I put the photograph back and moved on to the next item in the box. A stack of papers were tied together with a piece of fishing twine. I lifted them out of the shoe box and carefully undid the knot. The pages all had jagged edges, as if someone had ripped them hastily from a notebook. The missing pages. My throat was dry, and as the twine fell away, I realized what I felt was more than just the thrill of discovery. I was nervous—nervous that what I was about to read contained some valuable clue to a past that had forever seemed so hidden from me.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the quiet little closet, I could hear my heart beating. Its rhythm grew faster as I stared down at the first page. It was filled with the same looping handwriting I’d been staring at every night, in the notebook that was now hiding underneath my pillow. My handwriting. My mother’s.
My eyes welled with years of grief. The words sprawled across the page as if speaking directly to me.
The Order knows about our new faction. They’re coming to stop it.
I flipped to the next page, my heart in my throat.
We’ve moved into the cabin, are hiding here. Mer thinks it will happen any day now, but she and Sam continue to plan the uprising. There’s no way we can know, with the Order, how it will happen. Mer has lost that gift. But she says we have to live our lives and what they see will come to pass. The two of them always knew that no place would be safe for a union of the Order and the Rebellion. They would have no real home. Neither would Skye, a mix of both worlds but truly from neither. Neither would the other Rogues. Neither would I. It’s what bonds us together. It’s what drives the uprising.
We’re all nomads. Wandering, searching for peace. But the Order will never let us find it. They will never leave us alone, not until we’ve either been extinguished—or become one of them. They’ll come for us, but it will never stop us from trying.
Mer and Sam—my mom and dad. But why would she be writing about herself in the third person? And the part about the Rogues made no sense. I flipped the page.
Mer and Sam gave me a home, something I’ve never had before. In return, they asked me one favor, one small favor in all of this. When the Order comes, when they crush our fledgling mission and destroy its founders, take Skye. Keep her away from them. Raise her so she’ll never know. Protect her from her lineage. And from herself.
Wait. What was I reading? Whose notebook was this? I definitely hadn’t written these words. And the more I read, the more I realized, with a heavy sinking in my chest, that neither had my mom. Even as I turned the last page, my hands trembling, I had a feeling I knew whose handwriting I was staring at.
Because when she finds out, she’ll never stop fighting for their cause. She’ll have the powers of Light and Dark combined—her mother and her father. No one knows what her powers will be. Both sides will try to claim her, but they’ll be wrong. What the Rogues understand—what Skye will, too, one day—is that to choose one over the other is to deny the very root of who she is: a balance of both. They’re watching, waiting—they’ll come for her, too, when the terms of the pact have come to pass. And then she’ll either fight to change the course of the universe—or they’ll try to kill her. Just like they’re trying to kill her parents.
My breath caught in my throat as I turned the last page.
We’ve left the cabin. It’s no longer safe here. I’ll spend the rest of my life protecting her from herself. I swear it.
And that could only mean one thing.
The book had never belonged to my mom. The loopy handwriting looked familiar because I’d seen it on Post-it notes on the fridge, on parental permission forms for school, on every report card and every doctor’s note I’d gotten for the past eleven years. I knew it well, because it was my handwriting, too. I’d spent my whole life copying it.
“Oh my god,” I said out loud. “It’s Aunt Jo’s.”
She knew. She’d known all along.
And more important than that—she was a Rogue.
Chapter 24
“Skye?”
I looked up, and Aunt Jo was standing there. The sadness in her eyes made her wrinkles even more defined. Like she’d aged immeasurably over the course of just a few days.
I had a handful of pages from her notebook and no excuse. I’d discovered her secret—and by virtue of that fact, she’d discovered mine. I was caught. We both were.
“I guess it’s time we talked,” she said quietly. She rolled up the sleeves of her shirt and sat down on the floor of the closet next to me.
“How could you not tell me?” I asked, my voice coming out choked. “You let me go through all this alone.”
“I know,” she said.
“If I had known, I could have at least been prepared! I could have known what to expect, or tried to run away, or—”
“Skye,” Aunt Jo said calmly. “You couldn’t have run away. And you wouldn’t have known what to expect. The Order would have found you no matter what you did or where you went. If they’d marked you, they would have tracked you down—just like they tracked your parents.”
“But—”
She reached over and took my hands in hers.
“I made a promise to them that I would protect you. And I was going to keep that promise if it killed me, too. They knew what they were up against when they took on the Order. They knew they were going to die. Protecting you was their only wish.”
“I still don’t understand why they didn’t want me to know. They could have warned me. They could have let you tell me. Why keep it a secret? Why let me find out for myself, the hard way?”
“Because you wouldn’t have been able to change anything.” I’d never before heard such urgency in her voice. “You would have grown up with dread and fear in your heart, that every step you took, every choice you made, was being watched. It would have driven you insane.”
“So it’s better to turn seventeen and find out I’ve been stalked my whole life by angels? To find out I have powers that could sway the course of destiny?”
“No, better that you got to have a normal childhood, make amazing friends, and get to make your own choices—not based on what you think would keep the Order at bay for one more day.”
