Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker 3)

Samantha startled as if waking from a dream and jogged in her loping way to the side of the fire. In agony now, Lily reached through the flames and grabbed at the willstone resting on her mother’s outstretched palm.

“I’m sorry,” her mother yelled through the roar of the fire.

Lily had no idea why her mother was apologizing, but then her hand touched her mother’s willstone, and she understood.

A thousand moments almost exactly like the moment she was in, but each subtly different, stretched out in Lily’s mind like pearls on a string—she was touching the willstone, she was still reaching for the willstone, she had touched the willstone, she knocked the willstone to the ground accidentally, she caught the willstone before it hit the ground, she touched the willstone with her other hand—the possibilities refracted inside her mind, zipping through like cards shuffling in a never-ending deck.

“Don’t try to take it all in, Lillian!” Samantha yelled. Lily realized she was making a keening sound but she didn’t know how to stop. Samantha reached into the fire with her other hand and slapped Lily across the face.

A thousand variations on a slap hit her, and it took all of them to stun Lily into releasing her mother’s willstone and focusing on the here and now.

Rowan’s shirt was slashed and blood flowed freely down his side. Caleb and Tristan wrestled Carrick to the ground. Simms stepped up and took on Tristan. She was a good fighter—strong as an ox and twice as tenacious. Breakfast and Una were on the other side of the pyre, fending off the officers who were swarming across the lawn in riot gear. Hiding behind their shields, the officers pulled out their clubs and beat Una and Breakfast. Just behind the line of officers, Lily saw Miller’s face—a desperate mask among the black helmets. He was shouting and trying to get to her.

Lillian. I need you to guide me across the worldfoam, Lily called out in mindspeak.

I’m here. Hurry. You’re already badly burned.

Lily breathed in, and her witch wind screeched like a living thing. By the time she let her breath out again, she and her coven were in Lillian’s world.

Lily heard someone who loved her say her name. And then the pain began.

Toshi was surprised he was still allowed to come and go in the restricted zone.

After what had happened with Lily and the Hive, he would have thought that Grace would lock him up, but she hadn’t. As Toshi passed under the whips of the Warrior Sisters at the checkpoint to get back into Bower City, he understood why. By allowing him all the freedoms he’d enjoyed before, Grace was showing him not only that she wasn’t afraid of him, but that he’d never been free.

Toshi eyed a Warrior Sister as she moved aside to let him pass. He still didn’t know if Grace could see everything the Hive saw, or if they just filled her in on the things they considered important. Again, the strangeness of the Hive struck him. What did a Warrior Sister consider important? Did they have a language, or did they simply pass along images to Grace? And if they passed on only images without language, how effective was the Hive at spying for her?

He had been forbidden to tell anyone that Grace controlled the Hive, although when she’d come to his rooms after losing Lily in the woods, she hadn’t seemed too worried that he would. She’d wanted to talk about how Lily and her coven had simply disappeared, but Toshi didn’t have a clue. When she finally believed that he was ignorant, Toshi had steered the conversation back to what really concerned him.

“Why the lie, Grace? Why even bother pretending that the Hive is in control?” Toshi had asked her.

“You know what I’ve learned in all my years of building and growing this city?” she asked in return. Toshi shrugged, not interested in playing guessing games. “Ninety-nine percent don’t care how the lights get turned on or how the water gets cleaned or how we make the streets safe—just as long as everything works.” She smiled at him, almost wistfully, and Toshi was reminded of one night over thirty years ago when they’d stood and talked under the stars. He couldn’t really say who had kissed whom, but he remembered being happy for a while. It hadn’t lasted long. “The lie is for the other one percent who couldn’t bear to live under a human dictator. It’s a mercy, really.” Her eyes hardened in the same way that had driven him to break things off with her all those years ago. “The lie is so I don’t have to kill that one percent.”

“Grace the Merciful,” he said bitterly.

Half her face pinched into a condescending smile. “No one mysteriously disappears in Bower City. People aren’t being bullied or silenced. They have jobs, rights, wealth, and great schooling for their kids. There’s no crime, no poverty, and no sickness. No one wants that to change. They don’t want to know the truth, and if you told them, what I’d be forced to do to quell any uprising would be your fault.” She brushed his shoulder like the lover she used to be, and he recoiled. She dropped her hand. “Leave the lie alone, Toshi.”

When she left she didn’t even bother to close the door behind her. And why should she? Privacy was an illusion.

Toshi hadn’t wanted to believe her. He thought that there had to be malcontents—people who wouldn’t be bought out by the perks of perfect living. So far, he hadn’t found anyone. After two days of talking in code with family and friends, he was leaving the restricted zone more frustrated than when he’d entered it. He’d thought that if ever there were a place to find rebels, it would be there. He couldn’t have been more wrong.

The people in the restricted zone didn’t care one way or the other if the Hive controlled the city or if Grace controlled the city by controlling the Hive. They just wanted to be a part of it.

His father’s advice was given in Japanese. The closest equivalent in English was “don’t rock the boat.”

Toshi spent a day in his family’s apothecary shop, trying to feel out customers to see who would rise up if they knew that Grace, and not the inscrutable and invincible Hive, had kept them poor and sickly. He’d asked hypothetical questions that were met with blank stares and embarrassed laughs. They lived in a world where it was acceptable, even normal, to curse the Hive, but beyond curses all anyone seemed to want was to be accepted by them—to be ushered past the checkpoints and into the shining city by the sea.

At night, Toshi sat with his dying mother. He could see the cancer in her growing by the second, thinking how easily he could pluck it from her body. Like picking spilled seeds off the floor. But he wasn’t allowed to do that.

Toshi asked his mother why she didn’t want change. She placed her shriveled hand next to his smooth one and smiled up into his eternally young face. “You are not sick. You will never be sick,” she said.

And that was enough for her. It seemed to be enough for most in the restricted zone. As long as they had the hope that their children would live charmed lives in Bower City, they didn’t want change.

Toshi jumped a trolley and hung from the bar, glaring hopelessly out the window. The clean streets glittered at him smugly and the legions of fit people mocked him with their healthy bodies and pretty, smiling faces.

Grace was right. They would probably fight him—not her—if Toshi tried to change anything. That was the genius of what Grace had done. Her victims were far away and somebody else’s problem. The punishment was to be locked out of Bower City, and so everyone wanted in.

He got off the trolley and walked the last few blocks to the Governor’s Villa. Grace hadn’t even hinted that she was going to throw him out or demote him in any way. Still, Toshi was certain now that he had no hope of ever learning how to grow willstones. Grace would never trust him with that. If the formula for growing willstones was ever leaked it would end Bower City’s stranglehold on magic and therefore its dominance in the world.