Otherbound (8 page)

Cilla, on the other hand— “Are we safe?”

“No,” Jorn snapped, then checked himself. He smiled thinly. “Apologies, Princess. No. Dissolving the mage's shield would have cost too much time. Others might be coming.” Only now did Amara notice the red stains spreading across his topscarf. Small. She'd expected worse. At least Jorn focused on Cilla, not Amara. He didn't know about the blackouts. When he did find out—

She couldn't let that happen. If the blackouts were another ability the spirits had given her, she'd need to learn more, put a stop to them before she got Cilla—and herself—killed.

“I think the mages are too weak to follow,” Jorn said. “Let's find Maart and go.”

olan had moved Amara's body.

He'd
run
.

He buzzed with energy and felt it building into a headache at the back of his skull, but his pen practically flew across his notebook's pages, and he couldn't stop now. Amara's magic was shifting. She'd gone from letting him witness her world from the backseat to offering him the wheel and gas pedal, and that meant—

Nolan couldn't begin to understand what that meant.

Amara's blackouts gave Nolan control.

He didn't realize he wasn't alone until Dad stood right in front of him.

“You look better.” English. That didn't bode well. Nolan and Pat always spoke English together, but their parents stuck to Spanish around the house, or simple Nahuatl between Dad and Pat as practice. Dad saved English for his rare Talks, capital
T
. “That explains the noise.”

Oh: the washer was banging on the bathroom tiles and whining high. Nolan slapped his notebook shut, though he wasn't worried about Dad peeking. As much as Pat took after Dad, she hadn't inherited his respect for privacy. “Sorry—”

—and Cilla was still leaning on Amara's shoulder as they trailed after Jorn—

—Dad shoved open the curtains to let the evening sun roll in. Slow, wide beams caught dust swirling around the room. “Don't apologize,” he said. “Your mother told me you saw her at the Walgreens. You're trying to help out?”

Nolan wanted to listen, but his mind was stuck on the word he'd just written down.
Control
. The ink burned through the pages of the book, right into his hands and head.

“I. Yeah. I wanted to …” He gestured at abandoned, knocked-over piles of laundry. Some of his euphoria ebbed away. He'd meant to refold the messier stacks now that Amara's world was calmer, but how long had it taken him to get even this far? Some help he was.

“I figured. It's a good thing.” Dad pulled up an old chair that mainly served as a mannequin for his business jacket. “An odd thing for a teenage boy, but a good thing.”

Nolan found it hard to care about what a teenage boy was supposed to do. He spent half his life as a girl. As Amara, he'd done laundry a hundred times.

“I'm glad you're showing initiative. But if I had to choose, I wish you'd take the initiative to do homework or sneak out for a date. Wouldn't you like that better than laundry?” Dad eyed a pair of Pat's skinny jeans.

Nolan took care not to shut his eyes for too long, but he couldn't tune out Amara entirely. By now, Jorn had locked on
to Maart's anchor. Nolan tried to ignore that, replaying Dad's words instead.
Did
he want those things? They sounded nice in the abstract, but it seemed safer to care about what he could actually accomplish. Writing in his notebooks. Swimming.

Laundry.

“Listen, when your mother gets home and sees this … she'll feel touched. Then guilty.”

“She's working two jobs,” Nolan protested. “I'm the one who feels guilty.”

“You shouldn't, which is why she didn't tell you. You need that medication, Nolan.”

“I don't! All it does is make me nauseous. I know Dr. Campbell said to give it a couple of months, but …” But no pills would ever work, was the truth. Every time, Nolan tried to refuse them.

“We won't give up,” Dad said sharply. “As long as you keep trying, we'll keep trying.”

And every time, his parents insisted. Nolan would take the pills for a few months, deal with the side effects, and stop once people realized his seizures weren't going away.

“Can I keep trying while doing laundry?” Nolan wanted to smile, but it rarely worked when Dad paid him such close attention. He had this way of scrutinizing people, level and unflinching, that made Nolan's smiles feel transparent.