“I still don’t . . . ,” I began, a huge sob racking my lungs. “This whole time. I kept it from you to protect you, when you were protecting me. You could have helped me!”
“If I had helped you, you would have done exactly what your mother was afraid of—something drastic and probably foolish—”
“Thanks,” I said. “You’re making this much better—”
“I mean that in running away from your life—or facing it before your powers began to emerge and you were ready—you would have done something to change the course of the universe. Or the Order would have killed you and you’d have died trying to change something you never could. Even then, your parents knew how special you were going to be. They wanted to protect you for as long as possible.”
The torn edges of the notebook blurred in my hands. I blinked, fighting back the tears.
“But I can change things,” I said. “I can change them now.”
Aunt Jo looked uncertain. “I don’t know, Skye. Others have been trying. For years. For millennia. Nothing has worked.”
“I’m different.” I stood up quickly, and the papers fluttered to the closet floor. “They’re all telling me I’m special. That I’ll be more powerful than any Rebel or any Guardian. I can do it, Aunt Jo. Aren’t you the one who told me to follow my own star? Don’t you want me to take your advice?”
“You should do what you feel is right,” she said. “I’ll always protect you. I will always, always be thinking of how to keep you safe.”
She stood up, too. I didn’t feel anymore like the little kid she’d taken in. I felt like I’d lived a hundred different lifetimes since then. But when she held out her arms to hug me, I rushed into them like I was six years old and she was the only person in the world who really cared.
I w
as lucky enough to know that it wasn’t the case anymore.
When we pulled away, I bit my lip. “Aunt Jo,” I admitted, “I love you and all. But I was kind of hoping that the notebook had belonged to my mom. I just don’t have anything that belonged to her. I wish I did. It was nice to feel close to her for a little while.”
Aunt Jo frowned, seemingly lost in thought. “You know,” she said slowly, as if still thinking it through. “I do have something of your mom’s, actually.”
“You do?”
“I always forget that it belonged to her. I associate it with something else completely.”
“What is it?” I asked breathlessly.
“It’s right in here,” she said, disappearing for a minute under a rack of sweaters. When she emerged, she was holding a large box, the kind you get from a dry cleaner for storing wedding dresses.
I gasped. “Is it her wedding dress?” I asked, reaching out for it. Aunt Jo batted my hand away.
“No,” she said simply. “It wasn’t her wedding dress. She gave it to me for mine.”
“What!” I gaped. “I thought you said you never married.”
Aunt Jo looked sad for a moment, then seemed to snap out of it and shook her head. “I didn’t.”
“Then what . . . ?”
She just pushed the box toward me. “Here,” she said. “Open it.”
I lifted the lid off the box with the edges of my fingers as if it was a photo I didn’t want to smudge. Inside, tufts of tissue paper were layered on top of one another like a sugary, sweet cake. I gently moved each layer aside, and eventually my fingers touched fabric. But it didn’t feel like any fabric I had ever worn. It didn’t feel quite like fabric at all. I pulled out a long, flowing dress.
My jaw dropped.
It was the dress from my visions. But instead of streaked with salt and blood, it was ethereal, perfect.
The only word for it was diaphanous. The dress was a sweeping floor-length with layers of white melting into the sheerest blue silk and chiffon. I held it up to myself and grinned, suppressing images of the sand, the sword, the body crumpled on the ground. “What do you think?” I asked, twirling around. “Do I look like an angel?”
“I think you look just like your mom when it was hers,” said Aunt Jo. She was beaming. “I never got to wear it, but you should save that. You know, for prom.”
I pictured myself at prom in a couple of months, the beautiful gown sweeping the floor like a boat trailing stardust through a moonlit lake. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would usually wear, but when I pictured myself in it, something clicked inside me and it felt right. Who would I be with at prom? My friends, of course. Cassie, in something fabulous with sequins and feathers. Dan and Ian, in tuxes. Would I go with Asher? Would we slow-dance together like a normal couple in front of the entire school, like we were the only two people in the world?
I closed my eyes and let myself imagine it. The soft material of the dress fell over my skin in drapes and folds, grazing the floor as I walked across it in dangerously high heels. There was a beautiful boy in a tuxedo standing on the other side of the dance floor. And as I walked to him, I knew in my heart that this was the person I was supposed to be with. This was my destiny, my one epic love. I reached out my hands to take his, and he pulled me into his arms. The music whirled and lilted as if being distorted.
But no matter how many times we twirled, I couldn’t see his face.
“Babe,” Aunt Jo said. “You okay? Do you like it?”
“Oh,” I said. “I love it.” She smiled, pleased, proud.
“Your mom would have wanted you to have it. And I certainly got no use out of it. It’s angelic silk, sheer as clouds.”
It was the only thing I had that belonged to my mom. I held the dress to my chest, and pretended she was the one who had given it to me.
“I’ll wear it to prom,” I said, leaning in to give Aunt Jo a kiss. “It’s perfect. Thank you.”
“She’d be proud of you, Skye,” she said. “They both would.”
