Xander leaned forward, until his face was close to Piper’s. He spoke in a whisper. “Forever fire. Hot noise. Burning light.” The words chased one another out.
“He’s seeing the blast more than ever,” Sally said. “Day and night, now.”
“He never used to be as bad as this,” Piper said. “What’s changed?”
“Move over,” I said to Piper.
“Maze of bones,” muttered Xander.
I looked up at Sally. “What does that mean?”
“Search me,” she said. “Sometimes he talks almost normally. Other times, he comes up with stuff like that. The fire, most of the time. Sometimes stuff about bones.”
“Noises in the maze of bones,” Xander said.
His eyes had stilled a little, staring abstractedly at the corner of the ceiling. I placed my hands on the sides of his head, and stared into his eyes.
I didn’t want to force myself into his mind. I still remembered how it had felt when the Confessor had tried to probe my thoughts in the Keeping Rooms. After each session with her, my mind had felt like a dollhouse that had been picked up and shaken, everything scattered and rattling. I understood Zoe’s fury when she learned that I’d stumbled into her dreams. But I had to admit that I was also curious about what I might discover from Xander. I was desperate to see if what he saw was the same as what I saw. To confirm, I hoped, that I was not alone in the visions of fire that my mind hurled at me. If I was searching for anything in the jumble of his mind, I suppose it was a glimpse of myself.
His eyes remained blank as I groped toward his thoughts. Occasionally his mouth seemed to be trying to form words, but they didn’t take shape. Stillborn, they stayed at his lips, empty shapes incapable of sound.
His mind was burned out. Everything charred and gone, broken down to ashes and dust. This was what remained, after the flames had exploded too many times in his mind: ash, and smoke, and words sheared of their meanings, rattling loose in his head.
“It’s the visions of the blast that’ve done this to him,” I said.
It wasn’t the strangeness of his state that unsettled me, but its familiarity. I’d felt it myself, this madness, scratching around the edge of my mind like a rat in the rafters. It was always there. At times, particularly in the Keeping Rooms, or when the blast visions had become more and more frequent, it had been emboldened, almost crept into sight.
“Flash. Fire. Forever fire,” Xander blurted again. He didn’t say the words—they uttered him. As each word burst from him, he convulsed. He looked startled at the sounds emerging from his own mouth.
“You know it happens to seers eventually,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. I had lived with that knowledge for as long as I’d known what I was. But encountering the residue of Xander’s mind still left me with a chill in my guts, my fists curled so tightly that my nails cut into my palms.
He was rocking backward and forward now, his arms wrapped around his knees. I recognized, in his scrunched body, that futile attempt to hide from the visions, as if making yourself smaller would somehow spare you. I remembered curling like that myself, as a child, with my head tucked down toward my chest and my eyes clamped closed. It didn’t work, of course. Xander was right: Forever fire. It would never go away. The blast would haunt all of us seers, always. But why did it burst into our dreams more often now, enough to drive Xander to this?
“Let him rest,” Sally said, stepping forward and cupping Xander’s chin in her hand. She lifted the blanket that had fallen from him, and tucked it again around his shoulders.
As we were leaving, he opened his eyes and, for a moment, fixed them on me.
“Lucia?”
I looked at Piper for an explanation. He’d glanced up at Zoe, but she didn’t meet his eyes. She crossed her arms in front of her. Her face shut down.
“Lucia?” said Xander again.
Piper looked up at me. “He must be able to tell you’re a seer. Lucia was a seer, too.”
The older seer from the island, branded. She’d drowned, Piper had said. A shipwreck in a storm, on the way to the island.
“Lucia’s gone,” Piper said to Xander. “The ship went down more than a year ago. You