Girl One(115)

Then Fiona spoke. “You’re wrong. You don’t know him at all. You were only six when he disappeared, weren’t you? A mere child. Now you have an idea of him in your head that’s built out of lies and gossip. I know the real man. He wept for the Grassis. He’d never hurt anyone intentionally.”

Frustrated, I tried to gauge how much Fiona would even understand. All the little calculations that had gone into Bellanger’s planning, lost on someone as sheltered as her. “How did he manage to forge the autopsy reports? How did he steal you away to this commune? He schemed and he lied about so many things—about your mother—” About your sister, I wanted to say. About their deaths. But I reminded myself of Mathias, listening. Not now. I’d already said too much.

“I appreciate what you’re doing, even if your lies are quite twisted,” Fiona said benevolently. “You want to save me from my guilt, but I made peace with that long ago. Seventeen years ago, I did something terrible. For years, my powers were completely out of my control, but now look at me.” She shut her eyes briefly and tilted her head back, as if to give me a better chance to take her in. “Father gave up everything, just to give me a chance to redeem myself. I’m not like you. I don’t have to play the damsel in distress and blame him for my weaknesses.”

“Your whole life has been in the middle of nowhere, performing for him. He doesn’t love you the way a father loves a daughter. I know what a parent’s love looks like. Bellanger loves you like a—like a warden loves a prisoner.” I remembered the stockpile of weapons. “He loves you the way a coward loves a gun.”

We walked. The predictable sharp turn. Another long stretch of alleyway, the backs of buildings, the lonely desert. This was Fiona’s daily exercise. Looking out at the same barren stretch of the desert that held her captive, day after day after day. I imagined her in Freshwater, looking around at the wide, wide world, understanding her place in it, and lashing out, stretching into the sky and stopping all those flutter-quick pulses.

“Maybe Bellanger isn’t helping you control yourself at all,” I said. “Maybe he’s holding you back—”

“Holding me back?” Fiona interrupted. Anger and fear compressing her voice into a tight near-whisper. “You have no idea who I am now, do you? I’m—wait.”

She turned around abruptly, yanking at my wrist. Mathias paused, caught midstride. He looked from one of us to the other, searching, but Fiona was imperious. “Leave us. Now.”

The sudden authority in her voice gave me a prickle of discomfort.

Mathias made a tentative protest. “Dr. Bellanger instructed me to—”

“Do you answer to Dr. Bellanger, or to me? Leave us now, or I can make things very difficult for you.”

He hesitated, then stood firm. “My duty is to stay here. For your safety.”

Fiona turned away from him. “You need to see,” she said to me, a manic light in her eyes. “Of course you don’t appreciate what Father’s done when you haven’t seen proof.”

“What are you saying?”

In response, Fiona stepped toward Mathias. Her face changed. Her eyes slid upward, irises vanishing, to reveal a waiting blankness, slippery and fish-belly pale in her face. That picture on the altar, the empty-eyed goddess. Mathias made a small movement, like he was starting to run. All the times I’d let this man rule my imagination, haunt my every move, and now we stood here under the desert sun and he was completely helpless.

Then I was sinking—down, down, into the sand, and Mathias was a dark spot hovering above me. The soles, the heavy black soles of his boot. Fiona was rooted to the spot, head tilted upward. Mathias was rising into the air, a balloon released from a child’s hand.

I remembered what Cate’s mother had told her: A girl who didn’t have to use her hands the way people did, because her hands were in the air all around her. Mathias was suspended above us, blank-faced, not fighting. Ten, twelve feet above the ground. Part of the landscape. A fly hanging invisible inside a spiderweb.

A guilty part of me wanted to see what came next. I wanted to see how she’d grown since she was a little girl crying for her mother. But I forced myself to speak. “Fiona, I already know that you’re powerful. There’s no need for this.”

“He tried to kill you,” Fiona said. “What do you care what happens to him?”

I couldn’t answer. Something was happening now. A small flame, a bright spark shimmering on his shoulder. It looked like a reflection of the sun, a pale dot. But quickly, too quickly, it spread along the seams of his clothing, a blaze hot enough that I stepped back, the warmth touching my skin. Fire. It wreathed his arm, twisting. She was controlling it, a live wire that she was playing with. Then she let go, and the fire spread.

He screamed, an animal cry that wrenched something in me, nausea pushing up my throat. Hanging there, he was as bright as a planet. A star. I thought of that bird, evaporating into nothingness. Into ashes. Mathias’s screams were low and keening, outside of his control.

“Fiona, you don’t have to do this,” I said. The fire that night in Arkansas seemed so long ago now. Ancient, meaningless history. I didn’t have any desire to see this man punished, not now. Not standing here on the property of the man who’d kidnapped my mother, stolen my youngest sister, and lied to me.