Impossibility of Tomorrow (29 page)

I pull back, looking again at her painting. “Why did you give
me
wings?” I ask, upset. “
You
deserve them. You always wanted them.”

“I have them, silly.” And for a split-second, she does: great, snowy white wings, gone so quickly I wonder if I imagined them. “Besides,” she adds, “yours are
bird
wings.” She sounds offended that I couldn’t tell the difference.

“Because I’m no angel,” I say bitterly.

“No,” she answers, putting her hands on my face—on
her
face. “Because you were caged, and now you can fly.”

Taryn nods. “Kailey,” she says, and they both look upward, as though they hear voices that are silent to me. “It’s time for her to go.”

“But I have so much to ask you, so many questions—”

“Shh,” Kailey murmurs. “You need to go back. To Noah, to Leyla, to everyone.”

“But your family . . .”

“I know.” She nods sadly. “They don’t know that I’m gone. But the thing is, I’m not. Not really. It’s no use worrying them. They’ll be here soon enough.”

“How soon?” I must look concerned, because she puts her hand on my shoulder.

“Time moves differently for me now. Don’t worry about them. They’re fine. Years, hours, whatever. It’s all the same.” She smiles.

I feel a tug at my navel and look down, expecting to see the ghost of my silver cord. But there’s nothing.

“Now go,” Kailey murmurs.

“Take care of Luna,” Taryn asks. “By the way, her original name was
so
much more bad-ass. But Luna will do just fine.”

“Oh, and tell Bryan to keep writing,” Kailey adds. “I was such a jackass about that. He wrote this one poem—I can’t remember the name . . .” She pauses, tapping her paintbrush against her coral mouth. “Oh! I’ve got it. It was
called ‘So-Called Yellow Laboratory.’ It was pretty good. I was
really
mean about it, though.”

“I’ll tell him,” I promise. I feel dizzy, like I’m in a deep cavern, their voices echoing back and forth.

“Sera,” Kailey’s voice turns serious. “You have my body. You have my name. You have my life.
Don’t waste it.
”

And then she reaches out and pushes me.

I blink. A curtain of red hair falls over my face.

“Careful!” Charlotte gasps, over the squeal of car tires. I’m thrown to the side again, my face pressed against slick leather.

“We don’t have much time,” Sébastien says from the driver’s seat.

“I know. We’ll take the first human we see.” Wetness falls on my face, and I realize Charlotte is crying. “Sera! You’re awake? Hang in there, we’re about to get you a new body.”

I open my mouth, lick my lips. “Hospital,” I manage to say. “Please.”

“It’s too late for that,” Charlotte whispers. She takes my hands.

You have my body.

“It’s not too late,” I choke, my voice growing stronger. “Sébastien, please. This is my choice.”

“Don’t listen to her.” Charlotte’s voice shakes.
You have my name.

“Don’t be like Cyrus. Let me choose,” I say, weeping. I think of my mortal self, a fourteen-year-old girl on an ancient bridge over the Thames, a girl who would have died if not for Cyrus’s burning elixir. A girl who never got to choose her destiny but had it forced upon her.

You have my life.

“Damn it, Sera. Damn you.” Charlotte’s voice is quiet. “You win.” And then, louder, stronger, for Sébastien to hear: “The hospital. Hurry!”

The car accelerates as Sébastien changes course, screeching and flying through the streets of Berkeley. I close my eyes. The next thing I know, we’ve skidded to a stop outside the hospital’s emergency entrance.

“You’re sure, Sera?” Sébastien asks, his voice calm, as Charlotte continues to cry.

I nod once, barely.

Charlotte takes a deep breath, then throws open the car door.

“Gunshot victim!” I hear her yell.
“Help!”

Don’t waste it.

FORTY-THREE

The voice breaks through the fog surrounding me.

“Please, let me see her.”

Noah,
I try to say. But I have no mouth. I’m made of mist. On weakened wings I drift.

“Kailey, can you hear me?”

I try to move, to throw my spirit fists against the window that keeps him from me. I can see him, his crow-black hair and blue eyes, on the other side.

“Seraphina,” he says softly, almost like a question, like a palm held to the window on a rainy night. And the glass breaks.

“You called me by my real name.” My voice sounds strange, raspy.

“Thank god, you’re awake,” Noah exclaims. “Nurse—”

I reach out and take his hand. “Wait,” I murmur. “You know my name. I’ve wanted you to say it for so long.”