“Just know your mother will struggle with it.”

Nolan averted his eyes. He'd meant to help. Not add to guilt Mom shouldn't feel, anyway.

“I should finish up some work. There was a system crash at the hospital that set us back a few days …” Dad waved it off. “But I have five minutes.” He looked over the bed—the collection of Nolan's stump socks dotting the sheets, the crookedly folded tops. He reverted to Spanish. “You, uh, want a lesson in folding?”

By the time Nolan finished folding and hanging the newly washed clothes, the buzz he'd felt over affecting Amara's world had transformed into a full-on headache and the early stir of nausea. As he headed to his room, Pat called something to him.

Nolan hopped back. Her door was ajar. He could just catch a glimpse of Pat's reflection in the crescent-shaped mirror Grandma Pérez had given her on her eighth birthday, when she'd spent every waking moment reading about astronomy. She gave the mirror a wounded look, which included her eyebrows going comically high and her lower lip jutting out. “I can't stop you,” she declared. “But, oh, it's
dangerous
!”

Apparently she hadn't been calling to him, after all. Nolan shifted, allowing him to see more of her face. She wasn't holding a phone to either ear. Her eyebrows shot up again. “It's
dangerous
!”
she repeated. Her eyes caught his in the mirror. She squeaked. In a single step, she yanked her door open. “Nole? Are you spying on me?”

“Your door was open.”

She plucked at her T-shirt's neckline. “The AC's acting up.”

“Were you practicing for that school play?” He vaguely recalled it coming up at dinner.

“What? No.” She shifted her weight and scoffed. Pat's scoffs had as wide a range as Nolan's smiles. At the bottom rung was
Seriously?
followed by
I'm really too cool for this but, whatever, I'll play along.
Somewhere at the top sat
This is the most important thing in the world, but OMG I'll die if anyone knows
. This scoff had seemed closest to that last one. He should talk to her about it, but his head hurt. He craved sleep. It'd make his parents happy—proper sleep meant less chance of seizures—and it'd let him keep track of Amara. She was following Jorn around the harbor now, keeping her head low and waiting for another blackout.

He'd controlled her. The memory made a smile twitch at his lips, headache or no, but he curbed it. Watching Amara was the last thing he should do. The last thing he should want to do.

He couldn't get sucked back in. He'd ended up in a coma twice before.

“What's your role?” he made himself say.

She sighed. “I'm this nurse solving a mystery. There's singing. And I have to be vulnerable.”

The disgust in her voice almost made him laugh. “Do you need help rehearsing? Or feedback?”

He couldn't help Mom without her feeling guilty, but maybe he
could
help Pat. Using Pat this way might not be fair, but the more he had going on in this world, the less he'd think about Amara's.

Pat looked confused. “Um. Are you sure you can?”

“I'm feeling pretty good on these pills,” he lied.

“If you say so, but … I need someone objective. You lie. You lie to make people feel better.”

Nolan considered lying about that, too, but it wouldn't be much use. “I'll be honest. I swear.”

Pat laughed. “All right. Nolan with opinions. This, I gotta see.”

hey'd arrived on Teschel the night before. Another island. They hadn't been to the mainland in weeks. This time Jorn hadn't bothered with an inn. Instead, he'd set up camp in an unused granary across from a run-down farm. The storehouse was blocky and stained from age and weather and had long windows so filthy, they bordered on opaque. Pale trees—the very edge of a forest—pressed up against one side of the building, and abandoned fields stretched out on the others. Weeds sprouted upward, some tall enough to reach past Amara's hips.

Amara didn't know what had happened for people to abandon the farm, but Jorn was right about one thing: no one would expect to find a princess here.

Maart was inside, tending to Cilla and preparing their lunch. Amara ought to help. Instead, she sat crouched by the entrance. The low sun cast everything in the pink shade of morning, from the dew on the grass to Jorn's shape as he crossed the fields. After every determined step, he paused, leaned in to brush his hands over the ground, then took his next step. He kept his head down. A distant whine accompanied his spell.