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THIRTEEN YEARS AGO, Pearl sat on the cracked and peeling boards of Tango’s porch with her legs swinging above the dirt. Knees skinned, hand-me-down jeans cut across the thigh. The edges of the memory are time-worn and curling like an old photograph, vignette distance, and nowadays she mostly remembers it in split-seconds when the smell of the dirt in the rain pulls it forward through time. Blows off the dust, until she’s sixteen again and Tango’s humming a tune from the couch, and Etho’s on his back behind her muttering to himself, something in his hands. Solving a problem she doesn’t remember anymore.
It’s been a long time, is the point. It’s almost been long enough for it to have happened to someone else entirely.
Except that when she opens the door and steps outside, the smell of the rain hits her nose and all she can think is creaking boards and peeling paint and ripped jeans and Etho close enough to reach behind her and touch.
Etho in front of her, close enough to reach out and touch.
“Oh,” she says. She’s wearing slippers and sweatpants. It’s nine at night. She hasn’t seen him in over a decade.
He’s wearing a coat, zipped to his chin, and a backpack over his shoulder, mask over his face, lines around his eyes. He says, “Sorry. I didn’t know your new number.”
But he knows where she lives.
“Tango’s gone,” Etho says. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
Pearl lets him into her kitchen. Of course she does; it’s still Etho.
His backpack’s on the floor by his feet. Boots at the door; socks on rental-grey laminate. Coat folded over the arm of the chair, so he’s in a threadbare sweater instead that hangs off his shoulders. Mask over the lower half of his face, simple black fabric but well-fitting, and Pearl catches the glimmer of gold thread along the sides. Carefully stitched sigils.
Pearl wants to offer him tea, or dinner, put something on his bones, gangly as she remembers and every bit as lanky as he was at nineteen. It worries her now.
“Tango’s gone,” she says, instead, finally. Breaking the silence threatening to move into her kitchen along with herself and the almost-stranger (almost-friend) at her secondhand table. It’s a question as much as it’s an icebreaker.
“Almost two weeks ago,” Etho says. Hair in his eyes. “I thought, I dunno, he does this sometimes. Vanishes. I usually give him a few days, maybe a week, and he turns back up starving with some new project he wants to show me. You know what he’s like.”
Pearl knew what Tango was like, thirteen years ago when she was a different person. She folds her arms. “And this time it’s not that?”
“He was…”
The silence trails. Hugging the corners. Etho runs a finger along the seam of his mask.
“We had something,” he says. “Another project he was already in the middle of, and we were going to meet for part of it. He missed the day. He wouldn’t have missed those plans.”
“And you know he didn’t just forget.”
“He wouldn’t have missed it,” Etho echoes. And he reaches to his backpack beside him, zipper click, rustle of fabric. He sets a notebook on the table, creased cover, folded pages, and he slides it forward.
Pearl doesn’t move at first. “What is this?”
“He left it,” Etho says.
Finally, she moves to pick up the notebook. It’s a simple one, black composition, spine reinforced with white duct tape. It’s been years, but she still remembers Tango’s tiny, compact handwriting. Legible, but crowded on the page, like he’s worried he’ll run out of room to fit all his thoughts – and judging by the number of pages filled in this book, it’s a well-founded fear.
There’s pages of sketches, diagrams, notes. A few places where he’s written in Sigil, spellcrafting lines carefully broken up by a null, empty symbol that blocks a spell from taking any power on a page; careful not to cast anything too early. Careful not to imbue any magic in this book.
(She wouldn’t feel the tingle on her fingers even if there was, of course. It’s been thirteen years since she’s known that either. Etho, across from her, eyes dark; she wonders if he feels it coursing where the fabric brushes his cheeks. Wonders how long it took for him to get used to the feeling.)
Halfway through, the pages go blank. There’s torn edges instead; not all at once, but between written pages of notes. Careful, even; the pages were cut out, one at a time, like somebody cared a lot to keep some eight of the last twenty pages to themselves. And then the writing stop altogether.
“Why not take the whole book with him?” Pearl muses. “Why just take a few pages?”
“He would have,” Etho says. “Something’s wrong, Pearl. I don’t know where he went, but I don’t think he went willingly.”
