my arms. She groaned, fingers twitched, and I pressed my hands into the sieve of Isabelle’s body. Yvonne crept to me and wadded her scarf up against the wound. None of it helped.
Wasn’t this the plan all along? We couldn’t fight back if we didn’t know how. If we didn’t have weapons. We couldn’t do anything when we died early and our artists died at twenty-nine. We couldn’t heal ourselves when we did. We couldn’t heal ourselves, not like they could. It was a culling.
“Yvonne,” I whispered, voice rough as Estrel’s. “I don’t know how to fix this.”
But no matter how much I channeled or wore down, my necklace showed me nothing—no past, no present, no futures. The silver cracked. Crumbled.
There was no way to win this fight.
“Quicksilver. Do you have any quicksilver?”
Yvonne stared at me, brown eyes wide, and she passed me a vial from her pocket. I dumped all of it into my cupped hand. The silver shivered, melting into a puddle. No bowl to help contain the visions. No time to focus right.
Coline attacked her father as Brigitte distracted him, but he had fought wars before we’d even been born. He dodged easily. Magic gathered in him, and he channeled it into his sword. The steel flattened into a shield. Both of their strikes clanged off of it.
Brigitte swung her other sickle up, and he leaned back. His foot hooked around her ankle and yanked her off her feet. Brigitte fell.
He brought the shield down on her neck. She rolled at the last moment, hair ripped away by the shield’s base. Coline hesitated, eyes wide.
“Are we done now?” Henry asked, teeth clenched. He shook the shield, and it folded in on itself until it was a blade again. “This has gone on long enough.”
A pink stain flushed his skin. As if this fight were getting to him. As if he weren’t used to channeling so much magic by himself these days.
As if without his hacks, he wasn’t half as good.
I pulled Isabelle into my lap. If we were dying, we were dying together. My left arm wrapped around her chest, the quicksilver slithering between the cracks in my fingers and clinging to the back of my hand. I tucked my chin into her shoulder, and Yvonne leaned her forehead against mine. Her hands still trembled in Isabelle’s injury.
Magic seeped from me to it. Red streaked the edges, the blistered skin of my hands peeling away. I had been divining for so long today that channeling the magic was easy, the current of magic steady, but it ate at me, the weakened pieces of me giving way as I dredged the power from my bones. I had to find the right one. We couldn’t afford the wrong future.
“What are you doing?” Yvonne asked, her hands lifting from Isabelle’s shoulder.
I kissed her, only once, too quick to be nice. “What I do best.”
All the magic I had ever gathered paled in comparison to what I channeled into the silver staining my hands. Silver swam in my sight, the world smeared by the power in my veins, and a single, certain future danced across the quicksilver.
“Coline! Left,” I said.
She hesitated, her father’s attack rattling up her arm. She stumbled back. He raised his sword and attacked again. I yanked at the future and held it tight in my hands.
“Retreat.”
She did. Henry attacked, harder, faster, unyielding and giving up no ground, but when he reached to channel magic, he was close enough to grab. Coline and Brigitte tried to stop him, and he threw them off. They slammed into the wall, collapsing to the ground in a tangle of bruised limbs and blades. I hadn’t wanted a future where we beat him. They were too few and far between, and there was too much red in them. I wanted a future where he got close enough for us to channel through him. My fingers closed around his ankle.
“Oh,” I whispered, all the power he had wanted to use against us channeling through my skin. It was so easy to redirect. He was used to using hacks, to channeling magic through others, and I pushed all of it into Isabelle.
So I scryed the past as Estrel had taught me. I scryed what Isabelle’s body had been before the hit. Henry tried to pull away, but I held tight. Isabelle jerked.
Her veins slithered across the opening. Yvonne ripped herself away, the red stain on her hands and clothes streaming back into Isabelle’s body.