Lo looks out over the water. She exhales, smiles.
When she looks back at me, she’s Naida again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Naida
“Do you see a twin?” I ask, after we’ve sat for a while. It’s Lo’s question, really, but it’s floating around our shared mind.
Celia frowns, touches my arm. “It always feels like there was another sister,” she admits. “But I don’t see her. Maybe she died when you were really young? Why?”
“There’s a girl out there,” I say, motioning to the water, “who says something to do with a twin is why I went from myself to Lo. Why they chose me, why the angel wanted me. She wouldn’t tell me how or why, though.”
“Just because you’re a twin?” she asks, and I nod. Celia pauses for a long time, and when she speaks, she sounds queasy. “What about triplets?”
I turn to her, shake my head. “I don’t know.” I try to disguise the hurt in my voice, that Celia so obviously is horrified at the thought of becoming like me, but it doesn’t work. She gives me a sympathetic smile and looks away, but I can tell she’s still worried, still has questions. We both do, but I feel more and more like they’ll never be answered.
I ask her to go before the sun is completely gone. She hugs me but leaves, glancing back before she takes the trail up to the pier.
I don’t want to send her away. But I want to exist without her. I need to know I can exist without her.
My name is Naida Kelly. My sister’s name is Sophia. We had a golden dog and lived in a house in the forest. One day, something dark came for me. My sister fought hard, but it won.
And now it’s coming for me again.
I remember the house we lived in. Our father made things, sweets, like candied apples and chocolate-covered lemon slices. Deer grazed in the backyard, and my sister and I often fought like sisters do. I don’t remember all of it, but that doesn’t stop me from missing it. I wish I knew what my father’s face looked like, what my mother’s hands looked like. I wish I knew where my sister is now—if she’s still alive, or if the darkness killed her after it took me. If she’s still out there, I wish I could tell her that I’m going to be okay.
But I’m not. It’s not going to be okay, because soon I’ll be gone. Celia has faith, but she’s wrong. I don’t have a soul, I can’t live on the shore, I can’t erase Lo from me entirely, and Lo can’t erase the darkness she’s going to become.
I will miss Celia.
I’ll miss my memories.
I lie down on my stomach, push my fingers through the sand. My sister fought for me, might have died trying. She was brave. She had to know she couldn’t win. But she tried. She gave it everything; she was willing to die if she needed to. She went down screaming and fighting, a sound that’s forever locked in my head, a sound I don’t want to ever emerge from my own throat. The monster’s teeth on my heart changed everything. But there is a way to change everything back. There has to be. There will be.
My name is Naida Kelly. My sister’s name is Sophia. We had a golden dog and lived in a house in the forest.
And I’m not going out screaming.
But I’m also not going out without a fight.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Celia
The idea of doing this makes me angry. Makes me sick, even.
I need Anne, and only Anne. She’s the only one who can help me. But I know if I do this, she’ll think I’ve forgiven her. She’ll think that I’ve agreed that we’re stronger together, that it’s okay that they read me secretly in the night, creeping into my room like thieves.
It’s not.
But I want answers, I want to help Naida, I want to be brave, and so I need Anne.
“I have to ask you something,” I say to her a few mornings later, before I leave for Jude’s. Jane hasn’t woken up yet—I figure I’ll be able to handle my anger at my sisters better if it’s only one of them. Anne is watching TV, and the annoying weather thing keeps scrolling across the bottom of the show, muting the audio to alert us of an incoming hurricane. They’re rarely bad here, but they’re still something the weathermen like to panic over. It takes Anne a moment to look up at me—a moment I think she draws out to irritate me.
I can’t believe I’m saying this. I can’t believe I’m doing this.
“So you’re talking to me again, now that you want something?” she says, voice cool.
“I need you to tell me my future.”
Anne looks at me for a long time, then turns back to the TV, shaking her head. “Your future with Jude?” There’s maturity in her voice, wisdom that surprises me—the mocking, even the anger, is gone. I’m not used to it, and it makes my stomach coil.
“No.”
Anne raises an eyebrow, thinks for a moment. “With Naida, then.”
“Yes.”
She crooks an arm around the couch, watches me.
“And why should I do that, when last time we read you, you stormed out of the house?”
“Because I’m your sister. And I asked. And you do it all the time to total strangers, and I’ve never asked you before.”
“That’s the point,” Anne says, shaking her head. “To total strangers.”
I stare at her blankly.
“My god, Celia,” she says. “You really are selfish.”
“What are you talking about?” I snap, abandoning the fact that I need her help.
“I always thought your power meant you wouldn’t be, because you understood where people came from. But…” Anne presses her tongue to her teeth, drums her fingers like she’s trying not to yell.
“The powers don’t work for me like they do for you and Jane. I’ve told you that. They aren’t a game, they aren’t cute, because what I find out when I touch someone can’t be changed. The choices are already made, and sometimes they were horrible, and I have to know that. I have to feel it. So now I’m selfish because I won’t use them like some sort of game?”
Anne’s eyes widen. “You think our powers are a game?”
“You treat them like a game, and you can, because yours are easier to bear than mine.”
“Celia…” She looks disgusted, furious. “You know what can’t be changed. I have to know everything that can be. I see someone doing something terrible in their future, something horrible. I see suffering, and I want so badly to warn them that they just need to make a different choice, a new decision, and it’ll all be different…. And sometimes I do, even, but it hardly ever helps. I can’t untangle their lives to tell them what to avoid. I don’t even know when it’s coming….”