And it’s not magic, but Pearl feels an old familiar feeling settle right at the bottom of her ribcage. Almost dread. Almost a thrill. “Why are you here, Etho?”
When she was young, she would have died for both of them. Etho and Tango both. The way Etho looks at her now, she’s pretty sure he knows it.
“I need you, Pearl. I can’t find him on my own. You know I wouldn’t ask you if I thought I could.”
When Pearl was sixteen, she had a family for the first and only time in her life, and she sat on a desert porch with her feet in the dust and listened to the hum and chatter of two people she loved and felt the buzz of an oncoming thunderstorm in her skin, electric pop and sizzle like firecrackers in her fingertips. These days, she just feels the rain creak in her joints.
But she’s never been able to say no to Etho.
When she sighs, his expression doesn’t change. Hair in his eyes, dark, masked. He already knows what she’s going to say.
They alternate driving.
It’s early when they set out, and Etho’s already awake when she comes downstairs with a packed bag in one hand. If he takes his mask off to sleep, she doesn’t know, because it’s already back on and snug over his nose, and he’s plotting a course across the border on his phone.
“Thought you didn’t know where he was,” Pearl says as she climbs into the passenger seat. His shift first; she’ll take over after they stop for breakfast.
“I read his journal,” Etho says. “There’s enough clues to pick a general direction.”
“And when we get closer than general direction territory?”
“We’ll be close enough for me to find him,” Etho says, mild. Key in the ignition. “I can always tell when you–when he’s nearby.”
The weight of it sits in Pearl’s stomach. That Etho, even after all this time, still feels them in that magic-sense spine tingling way she only feels in her dreams now. “Right.”
Engine coughs twice, whirs to life. Low hum of the radio. Etho guides her out onto the street.
Pearl pulls out Tango’s journal again. The GPS says they’ve got twenty-three hours of driving to their destination. She’s got a lot of hand-cramped writing to read on the way there.
Here is all you know:
1. The world is cold.
(You didn’t grow up with a family, but you made one. Stitched it together yourself with sweat and tears, and no blood, because you can’t choose blood but you can choose who wakes up in your house and you picked them, and they stuck with you. There’s some world or another where you all could’ve stayed together, and it wouldn’t have been so cold.
It’s all you can really think of. Cold is a kind of emptiness, and it feels like the void. You’re grappling for a lifeline in the void, so you think about your family and you don’t think about the cold.)
2. You love him.
(Once upon a time, you could’ve said it to him. There used to be words to explain that sort of thing, but now there’s just distance. The cold follows you everywhere and it infects everything no matter how hard you work to scrub it out. No matter how many fires you build.
You think he knows it anyway. You hope he knows.)
3. If you can save either of them, you’re going to try.
(You’d die trying if that’s what it took.)
Tango’s journal is near indecipherable to Pearl. She’s glad Etho seems to understand it enough to know where he’s going, because Pearl flips through each page and becomes more confused.
She recognizes only a few of the Sigil lines, later in the journal, towards the missing pages. They’re echoed in the lines of Etho’s mask, carefully penned in the same shape and slant as the stitches. Dampening magic. Preventing any spell that passes through them from enacting, or at least lowering the efficiency.
There were a few drafts Tango must have tried, all printed out – with null symbols between each line – with notes on how effective each one was. He’s marked down how Etho responded to each one, or Pearl guesses he did, because he never writes Etho’s name. Writes it clinical, writes it “ subject responds with—” and then a list of symptoms. The first time, Etho’s voice cuts out entirely, and he can’t speak with the mask on. Then he can speak, but he can’t use magic at all, so he’ll have to take his mask off to cast, and then they’re back to square one. There’s a time where something nasty reacts between the Sigil and Etho’s own innate magic supply, and the mask itself nearly burns off his face.
And then, at the last page, there’s the usual lines of Sigil, Tango’s notes on spellcrafting and theory, and then–
And then it cuts off, and there’s a thin seam of cut paper between it and the next page, which starts on something else entirely.
Pearl holds the book up, squints at Etho’s mask from across the center console. Compares each symbol against each other. It’s a perfect match.
Etho watches her from the corner of his eye between merging lanes. “Do I have something on my face?”
