“And if I do not?”
“I will not ask again.” The familiar rose. His wings were spread, but he didn’t actually move them; he didn’t flex them; he didn’t flap them.
Mandoran’s hair was beginning to stand on end. In this world, where color was skewed, he still looked pale and nauseated to Kaylin’s eye. She looked at her own hands and froze; her skin was translucent. The Shadow wasn’t. But this Shadow didn’t sprout random eyes or mouths. It had no voice that she could hear. It moved, yes—but it moved the way fire might, if there was nothing to get in its way.
Mandoran hissed. It was an almost catlike sound. He yanked his hands back, and strings of Shadow followed. Without looking up, he said, “Breathe on it.”
This confused Kaylin for half a second, until she realized he was speaking to the familiar.
“I am not certain that’s wise.”
The Shadow strings thickened, becoming both irregular in width and almost mucus-like. Kaylin saw that although the Shadow continued to attempt to snake its way up the inside of her arms, it was also attached in the same way to Mandoran.
“Wise?” Mandoran almost shouted. “Just—do something with it—get it off!”
The outcaste smiled. It was almost, but not quite, gentle. “If you are as you appear to be, it will not harm you.” He frowned as he glanced at Kaylin.
“You’ll pardon me if I don’t take your word for it,” Mandoran said.
“My pardon is irrelevant.” He was staring at Mandoran now.
Kaylin was staring at the Shadow. Those tendrils that had wrapped themselves around the words on her skin—even the flat ones that should have had no dimensionality—were different. The transformation was subtle, and it had happened slowly. They were becoming transparent, just as Kaylin’s skin looked transparent to her eyes.
The outcaste didn’t appear to notice.
She could move her hands. She could control her own movements. Knowing what had happened to Margot, this wasn’t a given. As she moved them, she noticed that the Shadow tendrils didn’t move with them. This was more disturbing.
Mandoran and the outcaste seemed to be more solid here. Mandoran, who had accidentally gotten himself stuck in a wall. A wall. Mandoran could travel in ways most people who lived in the city couldn’t; he was learning hownotto do that.
“Shadow,” the outcaste said, “has much to offer you and your kin.”
“My kin are dead.”
“That is not what I meant by the wordkin. This world—her world—is confining. It is a narrow cage. We accepted its boundaries. We tried to remain within them. But it is not natural, to us.”
“It would have been,” Kaylin interjected, “for Mandoran and his cohort. Without the ceremonies performed at the heart of the green, it would have been.”
“Does it matter?” The outcaste looked at Mandoran. “What was done cannot be undone. I perceive you now: you are trying to limit who you are and who you can be in order to live a diminished life. You are trying to adapt to the rules of people who will not—and cannot—adapt to you.
“Do the Barrani even understand what you are?”
“I’m Barrani.”
“Is that your decision? Is that your choice? Unlike almost all of the people you know, you have other options.”
Kaylin thought of Terrano then. Of the cohort exposed at too early an age to magic they could not reject, Terrano was the only one who had had no desire to come home. He was happy in the outer worlds that people like Kaylin couldn’t see and would never be aware of.
“Why,” she asked the outcaste, “are you even here?”
He did turn to look at her then.
Kaylin’s translucent hands clenched in fists. “One of Mandoran’s friends chose not to come back. He could see the name he had once had. He could see that it didn’t fit him. He wanted the full range of possible lives he could live. He didn’t have a lot of interest in the Barrani or their politics or their wars. He wanted his friends to have the same choice—but he let them make a choice he couldn’t make.
“Why are you here at all, if you have all of that? Why didn’t you just walk, or fly, away?”
There was silence for one long beat, and then the outcaste roared.
* * *