of all.” At the time, I’d failed to realize this—and it had blinded me to Kip’s real identity. “But it’s finished now. They can’t hurt him anymore.”
“It’s not finished,” said Xander. He paused, still looking at me, his head cocked to one side. For a few seconds he said nothing. I wanted to grab him, to squeeze the words from him like the last drops of juice from a lemon. He turned back to gaze out the window. “Maze of bones,” he said quietly, and then would say no more.
Ω
That afternoon, while Piper sat with Xander, and Sally packed, Zoe took me outside to practice fighting. She was letting me do more drills with the dagger now, though it felt like she stopped me every few seconds to tell me what I was doing wrong. Keep your eye on my blade, not yours. Faster. Watch your wrist—block a strike like that and you’ll break it. Get on the higher ground—see how it slopes there. You don’t want to find yourself fighting uphill.
I could never match Zoe, her blade darting like a lizard’s tongue, but the dagger that Piper had given me was beginning to feel like my own, rather than a borrowed weapon. I was used to its weight now, and the angle where its hilt met the blade. Knew how tight to grip the handle to block a strike, and how to loosen my wrist when I wanted to swipe at my opponent.
I saw a movement at the window of the house. It was Xander, his mouth slack on one side, his eyes unfocused. He was gazing right at where we stood, but whatever he was seeing it wasn’t us.
Zoe took advantage of my distraction, coming at me faster so that I was driven a few steps back down the slope.
“Concentrate,” she said. “You yielded the higher ground again.”
I nodded, testing my dagger’s weight in my hand before circling her again.
The blast came, scorching my sight with flames.
It only lasted a moment, but Zoe slipped past my guard. The tip of her dagger came to rest, very gently, on my chest.
“If that happens in a fight, you’re a dead woman.” She stepped back, blade lowered.
“It was the blast,” I said. I didn’t know how to explain to her that when the blast visions came, we were all dead, in a world turned to cinders. “I think it’s being around Xander,” I said, glancing back at the window. “It sets the visions off even more than usual.”
“So concentrate harder,” she said.
I raised my blade, and we circled each other once more. She lunged, and I blocked. I swept my blade at her shoulder, and she darted backward. Then the blast came again, an aftershock, a flash of whiteness that hit me like a seizure. My knife dropped to the ground.
Zoe threw down her own blade.
“There’s no point practicing if you’re like this,” she said.
“I’m trying,” I said. “You don’t know what it’s like, having the visions.”
She followed my gaze to the window. “I’m trying to help you. Do you want to end up like him?”
I picked up my dagger again, and she did the same. We sparred until it was almost dark, but Zoe was quieter, not correcting me as often, or pushing me as hard. There was no point. We both knew that the greatest threat to me couldn’t be fought with blades.
chapter 12
It was too dangerous to sail through the sunken city by night, so we left just before dawn, bags loaded with all the food that we could carry. Sally didn’t even look back as she closed the door behind her. She was concentrating on calming Xander, who had begun to whimper as we led him from the house, and would only walk if Sally held his hand and coaxed him forward.
It took us a long time to reach the boat. There was a path, of sorts, zigzagging down the face of the cliff, but over the years it had half crumbled with disuse. In the end, Piper had to carry Sally, though she grumbled and insisted she could manage by herself if we weren’t hurrying her. Zoe and I, between us, helped Xander. He refused to look down at where the narrow path was shedding its edge beneath our feet, and clamped his eyes shut, his limbs stiff. Stones clattered from the path as we walked, and the sea was so far below us that I couldn’t hear them land. The sun had risen by the