The Blue Door

Chapter 2

Connections

Cinder

I could still hear Nick's weaves in my head, thunder mingling with a woman's sobs as crystal sang in the background, like when someone runs a wet finger along the edge of a glass.

I wasn't alone. I felt him in my arms, solid, real, here. "I thought I was the last. I thought I'd end up the crazy old lady who starts fires just to feel something, to convince herself that magic was real."

I let go, backed away, and really took in Nick, not for the first time, but for the first time since I knew there were still weavers left in the world. His eyes had changed. I was certain they'd been dark brown the day before, but now they wore a crisp blue. "Did you get contacts? Those aren't weaves, are they? No, of course not. I'd be able to hear them."

I pulled him into another embrace. All that mattered was he was there, he was real, and he was a weaver. "Not alone. About time!"

It took a moment, but he finally wrapped his arms around me and accepted the embrace. Boys can be weird about hugs, especially the ones who think they're too tough to ever need them. I suspected he might be one of those.

We held each other in silence for a long moment before I let go and handed him back his prosthetic. "We need to talk."

He slipped the hand onto his arm and tightened a couple straps. "You think?"

I took his reattached hand in mine and dragged him up the grassy hill. "Right now."

He stumbled along behind me. "Okay. Wait, where are we going?"

"To that table. Come on."

The water pouring from the wall slowed to a steady drizzle as we slid onto the benches across the table from each other. A loosened brick fell with a wet thud into the growing pool that had enveloped Nick's old, gray hoodie.

He grimaced back at it. "My lunch was in there." But then he shrugged it away. "Not the first time I'll go hungry."

A pang of shame shot through my heart. I'd never gone hungry a day in my life, except for one nonviolent protest to convince Tiana to buy me a cellphone. I still held his prosthetic over the scarred wood, years of initials, doodles, and random bits of profanity carved into it like badges of honor. I squeezed once before I let go, which I was silly, but I did it anyway. He might not feel it, but he can see it.

Nick gritted his teeth. I don't know if it hurt him to let go, like it did me, or if he wasn't used to people treating his prosthetic like a real hand. Connection and normalcy are rare gifts for people who've lost so much, and I hoped I'd given him a touch of both.

His gaze fell on a symbol carved into the table, a fiery eye inside a triangle. I'd carved it there a month or two earlier with a butter knife. I hadn't realized I'd done it until I finished lunch and stared down in horror at damaging school property and carving the symbol I hated so much.

I think maybe it's on my mind too often for it not to leak out. I've drawn the ugly thing a million times. It dots all my notebooks. Sometimes things that you hate stick with you like that.

Nick rubbed at it with his rubber-covered fingers, tracing the pattern. "Huh. This looks familiar."

I wasn't ready to talk about it just yet, not with the music of the real symbol fresh in my head from that morning, so I turned the conversation back to his recent use of magic. "When did you know?"

He tapped the symbol. "Know what?

"That you were a weaver?"

Nick shook his head. "I don't even sew."