“A mask,” she quips. “Which Tango made for you, and then cut a page out of his journal about.”
“I saw that,” Etho says.
“What did he have to hide there?” she wonders aloud. “What happened when you tested it?”
He shrugs. “It worked. It’s the final version. We haven’t adjusted it since.”
She studies the end of the page. “Then why did he cut that one out?”
“Maybe he wrote something on the other side,” Etho suggests.
“Maybe.” She squints down at the next sheet of paper, still intact in the journal. There’s a complicated diagram and a series of mathematics equations so tiny she might need a magnifying glass to parse it all. Her head swims.
Instead of trying to make any sense of that, she pops open the glove box and slides the notebook in. “Let me have a turn at the wheel.”
At the next rest stop, they stand outside to stretch their legs for a few minutes. Pearl stands on the opposite side of the wall, and Etho hunches on the opposite side with his mask under his chin while he wolfs down a slightly-soggy rest station sandwich. It’s the first food she’s seen him eat all day. She knows he won’t talk til the mask is back on, so she doesn’t say anything either.
The wind is bitter today, blowing in from the sea and tugging sharp at her hair and the hem of her coat.
“When did you last see Tango?” Pearl asks, when Etho is crumpling up the wrapper of his sandwich and fitting his mask over his nose.
“A few weeks ago,” Etho says. “I got home from work and he was in the kitchen.”
“You still live together,” Pearl says. Not really a question. An observation. She doesn’t know why it surprises her.
“We do,” Etho says.
“Where at?”
“Same as always.”
“Oh.”
And she doesn’t ask anything else. Doesn’t ask what it looks like inside, thirteen years later; if they’ve redecorated, if there’s new furniture. If the second door to the left, just at the top of the stairs, is empty, or if her bed is still there. If they’ve taken her things off the shelves.
She doesn’t even ask how he can stand to see those walls every day after what he did.
So they go back to the car in silence, and Pearl adjusts the rearview mirror and doesn’t have to move the seat at all, because she and Etho are still the same height, and he doesn’t make eye contact with her the whole time.
But he does say, just as she’s turning the key, “He was off even then. I should’ve known something was wrong.”
She pauses. “Off, how?”
“Distant. He’d get, you know, off in his, in his own little world when he was caught up in a project, so I didn’t think much of it at first. But he didn’t even want to talk to me about what he was working on, he’d avoid me, and that—”
“That’s not like him,” Pearl finishes. As if she knows Tango, but Etho’s nodding, so the bittersweet residue sticks to her alone.
“Yeah,” he says. “You know how he is.”
Pearl’s chest aches, right at the bottom of her ribs. She pulls the car back out onto the freeway.
“So why did you come get me, out of everyone in the world?” Pearl asks, that night, looking up at the motel ceiling. It’s too much to look at his face while she asks it. Doesn’t think she can handle both the truth and his eyes at the same time. “Surely you know any number of people who could help you.”
Doesn’t think she’ll hear the truth anyway, of course. But there’s a grain of it, somewhere, in everything Etho says. Under all the layers she has to re-remember how to peel back. Under all the new layers she needs to figure out for the first time, all over again.
“Tango needs you,” he says. Voice trailing up to her from where he’s sitting on the floor, blanket on the carpet, one pillow under his head.
She scoffs.
“I mean it, Pearl. You see things I don’t notice, an extra set of eyes on his journal for anything I missed.” Rustle of fabric as he lays out his bedding. “There aren’t many people in the world I could go to about this.”
“So it was all for Tango?”
He’s quiet.
“You’re capable.” She folds her hands over her chest. He’s always been stronger than her, better at the spells he casts and at the innate sort of power that coils under his fingertips and beneath his tongue. Even before everything, he knew more than she did. “You don’t need me, Etho.”
He says, softly, “Maybe I just need someone Tango will actually want to see.”
And that’s not what she asked, not at all, but it burns into her chest. Almost anger, that he’d think that, that he’d compare them against each other, that he’d force Tango to be the arbiter of their shared guilt. Almost regret, as if it’s her own fault. “Well, that isn’t–as if Tango wouldn’t want to see you, either.”
“You didn’t know him after you left.”
She doesn’t know what to say to that. “Tango loves you.”
A quiet exhale.
