Corinne Duyvis: Otherbound

Mom probably felt she needed to take care of him. Nolan didn’t know if it was his leg or his seizures or something else. He’d complained about it once, two years ago. Then he’d seen the look on her face. Ever since, he’d let her baby him. If she needed this, he refused to cause more hurt—

—a sharp noise—

—Nolan closed his eyes. Noise meant bad things. Jorn’s temper. Cilla getting hurt—

—Amara and Maart went dead still, alert for further sounds. “I should check on Cilla,” Amara signed. A second later, the pub crowd downstairs burst into cheers. Relief washed over her—

“—Nolan? Polite? I’m shocked.” Pat laughed.

Nolan took a second to replay her words. His parents would be waiting—hoping—for a smart-ass big-brother response. Pat knew better. Her eyes only met his briefly before she gave her plate her full attention again.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t try. He laughed, which seemed to please Dad, but when he racked his brain for a response, nothing came.

This act used to be easier. He’d always been the good big brother and the ideal son, who might be aloof but at least didn’t do drugs or smoke or hang with the wrong crowd. At least he didn’t splurge on video games or stay out all night. At least he no longer had those hallucinations.

But lately, people wanted more than tailor-made smiles, and he didn’t know what to give them.

Whenever Nolan read, he lost his spot on the page, every page. Music interrupted and paused but was low-key enough to be bearable, unlike TV, which had him zoning out within minutes.

Homework? Out of the damn question.

What Nolan could do was this: open his journals and report on every blink without thinking. The Dunelands took up five dozen notebooks and counting.

He wanted more than that. Something that was his.

Without the money for a running leg, sports were out, whether it was disabled sports two hours away in Mesa or regular sports here in tiny Farview, Arizona. He’d get too distracted, anyway, and anything involving running or jumping was too dangerous with the Dunelands catching him off guard at any moment. What’d happened ten years ago proved that: Cilla had tripped and skinned her palms. Blood welled up in tiny drops. The curse awoke, sending ripples through the earth; they had only seconds before it would strike.

By then, Amara had been with Jorn and Cilla for a year. She’d lost track of how often she’d had to cheat the curse, but she knew her script and everyone else’s.

It didn’t make her shake any less when Jorn grabbed his knife. He slashed open Cilla’s skin further, then thrust Amara’s hand into the cut and dragged her arm along it. Then, pushing her out of reach, he helped Cilla wrap up, shielding her palms from the air so her blood couldn’t call louder than the fresh smears on Amara’s skin.

The earth drew open. Roots wrapped around Amara’s ankles. They dragged her down, slicing her legs through the thick fabric of her winterwear. When she stumbled to all fours, the next root coiled around her arms, up to her throat. One wormed its way between her lips. Pushed into an empty mouth, past the remains of a sliced-up tongue, and beyond.

All in all, it might’ve taken five minutes. When the roots drew enough of Amara’s blood to block out the final whispers of Cilla’s dried streaks, the curse backed off, leaving Amara to cough and choke and claw and heal.

She must’ve been seven. She was thinking: I don’t want to heal anymore I don’t I don’t

Nolan was seven, too. Five minutes was more than enough for him to lurch off his bike on his way to school and fall to the street, groping to free himself from roots that weren’t there. He barely saw the Jeep in time. Adrenaline flooded him. He crab-walked out of reach, but too slowly, leaving his left foot and a child-sized bicycle for the Jeep’s tire to crush.

The good part was that Nolan passed out from the pain. The bad part was that Amara’s world offered him just as much pain as his.

So he avoided sports. Even a regular fall with only half a leg was a pain in the neck.

Just as Nolan’s family couldn’t afford a running leg, they couldn’t afford a swimming leg. What they could afford—or would make sacrifices for, anyway—was a season’s membership to the nearest pool and an adjusted flipper. It wrapped around the stump of his shin, allowing him to push off and keep afloat.

So he swam under the lifeguard’s watchful eye, reducing the world to kids’ screams and the kick of his legs and chlorine in his nose. Swimming meant moving on autopilot, making it ten times easier to deal with the back-and-forth between worlds. It made his parents happy, too. They thought he had a hobby.

Right now, Nolan really wished he was swimming.

Instead, he’d gone upstairs after abandoning his meal, leaving Pat to her Nahuatl studies and Dad to sort through bills and write angry letters about banned books at Nolan’s school. Nolan made a beeline for the bathroom, where dirty laundry was stacked knee-high in one corner despite the quick load Dad had run yesterday. Mom normally handled the laundry. Working two jobs probably explained the size of the pile.

How had Nolan not noticed? When had she started at the Walgreens anyway—and why ?

Nolan suspected he knew. Dad’s insurance from his hospital administrator job covered only part of the cost of the latest pills. Nolan had known they were in a bad situation, just not how bad.

Three jobs to pay for anti-seizure meds when he didn’t even have seizures, and all Nolan did was fill up one notebook after another and go swimming three times a week. If Amara wouldn’t leave him be long enough for him to help himself, he should at least help others.

“How difficult can a washing machine be, right?” The words came out angrily. He lowered himself to the ground and started sorting through the pile.

By late afternoon, Amara had decided that, as dangerous as sneaking downstairs was, she’d do it anyway.

She hovered at the top of the inn stairs, listening to the noise from the ground-floor pub. The clinking of glasses, shouts and laughter, a flute player’s screech. She smelled greasy bread and alcohol—Jélisse ports and wines, and beers from all over the Continent. She’d never liked the taste but wished for a sip anyway; at least she had enough of a stump in the back of her throat to notice that taste, or any taste at all. Maart rarely did.

Amara moved down a stair, then two, until she had a sliver of a view of the crowd. Most were Dit workers, sun-freckled, flat-faced, broad-shouldered. Jorn fit right in, sitting at a booth near the bar and shouting for another beer. He’d drunk more in the past few weeks than he had in years. He hadn’t punished Amara so badly in just as long.

In the deepest end of the booth, with her back safely to the wall, Cilla nursed her own drink—her first and last. They couldn’t risk her losing her coordination. Cilla took a tiny sip and glanced up as a gangly boy leaned into their table with a lopsided smile. His words were lost in the noise.

Jorn said two words of his own, and the boy stumbled back before Cilla even had a chance to return his smile. Amara relaxed marginally. Jorn was still alert enough to be cautious. No one should come near Cilla, especially after drinking.

Amara looked for the news sheet pinned to the wall downstairs, in a weakly lit niche. The innkeeper refreshed it every three days. She moved down another stair, keeping a close eye on Cilla and Jorn as she went—part caution, part habit. Most people in the bar gave Cilla a wide berth. Amara didn’t know if that had anything to do with Jorn telling off her last suitor, or just her being Alinean in a predominantly Dit bar; most Alineans had returned to the Alinean Islands after the coup, but the ones who remained in the Dunelands still made all the money, still had the best jobs, and still walked with their heads held high, and that was starting to bother even those who’d supported the monarchy.