“You would have had to bed her eventually,” I say. “And cried the whole time, no doubt. What a nightmare.”
He flushes. “Why do you care? It’s not like either of us wanted… that.”
“I don’t care,” I assure him.
“Then why are we talking about it? We have more important—”
“Nobody wants that with you,” I say. “Nobody wants you at all. Do you even realize how pathetic your life is without me? What did you even do while I was in the tower? Hide in your room like a child? What would you have done with the rest of your miserable days?”
He’s not looking at me anymore.
“Well?” I demand.
He doesn’t answer me. But he doesn’t need to.
I didn’t belong in the watercrea’s tower. I know it. He knows it. Everybody should know it.
I get to my feet. I’m weak and shaking, but I keep myself upright through sheer force of will.
“I’m not sorry,” I say.
I’m not sorry about any of it.
Then I march off into the dark.
I make it around the next corner before my legs give out. I collapse, biting back my scream of frustration, and urge my body to crawl, but it won’t. I’m too hungry. I’m too thirsty. I’ve lost too much blood.
Ale creeps around the corner, lantern in hand. Without a word, he sits down across from me.
I crawl away.
“Emanuela—” he says.
When I’ve escaped the light of his lantern, I stop, curling up on my side. Maybe, in this exact moment, I’m not capable of sprinting off. But I’m trying to make a point.
The watercrea got what she deserved. It wasn’t like I killed her for no reason. It wasn’t like she was a person the way the rest of us are. She didn’t have family or friends. She didn’t have anyone. She just had a tower and magic and prisoners, and now all those prisoners are free. I’m free.
I’m not going to think about the sound she made when she hit the ground. I’m not going to think about the way her blood seeped out of her broken body like she was an ordinary person.
But now that I’m lying here in the dark, it’s all I can remember.
I curl tighter into myself. I have to stop shivering, or Ale is going to notice.
The watercrea wasn’t an ordinary person. She was just a thing holding our city captive—a thing that tried to kill me and my best friend. But she failed.
She’s gone. She can’t touch me anymore. And that’s what matters.
When I was very small, I was sick. I had fits—bad ones. I would seize up out of nowhere and black out and, apparently, thrash around and hurt myself. Paola carried me up and down the stairs to head off a fall. Ale surrounded me with pillows whenever we played on the floor. They found my sickness terrifying, but I mostly found it aggravating. I’d be in the middle of doing something important, like making an exhaustive list of Chiara Bianchi’s worst qualities to read out at her next party, when I’d feel funny and warm. The next thing I knew, I was waking up on the floor with ink everywhere and my mamma standing over me, crying noisily.
I hated losing time. I hated that, no matter how much I pressed them, nobody ever properly described what my fits looked like. It was my body, and I wanted to know what it was doing without me.
When the fits got so bad I became bedridden, it didn’t strike me as anything more than another bothersome obstacle. I was used to feeling terrible and exhausted, so I assumed that I would just carry on my business from bed until it subsided again. One afternoon, I was sitting under my covers with an array of dolls in my lap. They were a gift from the House of De Lucia, known for their intricate porcelain sculpting. I was prying off the dolls’ beautiful heads and swapping them. It was a very involved ritual, so at first, I didn’t notice the commotion in the hall. Then my door opened to reveal one of the doctors who was always rotating in and out of my room. He was one of my least favorites. His beard was distractingly ugly.
“I believe you, Signor Ragno,” he was saying. “But you know how quickly they spread.”
My papá ran into the room after the doctor, and I sat up straighter. My papá was very busy. I usually didn’t see him until the evening.
“She doesn’t have any,” my papá was saying.
“I believe you,” the doctor said again, pulling on a pair of black gloves. “But it could happen at any moment—”
My papá dove in front of my bed.
“Of course you believe me,” he said. “Because it’s the truth, and there’s nothing more to be done. She’s engaged to the heir of the House of Morandi, you know.”
“I know,” the doctor said.
“What shall I tell them, then?” my papá said. “That you’re questioning the loyalty of both our houses to the city?”
I had no idea what was going on, but I held my breath nonetheless. My papá wasn’t a tall man, but he’d somehow managed to draw himself up in a way that I found very intimidating. There was a power in his voice that I’d never heard before.
The doctor, on the other hand, had gone very quiet. He wavered for a moment, but then he took a small step back.
“If it gets any worse—” he said.
“It won’t,” my papá said.
“I know you won’t hesitate to do your duty for the city,” he said.
“We won’t,” my papá said, in a way that made it very clear the conversation was over.
Without another word, the doctor disappeared. My papá turned to face me. He looked flushed, like he’d run from the Parliament buildings in his crisp black suit.
“What’s happening, Papá?” I said, and my voice came out very small.
He took up the chair at my bedside. “Nothing,” he said coolly. “Now, tell me about your dolls, my little spider. They look rather… headless.”
That night, it was Paola sitting at my bedside instead, a pile of shoes to be polished in her lap. I was supposed to be sleeping, but I was just staring at the ceiling, until finally, the words tumbled out of my mouth.
“Why did the doctor want to take me away?” I said.
“He’s not going to,” Paola said without looking up. “Your papá made sure of that.”
“I know, Paola,” I said. “I saw it. But why did he want to take me away?”
She paused in her work, and she was quiet for a long moment. Too long.
“The doctors wanted to keep a closer eye on you,” she said. “That’s all.”
“Because they think I’m going to die,” I said.
Paola opened her mouth. She shut it.
The doctors thought I was going to die, which meant they also thought my first omen was about to appear. They wanted to make sure they were nearby to rush me to the watercrea’s tower before my omens spread. Anybody could get their omens at any moment, but with very sick people, it was a certainty.
Everybody said that when we died, we went back into the veil. They said God was in the veil. They said everyone who had ever lived was in the veil. But they never explained it in a way I could really understand. They never explained how it would look or what it would feel like.