There’s a grain in there. A tiny, microscopic truth somewhere in what he’s telling her, and Pearl doesn’t know which one it is. Doesn’t remember all the layers he hides under, whether it’s selfishness or anger or hatred, or if those are the ones he’s hiding. Etho doesn’t hate himself. Etho’s poking guilt into her like needle felt.
His breath’s gone slow and even, drifting off on the carpeted floor at the foot of the bed before she’s got any of it unraveled.
He still has the nightmares. When she wakes up, he’s heaving for breath, so she crawls off the bed and settles at the floor beside him. Knees dug into stiff carpet. His eyes are still closed, hands balled into fists beside him, and he’s wearing the mask. He sounds like he can’t breathe around it.
She’s barely got her fingers hooked around the loop of elastic, only just lifted it from his ear, when his hand flies up. Long fingers, bony, pale, near-skeletal, tight around her wrist. Vice-tight grip.
Etho hisses, eyes open, gaze locked with hers, “Don’t.”
For the first time since he’d arrived at her house, she sees his lips move when he speaks. Sees the corner of his mouth, the way it twists and pulls around the sound of just one word, unfiltered. The sound of it washes over her, and time stretches out, frozen in place. She hears her blood in her ears, feels the tips of her fingers pin-prick-tingle with the cold, and she can’t look away from Etho’s eyes. She’s pinned in place.
And then Etho blinks, and she breathes out all at once until her chest aches. He rears back, and she stumbles off the balls of her feet and falls back to the ground, unceremonious and bruising.
He’s hooking his mask back over his mouth with one hand, the other holding him up as he shuffles away from her.
“Stay away from me, Pearl,” he says, but there’s none of that force behind it now. Just Etho, in the dark, backed against the foot of the bed. One eye glints back at her, moonlight reflecting from the window over her shoulder. He melts into the dark; she can’t quite tell where his body stops and his shadow starts.
Even with her fingers frostbitten and her heart in her ears, even with thirteen years of distance and one horrible moment all that time ago to teach her she should be, she can’t scrape up enough fear to be afraid of him.
But she isn’t stupid.
He’s poised like the fear goes the other way, and she won’t go poking something that’s scared of her, so she gives him a wide berth while she climbs back up on her mattress. Doesn’t even look his way while he settles back down; spares him the embarrassment of pulling himself back together under her eyes.
She waits until she hears him moving, settling back down into his makeshift bed, before she speaks. “Are we gonna talk about it?”
“Nope,” he says, light, like it’s a joke. That one’s easy to peel back.
“All right,” she says. “Goodnight, then.”
A reminder:
1. The world is cold.
(A family you stitch together is only as good as the threads that bind it. And, even then, you have to hope none of the pieces you sew together have teeth. You have to hope they play nice, and you have to remember that a loose thread unravels the whole blanket apart.
You’ve been cold for your whole life. And it’s not so much about having a blanket, these days, as it is to… this metaphor’s getting away from you. God, has it always been this cold? How are you supposed to think around it?)
2. You love him.
(And it’s easy to blame him for the teeth, to go back to the metaphor. It’s easy to sink into it, but it’s easier still to imagine there’s a way you could file them down instead. Maybe you can keep him from biting. So your whole life is that: the file.
Is it love to change him? If it’s to save him?)
3. You can save them.
(You have to try.)
(She wakes up to the sound of his gasps, and she pretends for both of their sakes that she doesn’t hear it.)
On the third day of driving, Pearl tries to read more of Tango’s journal.
Key word being try. The pages start getting choppier, and harder to understand. The notes take on a frantic tone, rushed, a little sloppier. He skips words here and there, adds in abbreviations that she can’t always parse, and the neat handwriting starts turning into a scrawl in his clear rush. It’s less of a careful log now; more of a scribbled list of important to-dos and reminders.
He’s writing something about traps on this page. There’s two pages missing, and then the next set of notes talk about containment spells and barriers. It doesn’t say what he’s keeping inside of them.
The last intact page in the journal has what she thinks might be a map; scrawled diagram, something like a maze, and a gate drawn on the paper with Sigil writing along the top of it. There’s no null symbols. Pearl reads them, silent in her head, as something like a key.
