Havenfall (Havenfall #1)(83)

Her lips twitch. “I’m sorry I scared you.” She takes a shuddering breath and glances at the wall to her left—in the direction, I realize with a chill, of the Solarian doorway, if you drilled straight through the tunnels.

“How long have you known?” I ask carefully.

“Not for sure until yesterday.” She smiles, but without any real feeling to it. “On our second day here, I felt drawn to the tunnels; I bribed one of the guards to let me down to see them. And when I was in front of the Solarian door, I blacked out; there’s a few minutes I don’t remember.” She extends her hand, like she expects to see claws there.

I remember coming across Willow castigating her in the common room after she went to the tunnels. The claw marks we found outside the Solarian door.

“That started happening more and more,” she says, eyes distant. “I could feel myself changing, but I thought I was just dreaming or hallucinating. I can’t control it. I just know I have to get outside when I feel it coming on. Some kind of instinct.”

She meets my eyes, her gaze pleading. “I had no idea what was going on, Maddie. It had never happened before.”

She looks normal; she looks shaken. But something is different. I can feel the power coming from her, the magic, just as strong as from any Fiorden noble or Byrnisian soldier. It feels like sparks, like a light, burning, invisible snow falling over my skin. It feels alien, and yet I want to get closer, want to open my arms and feel as much of it as I can.

But no. I have to think. “The door opened wider after you came down here,” I say. “Do you think that was you?” If the open door is what’s disrupting the balance and keeping Marcus unconscious … If Bram’s blood opened the door, could Taya close it?

Taya looks between us, shrugging; Brekken bites his lips, eyes fixed on her.

“You clearly have strong magic,” he says, his tone polite even as his voice trembles slightly. They both look at me, waiting for me to weigh in, but I have nothing. Shock has wiped my mind clean of words.

“Maddie,” Taya says. Her voice is quiet but ragged, urgent. “I didn’t mean to lie to you. And I didn’t hurt Max.”

I take a deep, centering breath. “I believe you,” I say, and I do. Maybe I shouldn’t, and my mind is racing with other questions, but I do believe that much. “Why did you go to the door?” I ask her after a moment. A weird, unsettled feeling stirs my stomach. “Do you want … do you want to go through?”

“No.” But Taya sounds less certain of this.

She slides into a sitting position on the floor, and Brekken and I instinctively follow suit. The stone floor is cold through my damp jeans, and distantly I’m still aware of the guards’ presence somewhere behind us, but that all feels unimportant right now in comparison to the words trickling from Taya’s lips.

“This world is my home,” she says, reaching down to toy with a speck of dirt from the floor. “All that stuff I told you about foster care, about Terran, that was true. My life is here, my brother is here. My parents never told me we were Solarian. I don’t even know what that means really. I thought I was just like you.”

Brekken is the next one to speak. “What about before that?” he asks, carefully. “What do you remember of where you came from?”

She looks down at her hands, her lips pressing together. I think of everything she’s told me about her family. Their car going off a bridge. The parade of foster homes. Her twin, Terran, and her determination to find him.

“My brother was like me,” she says slowly. “I remember he told me once we were special, magical. We were just little kids, but I think he knew somehow.” Her white fingers twist around each other in the dark. “We lived in Nevada until I was three. Then our parents died and Terran and I went into separate foster homes. Everything was normal, or normal enough, until I got here.”

In my head, I hear Brekken’s voice. Every time a Solarian binds magic to matter, a piece of them is bound too. I see the girl from the antique shop slumping against the wall. A sense of dark foreboding and a question gather in my chest. I’m not sure I want to know the answer, but we’re short on both time and options, so I make myself ask it anyway.

“Do you remember any weird objects from when you were little?” I try my best to keep the fear out of my voice. “Objects made out of silver, especially.”

Taya tilts her head at me. “Like jewelry?”

“Anything,” I say, deliberately casual. “Jewelry, yeah, or trays or pens or marbles. It could have been anything.”

She blinks at me. “Actually, now that I think about it, yeah,” she says at length. “My brother, Terran, had this set of jacks.”

My breath halts.

A faint, joyless smile curves Taya’s lips. “He was obsessed with them.”

Her words hit me like raindrops and slide off, their meaning not sinking in. Nothing sinks in except for the tiny pinprick of pain under my collar, so slight that I almost never even notice it anymore.

The place where one of Nathan’s old jacks, strung on a silver chain, rests below my collarbone.

“When you two were separated …,” I whisper.

Brekken must hear something off in my voice; I see him glance at me out of the corner of my vision, but I can’t tear my eyes away from Taya. Can’t stop scouring her face for clues, as if I’ll be able to find something in the dark of her eyes beyond even what she remembers.