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There is no way out.
The words are written in blood on the wall of the labyrinth, every wall that she passes, always exactly the same, as if she’s passing the same wall over and over and over. She tries to follow puzzle logic, to always turn left, to always keep a wall on her left hand, but it doesn’t end. Long hall after long hall, there is no way out there is no way out there is no way out
She’s so busy, is the thing. Adaine’s always been so busy with school, adventures, and whatever else she’s got going on that she hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t noticed the ache that lingered after a Healing Word, the exhaustion that pulled on her bones and sinew every time she dragged herself out of bed. She’d explained away the headaches, the nosebleeds, the bruises, the lack of appetite. In her life, each one of those symptoms could be ascribed to any number of things.
She’s so busy.
By the time Sandra Lynn suggests she see a doctor, it’s too late.
The first thing she feels is the most profound sense of dread and grief that she’s ever felt. The next thing she feels is rage.
She beats her fists (powerful, bloodied fists, she killed her father with these fists) against Jawbone’s shoulders as she sobs in the hospital room, simply allows herself to boil over into a tantrum, allows Jawbone to hold her on his lap like a toddler.
“It isn’t fair!” she cries. All she can see is the doctor, all she can hear are the words brain tumor and inoperable and terminal dropping from their sympathetic lips. “This can’t be, it can’t, I can fix it! I have to fix it!”
Jawbone gently pushes her head down to his chest, and Adaine lets him, feeling oversized but too angry to care. “It’s not fair,” he says, voice choked with tears. “I wish I could fix it for you. Oh, hon.”
She doesn’t yell out everything she’s feeling, not there. She waits until they get in the car, loaded with prescriptions and papers and advice, and then she screams at the top of her lungs. Jawbone howls alongside her.
The only person she told about the appointment was Aelwyn. Now, as she checks her crystal in the middle of a wail, she sees her sister texting to ask how it went.
Barely able to see through the tears, Adaine jabs out letter after letter to send back the worst case scenario. Her hands won’t stop shaking and she has to write it twice.
Aelwyn, never one to respond on the same day (let alone immediately), texts back immediately.
How long?
Simple numbers shouldn’t be so hard to convey.
6-9 months.
She reaches the end of the labyrinth and there is no way out.
It simply ends. It used to be the exit—she can tell from the bricked-over arch—but it is not open to her. She claws at the mortar until her fingernails tear out completely and her own blood drips onto the bricks.
There is no way out, the blood reads.
She did not trace it herself.
She continues to go to school.
Senior year has only been in session for a month, and Adaine Abernant is nothing if not dedicated to her studies. Six to nine months, and she can only hope (no, she can only insist) that she will make it to seven. She’s going to graduate, if it’s the last thing she does.
She doesn’t tell the Bad Kids. It’s too hard to articulate the words when anger steals them from her, when her eyes and chest burn too much to eke them out. Instead, she does her best to act like everything is normal. She laughs with them, helps Fig with her homework, sits in her spot at their booth at Basrar’s every Friday to hang out and discuss quests that they could take on for credit.
Riz hounds everyone about their college applications, and Adaine stays quiet.
It starts to take its toll. She crashes on the weekends and every day after school that they don’t have an adventure, telling Fabian that she’ll be at his study session next time, telling Riz she’ll go to the library tomorrow. She barely has the energy to do her homework before she passes out, truly sleeping instead of trancing. She only gets up for dinner because of the appetite stimulants she’d been prescribed. She only showers because of Jawbone’s concerned glances.
It’s a lot, but it’s fine. It works. The medication she’s on has been staving off the worst of the symptoms. Depending on how well the tumor reacts to it, she might even have a full year left. Decline isn’t coming as rapidly as she feared it might, so she doesn’t let herself become sedentary about it. She has too much to do.
Sometimes when she needs to keep herself awake during class she plays a game called If the tumor didn’t exist. What would she be doing right now? Focusing harder, maybe. Helping Riz work on his spreadsheet of which college would be the best fit for all six of them. Going shopping with Fig and Kristen, talking about what look they want to bring to adulthood and whether or not their style needs to change.
