Corinne Duyvis - Otherbound

The wind slapped the laundry overhead into brick walls. Not far ahead, a girl Amara’s age reached out the window to adjust her clothes. She shouted something in a language Amara didn’t recognize. Before that, Amara hadn’t even noticed the silence. The alley was locked away from the world. Just the wind and too-shallow breaths and endless footslams that reverberated throughout her body.

The carecenter was another minute away. Exhaustion in her legs and lungs joined the pain in her shoulder, which bored deep and sharp and hot, even as she felt her skin stitching up—

—Nolan favored his shoulder without thinking as he wrote. About the news sheet. Amara’s resolve to keep reading. Jorn’s drinking. Cilla in the niche, the mages in the doorway. His handwriting turned crooked. He checked his shoulder again, knowing he wouldn’t find anything.

Breathe. In, out. He was fine. Amara’s pain was not his. Still, her exhaustion seeped into him, weighing heavier with each blink. He focused on keeping his writing legible, and took his pen off the paper whenever he closed his eyes, wanting to avoid ink blotches. That was a good thing—

—because when the next arrow hit, it wasn’t Amara’s shoulder, and it wasn’t a scrape. It hit her low, between pelvis and spine. The arrow didn’t feel sharp. It felt blunt, like a punch. Amara’s legs gave out. She went flying to the pavement, shredding her palms on the stones. She gave it a second, two seconds, three, unable to do anything but lie there and wheeze. The world shrank to that spot in her back.

Get up ! Nolan wanted to scream. Get up! Get up !

The mages were coming closer. Nolan heard their footsteps and saw Cilla’s boots scrape to a halt and turn to Amara, limp on the stones. Blood trickled down her back, and for one bewildering moment, Amara mistook the laundry flapping overhead for birds, great big herons bearing down on her, a fish splashing on dry land. She even heard squawking, not far off now.

No, not herons. Seagulls. They were close to the dunes.

With a shaky hand, Amara reached back for the arrow. She pulled, swallowed a scream, and let the arrow clatter to the stones. The sound was light. Harmless. Something that made a sound so harmless shouldn’t be able to hurt so much. She pushed herself up, and in the corner of Amara’s eye, Nolan saw the shapes of the mages approaching and people pulling in their laundry and shutting their windows.

Then—Amara disappeared. For the third time, blackness swept over her, pulling her out of reach. Her body thumped back to the ground, lifeless—

—Nolan’s eyes shot open. He looked around in a daze, at the glow coming in through thick curtains, at stacks of laundry surrounding him in blacks and browns, at the old-school TV set bolted to the wall. Through the wall came the muffled rattle of the washing machine.

Amara had a theory about how she could die: hit fast, hit hard. The mages following her through that alley would be eager to oblige. Taking out Amara would mean taking out the princess’s last defense.

And then? Maybe whatever magic of Amara’s that pulled Nolan into her world would disappear. He’d live out his life in his own world and his own body, a concept he could barely grasp.

Or he’d die, too. Nolan’s life was secondary to Amara’s. That much he’d always known. He was the hanger-on, the badly made copy, the hazy mirror image in this alter-ego life they led together. Maybe whatever connection Amara had forged with him was strong enough that he’d experience her death along with her pain.

He couldn’t stop it, either way. And either way, Amara would die. On cold, unpainted cobblestones with fingernails that hadn’t grown back all the way.

He hated her. Amara had taken his life and locked it into hers, and he hated her more than anything in the world for that. But he didn’t want her to die. Nolan closed his eyes—

—and felt the wound healing, despite Amara’s absence. If she’d just come back as she had before, if her mind was just here , she’d be running again in seconds. It’d hurt, but she’d have no choice. They’d been in worse situations, and—all she needed to do was come back like before, crawl upright and run, and—

Her arms convulsed as if a pulse went through them.

“Come on!” Fear made Cilla’s voice crack. She grabbed Amara’s hands to pull her up, but Amara’s mind was still absent. Nolan had never felt her mind this far gone, not even when she slept. Run , he pleaded. Run .

Amara’s hands tightened around Cilla’s. She let herself be pulled onto unsteady feet, then away, in a stumble that turned into a run. An arrow slashed past her ear.

Amara moved, yes, but where were her thoughts ?

The hospital still lay—what?—half a minute off? Nolan needed to know how far behind the mages were and if Amara and Cilla had any chance of making it. Amara’s head turned. Enough to catch a glimpse of the Elig mage rearming himself, the Dit mage still running. Nolan looked back in front of him, at Cilla dashing around a corner—

He looked back in front of him. He. He .

He exploded into a sprint, but his legs moved on autopilot. He clenched his hands—Amara’s hands—and guided her eyes, and opened her mouth, and pursed her lips. His breath—Amara’s breath?—came in too-short spurts.

He was doing this. These movements couldn’t be a coincidence. Couldn’t be. “Nolan,” he tried to say with unfamiliar lips. The n ’s were lost, and so was the l , his name unrecognizable except to him. Owwa , it sounded like. But it was close enough.

“What?” Cilla shouted. The wind turned her voice frail.

Nolan was steering Amara’s body. He could—he was really doing this—

Amara lay in the alleyway, the clatter of the arrow still echoing—

—then she was running. Stumbling. The alley no longer choked her, the world having opened back up. Storefronts and pubs lined one side. On the other, dunes blocked any view of the ocean but not its salt on the air. She crashed to the ground before she could take in the image properly. Her palms scraped open, just like—just like a moment ago, she wanted to think, but more than a moment had passed. She’d blacked out again.

The mages couldn’t be far behind. She had to keep moving. She couldn’t let whatever was happening cost Cilla’s life, but—how had she been able to get here while blacked out?

Amara scrambled to her feet. She’d almost finished healing, but that didn’t stop her lungs from burning or her mouth from tasting of metal. Cilla was still running in that way she did, at once precise and raw, unpracticed. Cilla looked over her shoulder. The wind tugged at her chin-length hair.

All right. Focus on Cilla. Focus on the stinging of her own healing palms. On the now. Everything else came later.

“Into the carecenter.” Amara signed as broadly as she could. Servant signs weren’t suited to speaking across distances. “I’ll delay them.”

Cilla looked as if she’d object but whipped her head back anyway.

Another arrow flew. Amara ducked instinctively into its path. The arrow clipped her arm, and she hissed, slapping her palm against the cut. Sweat pasted her hair to her face, smoky strands obscuring her vision.

She couldn’t afford another blackout, but right now, she couldn’t prevent one, either. What she could do was slow down the mages. She had her knife and one advantage: not worrying about getting hurt. She’d go for the Elig mage first. Wrestle away the bow.