Shadows of Perl

One
Quell
Every time I close my eyes, he is there.
I blink away the face of the boy I used to love and focus instead on the buzz of the streetlamps as they flicker off, one after another. The city lights always remind me of my mother, and the busy street fogs through my tears. We had nothing. We had no one. And somehow everything’s changed and yet nothing has.
I hug around myself. When she and I first started running from the Order, before we could afford an apartment, before my mother could find a job, those first several weeks, we would sleep wherever we could: a random unlocked car, a boarded-­up building, an alleyway. Each night she’d leave to find food or other things we might need. It’s easier to go unnoticed without a little one at my side, she’d say. A lot of things would have been easier without me at her side. But I’ll be back before the streetlights are off, I promise.
I wish she knew how strong I am now. How I can protect her, once I find her. Magic prickles the crown of my head, and on the back of my eyelids I can see my regal black diadem encrusted with bloody, dark-pink gems. I wish I could show it. I wish I could show everyone. But I hold the tightness at my center to keep my diadem hidden, a skill I saw Abby do the first day I met her, one I’ve finally mastered.
I settle deeper into the park bench and watch as strangers scamper across the street and enter the park on East Capitol. Car horns usher them hastily. I groan, checking my watch. One last test. The sky continues to brighten until all the streetlights I’ve stared at the last few hours, as far as I can see, are off.
Octos clears his throat next to me, his face hidden behind a giant newspaper. Its outer pages are from The Washington Post; its inner pages, Debs Daily. It’s been a couple of months since I fled Chateau Soleil, where I shared my grandmother’s tethering secret with Cotillion guests before plunging my dagger into my chest to bind with my toushana. And yet, the chaos that engulfed House of Marionne still haunts me. There’s been no official word about any of it—­my grandmother or her House.
“Anything yet?” I ask him. He leans over the paper, his blackened-­bluish fingernails curled tightly over a magnifying glass held up to a few lines of text. Then he furiously jots down notes on a pad of paper.
“Almost,” he says. Despite his attempt to blend in, his withered olive ­skin, tally marks beneath the rolled sleeves of his threadbare coat, and greasy straight hair crawling over his shoulders have won us a few quizzical glances. “How’s Lincoln looking?”
“Still a few stragglers.”
Octos has been training me while Abby looks for my mom. We’ve spent the recent weeks hunting for places I can push my toushana to its limits without hurting myself. Today’s the final test. After that I’m going to meet Abby, and then we’ll find my mom.
I flex my hands and pull on the hum of cold lurking in my bones. It shoves through me like a tide swallowing a shore, until iciness pools beneath every inch of my skin. I picture the release of my magic, and tiny plumes of smoke seep from my pores. I tighten at my center and draw in a deep breath. As my lungs fill with air, my shadows retreat back inside me. Sometimes I just call on my toushana to feel its nearness.
“Save your strength, you’ll need it,” Octos says. His tone is even. Always calm.
My training has gone well. But he insists we try my dark, destructive magic in various environments and under different amounts of stress. Once he had me bring down an abandoned multistory building. Purple bruises covered my arms from using the toushana for too long, and it was several days before I could even get out of bed without blinding pain.
“And those are only the bruises you can see,” he’d said.
My control over my dark magic, balancing the oscillating cycle of release-­release-­rest, has grown over the past several weeks. I still have splinters from the walls I collapsed to trap a robber in a basement. But he was apprehended and I left there without a single bruise. I thought Octos’s and my time together would be over then. But today he insisted on one last big test to push my toushana harder than I ever have. The only place in this city with enough tree cover to do magic is Lincoln Park, which was closed to the public for construction last night.
“And you’re sure about this place?” I ask, wary of being in a big city. It was his idea to get far away from Louisiana, or any place my grandmother could stumble upon us. Crossing into new territory was safer, and everything on the East Coast north of the James River is House of Perl country. We settled at a safe house in a rural town several hours from Washington, DC, in the middle of nowhere, but you can’t use magic in or close to a safe house, so DC it is.
“As sure as I can be.”
I leave Octos to his newspaper decoding. Cars whoosh by and I peer at the drivers, foolishly searching for a face that looks like my mom’s. She’d take me to time the streetlamps early in the morning and at night so that I’d know she was paying close attention. Then she’d return me to wherever we were staying and tuck me in. I would rarely sleep. Instead I would stare at the glow the lights cast on the walls outside, imagining it was the light in a hallway outside my room, in a real home somewhere. A reminder that my mother was never far, always just a few steps away. The hum of the lamps was her voice, I told myself. Any moment, she’d come back and we’d be together again.
What will she think of what I’ve done?