, though the bodies of the guys were still all situated around them. Natalie did her best to avoid looking at any of them. She didn't want to remember what had happened in that room. She just wanted to get away. Her skin was burning, her stomach churning. She felt sick to the point of agony. The sooner they got out of there, the better—but for the moment, Cinza was clearly in no shape to move.

"It took us a while to determine where you were," Cinza murmured, clutching her side as if she'd just run a mile. "I went to the park, but you weren't there. Nicole had to scry you over the phone."

"I—" Natalie started, but Cinza held up a hand.

"I asked around. One of my old… acquaintances told me who you'd been seen with. That park used to be safe… I'm so sorry."

Natalie's heart stopped. She hadn't wanted anyone to know what had happened to her in that park. "...Tom?" she whispered.

"He switches names. I knew him as Philip." Cinza shook her head. "I'm disgusted that no one has ever dealt with him."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because at the time, I was nothing." Cinza shook her head. "You see me shaped by the life I had forced upon me, through no choice of my own. I couldn't escape, any more than you could escape the fate that befell you in Rallsburg." She paused, looking Natalie in the eye. "These events do not define us. You won't ever forget what happened here. Don't try to. Keep it within you, let it teach you who you will become. You are stronger than they are, and you have a whole life ahead of you yet to live."

Natalie wanted to believe her, but after the night she'd had, she didn't know how much more she could take. Her face chose that moment to twinge in pain, and she instinctively reached up to touch the bandages.

Cinza's eyes softened. "What is this?" she asked, pointing at her face.

"They… they cut me. Initiating. That's what they called it."

"Ah." Cinza nodded slightly. "I didn't realize you were joining a gang."

"I didn't!" Natalie said indignantly, then winced as the pain spiked in her face. Her eyes welled up. "I tried to stop them! I didn't want to hurt anyone!"

"I know. You only wanted to protect yourself. You've never had to deal with something like this before, and you never should have, but it happened." Cinza took her hand, but Natalie slipped away. Something about the touch made her feel nauseous. "I swear to you today, I'll help you find a way to undo their mark."

Natalie's heart fell. "You don't know how?"

She shook her head. "I can make illusions of change, but they must be maintained constantly. Others have found ways to change their appearances in permanent ways, but they are all superficial. Colors and pigments. No one has ever managed to actually change the structure of their body beyond the lightest touch upon the surface. A scar this deep is beyond us."

"I…" Natalie started, her eyes welling up.

Cinza moved forward, as if to hug Natalie. Natalie leaned into it, wanting to feel comforted by someone, anyone, even someone like Cinza whom she didn't really like—but the moment they made contact, she felt a spike of fear and pain unlike anything she'd ever known.

Natalie pulled away as if she'd been struck. Cinza looked at her, confused. "Is something wrong?"

"Don't touch me," she whispered. She backed away fearfully. She turned toward the couch, but it had a dead body. Dead bodies surrounded her. Everything was painful, everything was terrifying, everything wanted to hurt her. Even people she trusted couldn't come near.

She'd been damaged by them in a way not even Rallsburg had managed, and even though they'd paid dearly for it, she knew she'd feel that pain for the rest of her life. She sat down against the wall while Cinza watched her in pained confusion, and rocked back and forth, trying to comprehend what she'd been through, what she'd done.

I just want to go home.

But, of course, Natalie didn't have a real home to go to. Her home had been destroyed, like these men, like her entire life.

They finally exited the building a few minutes later, after Cinza recovered and Natalie calmed down. She pulled the door open with one hand easily enough, with only a little bit of magic.

"You've gotten taller," Cinza commented.

Natalie glanced down at her. It was true. The last time they'd seen each other, Natalie had been about an inch shorter than the grey-robed girl. Now, she could claim a good three inches—maybe more if Cinza wasn't wearing such thick boots. "It doesn't mean anything," she mumbled.

"Oh, it certainly does. It means you can reach things more easily than I can." Cinza smiled weakly. "Not that I'd ever let that stop me."

"Do you want to be taller?"

She shook her head. "I am content with exactly who I am. If I wished myself different, I would find a way to achieve it. I may do so anyway, for the sake of our research, but I'd never change a thing about myself."

"But like you said, it would make some things easier."

"Perhaps." Cinza shrugged. "But this is the body I was born in, the body I grew to understand. Its flaws and its strengths. We've fought through a lot together."

Natalie glanced at her. "I'm confused. Are you saying you and your body are different things?"

"To me, it's always been a very complicated machine keeping my mind awake and alive. It's a source of energy that the mind can use as it sees fit. Magic works in much the same way, but now our minds can access energy from more places than just our body. Do you see what I mean?"

"...I guess so."

Cinza smiled. "Philosophy is something we've been trying to master for thousands of years. No one is ever right. We each chip away at a tiny part of the whole and hope someone, eventually, figures out the right way to think."

"How can you have ways of thinking?"