It’s almost comical, if it wasn’t so chilling. He’s gone full mad scientist, leaving behind a redacted collection of clues and everything. She doesn’t understand how Tango could have ended up like this.
“This is your clue?” Pearl asks. “This last map.”
“I’ve seen that gate before,” Etho explains. “We went there once, a few years ago. Hunting for a safe house, just in case I, uh…”
The pause lasts only a few seconds, but it paints a world of a picture.
“In case I needed one,” he says, mildly. “And there was this place. Just without the sigils, so there must be a way to activate the magic there. The gate is the key, somehow.”
Pearl squints down at the symbols inked on the page again. Traces over them with the edge of her finger. “I don’t think so.”
Etho glances her way, spares a look away from the road ahead. He doesn’t say anything, but the question hangs in the air between them anyway.
“The spell is here,” she says. Her finger still rests above the Sigil, and thirteen years ago, she would’ve felt it buzz under her skin. She still almost imagines she can. “He didn’t null it. This map is the compass and the key.”
Etho says, “And this is why Tango needs you, Pearl.”
She scoffs at him, but when he glances at her from the road again, the edge of his eye is curved up in a smile. They’re only a handful of hours from the address Etho’s put in the GPS. She’s holding the key in her hands.
And maybe, she dares to hope, just maybe, this is going to work out.
Pearl learned she was going to be alone her whole life when she was seven years old.
It wasn’t some horrible, tragic thing, none of those horror stories you hear on the news — Child’s magic manifests in inferno, kills whole family — but just… quiet. She was playing outside, her dad smoking on the porch, and for the first time ever she felt her body shift while she ran through the grass. Felt the way her limbs twisted and reformed, and it didn’t hurt, but it was strange and new and she didn’t know what was happening.
She still didn’t know what had happened when her dad looked at her, had sighed as if inconvenienced, and said, “Great. That’s just my luck, isn’t it?”
And he didn’t believe in spending extra on the whole magic-training thing, so she taught herself in the mirror instead, read books at the library and after the lights were out in her room, whispering the words to herself. Nobody else in her class had manifested, so she was the novelty – a party trick to show off and not good for much more than that. She didn’t even see someone else with magic until high school, when she met Etho and then Tango by extension, and then all-but moved into Tango’s guest room while her dad never noticed.
Tango sits her down and tells her how to form spells. Teaches her the baselines, tells her that everyone’s got the same magic, but some people form it different and it spills over in one way for them instead of in the sort of spell-casting blanket. Says they can form it back into the blanket-type, or she can hone in on the shapeshifting, and either way’s fine.
Tango’s not magic. He’s just curious, he says.
And Etho–
He never sits with her to practice spells. She never sees him actively using magic, and she’s never really seen anyone actively use magic, but there’s such a gap between the way Tango teaches it to her and the way Etho uses it. Tango tells her not to be afraid, tells her there’s nothing wrong with her, teaches her to be comfortable. Confidence will come later.
But Etho is afraid.
The way he uses his own magic is understated. In the kitchen, he drops a plate and whispers, “Please don’t break,” and something catches it inches from the floor. Lowers it without a sound at his feet.
The first time he uses it directly on her, she feels that unsteady, ice-sheet under her shoes feeling, feels all the air punch out of her lungs. It’s like the pinpricks in her fingertips of an oncoming storm; it’s like the way her limbs shift and twist around her, except it’s not in her but around her. The world itself reforms to Etho’s every whim he ventures to voice aloud.
And all he’d said was, “Oh, shoot, move–” With an armload of glass he’s helping Tango move across the house.
Pearl doesn’t have any control of the way she steps away from him. She would have moved, of course, would have gotten out of his way, and is glad she did not collide with a potentially volatile box of glass bottles. But she doesn’t lift her feet to move. It’s not her. Etho moves her, reshifts the mass that makes her up until she is out of his way. It’s disorienting. It would be terrifying, if she didn’t trust Etho.
And his face is ashen after he does, expression drawn tight over the sharp angles of his face. “I didn’t see you.”
“Sorry,” Pearl says, as soon as she can breathe again. “I, uh, snuck up on you, I guess.”
He doesn’t say anything else. He turns around, puts down the box, and then he locks himself in his room for the rest of the day.