His face comes into focus with the rest of the room. It’s dark outside; rain lashes at the hospital windows. I look down at the plastic bracelet encircling my wrist, nearly identical to the one I was wearing just over a month ago.
Kailey Morgan. F. Age 16.

“None of this seems real,” Noah murmurs. His hand feels so warm in mine.

“How much do you know?” I ask. “Did Sébastien and Charlotte—”

“They wouldn’t tell me anything, except not to talk to the police. Not to talk to anyone.” He pauses, choosing his words carefully. “Who
are
they? I keep replaying it in my mind. That girl with the red hair—Charlotte?”

I nod.

“She said she’d get you a new body.” It’s a question, not a statement.

“Yes,” I answer. We’ve come too far for me to lie now. He saw Amelia crumble to dust in Rebecca’s body. But I’ve never done this before, and I’m afraid—
terrified
—that when Noah knows what I am, he’ll run from me.

He lets go of my hand, and my fingers instinctively grasp the cotton blanket at my side. I need to hold onto something. “What did she mean?” he asks.

I’m at one of those doorways through which there is no going back. Time will forever be divided into two halves: into a before and after. Before and after I shattered Noah’s innocence, before I laid my secrets bare before his judgment.

“I’m going to tell you everything,” I say, “if you’ll promise to hear me out. Because it’s crazy and you probably won’t believe it. But it’s all true.” I pause and take a shuddering breath. He stands and moves over to the window. I note the distance he’s put between us—but at least he’s listening.

“The night I was shot, you saw unbelievable things. You saw Rebecca’s body turn to dust. But it wasn’t Rebecca—it was another soul living inside her. Just like . . . just like I’m living inside Kailey.” My voice grows thick. I swallow hard and continue. “I was born in the year 1334, in London. When I was fourteen, I met a boy named Cyrus at a masquerade ball. He was an alchemist. He’s the same person you knew as Mr. Shaw. The same person who put his soul inside Madison. You heard him say as much.”

“He said he was in love with you.” Noah’s voice is barely audible.

“Not long after we met,” I continue, choosing not to answer his remark, “I was stabbed on a bridge and left for
dead. Cyrus saved me. He gave me the elixir that made me immortal. He freed my soul from my dying body, and I took another.”

“The silver cord,” Noah whispers, “that connects the soul to the body. It’s real? Mr. Shaw told me about it.”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes. Mr. Shaw was Cyrus. He’s been alive this whole time. As have I.”

“But Kailey—”

I forge ahead. “Two months ago, I ran away from Cyrus. He’s damaged. He’s cruel. He hurt me, many times.” Noah’s arms are crossed across his chest. His hands clench into fists. “I saw a car accident in Jack London Square. A sixteen-year-old girl driving her brother’s car. She was broken, Noah. Bleeding. She was about to die.”

“Kailey,” he whispers.

“Kailey,” I agree. “I tried to save her, I really did. But I ended up accidentally taking her body instead. I didn’t mean to, and when I woke up in her body, in her
life
, I thought this was the end of the road for me. Until I met you.” The ghosts of jasmine perfume and gasoline rise around me now, the ghost of lost girls painting portraits in a dream.

“Stop.” His voice is harsh. “Don’t say anything else.” I think suddenly of my mortal father—how he cursed me and spat on me when I tried to tell him what I was. As far as he was concerned, I was already dead.

“Do you believe me?” I ask, my words laced with sorrow. I’m not even sure I want to know the answer. I wonder if it would have been better to take another body and try to make Noah fall in love with me again as someone else. But then I think of Kailey—
Don’t waste it
—and know that I owe her this.

“I shouldn’t believe you,” he answers finally, stepping toward me in the dim orange light. He sits heavily next to me on the narrow hospital bed, the movement sending a rip of pain through my side. But that’s not why tears squeeze out from my eyes.

“But you do anyway?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer me, just reaches out to take my head in his hands and presses his forehead to my own. He breathes in, out. We breathe the same breath.

“Just give me some time,” he says finally, his words stabbing into my heart like hundreds of miniature daggers.

“I love you,” I answer, and his hands clutch me harder.

But he doesn’t say it back. He pulls away and stands up. “Some time,” he repeats, moving toward the door. And then he’s gone.

Charlotte bursts in. “Thank god you’re awake, Sera.” She’s followed closely by Sébastien.

“Quickly,” he murmurs. “Before the parents come in. We need to get you out of here.”

