LIZZIE, REBECCA, SARAH, ADELAIDE, AND I CALLED IT QUITS FOR THE DAY, Hoping not to push our luck with my early success in the apothecary. As we left, Lizzie lifted her palm toward the lights in the ceiling, and as she closed her fist tightly, the oil-lamp chandelier went dark.
In 144 years, I’d had no inkling that the elders could do this or anything else beyond the talents or powers everyone knew they had. This made it so hard to trust them — even Lizzie, whom I adored. I know she had reminded me of my place, growing frustrated that I felt I had a right to know these things, but didn’t I have a right? I was risking absolutely everything — most notably, my freedom — to be here, to help them and to protect them, but they were keeping secrets. As we wound down the earth-walled tunnel back to the church, I was upset — not because they were still keeping secrets (I had come to expect it), and not because I would never uncover those secrets (I was sure I could), but because there might never be a way for me to determine when I had figured it all out. After all, how could I know what I didn’t know?
When we got to the end of the tunnel, Rebecca reached her palms out to the wall to open the missing door.
“Wait,” I called. “Can we see if I can do that? What if I’m in here alone and can’t get out?”
Rebecca quickly put her hands to the wall, as if I hadn’t asked her anything. “What?” she asked, once the door was open. “Oh, sorry, Sadie. I didn’t hear you in time,” she said. A lie. I clearly heard her think, Goodness. We might trust you, but there would be no occasion for you to be in our apothecary by yourself.
Light poured into the hallway from the room inside the church. It was already morning. I was surprised to find several of the elders meeting around the giant marble table, including John. My stomach clenched. As soon as he saw me, he jumped to his feet. “What is she doing in there?” he said in a growl to the others, not even bothering to address me himself.
“We’ve had this discussion,” Lizzie said, the only one among them comfortable with defying John.
“And I thought we agreed we’d stop telling the girl everything she wanted to know,” he barked.
“This was my idea, John. We need to know what she’s capable of. There will come a time when we need to know what all Survivors are capable of,” Lizzie said.
John scoffed. “These are not your secrets to give away! And they aren’t yours either,” he shot at Adelaide. “What were you even working on in there?”
“Merely a discussion of protection elixirs,” Lizzie said, but John cut her off.
“Protection? Good Lord, you told her she is incapable of being bound by your protection charms and elixirs? What did you hope she would do with this information? Suddenly be loyal and help us reinforce the barriers around the city with her own irreverent breed of magic?
“John — “ Lizzie interjected.
“It is imperative that we stop telling her these things. It is bad enough that she already knew that we knew not to let anyone outside of this sacred city. What of our secrets haven’t you given away?” he asked, heated.
Lizzie pursed her lips together. “We were merely talking about protection elixirs in the apothecary. Simple, primitive versions. We were going to educate her on the things we learned first. So, until you said that just now, Sadie didn’t know about the barriers, so now it is you who is — what was the phrase you used the other night? — ‘impulsively giving away our most trusted strategic information to Sadie and the Winters’ I believe it was?” Lizzie smiled, but there was an edge to it.
“What barriers?” I asked. Just how much were they talking about me when I wasn’t around? And what did they mean about knowing not to let anyone outside, I wondered. I didn’t actually know that. I don’t know why he thought I did.
All ten of the elders in the room exchanged glances.
“There are protections around the walls of the city,” John said, defeated. He sank back into his chair. “No Survivor can cross them, except for those who created them.”
“All of you, I presume,” I said, and he nodded. And it clicked. They wanted me to learn to make protection elixirs, however basic, because, as Lizzie said, they used them often. Surely they used their more advanced protection elixirs for these barriers? And what else did they use them for? “Did the barriers not work...before?” I asked.
“They weren’t strong enough, apparently,” John said callously, looking at the women standing around me. He blamed them. How convenient for him.
“But they are now?” I asked.
“They are,” Lizzie said before John had a chance to answer.
“Did you make an exception so that I could cross them?” I asked, thinking about how I freely went in and out of or over the gates and walls of the City.
“No,” John said. His fury was evident on his face. He didn’t give any further explanation, but he turned to Lizzie.
“Or...for the others?” I asked.
“No, not for your rogue brothers and sisters either,” he conceded. “Happy now?” It didn’t take my powers to feel the disdain he felt toward me, possibly even toward Lizzie. She stared him down, but the gaze he returned was just as icy. “Now, you can leave us,” he said, turning his attention back to the elders at the table.
“Meeting you don’t want us to sit in on?” Lizzie asked, provoking him. “I think I’ll stay,” she said. She was testing his patience, and I liked this about Lizzie. I’d heard her think often about how John, too, needed to remember his place. He may be some kind of patriarch to this family, but he was not one of the three original elders, and she was. Though the hierarchies other than the basic elder-children divide in our family were relatively subtle, this was one she wanted to make sure was clear, at least to John.
“Fine, just her, then,” he said, not even looking at me.
“We’ll go,” Rebecca said feebly as she hurried toward the exit of the room. Sarah and Adelaide were fast on her heels, but I sauntered, in no hurry to please him.
When I walked by him, I heard him whisper, “What a disgrace.”
