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Imogen watches the bolt of purple energy like it’s a shooting star that’s already carried out her wish. Her eyes well; Laudna grabs her and she has to focus, no matter how torn that attention is. The landscape is a blur as she moves down the rope, her hands raw and burning from the descent. Her feet touch the ground and the air is a haze of lavender and pink. The scream of her mother bounces off the walls of her mind, echoing relentlessly.
“Did she know?”
Her limbs lock, the tug on her arm useless. It can’t be clear what that means, who it references. But every sense tells her it’s her. That they know she told Liliana, and she’s ruined everything. It burns and fights against the relief coursing through her, a contrast that leaves her trying to cup reality through spread fingertips. Ones covered in the same scars that hold her mama. The mother who lives, for now, because of her.
“Imogen, we have to move.” It’s Laudna. She’s knows that urgency, that sympathy, no matter how distant. She nods; the action makes her dizzy. Another tug on her arm kicks her into motion and she blinks. Still, the air’s coloration lingers.
Orym and Chetney move ahead of them, and she watches their form clear and blur in rhythm as tears build and fall. They don’t stop for a while. Imogen loses track of the distance, the time. She squeezes the hand that laced with her own at some point. Her tether as her scars flare and her mother kills the people they’re helping. Without it, she might float right up to the same spot Liliana is. Maybe she’d leave the same trail behind.
They’ve stopped. Imogen doesn’t know where, but she knows Fearne and FCG and Ashton are with them again; it’s all she can process before her knees give out. She reaches out for the arms that inevitably circle her and clutches them to her chest. “Don’t let go,” she cries, “don’t let me go.”
The possibility is terrifying. There’s so much she can’t understand. How can she feel relief, when fear chokes her? When the resentment seeps so deeply it fuses in the blood she shares with her mother? Imogen has been holding it all so close. Bundling this onslaught with desperate fingers, watching them slip and slide against sweaty palms. Now, as she sees that beam in the sky, she just wants her mom.
“Tell me what you need.” It’s whispered against her skin, and she melts against it, trusts that Laudna’s cold skin will build her back into something that resembles a whole.
Imogen shakes her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”