Indigo(50)
She blinked again and then saw nothing.
Indigo fell backward into the darkness, and there was nothing to catch her fall. And so she fell down, down, down …
10
Alice in her rabbit hole could not have fallen any farther, or with any less regard for what was real and what was fiction. A world peopled by talking flowers and handyman lizards didn’t seem any less likely than a world where she could have done—where anyone could have done—what she had.…
Shadows she could understand.
Shadows were ordinary, shadows were safe, shadows were hers. Even with Damastes clawing at her mind like a rat scrabbling at a pipe, the shadows belonged to her. Nothing in the shadows could scream a world to pieces. She wasn’t a banshee, to wail death to the living. So how …
It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
Everything matters, murmured a voice, and for the first time she couldn’t say whether it belonged to her or to Damastes. She was falling, down, down, down, until nothing existed but the shadows and the fall.
She could fight it, but to what end? As long as she kept falling, she didn’t have to think about any of this. She could let herself go, relaxing into the comforting arms of gravity, which was only an echo of itself here in the darkness; it pulled her down, but it would never pull her all the way to the ground. She could fall forever, a perpetual motion machine of one, and nothing else would matter.
It was tempting—so tempting—and she was so tired. She didn’t think she’d ever before been this tired in her life. The exhaustion ran all the way down to her bones, curling around them like smoke, making her feel fragile and thin, like a glass sculpture of herself.
Her powers should have come with an instruction manual. Better yet, they should have come with an actual teacher, not the half-remembered lie of one, someone who could actually understand what she was capable of and explain it to her so that she would know.
The place where Nora ended and Indigo began (or was it the other way around?) was raw. It rubbed against itself, and that small pain was enough to keep her from surrendering completely to the fall.
How was it her fault that Damastes wanted her? She hadn’t asked for this. She hadn’t been the one to join a cult or barter her soul to the gods of murder.
How was it her fault that the Phonoi wouldn’t leave her alone? Yes, she killed them when she found them, but they killed children. They made their perverse beliefs her problem when they left the bodies of innocents scattered in the streets like trash. That stupid nun should have realized that if anyone was killing in the name of righteousness, it was Nora.
Wasn’t it?
Wasn’t it?
And still she was falling. Nora scrabbled at the edges of her mind, trying to find the place where she ended and Indigo began. Something was important, even here. Something still mattered; something she had almost forgotten, except as a small, nagging need to act, to perform some unremembered task. Indigo would recall. They weren’t really different people—Nora wasn’t so far gone as to believe that they were—but she had been Indigo when she’d heard the bad thing, the important thing, and she wasn’t Indigo now.
Or maybe she was. Maybe this was what it was like to really be Indigo, no friends, no family, no …
Nora’s eyes snapped open, beholding only blackness. Friends. Friends.
Shelby and Sam were in danger. Damastes had as much as confirmed that Rafe was on his way to hurt them, and she had gotten sidelined by the murder nun and her sister, leaving her friends all alone. They didn’t know what was coming.
She was so tired. She was hurt, and she was exhausted, and if her powers were ever going to give out, this was the time. Maybe her power had never been to enter the shadows; maybe it had always been to leave them, and now that she was at the end of her rope, she was trapped, no way out.
But they needed her.
Please, she thought, and there was no more divide in her mind. There was no more Nora, no more Indigo, only her, only a woman who needed, more than anything, to save her friends.
She wrapped the shadows around herself, pulling them tight as a veil, and she was gone.
*
Transitioning back into the real world had never before felt so difficult. From the outside it might have looked easy, but for her, it was a struggle every inch of the way. There was nothing between reality and the shadows—they were the flip side of each other, connected and connecting and inextricably linked—and still she struggled through the morass before collapsing into the light.
Everything ached. Her wounds from the fight with the murder nun had traveled with her into shadow, but they had somehow been inconsequential there; the trials of the flesh mattered less in a place that was defined by the absence of light. Now that she was back in a place with physical laws, every bruise, abrasion, and cut felt as if it were being delivered all over again.
Panting, Nora used the wall to pull herself to her feet and looked dully around. The shadows seemed too heavy. She couldn’t see through them the way she should have been able to, so tired that even the most basic attributes of her power were unreliable.
There’s the answer, she thought, with a trace of wry bitterness. I can be normal. I just have to run myself into the ground to do it.
Into the ground—where was she? After the shadows had dumped her in Florence, she was less willing to trust her sense of direction. The unshifting shadows made it hard to tell exactly where she was. It was like having a whole layer of her vision stolen, replaced by … what? By what normal people saw. By what she had claimed to want for so long.