Thin Air

“I thought you said teleporting could kill people,” I said.

“It didn’t.”

Even though I knew it was a mistake, I took a step toward them and heard that he was gasping for breath in helpless, hopeless sobs. He looked up, and the dim light gilded a pale face, pale hair.

“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. “I can’t be here-” And then he just…stopped, staring at me.

“Ashan?” I asked. He should have rung some recognition bells, I knew that, but…nothing. A frustrating lack of context. “You know who I am?”

He licked pale lips and wiped away his tears with shaking hands. “You’re gone,” he said. “I killed you. I killed both of you.”

He lunged at me, and slammed the heel of his hand into my shoulder. He seemed as surprised as I was-apparently, he’d been expecting a ghost, not flesh and blood. And I hadn’t expected him to move quite that fast. “Whoa!” I said, and skipped back out of reach. “Watch the hands!”

Ashan didn’t exactly look well. He was wearing some kind of a gray suit, but it was dirty, smudged, and torn, and he smelled. I mean, really smelled. His hair was greasy, and all in all, he looked like somebody who’d never discovered the basics of hygiene. Which I suppose would follow, if he’d been busted from near-angelic status to the merely human. Ve

He kept looking at me like he wasn’t sure he was sane. Well…actually, he looked like he’d blown past the borders of actual sanity some time ago. I glanced over my shoulder. Ve

“You have to be dead,” he said. “I watched you die. I felt you die. And I paid the price.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “Guess what? Good news. You get to make amends and help me get my life back.”

He was fast. Faster than he ought to have been, and I hadn’t moved far enough. He crossed the space, grabbed me by the throat, and slammed me down to the floor with such violence that I could barely comprehend it, much less react.

Upside down, Ve

My instincts reached for power…and failed.

There was no access to the powers I’d started to get accustomed to, not here. This was like a bubble, cut off from the outside. Cut off from the aetheric.

“Get off!” I squeaked, and twisted, trying to throw Ashan’s weight to one side. He wasn’t heavy, but he was wiry, and he had an unholy amount of strength. I had no leverage. I grabbed a handful of his greasy hair and yanked, and he howled and used his free hand to grab my wrist. I bucked, got him off balance, and we rolled down the aisle of the chapel, spitting curses, and this time I ended up on top, my hands on his throat. Holding him down.

“Go on,” he spat at me. “Break my neck. Kill me like I killed your child. Put me out of my misery, you pathetic bag of meat!”

I went very still. I must have looked like a crazy woman, my hair sticking to my sweaty face, my eyes wide, my lips parted on a truth I didn’t want to speak.

He’d killed my child.

That was what Ve

This time, Ve

Oh, I was pretty sure I could. And should.

Didn’t the daughter I couldn’t remember, whose pain had soaked into the very stones outside of this place, demand that much?

TWELVE

It wasn’t so much the moral quandary that stopped me as the fact that something changed in the room, right at that moment. Not Ashan-he was a stinky, horrifying excuse for a human being, and right at that moment I had no reason in the world not to hurt him as badly as he’d hurt my daughter. I didn’t figure that Ve

What changed was that the three of us were no longer alone.

Ve

And then she slipped down to her knees, put her hands in her lap, and bowed her head.

“Oh,” she said faintly. “I see now. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought them here.”

And there was someone sitting in the blackest shadows of the room, an outline of a person, nothing more, but a sense of presence and power sent little shocks up and down my spine.

I hesitated, staring at that dark shape, and then I sat up, grabbed Ashan by his filthy collar, and yanked him to a sitting position. “Who is it?” I asked Ve

She didn’t answer.

“Ve

Whoever it was, Ashan looked destroyed. The expression on his face was horrifying in its vulnerability. His eyes filled with tears, and his whole body trembled with the force of something like grief, something like rage, more toxic than either one of those. I let go, because he didn’t even know I was there, and he crawled away from me, crawled, to kneel at the end of the pew where the shadow figure sat.

“You can’t be here,” he said. “You can’t.”

But whatever the shape was, it didn’t move, didn’t speak, and didn’t seem to notice him at all. I got slowly to my feet and watched Ashan tremble, and suddenly killing him didn’t seem like a priority. He was suffering, all right. Suffering in ways I couldn’t begin to understand.

Good.

All around the chapel, candles came alight-one after another, a racing circle of warm flame.

And I saw who was sitting in the pew. I guess I should have known, from Ve

She looked human, but there was no way she was anything like it; she had a stillness to her that not even Tibetan monks could attain. She was wearing a full brickred dress, shifting and sheer in some places, solid in others; it fluttered in a breeze I couldn’t feel, and her full lips were parted on what looked like a gasp of delight, as if she’d seen something truly wonderful that none of the rest of us could grasp.

And then her eyes, a brilliant shade of hot gold, shifted to fix on me.

Ashan pressed himself down on the floor, totally abasing himself, and I thought, No, this can’t be true. This can’t be happening.

Because it was my daughter. My Imara, the Imara of the memories I’d gotten from Cherise and Eamon. And yet…not her at all.

Not until she smiled, and shattered my heart into a million pieces.

“Oh,” I whispered, and felt my knees go weak. “Oh, my God…” I didn’t know what to say, how to feel. There was this storm of emotion inside of me, overwhelming in its pressure, and I wanted to laugh and cry and scream and, like Ashan, get down on my knees in gratitude and supplication. But I wasn’t Ashan, and I didn’t. I braced myself with both hands on the back of a pew and stared at her until my eyes burned.

She didn’t speak.

“Imara?” I asked. My throat felt raw, and I could barely recognize my own voice. “Are you…?” Alive? All right? I didn’t even know what to ask.

Ve

Help? My daughter was there, smiling at me. How could it not help? I swallowed. “Can she…can she hear me?”

“Not the way you think. She hears who you are, though. And she knows.”

“Knows what?” I felt a bizarre mixture of pain and grief and anger fizzing up inside, overwhelming the relief.

“Everything,” Ve

There was something about Imara that kept me from rushing to her, touching her, babbling out everything I felt. Something…other.