Author: Jodi Meadows

“Clever.”

“Tell him you think so, and you’ll have made a friend for eternity.” Sam grinned. “Better yet, tell him you like the name.”

“SED? Why?”

“It stands for Stef’s Everything Device.” He paused while the music swelled against my ears, and while I smiled. “Now the Council makes sure everyone has a SED so they can be reached during emergencies. Stef may be a little proud of that.”

“Deservedly so, because now I get music.” I closed my eyes during a flute solo, wishing I could wrap the silvery sound around me, like armor. When the rest of the musicians started to play again, I twisted to face Sam, so maybe he could see in my eyes how much this meant to me. “Thank you.”

“I still want to know more about you.”

That again. Watching the musicians on the screen, I considered whether there was anything worthy of telling. But maybe he didn’t care about worthy. Maybe, for some unfathomable reason, he just wanted to know anything. “Once, I found a jar of honey in the cupboard. I took a spoon and ate half of it. Li had never let me try any before.” And she’d withheld meals for two days after.

“So you like sweet things. Did you ever get any more?”

“No, she hid it better after that. Up high.” I stilled, realizing I’d just admitted to stealing from Li. “But don’t worry. I was younger then and wasn’t thinking. I wouldn’t just take anything from you.”

What I really meant was, please don’t send me away.

“Besides,” I added, turning my bandaged hands palm up, “I can’t take anything without asking.”

“Your hands will recover soon.” He gave a sly half smile. “And in my house, you can have all the honey you want. I’m friends with the beekeeper.”

“I’m going to Purple Rose Cottage,” he said, our second week in the cabin. “We’re low on painkillers and gauze.”

“No!” I stood so quickly the SED dropped, cutting off the music. “Don’t go there.”

Sam knelt in front of me, retrieving the device. “Either I get supplies, or your hands go back to hurting all the time.”

“Don’t go. She’ll know I’m with you and do something awful. Neither of us will be safe.” Adrenaline flooded me, making me shake. “I’m willing to suffer the pain. Just don’t go.”

“I’m not willing to let you suffer.” He reconnected the SED with my earpieces, and a dozen-person symphony began again. “I’ll be back before nightfall.”

And he was. I wasn’t clear on how far the cottage was from his cabin—I’d never found this place during my explorations—but he returned well before dark. Maybe he’d run. I was just happy to see him again.

“Was she terrible?” I asked from where I sat on the chair with the SED. Now it played a piano song with a strange, bouncy rhythm.

He dropped the bag of supplies on the counter with a clatter of pills and a thunk of glass. “She wasn’t there, but the door was unlocked.”

“So you just took things?” That idea made me smile.

“You need them.” He frowned toward the stove, in spite of our good fortune. Li wasn’t there. She wouldn’t come after me. He should have been relieved, but he just looked pensive. “I wonder where she went.”

“Maybe she went to fight dragons and they ate her.”

Sam just shook his head. “I do have good news.”

Li’s absence was great news. If that didn’t count as good to him, I was eager to find out what did.

From the bag, he drew out a glass jar filled with golden-amber liquid. “I found where she hid the honey.”

Emotions tangled inside of me, like vines. Carefully, I nudged the SED off my lap and onto the chair. The earpieces followed.

Sam watched as I moved, and as I walked toward him. “Ana?”

The way he said my name, I must have been some mysterious creature; he’d thought he’d known my habits, but now I threw my arms around him and hugged him as tight as I could. I shook with nerves—with touching someone voluntarily, and allowing him to trap me in his embrace—and I shook with warring confusion and gratitude.

Why would he do something so nice?

I didn’t understand. If he’d been Li, he would have used my desires against me somehow, but every time I told him something about myself, he gave me something in return. Music. Honey.

Hugging him felt nice, safe almost, but it lasted too long. Not long enough. He pulled away first and began checking my hands. “Looking much better.” One side of his mouth pulled up. “Think you can hold a spoon?”

“Maybe. Why?”

One eyebrow raised, he glanced at the jar of honey on the counter.

“You aren’t serious.”

“Only if you can hold a spoon.” He gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. Amusement? Challenge? It wasn’t like Li’s challenge look. “But if you can’t . . .”

“Oh, I can. I’m just not sure whether you can keep up and eat your share.”

He grinned and riffled through drawers for a pair of spoons. “We’re going to make ourselves sick.”

“It’s going to be fun.” I tested my right hand. Though it certainly didn’t feel good, when Sam offered a spoon, I was able to hold it.

Soon, we were both perched on the counter, jar between us, and desperately trying not to dribble honey all over our clothes. He told stories, and listed all the things he thought we should do when we got to Heart, and I couldn’t remember ever smiling so much.

Chapter 6

Butterfly

AT THE BEGINNING of the third week, we quit the cabin before dawn. The weather had warmed and the sky was deep sapphire as we made our way through the graveyard, the silence as delicate as hoarfrost. The predawn air was crisp, but pleasant. Elk pushed through the forest, while eagles and hawks called their territory boundaries at one another. I couldn’t help but hum as we crossed the river bridge.