I lay in bed that night and tried not to think about the connection between the beautiful dress and my violent vision. Instead, as I hovered somewhere between dreaming and waking, I wondered if Aunt Jo had left the notebook in the cabin by accident—or if she’d left it there on purpose.
The morning of the race dawned, bright and clear. Coach was skeptical about my miraculous recovery, but I managed to prove to him that I was fine.
After my discoveries from the night before, I felt more ready than I ever had to hold my power in the palm of my hand, like fire, like snow, like freezing rain. Aunt Jo was there, with Cassie, Dan, and Ian. The four of them had scrawled a different letter of my name in puffy paint on T-shirts that they wore over sweatshirts. Cassie was S, Dan was K, Ian was Y, and Aunt Jo held up the rear with E.
A little ways off, Asher stood with Gideon and Ardith. The two Rebels talked to each other, smiling as they watched me prepare. But Asher looked so serious, so wholly focused on what was going on in his head. What was he thinking? Probably he was just praying for me not to royally screw up. My pulse quickened as I thought of how embarrassing it would be to accidentally reveal my powers in front of everybody. The key, of course, was control.
As I scanned the crowd, I noticed Devin was there, too. Watching me. A spasm clenched my heart. The memory of our kiss still haunted me, but it wasn’t that I longed to feel his lips on mine again or his fingers graze down my arms. Aunt Jo had reminded me how unrelenting the Order was—and how very little stood in their way. They would not have let that kind of transgression occur. Even if I was causing static in the frequency of destiny—they would have known, somehow. They always knew. They were always ready. There was no fooling them.
The morning was cold, but I shivered from fear. Had my kiss with Devin been genuine? Or, like everything else, had it only been some trick? The Order’s attempt to shake me up, keep me vulnerable?
I tried to wipe everything clean and make my mind calm and focused. At the top of the mountain, I took a few deep breaths and stretched. I could do this. I was ready.
Ellie was racing first, and she crouched against her opponent at the starting line. The team cheered behind her. “Come on, El! You got this!” She frowned and leaned forward. Poles back. The whistle blew, and she and her competition from Holy Cross were off, a blur of school colors against the white snow. I found myself cheering along with the team. Soon I couldn’t see them anymore, but when I heard the crowd cheer just minutes later, I knew without a doubt that Ellie had won. Her time would be hard to beat.
My number was up. I pulled my goggles down and glided forward to the starting point.
I was hovering on the edge.
I am hovering on the edge.
In the clear, cold light of day, the dreams that I’d had while unconscious came rushing back.
The dead of winter. Snow covering the slopes like it was trying to bury us all with it. I can hear the sound of my classmates’ voices echoing off the mountains as they laugh and horse around.
No, not horse around. Cheer. Cheer for me. As I readied at the start, I could hear them cheering my name.
I looked down over the edge, into the chasm below.
Just like in the dream, I was torn. I was always torn. But now I felt like I was beginning to figure out an answer.
“Make a choice, Skye,” I said to myself. “You can’t stare off the edge of this cliff forever.”
The whistle blew at the start, and we were off down the slope. I felt the tension of opposites rush through me, keeping me in control. I passed through patches of sunlight and then shadows cast by the trees. Light. And then dark. Control and chaos.
I knew then as well as I ever would that Aunt Jo was right: I couldn’t have one without the other. Destroy the Rebellion and life would be governed by an impossible set of rules for eternity. Destroy the Order and no place on Earth would be safe from the never-ending cycle of destruction and renewal.
I was the only
thing keeping them in balance.
The powers of light and dark were twining themselves together inside me, into a power that only I possessed. Me—and no one else.
I couldn’t make a choice between chaos and control. Not because it had been made for me. But because there was no choice to make. It wasn’t one or the other. They were both inside me. They were both a part of me. I was nothing without both sides.
Take one away and I would fall.
I’d had the dream every night. And I never woke up to the relief that it was only a dream. Because for days, I hadn’t woken up at all.
But I was awake now. I was out of the darkness, and suddenly my world was flooded with light.
And as I sliced across the finish line, I knew that I had done it.
Coach Samuelson stood in front of the crowd with his stopwatch. He nodded at me imperceptibly, but his eyes remained distant. Ellie’s time had been better than mine. She had beat me out for captain.
But as I saw Asher break through the crowd and rush to swoop me up in his arms, I knew it didn’t matter.
She could be captain—that was what she wanted. I had found clarity at last.
And that was what I needed.
Chapter 25
After the race, the whole gang of us went out for pizza.
I sat with Cassie, Dan, Ian, Asher, Gideon, and Ardith—and Aunt Jo, who beamed with happiness. A few tables away, Ellie and Maggie were sitting with a few of their friends and a couple of girls from the team.
“Be right back, guys,” I said, sliding out of the booth. I walked over to them. Ellie looked up at me nervously.
“Hey, Skye,” Ellie said. “Look, I’m sorry—”
“That was a great race.” I cut her off. “You were amazing. You definitely deserve captain more than I do.”
“I do?” She looked perplexed. “But I thought you wanted it.”