When Tango finds Pearl later, he sits beside her and tell her that Etho is skittish, is the word he uses, about his own magic. That it’s an accident to him, and he’d rather avoid it than learn it. Pearl figures that much. Etho’s got the kind of magic that makes the news, the kind that makes people afraid of him. Pearl just turns into a dog if she gets too excited.
Etho hides, and he’s quiet, and he avoids saying anything at all for as long as he can. It all bottles up, pressure dropping until he explodes again. That’s the way Etho works. A hurricane builds every time he opens his mouth, and then Pearl and Tango clean up the debris after.
(The worst thing Etho ever tells her, mid-hurricane, middle of a storm with lightning tingling in her veins, is this: “You don’t understand what this magic does. You shouldn’t even have it.”
The world reshifts to swallow Pearl whole.)
They take one more rest stop, because Pearl’s legs might cramp so hard they fall off if they don’t, and she’s not gonna be much use to Tango if she can’t walk when they get there. Etho heads inside the convenience store, and Pearl stands out by the car to stretch her legs.
She’d dropped her phone at some point, and it slid into the backseat so now she takes the opportunity to retrieve it. Pops open the back door and leans in, reaches under the seat, hand jammed blindly in her way. There’s some papers jammed up in her way, and she thinks, Etho, clean your car. Pulls them out in a heap on the floor, and then reaches back under. Fingers fishing around.
And it’s there, with her arm under the back seat to her elbow, propped up awkward on the cushion and knee on the floor, when she glances down at the pile of crumpled papers in front of her now.
Torn edges on some of them. Neat, packed handwriting, covering every spare inch, like whoever wrote them was afraid to waste any space.
She freezes. Her heart thuds to a stop in her chest.
Slowly, she shifts back, withdraws her hand and sits up. Examines the papers a little closer.
Tango’s handwriting fills it corner to corner, easy to recognize after the hours Pearl has spent poring over his journal. Something bubbles up in her chest at how easy it is to spot now; something like homesickness and nausea. She tamps it down and reads.
The missing notes about Etho’s mask. It worked, Etho told her; it worked, so now he wears it. And Tango’s careful handwriting says, Partial success. Says, Subject had no reaction to mask, though some blanket magic seems dampened. There’s notes for another draft, but the Sigil isn’t complete. The rest of the page is empty where it’s been cut away from the notebook.
Something’s in Pearl’s chest, in her fingertips. Pinprick, building, like an oncoming storm. She feels like she might be sick.
There’s more on the other pages, but now she’s busy watching out the window, waiting for Etho to appear around the corner, and part of her wonders if she should just run now. The rest of her knows she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she left him and Tango—oh, god, Tango.
Tango’s notes stretch, rushed, spiralling, across each missing page. Traps, mazes, a cage he doesn’t want to build but only he could ever complete. Containment spells that start to look eerily like the stitching on a cloth mask.
Her heart is pounding. Etho steps out of the gas station, and she shoves the missing pages back under the seat. Climbs back up front, settles into the passenger seat, and hopes she’s not trembling when he opens the door.
He’s got a gas station coffee in each hand, and he offers her one. She takes it. “You okay?”
“Yeah, of course,” she lies. “Just nervous. I hope Tango’s all right.”
“He’s gonna be okay,” Etho says, like he’s reassuring her. She hopes he’s not lying. “We’re almost there.”
She studies the stitching on his map while he cranes his head to look through the rear windshield. Dampening Sigil, but not totally effective. But she hasn’t felt the world reform around her, only the once, and she knows – she knows Etho. She thinks she knows Etho.
She knows she can’t say no to him, even when he doesn’t ask.
So she buckles her seatbelt, and she drives with him for three more hours.
1. The world is so cold.
(It’s leeching into you and sinking deep in your bones until you can’t remember anything else. The world’s all void and cold and empty. It’s always been.)
2. The world is so cold.
(If you could just remember what it is he did, you still think you’d forgive him.)
3. The world is so cold.
(You did this for someone. You wouldn’t have done it for anybody else. There’s no world you’d do anything else.)
When Pearl opens her eyes, the world is shifting around her. She remembers it all in snapshots and flashes. In the sparks in her fingers and the ache in her ribs.
She remembers:
The book is the key.