“You’re chipper.” Sam tugged Shaggy down a stair carved into the path; the pony snorted and swung his head toward the cabin again, and his warm stall with endless food.

“Yep.” Finally, we were going to Heart, the great white city I’d heard about since I was a child. “The idea of learning what I am is”—I rolled my shoulders to keep the backpack straps from digging—“it’s terrifying, because I might not like what I find out. But it’s exciting.”

“There’s always the option of deciding for yourself who you are and what you’ll become.”

The sky turned paler shades of indigo as we walked. I couldn’t ask him to understand the need to know what had happened, why Ciana was gone forever. He couldn’t understand the guilt, knowing everyone wished I were her.

I tugged at the gauze. “For a year after Councilor Frase’s visit, I convinced myself I was Ciana. I called myself Ciana in my head and told myself I’d somehow lost my memory between lives. I read everything in the cottage library about her, tried to imagine myself weaving and inventing ways to mass-produce cloth. It turns out I can barely imagine how that would work, let alone discover ways to synthesize silk to avoid the mulberry trees and worms. So there’s that. Plus, the Soul Tellers are never wrong.”

“Not these days, anyway.”

“Oh?”

He chuckled. “The tests weren’t always as accurate, but we figured it out when toddlers started cursing at the Soul Tellers. It took some doing to remember Whit was actually Tera and we should call him that. A few of us might have had faulty memories for the next few years, just to make him angry.”

My grin appeared before I could hide it. “You’re lucky you have any friends left if you treat everyone so badly.”

“That’s why I had to go out and find a new one. The others all left me.” He winked before I could wonder if he was serious. “When we get to Heart, I’ll introduce you to anyone you want to meet. Even the friends I don’t deserve.”

“I can think of a couple.” I blushed, remembering the confession about Dossam, but Sam kindly didn’t say anything. That was part of a conversation I still wasn’t ready to have.

We followed the path around spruce trees and rotting logs, down to the road, which would take us to Heart.

Just before midday, Sam came back to our earlier discussion as if we’d never left. “Seems to me you’re in a unique position to be anything you want.”

“I doubt that.”

“You have the benefit of learning from others’ experiences. You don’t have to make the same mistakes we did in the beginning, or the ones we’re still making.” He led Shaggy to the side of the road and looped the rope around a low cottonwood branch, leaving enough slack for the pony to nose around in the sparse foliage. “And who you are isn’t already cast in everyone’s eyes. No one knows what to expect from you. Some would say society is in a rut. Stagnant. By virtue of being new, you have the power to shake us out of that.”

He was crazy if he saw that in me. A nosoul couldn’t do that. “What if I don’t want to? De-stagnate you, that is.”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” He spread a blanket on the road and motioned me to sit. “But I don’t believe you want to be just another person, doing the same thing every generation. You have more power than anyone, Ana. It’s up to you whether or not you use it.”

“I don’t feel very powerful.” My hands hurt, I could barely feed myself, and Sam kept rescuing me. “I feel like the smallest, most insignificant person.”

“Small, maybe. Definitely not insignificant.” He sat next to me, and we watched the empty road. “Everyone knows who you are.”

That didn’t sound like a good thing. I was that Ana. “Aside from you, no one bothered talking to me. Not even Li.”

“Last life, no one could get him to shut up.”

I almost corrected, “Her,” but bit my lip. It was hard to remember that my mother, definitely a woman, had been male before. Different body. Different life. Instead, I said, “What about everyone else? Did Li forbid it? Or did they just not want to bother?”

Sam took a knife and a wedge of hard cheese from his bag and began cutting. “Honestly? I think people aren’t sure it’s worth getting to know you. It would be like you deciding if it was worth befriending a butterfly, even though it wouldn’t be there in the morning.”

It hurt to breathe. “What about you?”

“Surely you know by now.”

I didn’t, but I didn’t want to admit it. “Nothing stopped you from seeing me before. I could have used”—not a friend, that was too familiar—“someone to talk to me.”

He gave one of those half smiles. “Li stopped me. We haven’t gotten along in lifetimes. And I didn’t know how she was treating you. If I had, I can’t say I’d have been able to do anything, but I might have tried.”

Might have. It didn’t matter what he said about me being powerful. I was just a butterfly to everyone, and why would anyone in their right mind rescue a butterfly from being ignored by a cat?

He offered a slice of cheese, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. “You have to eat.”

“Says the boy who just told me I can do whatever I want.” I flinched away—Li would have slapped me for that—but he just turned back to his lunch.

“Okay.” He ate the entire meal by himself and didn’t offer anything else. When he was done, he folded the blanket and slung the bag over his shoulder. “Time to go.”

Part of me felt like I should apologize, mostly because I didn’t want him to ignore me, but neither of us had actually done or said anything wrong. We’d just kind of . . . gotten mad. I sighed and fiddled with my bandages for the next mile before I rested my palm on his shoulder, gently so as not to irritate my healing skin. “Sam?”