HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
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I DON'T KNOW WHAT I THOUGHT WOULD HAPPEN WHEN SADIE AND Kutoyis met one another, but it hadn't been this.
My mother was making chicken tikka masala for Mark in our kitchen, which overlooked the giant living room, so I attempted to help to be better poised to eavesdrop. After their first encounter the day before, Sadie and Kutoyis sat on a corner couch and started sharing life stories. They talked all night, sitting still or, from time to time, bouncing around the giant fallen trees that spread through the room or walking through the forest presumably to talk about something they didn't want to share with the rest of us.
This shocked me. As I sat at the kitchen table watching them interact, I couldn't figure out how I was supposed to feel. Excited that they got along so well? Relief that what I perceived as one of the most significant secrets I'd kept from each of them hadn't ended in them hating of me but instead in some insane connection to each other? Envy that all Sadie wanted to do was tell Kutoyis everything she had probably never bothered to tell me? I wished I could borrowed Ginny's ability, to feel what Sadie felt, to know how she was taking all this. After all, was it short-sighted of me to think that their interest in one another meant they weren't mad at me? Couldn't they, perhaps, be angry later but just glad to be around each other now?
I had too much time to think. Eavesdropping, it turns out, is not as engrossing as a sport as one might think.
They started with the basic stuff, like comparing powers. They both heard the humming and buzzing, both could track in that weird way, but while Sadie could read minds, Kutoyis could control them. This fascinated Sadie, who asked him many questions and then asked him to try it on her. They also discussed Sky, his sister, whose main power was a completely physical one: She could fly. That's why they named her Sky. It interested them both that neither of them could do what she did.
A little while later they decided to go outside, out of earshot. I tried to not let my mind wander to what she'd be willing to tell or do in front of him that she wouldn't do in front of us.
Then it got more serious. When Kutoyis told her about the insane number of children he had fathered, they talked intently about Sadie's fear of having children. It had always been a fear, but a distant, abstract one. Hearing that she and Kutoyis had a bizarrely identical makeup and that he had any number of children — with humans, no less — made it more real. This was, after all, how the group of magical, human children came to live on our land. And it was what Raven said he wanted to do with her. But Kutoyis had mated with humans and made magically abled humans. It made us all silently ask the question: What would her having a child with Raven produce?
I tried not to think about it.
Kutoyis left out the part about Sky having many children, none of whom she ever felt connected to. But maybe this was because the Red Blood elders, who operated in secrecy from the rest of the Kainai, attempted to regulate the magic that had entered their lands, and they had looked on Sky as a vessel for creation. And so she was used as such, until it destroyed her and she ran. I wondered if Kutoyis ever recognized that toll. After all, the process Kutoyis got to partake in and the one Sky had to endure to produce magical children were very different. I'm not sure he ever appreciated that.