She laughed. "Exactly." Which, to Natalie, wasn't answering her question at all, or very funny, but she could tell Cinza was trying to distract her from what had happened. It wasn't really working. As Cinza laughed, her legs got weak again. She tapped Natalie, and they both sat down against the wall to take a quick rest.

"Did something happen to you?" Natalie asked. Last time she'd seen Cinza was in Rallsburg. She'd been recovering from the big ritual they'd tried to perform, but Natalie only vaguely remembered how badly she'd been doing. Surely this was something else, right?

"Overexertion of magic, it seems." Cinza took out a water bottle from her bag, drinking deep. She offered it to Natalie, who drank down some as well to clear her dry throat. At the sight of the bag, a new wave of panic burst into her head.

"My purse and my phone!" she cried. "We need to find them!"

"It's all right." Cinza finished off the bottle before placing it back in her bag carefully. "We locked your phone remotely. I've also blacklisted its device ID from the website, and temporarily disabled your account. Unless they manage to pull some information from the browser cache, there's no way they can find out any information about it."

Natalie didn't quite follow all the technical details, but Cinza sounded confident, so she took her word for it. "And my purse?"

"That… might be difficult," Cinza sighed. "Can you describe the man who took it?"

"No… I didn't see him. He snuck up behind me. But the guy who took my phone, I saw him!"

"They were working together?"

"I think so. He walked up and asked me what time it was. Then when I pulled out my phone to check, he took it, and the other guy took the purse."

Cinza shook her head. "They're still using that…?" she murmured. "The man you saw, his face looked a bit off? Almost like it were melting?"

"Oh. Yeah. That sounds right." Cinza withdrew her phone, but Natalie interrupted before she could start dialing. "Please… don't tell anyone what happened?"

She nodded. "There's no need. You simply got lost downtown. And a sharp piece of metal somewhere accidentally cut your ear," she added, nodding at Natalie's face. "Nothing else happened."

Natalie cracked a smile, the first time she'd felt anything resembling happiness in hours, but it was still hollow and faint. No matter how reassuring Cinza might sound, she knew she couldn't keep everything hidden forever. The spiral mark on their faces was too distinct, and now it was on her too. Someone was bound to see it eventually, and Natalie doubted she could keep an illusion moving on her face all the time. She'd never even made an illusion before, or any kind of light magic really. The method Cinza had described on the website hadn't worked for her at all.

Cinza was talking to someone about the two men. She'd named them, but Natalie hadn't heard her, lost in her own thoughts. Natalie stared at her reflection in a nearby puddle, the bandage taped to her face standing out like a sore thumb.

"I know where they are," Cinza announced with a flourish.

"How?"

"An old friend who luckily still had enough minutes on her phone. I'm going to owe her a good lunch for this, at the very least." She dropped the phone into her bag. "I should say, I know where they should be. This may take longer than we'd hope."

"Why can't you just do the thing… the thing you did to find me?"

"Scrying?" Cinza supplied. "Well, for one, it takes quite a lot of strength for Nicole to scry even one person, unfortunately. She's gotten better at it, but it was quite taxing to find you."

"I'm sorry," Natalie mumbled, turning away.

"No!" Cinza shook her head fervently. She started to lean towards Natalie, but stopped as Natalie involuntarily shrunk away. She didn't want anyone to touch her, or get close to her. She felt like a monster. The bodies of the men were stuck in her mind, burned and twisted, just like the ones back in Rallsburg.

Cinza continued as if Natalie hadn't reacted, but Natalie saw her face fall a little, and felt even worse. "This is what we're here to do. Nicole will recover in time, don't worry. You've felt tired after using too much magic, right?"

"...Yeah."

"But every time, given a break, food and rest, the effects vanish, yes? It's quite the same with her, albeit rather more dramatically. She'll be fine."

"Okay."

"Besides that limitation," Cinza continued, getting to her feet, "Nicole has never met these two particular thieves, or had any interaction with them, so they cannot be scryed. She is not familiar with their essence, to use her term."

"Their essence?"

"I'm afraid I don't know what it means either," Cinza shook her head sadly. "Knowledge magic eludes me entirely. Nicole is the only member of our family to achieve even the faintest result, though apparently Joshua made some headway with identifying essences."

Natalie had to take a few moments to follow Cinza's complicated way of talking. "Oh."

"Shall we, then?" Cinza started back toward the open street.

Natalie hesitated, glancing down at her reflection in the puddle again. Everything about her face looked wrong. Her hair was too long, her eyes looked red and puffy. The white bandages clinging to the space in front of her right ear were like a patch of dirty snow stuck to her face, with a faint lining of red around the edges from the blood they'd absorbed.

She hated it. She hated everything about what she'd ended up like. She wanted to go back to her old self, where she felt happy and free, without so many things pressing down on her all the time, screaming at her to stay quiet and stay safe.

You can never go back.