Arjun sighed and looked at me. “Are you also a mechanika?”
“I don’t know what that word means,” I admitted.
“It’s someone who invents things no one really asks for.” But his expression was markedly different from his flippant tone. He was already smiling, the harsh demeanor he liked to fall back on thawing at her presence. It made him look younger than he probably wanted.
“It’s for cooking,” Haidee announced proudly as she reached us. “We won’t need to fire up any stones—the sun’s heat does all the work. Won’t need incanta, either. Metal like this traps heat from the sun quickly, and it should cook most food in twenty minutes, tops. I’ve set some wooden slats here to protect your skin from burning—” She broke off. “But I can talk about it later,” she added, looking guilty. “Was I interrupting?”
“Not at all. It actually sounds rather interesting. But I was hoping we could . . . talk? For a little while?” I glanced over at Arjun, and he nodded to indicate he understood.
I knew that Haidee had been giving me time to process everything that had happened—it was difficult, adjusting to a strange new world that was the exact opposite of the one you were used to.
But what I really wanted to do was throw my arms around her waist and not let go until we’d talked about everything. I wanted to tell her about growing up in Aranth. I wanted to ask her a billion questions about what life was like in the Golden City. There was still the problem of the Abyss and of the creatures there, but I wanted to make up for all the years that we were apart, wanted to be some kind of family with her no matter how contemptible our mothers turned out to be.
Haidee looked surprised, then happy. “Absolutely,” she said, not bothering to hide her eagerness. Her hands wouldn’t keep still, like she had to stop herself from throwing her arms around me, too. I knew that the thought of family appealed to her.
I just wasn’t sure if she’d want to be one with me, once she knew everything I’d done.
I reached into my robes and drew out her journal. It contained all the notes she’d taken from the book she said a sand pirate named Sonfei had lent her, about the galla rituals and the lore surrounding our mutual ancestor, the goddess Inanna.
“You wrote about the radiances that the galla would bestow, along with the terrors they would impose.” I closed my eyes, swallowing. “They came to me. They gave me the gift of clarity and the ability to glean brief visions of the future, but made me reckless. They gave me the ability to grow and tend to plants, but poisoned the soil in their wake. They gave me greater strength with patterns, but they also made me cruel.” I hugged the book to my chest, trembling. “I accepted six of those seven radiances. I still have them. And the terrors, too. I thought they would renege on the deal and take back everything. Their voices in my head dissipated when I rejected the final gift. I thought they were gone for good, that I was finally free. But I’m not, am I?”
Haidee frowned. “I saw the vines you wrapped around one of Mother’s cannons to disrupt its glowfires. That was one of these radiances, right?”
“Can you do it too?” I shifted the patterns around us, a variety of greens and golds that twisted into the sand until, inexplicably, a shrub sprouted by our feet. It rose higher, twisting and forming branches above us until a tree stood in its place, roughly seven or eight feet high. Thick leaves grew along its branches where I could see small, rounded fruit, ripe for the picking. But just as quickly I saw the ground around it sink, turn brown and sickly looking.
Haidee’s eyes glittered as she tried to copy the incanta, knitting the same braids of color, but nothing sprouted beside my plant, for all her efforts. “No,” she said slowly. “I can’t. I’m not surprised, given what we already know of the ritual.”
“Why can’t I give them back?” It was hard not to give in to despair. “I don’t want them. I never should have accepted them to begin with. I was hoping there’d be something in your notes that could help me, but . . .”
“Your mother, Asteria, would have gone through the same ritual. Did she show any similar abilities?”
But she’s not my mother. Having to acknowledge that hurt, but I schooled my features. “None that I’ve seen. She could see brief glimpses of the future, but that’s it. I always thought it was a natural extension of a goddess’s abilities.”
“Neither my mother nor I have any gifts for prophecy. But your mother is proof that nothing has to change. You can still use the galla’s gifts to help people.” Haidee looked hopeful. I had known she would be optimistic; from our first meeting she had accepted me without blame or envy. I wished I had her self-assurance.
“I still don’t want it. The power—it changes you. For every new skill I gain, there’s a fresh cruelty I receive along with it. They made me selfish, and aggressive, and cold. I . . . I killed someone.” The words hung heavy in the air. I waited for her to recoil, but she showed no reaction. “I wish I could say I didn’t want to, that I was forced. But I wasn’t. I enjoyed doing it. I don’t want these gifts. Not anymore. They’ve cost me far too much, more than anything I could ever gain from them.”
She knew bits and pieces of my story by now, cobbled together from what Lan, Noelle, and I myself had told her back at Brighthenge. The idea that her twin sister had killed someone should have repulsed her. It might have repulsed me, had our roles been reversed.
“Do you think we should never have done this? Tried to close the rift, tried to make Aeon right again?” The guilt had been eating me up ever since we’d arrived here.
“I . . .” She paused. “I don’t know. I never realized it could go this way. I’m already exhausted at the very thought that there’s still so much more to be done. But now that we’re here, we have to see it all the way through. We have to get rid of the galla, of Inanna’s corruption, once and for all. It’s just . . .”
She looked away, as if ashamed. “Mother told me that I’d made it worse. I hate that she might have been right. But if the alternative is to accept that our world is slowly dying and we can do nothing about it . . . I reject that. I refuse to believe that our only option is to wait for death.” She turned back to me. “You have the galla’s gifts. Perhaps there’s a way we can use that to our advantage—”
“No.” I was shaking my head. “You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Tell me. Please.”
I pointed to the ground, where the sand had blackened, the corruption already taking root. “In a few days, this will rot away, and nothing else will ever grow here. What looks to be a blessing has always been a curse instead.”
“But nothing had ever grown there to begin with,” Haidee said thoughtfully. “I’ve done research on sustainable farming, and desert sand isn’t conducive to it—unfortunately. Whether it rots tomorrow or not, you’ve grown something in a place that would never have been able to in normal conditions, and that’s saying something.” Haidee’s own eyes glowed as she drove terra patterns underneath the sand once more. But nothing grew, and she sighed in defeat. “I was expecting that, I suppose. I’m not the one who’s been offered the galla’s gifts. . . . Still, I hate failing.”