“I’m not leaving,” I say.

“Cyrus was shot,” Charlotte tells me. I know what’s coming next before she even says it.

“He’s not dead, is he?” Trust Cyrus to be indestructible.

“Very much alive,” she agrees. “And he knows who you are.”

“Is he here?” I ask, my heart racing in sudden panic.

“No,” she replies. “Sera, he was taken into custody.”

FORTY-FOUR

“Madison Cortez,” I tell the security guard at Napa State Hospital, previously known as Napa State Asylum for the Insane. He shudders.

“Unit T-Fourteen?” He gestures me toward a waiting area, and I nod, wincing at the pain that blossoms on my right side. Apparently, the bullet wound was “clean,” a funny term for its destructive path through my body, shattering two ribs and grazing my right lung.

I nearly died, they say. I was lucky.

The weary guard leads me beyond the razor wire that rings the hospital’s secure unit, reserved for the most
dangerous patients: the criminals who are mentally unfit to stand trial for their crimes.

Charlotte and Sébastien—in their guise as the “concerned passersby” who had the quick wits to take me to the hospital—have continued to visit, bringing me what news of Cyrus they could. Apparently “Madison” was caught the night of the dance in the middle of Garber Park, bleeding from a gunshot wound that was determined to be self-inflicted. She didn’t come quietly, though. She managed to empty her gun’s clip at the arresting officers before she was taken, and continued to struggle even once handcuffed.

“It was the strangest thing,” said one of the officers in a news report. “She kept trying to
kiss
me. But it wasn’t deranged so much as, well,
terrifying
.” He added that Madison burst out laughing when asked about the whereabouts of Rebecca Sawyer, insisting she’d been dead for weeks.

The guard escorts me through security and down the hall, past a row of closed, windowless doors. “She’s being kept in solitary,” the guard tosses over his shoulder by way of explanation. “She wouldn’t stop talking about something—Astronomy? Algorithms?”

“Alchemy,” I offer.

“That’s it. Strange stuff, very disturbing to the other patients. Plus we have to keep her restrained. She keeps trying to kiss everyone.”

I keep my mouth shut as he punches a code into a keypad and opens another door. The room that I step into is stark and bright, walled in white brick and containing a single visiting station. Several cameras are trained on the plastic chair where the guard tells me to sit in front of a thick pane of glass. “Wait here,” he instructs me, then departs. And I’m alone.

I hear a muffled click as a door opens on the other side of the glass. My breath quickens. The ache in my ribs becomes an insistent shriek.

Two orderlies appear, holding the slender frame that would appear to anyone else as an average eighteen-year-old girl, her skin as dull as the white cinder blocks behind her.

Cyrus.

His arm is in a cast—the aftermath of the second gunshot, the one I heard right before I passed out. Apparently Cyrus had aimed at Noah again, but Sébastien managed to tackle him in time, and he shot his own elbow instead. Even with the cast, he’s handcuffed.

Sébastien and Charlotte had both begged me not to come. But I had to see him for myself: the man who kept me in his cage for hundreds of years, now trapped in his own glass-walled prison. Shackled inside a secure room, inside a secure building, on a property lined with guards and barbed wire.

Cyrus takes his seat on the other side of the glass and stares at me. His eyes—usually ice-blue, now warm brown and flecked with hazel—flash in anger.

I pick up the waxy black telephone receiver and hold it to my ear. He does the same. For a long time we don’t speak.

“You’re hurt,” he says finally. “I never wanted you to be hurt.”

“You shouldn’t have shot me, then,” I say, my words laced with anger.

“I didn’t,” he whispers. “I was aiming for someone else, if you recall.”

I glance upward, at the cameras recording this entire conversation. Then again, I don’t suppose it matters what Cyrus says. He’s been declared criminally insane.

“Why couldn’t you just let me go?” I say, instead of arguing.

He sighs, scratching his forehead with his palm. His wrists are bruised and raw from the handcuffs. “I’ve asked myself that same question, many times.”

“Don’t say it’s because you love me,” I interrupt. “Because you don’t even know what that means.”

“Loving you is
all
I know, Sera. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been certain of.” His voice cracks. Suddenly, he’s not my captor anymore, not the man who’s been hurting me for hundreds of years—he’s my young scientist, broken and scared,
stroking my hair on a bridge. A boy who loved a girl once upon a time, who would have done anything to keep her safe.