(Stopping the car, stepping outside. Cold wind, tangling her hair and biting fingertips. She’s holding Tango’s notebook in cold fingers, tight around the cover, and Etho’s standing beside her.
He holds out a hand. She doesn’t give it to him.
“Where’s Tango?” she asks, finally honest. “I know you know. I know what you did to him.”
And Etho’s eyes are dark. He says, just one word, just her name. “Pearl.”
“I listened to you. I followed you. I trusted you.”
The wind whistles.
“You trusted me?”
She can’t remember what she told him after that. In her chest, she knows it was only in the way she can trust him to lie to her, and to follow him anyway.)
Cold, the way it sinks into her. The unsteadiness of the ground below her feet.
(There isn’t really a way to say no to Etho. Not when he’s already decided nobody else knows better than him. Not when he’s already made up his mind.
“You’ll have to make me,” she tells him, honest. Holds the book against her chest. She won’t be willingly made into his own executioner. “I’m not doing this for you.”)
And then, Tango.
She’s bleary, cold, and struggling to find her footing in consciousness when she sees him. He’s so much older, but she guesses so is she. Scratchy and scruffy, face blurring into view, and he’s pale with dark bruises smeared under his eyes, but it’s Tango.
“There you are,” he’s whispering, so quiet. “You’ll be okay.”
It’s so cold. She doesn’t know where they are – barely remembers getting inside, into this place, all cold and stone and dusty red Sigil etched into the walls. Blue light flickers faint from the corners. Her chest aches. She doesn’t have the journal anymore. “Where–Etho—”
“He’ll be back,” Tango says. “Take a deep breath.”
She does. Expands her lungs until they could burst. He helps her sit up, hand on her shoulderblades. Real, solid pressure. Warm.
“I missed you,” Pearl says, and that’s when tears burn at the corners of her eyes. She left on her own, she never came back, and she missed him. She doesn’t know how else to say it. “I read the journal, I found the key. I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was for him, not for you.”
“Oh, Pearl,” Tango says. Voice hoarse, scraping over each word. He opens his arms, and she tumbles into them and she never wants to let go. “Pearl, you did so well. I’m so proud of you.”
“I’m so sorry,” Pearl gasps, and now she can’t stop the hot tears streaming down her face. “I’m sorry I didn’t come back. I didn’t know how—”
“It isn’t your fault,” Tango tells her. His arms are trembling around her, cold as the stone beneath them. “It was never your fault.”
She sniffles into his shoulder, and he lets her. It’s been so long, but she’s missed him. She doesn’t want him to let go.
But eventually she composes herself enough to sit up again. Wipes her face, sits back, tries to act like she isn’t still, deep down, the same unstable sixteen year old who ran away from the only people who ever loved her. “This… This place.”
“It was supposed to keep him safe,” Tango says, mournful. “I built it for him. We both knew it was only a matter of time until he–you know. To protect him. I didn’t realize he was going to turn it into…”
Into his own tomb, Pearl thinks. Casting himself as a Minotaur in a labyrinth.
As if on cue, she hears the footsteps.
Etho, or part of him, or a part of something with Etho in it. His eyes are dark. His limbs are shadow, melting into the world around him and reforming again. He holds out the journal.
Pearl gets to her feet.
She could be feeling a hundred and one things right now. Anger. Hurt. Betrayal. Guilt. There’s more nameless ones, the kind she can’t put her finger on, but make her think about late nights and kitchen chairs and sitting out on the roof with someone until she’s falling asleep with her head on his shoulder.
Under everything, there’s that too. That this is Etho, and thirteen years ago, she loved him.
“You can go,” he says. Not a demand. Still holding out the journal. “You and Tango both.”
“And, what,” she says. “Leave you in here?”
He says, “That’s what it was built for.”
She scoffs, sharp. His shoulders stiffen.
You make it all about you, Pearl wants to say, but she doesn’t. About your fear. About your survival. She wants to say it all. Every angry thing that’s built up in her for thirteen years, every little fracture and old bruise she still presses on.
He stands very still. He waits for her.
“I was sixteen,” and her voice breaks. “I was sixteen, and you hurt me, and I felt like I lost everything. I finally had a family, I finally had people who understood, and you took that away from me. What about me, Etho? What about what you did to me? Don’t I deserve to hurt?”
