Otherbound (16 page)

olan's pen tapped the pages of his workbook. He was going over yesterday's physics problems a final time before class. Only a few of the seats were filled, and he could hear streams of students rushing past the door to get to their own classes. Down the hall, some kids were fighting, others cheering.

Nolan double-checked the questions he'd flagged as beyond his reach. Two out of every three.

The totally pathetic thing was that completing even a third of his assignments meant an improvement. Everything was an improvement. He could hold on to his train of thought. He found himself spreading his eyes open in class before realizing he no longer needed to; he could deactivate his phone's alarm, which normally woke him every few hours so he wouldn't stay in Amara's world too long; that morning, he'd woken up disoriented from nothing but the weirdness of his own dreams instead of the jolt of remembering who he was, where he was, that Amara was nothing but a far-off girl in a far-off world.

If she was even that. Maybe the medication worked. Maybe he really had been hallucinating all these years.

“Oh, good!” Sarah Schneider thumped her backpack onto the desk next to Nolan's. “You did those problems. Can I copy them?”

“You probably don't want to.” Nolan tried to come up with something else to say, something witty, but nothing came to mind. He didn't have much practice, and, despite his uninterrupted sleep, he was tired. He'd dreamed about the Dunelands, then spent too long staring at the cabinet where he kept his journals. It'd been a real dream, complete with random nudity and Maart showing up in his kitchen and Pat shouting at him—nothing like Amara's dreams or the Dunelands not-really-dreams he'd had as a kid that had evolved into something more. These dreams didn't need to go into the journals.

Nothing needed to go into the journals anymore. What should he even do with them now?

“Oh!” Sarah only now turned to look at him. She must've thought he was someone else. No one ever asked to copy his homework. Mainly because he never did any.

“You can copy my Spanish homework,” Nolan offered. “I guarantee that's in good shape.”

Sarah laughed, showing off braces that glinted in the stark lighting. “Thanks, I got that from Luisa already. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm bad.” She punctuated that with an angelic batting of her eyelashes.

“I don't …” Nolan sucked his cheeks, thinking. He could
do this. Talk to a cute girl. Sometimes he forgot just how clueless he was, though. The way Amara slept with Maart came so easily that Nolan occasionally, sourly, had to remind himself that he was still a virgin.

He'd kissed a girl before, a year ago. Maybe he could do it again sometime. Nothing stopped him. He was like everyone else now. He could date and kiss and a whole lot more—see what sex was like with his own body. He'd probably be decent, having lived the girl's perspective a hundred times already. That
had
to give him a leg up.

Plus, Sarah was … nice, even if she weirded him out. She seemed so young. Not physically, since she was taller and had a lot more going on cleavage-wise than Amara or even Cilla, but just the way she laughed and talked, the way she simultaneously complained and bragged about her part-time job at the fro-yo shop. Last week she and her friends had been late for English class, and she'd been the only one to actually run through the halls despite those tiny heels of hers or her bag bouncing off her hips. Even her brother had lingered with her friends, way too cool to run. Nolan couldn't remember Amara or Cilla ever being that young.

Maybe Sarah wasn't young. Just normal.

“Well, I can't judge you for copying homework,” Nolan said, realizing how long he'd been silent.

“No way. Mysterious loner boy cheats on his homework?”

Mysterious loner boy?
His eyebrows rose. It didn't sound as if Sarah meant it in a bad way, though. Maybe she was into mysterious loners. “And not just any homework,” he said. “I've even copied Luisa's Spanish a couple times. There's no excusing that.”

Sarah laughed. “Oh, shit, Luisa never told me that. Seriously? Tell me you were sick.”

“
Meet-my-lunch
sick that time,” Nolan lied, half laughing. After yesterday, and given how often he supposedly dozed off in class to check on Amara, it seemed safe to joke about. How
was
Amara doing? He should close his eyes and—no. She'd kicked him out.

“Well, you can get away with just about anything if you're sick.”

Nolan swept his pen at the empty exercises in his physics workbook. “Think Mr. O'Brian will agree?”

“I could cover for you? I can go, ‘He was totally hurling, Mr. O! I could hear it all the way from the girls' bathroom!'”

“Take it from an expert. Hurling lets you skip all the tricky assignments.”

“Does it?” she said airily. “Well, shit. I oughta try that.”

“You should. And we should go out.” He didn't even realize he was saying the words until they'd already passed his lips. That … might've needed more finesse.

