of my stomach. Her hand still held my wrist, and I didn’t mind.
“I want to stay,” I said, and I grabbed her hand as she let go. “I like watching you work. It makes me feel like something’s gone right in the world. But I have to do something now. I made a promise, and I can’t put it off any longer.”
Her narrow-eyed focus, the taut lines of her jaw as she gathered magic in her alchemistry, and how she scowled then smiled when something tricky went well. All the good in the world was here.
“Of course.” Her head tilted to the side, and she tugged at one of the tight coils of her black hair, letting it bounce and then pulling it back down again. “Come back soon.”
“I will.” I clutched the metal box of quicksilver to my stomach.
Gabriel would too.
* * *
When the clock chimed four in the morning, when we knew most of the others would be falling asleep so the dawn light didn’t keep them awake, the three of us—Coline, Isabelle, and I—sat in the bright light of our open window and filled a scrying bowl with quicksilver. Stareaters swarmed along the glass, wings thunking against each other as they scrambled into our room. A gibbous moon stared down at us.
“Think about him,” I told Isabelle. “And when you have, channel all that magic and all those memories into me. I’ll divine him. I just need to know him as you do.”
Isabelle laid her hands on my shoulders. She didn’t speak, but suddenly, laughter pealed in my head. Gabriel’s laughter. Power rushed through me.
A gold sky. Flickering. My skin itched, but I couldn’t move. It was too tight for me. To contain me. Magic pulsed through me, tugged at my bones, and settled deep. I rolled my eyes to the side. To see where the voices were. Muffled. Like sitting at the bottom of a river. Not a gold sky. A tent.
“It’s not clear enough,” I said. “I’m too close. I’m in his head. I need—”
I gathered up the moonlight arts spilling over me and thrust all of the power I could into the bowl. It shuddered. The image shifted. I wasn’t watching it in the water. I was in the image with it.
I walked across the grass, looking down and seeing nothing where my body should’ve been. A girl knelt in the mud at the base of a tent, and my fingers passed through her shoulder. Emilie, the real Emilie, stared wide-eyed and horrified through a mesh window in the tent wall. I bent beside her and watched as well.
A physician laid his hands, glowing gold as the noonday arts, as the sun, as the flies humming in my ears, on Gabriel’s arm. A knife slipped through his skin.
I gagged. Blood curdled in my throat, clotted and thick. All the magic, all the power, channeling through me dragged. It wore me down, ripping through my skin. Red tinged the quicksilver pink, and I reeled at the pain. A hand grasped mine, holding them to the bowl, and Coline gasped. She channeled some of the power through her, lightening my load. The pain eased. Welts rose on her hands.
But the image steadied.
I stood at the physician’s back and saw Gabriel as he saw him—a catalog of parts, a collection of bone and blood and flesh ripe for the taking. He broke down the marrow of Gabriel’s bones and pulled them out piece by piece. He felt the prick of Gabriel’s pain in the back of his mind, and he pushed it away. He took.
And he gave.
I stumbled back, hands flying to my throat, and coughed up a glob of spit tinged red. The Stareaters fluttered to my feet and fed. A small, white mushroom cap crumbled to dust under the moth’s prodding. The quicksilver seeped through new holes in the bowl. It was silver no longer, now a pale, pale red burnt at the edges, powdery and off-putting. It coated every crack in the floor. In my hands.
“We are not our own,” I said, voice broken. “They broke him down and used the pieces to repair the king’s injuries from channeling too much.”
Coline leaned back against the wall, blanched by moonlight, and covered her face with her hands.
“No one will believe us.” I turned to Isabelle. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know he would—”
Isabel, hands bloodied and face streaked with tears, shook her head.