“You do,” he says. Quiet.
“Then why do you do this?” She takes the journal, and she hands it to Tango behind her. “Punish yourself until I feel bad for you instead of feeling anything about myself.”
He doesn’t say anything. There’s barely anything on his face at all.
But it’s Etho in front of her still, twisted and cold and she barely recognizes him under all of the shadow, but it’s Etho, and he was the first person like her that she ever met. He was the only one who ever made her feel normal.
And here is the truth Pearl knows, thirteen years later, buried in her this whole time: She will always forgive him.
Even before he asks.
“I can never want anything,” he says, slow, struggling with the words. “I can never be angry. I can never say the wrong thing. That’s—I’m not even a real person anymore, Pearl.”
She closes the distance between them. Etho, shuddering, cold energy and tension snapping icelike, but she doesn’t stop. She reaches up, takes his face in her hands, and he stiffens but doesn’t recoil. Doesn’t pull away.
“I love you anyway,” she says. She presses a kiss to his forehead.
He lets out a sound like a sob, but she doesn’t let go. Flings an arm around him and holds on tighter, and she feels his fingers right against her sides. He doesn’t push her away.
“You don’t get it,” he says. “You don’t get it.”
“No,” she agrees. “I don’t. I don’t have to. I’ll be here anyway.”
And she feels it then — tingling in her chest. A ghost of a feeling she’s never really forgotten. The warning before a storm. The way the world shifts around her but she locks her heels in and she doesn’t let go, and Etho crumples but she sinks with him so they’re both knelt on the ground, and she doesn’t let go.
She feels her own magic, thirteen years missing and there’s a place for it right in the bottom of her ribcage and oh she misses it, but she feels it. Curled up against her where Etho’s skin touches her own. Close enough to wind it around her fingers and hold it tight.
The world shifts under her feet, but Pearl doesn’t move with it. She’s stubborn too.
She ties her magic around her fingers, looped around her wrist. Etho’s head drops to her shoulder, and he doesn’t move. It’s ice and blue and black bruises and gas station coffee sharp and laying outside in the desert night cold and watching the stars turn overhead. It’s the pressure in the air before a storm and the hum of lightning before it strikes. It’s an empty ache in her ribs begging yes, yes, yes.
Thirteen years ago, Tango taught her magic. Etho took it from her. Today, she winds Etho’s magic around her fingers in a way that doesn’t unravel. A way that makes it hers.
She ties the final knot. She pulls it tight.
Etho sleeps in the backseat while Pearl drives. Tango’s in the passenger seat, chin on his hand, elbow on the window, and his eyes keep drifting shut, so she doesn’t wake him. She can drive in silence a few more hours.
In the rearview mirror, she can see the rise and fall of Etho’s chest. She feels it mirrored in her own chest, sparking cold flame and electric tingle, twin, shared magic curled up under each of their ribs. He isn’t wearing his mask.
When dawn breaks over the horizon, Pearl pulls them into the parking lot of some shitty, run-down diner. Tango wakes up like he’d never fallen asleep, chats about how he’s starving, orders the biggest thing on the menu. She laughs and warns him not to make himself sick.
(He does, she thinks, because he excuses himself halfway through a stack of pancakes. They’ll have to work back up to a normal Tango appetite.)
Etho, through it all, is silent. He hasn’t spoken more than a few words at a time, but Pearl thinks that’s something they’ll work up to as well. She understands his fears a little more now, his hesitation before he speaks, but she won’t let herself be afraid of it. Even with half of Etho’s magic living under her tongue. He hasn’t apologized, not for any of it, but she knows Etho well enough to not expect that from him. Not yet, anyway. And she’s a little relieved, because then she doesn’t have to answer that apology, and she’s not ready to admit she’ll forgive him before he asks.
There’s maple syrup sticky on her fingers, and Etho in the booth seat beside her. Still sleepy; she watches his eyes half-close as he struggles through his sausage links. She shuffles next to him, and he sets his head on her shoulder after only a moment of pause. Tango’s making his way back to the table, and he catches her eye with a smile.
Here is what Pearl knows:
She loves them. She’s going to make this work.