WE FOUND EVERETT AND GINNY IN THE SQUARE TALKING TO ANDREW AND Benjamin. Everyone seemed to be in a pleasant mood, which was a relief. “Good morning, princess,” Everett said as I approached them. I hadn’t realized that we’d been in the apothecary all night.
Andrew smiled. “Did you enjoy your time with your elders here?” he asked, gesturing to Sarah and Rebecca beside me. “Not to discredit
Adelaide’s presence,” he added.
“I did enjoy it. Successfully,” I added.
His face lit up. “Good! Praise God,” he said.
Everett stepped toward me and put his arms around me. “Where’s Lizzie?” he asked.
“She chose to stay in the church. John was holding a meeting and she crashed it — just to irritate him, I’m pretty sure,” I said.
Andrew chuckled softly and looked at his feet as he kicked at the snow. He loved Lizzie for all the reasons I did. He lifted his gaze to meet mine, but then met Rebecca’s unforgiving glare and the smile evaporated quickly. Rebecca clearly did not condone Lizzie provoking her husband, much less Andrew’s approval of this. “Sorry,” he whispered. After that, we all split up. Rebecca retreated into her house, and Adelaide retreated into ours. Andrew went to the church, and Ginny went with Sarah to practice what they had been practicing for weeks. Sarah had one of the most unique talents among the Survivors, one that had been almost irrelevant until now — power bestowal. She could give the powers of one Survivor to another temporarily and without diminishing the power of the Survivor she was taking it from. Ginny had the most difficulty mirroring this skill, and it was potentially one of the most important powers we would need in a war.
I had theorized that Sarah might be able to do more than just bestow power. I believed that she could strip a power from someone entirely and give it, intact, to another. Essentially, I believed she could do what Anthony, Patrick, and Mark did when they acquired powers, only she could do it without killing someone to make it happen. By all accounts, this had never been done. But if there were any hope of power evolving, she’d have to spend time around humans. That’s when my powers evolved so rapidly. I knew she’d never do this, not even if it meant success in the war.
Combined with Lizzie’s power to merge, I envisioned a battlefield where Sarah and Ginny could pull powers from the enemies and Lizzie could quickly combine them and give them to our warriors or allies who needed them. Ginny, Lizzie, and Sarah spent an enormous amount of time together trying to make this happen. So far, they had been unsuccessful.
This left Ben, Everett, and me. Ben quickly got nervous in this trio, so he trailed after Ginny and Sarah. In an attempt to be in the middle of as much as he could, he’d often offer to be their guinea pig. He’d described the feeling of having one’s powers separated and sectioned off, however temporarily, as a soul-splitting sensation. I had no idea what he meant by this, but I wondered if it was anything like what I’d felt at the bonfire six months earlier, when half my soul went with Everett and the Winters and the other half was rooted in this ground in the Survivors’ City.
I sighed. In that equation, where was the part of my soul that belonged to the human world? Or the part that belonged to me?
“What is it?” Everett asked as we watched Ben walk away. “Nothing,” I said.
“Something,” he said, taking my hand as we walked toward our house. “Missing my humans,” I admitted. “Maybe just my human life.” “It’s funny to me that you refer to it that way. It is not as if you ever were a human,” he said.
I shrugged, saying nothing.
“You should try to sleep,” he eased. “You haven’t since Monday, and it’s Friday now.” I nodded, though I knew I wouldn’t. I wondered if I would ever sleep again. “Did you have fun being witchy with Mom and Lizzie?” he asked, changing the subject.
“How’d you know about that?” I asked.
“Andrew told us. I knew Mom had to be up to something very... Adelaide,” he said, which I had learned meant doing something only a witch could do or, more specifically, something he could not. “But Andrew told Ginny and me so you wouldn’t have to keep it from us. He figured you have enough to worry about.” That was sweet of him, I thought. Andrew seemed to be the elder most concerned about my stress level, which I attributed to our nearly father-daughter relationship. I was grateful for it.
“I see,” I said.
“So was it fun?” he asked.
“I’m not certain that fun is the right word. It was successful, though,” I said.
“So you can do what the witches can?” he asked.
I nodded. “Does that mean that’s what I am? That all this ridiculousness about me being special is just that? Am I really just one of them?” Everett bit his lower lip. “I don’t think it means that,” he said.
“John just told me something that didn’t sit very well with me. A few things really.” We’d reached the front door of our small home.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Crossing the threshold into the much-warmer inside, I said, “He said they have protections around the city walls — barriers, you could say — designed so that no one can cross them. But I can.”
“Just you?” he asked, kicking snow off his boots and wiggling out of his exterior layers in the entryway of the house.
“And presumably the rogue Survivors, as they had to get out somehow,” I said. “You and your family obviously can, but that’s because you aren’t Survivors.” As I said, I realized how unique this was. Most gates existed to keep threats out. The elders’ barriers existed to keep us in.
I shrugged out of my coat and hung it on a hook by the door. “It’s just weird. Yes, I’m like them. No, I’m not like them. Yes, I can do what they do. No, their protections don’t apply to me. Nothing makes sense! No one can even tell me what I am,” I said. The distress in my voice was more obvious than I’d like.
Everett put his hands on my face and looked at me. “I know what you are,” he said very seriously. I stiffened and braced myself, wondering what he could possibly know but ready to hear anything. He had always kept secrets. This I knew. “You’re a Sadie. And I love that about you.”