She blinked in surprise. “We should, huh?”

Was that a question or an agreement? “I …”

Right on cue, the bell screeched. Mr. O'Brian walked into the classroom.

“Hey. I'll think about it.” Sarah flashed Nolan a smile, unzipped her bag, and pulled out her physics book.

His first day without Amara, and he'd already asked out a cute girl. Nolan closed his eyes, reveling in the noise of the classroom instead of that of Amara's world.

Maybe he really could do this.

n a way, Amara supposed Cilla should be grateful for the curse. It must've taken many mages to cast. With that much power, they could've killed Cilla straightaway. It would've been quicker. More effective, too. They'd had one chance to get rid of the princess, and they'd screwed it up.

It would've been easier for everyone if they hadn't.

They couldn't wait for Jorn. Amara kept her hand around Cilla's wrist, ignoring the looks around them as they stormed away, diving between stalls to avoid the crowd. The commotion from the mixed magic served as a good distraction. If they drew too much attention, Jorn would—

Didn't matter. The curse came first.

The cobblestones shifted. Would that be it this time? The stones? Would they twist and groan and batter into her? Would they spread apart and choke her in the earth?

“The cut's small,” Cilla said, her voice muffled through her hand. Blocking the blood wouldn't stop the curse, but it might slow it down. “It'll heal fast. At least—at least there's that.”

They ran for the market center. One half stood solidly on
the dunes while the other half towered over the beach on high posts; they might find a safe spot underneath. The salt scent of the water was stronger here, mingling with rot and dirt and cold. The market seemed far off and long gone.

The sand shifted as they ran. The dune grass swayed as if carried by a ripple of wind.

The moment they plunged into the chilly shade under the market center, Amara grabbed her knife. She pulled Cilla's hand away to expose her lip. The longer this went on, the more blood Amara would need to make the decoy work.

How could Amara have been
stupid
enough to think she could trust the mage?

“Do it,” Cilla said.

Cilla's cut bled slowly, one drop at a time. Amara would never be able to distract the curse with so little blood. She raised her knife and pressed its point to Cilla's lip. At least the skin there was soft, with no risk of hitting bone or tendons. Amara pressed. Puncture wounds bled less than slashes. They were small, too, which made it easier to block the blood from the air. Cilla held in a grunt.

At the market, the dunes had shielded them from the worst of the wind; they lacked that protection here. A gust blew sand into Amara's eyes and nose. The dune grass rustled by their feet and bent as though touched by an unseen storm, pointing in the wrong direction. So it hadn't been the cobblestones that moved back at the market, Amara realized, but the dune-grass roots
underneath, the moss in between. The grass pricked at the legs of Cilla's winterwear, whipping past but not yet through.

Moving away was pointless. The curse would just shift its weapon to the sea or sand.

Amara ran her hand over Cilla's lip, smearing the blood onto her own skin. She pressed it to her hands, to her arms, her exposed throat. Already, the grass was shifting. It tickled at her legs. Amara backed away from Cilla. Her heel hit a half-buried log, and she fell. The ground felt like ice. The sun hadn't touched this sand in years. In her peripheral vision, a sand spider the size of her palm scuttled to safety.

The first blade of grass cut Amara's arm.

Cilla knotted up a corner of her topscarf and pressed it to her face. Once the blood clotted, they could carefully peel away the scarf, making sure they didn't tear open the wound again. Curses followed curses.

All around Amara, the dune grass rustled. She bit back a scream as a blade tore through her wear by her knee. Dune grass was tough and tall, and right now, animated by the spell, the blades felt like just that—blades. Like knives so sharp she almost didn't notice at first when they cut her.

Amara clenched her teeth until it felt like they'd crack. Sticky blood dripped from a dozen cuts. She only needed to wait this out. Cuts were good. Cuts were clean. They healed quickly—no messy bone shards to mend, no skin to regrow over burned flesh—and bled freely, so it never took long to
overpower Cilla's blood and leave the curse aimless and dying.

The dune grass was everywhere. It cut deeper, harder. Amara wasn't hiding her face well enough. The points of the grass slashed at the thin skin of her lips, the arch of her throat. She scrunched her eyes shut tightly, so tightly, as blades jabbed her eyelids. Another prick. Amara screamed, but the sound stayed inside her mouth, muffled.

“Amara,” Cilla whimpered distantly. “Amara, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry …”

Amara had to choose which parts of herself to shield. Maybe if she pressed her arms to her eyes …