Infinity Son(52)

I’ve got dinner for him tonight, so I go to his room and knock gently. He doesn’t invite me in, but that’s usually how it goes down. I enter, and where Ness usually rests, there’s an older white man murmuring in his sleep. The first three times I walked in on Ness sleeping as someone else—a woman who was balding, a young boy with burnt fingertips, a man with greasy hair and a mousy face—I assumed he was playing some weird game with me. But this is the first time I’ve seen him so distressed. The man’s long red hair is plastered to his sweaty forehead, and a deep scar runs across his face. On closer inspection, he’s missing a chunk of his nose.

“Please don’t, please don’t,” the man mutters.

I set down the plate of food and rub the man’s shoulder. “Ness?”

The man snaps awake, and his hand finds its way around my throat quick as a blink. His nails are digging into my flesh and have trapped my next breath from reaching me when I need it most. He’s missing an eye, but the bright blue one that remains burns with more than enough hate to make up for it. I pound at his wrist, his arm, his chest, but every punch is weaker than the last. I’m fading, and a gray light and loosened grip and new breath keeps me awake. Ness is himself again, and he’s shaking. He removes his hand from my throat.

“That wasn’t me,” Ness says. “I didn’t do it.”

Of course that was him, of course he did it. What is he running his mouth about?

I fall on my back, breathing in and out, in and out. He hovers over me. He’s been threatened by Maribelle left and right, but this is the first time I’ve seen pure concern on his face. I massage my neck while my heart runs wild.

“I’m sorry. That happens sometimes,” Ness says as he helps me up, resting me against the wall closest to the door. “Turning into other people when I sleep.”

I’m so thrown by all of this—the strangling and the apology and the opening up.

It takes me a minute, but I get the words out: “Who is he?”

Ness sits against the opposite wall. There couldn’t be more space between us. “He was a trafficker who tried killing me that night on the dock. So I killed him first.”

I figured Ness had taken a life before, but the confirmation still pins me. I’m afraid to ask, but I have to know. “So those other people I’ve seen you turn into . . .”

“I don’t know who you’ve seen or haven’t seen, but I’m haunted by people who I haven’t killed too. I get so deep into some of these nightmares that my power mistakes it as concentration to morph into them. Dione was the only Caster who showed any sympathy. June doesn’t care, and Stanton thought it made me weak.”

“You’re not weak,” I say. “The strongest power above all is a living heart, right?”

“You pushing your brother’s campaign on me?”

“No. I’m heartbroken because we’re eighteen and we’ve been turned into weapons. You have to lie about being dead so your father won’t find you. You had to manipulate your way to safety. You had to kill for a gang you don’t want to be in. It’s only a matter of time until I find blood on my hands too.”

My eyes drift from Ness to the floor as I go off about all the pressure I’ve been under. I unload about all my guilt that’s tied up in Keon’s alchemy. But I talk the most about how I’m being so hard on Ma when she raised me right and gave me a home. It still feels impossible to forgive her since learning I’m not a biological Rey came right after another devastating surprise that has truly upended my life. Everything that’s happened the past three weeks is so wild. I crack and cry so hard that I wish anyone, even a stranger like Ness, would take me in their arms and lie to me about how it’s all going to be okay.

“Why are you telling me all of this?” Ness asks.

“I don’t know. Maybe because I’m freaking out about how to be a good brother and a good son and a good best friend and a good hero, and you’re the only person not expecting anything from me.”

There’s something about his silence that pulls more words out of me. It reminds me of whenever I was upset as a kid and Dad would ask me what was wrong, and I would swear that I didn’t want to talk about it, but he kept me company until I eventually burst and got everything off my chest.

“I wonder what my dad would think about me today,” I say.

Before Ness can ask me about him or tell me to go away so he can eat his microwaved pancakes in peace, I tell him all about how accepting Dad was. He never questioned my sexuality and was quick to encourage me to shoot my shot with Nicholas because maybe I would marry my high school crush like he did. He made sure I never felt inferior whenever Brighton’s report cards were glowing and mine were disappointing.

“I really miss him, but maybe it’s a good thing he’s dead. He won’t have to watch me turn into someone I don’t want to be.”

“I think the same with my mother,” Ness says. “I grew up wanting to be an actor. We used to go to musicals and movies, and I felt this . . . this pull to be on stages and sets. Broadway, blockbusters, indies. All of it. We ran lines for school plays while our driver took me to acting classes an hour away. If she knew how much I was using all those lessons as a Caster, she would’ve told me to forget my dreams like the Senator did.”