She needs to tell them. She doesn’t.
At Gorgug’s eighteenth birthday party, she loosely holds the red solo cup of Bad Baby Milk that she isn’t allowed to drink on her meds and watches everyone else get progressively more sloshed.
This isn’t the last time that they’re all going to be together, forgetting their responsibilities for one night and just having fun, but now that those times are numbered Adaine can’t help but wonder which one this is.
She leaves early and quietly, leaving her cup on the kitchen counter.
The prom decorations in the gym are utterly torn apart, the students all have fled, and Adaine faces down Kalvaxus alone in her puffy teal dress, borrowed from Fig’s old clothes that Sandra Lynn had never thrown out.
“There is no escape,” Kalvaxus roars. His hot breath blows back Adaine’s hair when it hits her face. She pulls on her magic, tries to find something to defend herself from the teeth quickly bearing down, but all her spells fizzle out into nothing.
Rooted to the spot with fear, Adaine can only look up as his mouth opens wide around her.
She practices joking about it, just to get more comfortable with the idea. To get less emotional about it.
Unfortunately, she gets a little too good.
She’s washing dishes because it’s her turn to do chores. Kristen is sitting at the kitchen island behind her, trying to work through an assignment that apparently requires loud complaining.
“This thing is gonna kill me,” Kristen moans, and before Adaine can stop herself, it slips out.
“My brain tumor behavior.”
Kristen goes silent. Then, with a scramble of stool legs scraping and socks against linoleum, she appears at Adaine’s side, face wrought with concern.
“Brain tumor? Are you kidding?”
Adaine shakes her head.
“Here, I can heal—”
Adaine shakes her head again—not before a Healing Word, though, petrichor tingling on the back of her tongue—and sighs, continuing to wash dishes even as her hands begin to tremble. “It’s—it can’t be healed.”
She hasn’t said that out loud, before.
It feels almost freeing.
“Is it terminal?” Kristen asks after a moment, and Adaine nods.
“Six to nine months.”
Kristen didn’t ask for the timeline, but that was the next thing Adaine prepared on her tongue and she had to either spit it out or swallow it.
She doesn’t say that two of those months have already passed.
Kristen bites her lip. Then the inside of her cheek. Her hands clench into fists. Finally, she speaks. “I’m so sorry but I thought you said sixty-nine and I have to just—nice.”
Surprised, Adaine can’t help but laugh, even as Kristen continues to apologize. She lets Kristen hug her (and she would hug back, if her hands weren’t covered in soapy water) and leans her head against hers, and something feels a little lighter in her chest.
It’s easier after that. Kristen tells Fig right away, and then Jawbone has a Mordred chat about it (requested by Adaine, though she doesn’t attend), so everyone who lives in the manor is up to date. Telling the boys is a little bit harder, but Fig and Kisten encourage her and she ends up talking about it at Basrar’s, her sundae melting in front of her as she explains all the details she can without breaking down.
Silence follows her confession.
“Well, I’m paying for your ice cream,” Fabian says eventually, and then everyone’s hugging her (Fig just grabs her hand but Riz scampers across the table) and talking and telling her how much they love her, and Adaine starts crying anyways.
“I just want to be normal,” she admits, once the sniffles from everyone (because they had started crying, too) die down. “I don’t mean, like, ignore it, because—” she takes a breath— “yeah. But I’m finishing out senior year, for sure.”
“Okay,” Riz says, bumping his forehead against her cheek. “We’re here to help.”
“Honestly, I think you have a really good out for school right now and you could literally be getting out of everything with zero consequences, but I respect your decision,” Fig stage whispers, and Adaine laughs wetly.
“When it’s your brain tumor, you can do what you want.”
No way back.
No way back that matters.
Aelwyn, who disappeared after the diagnosis came, returns just in time for the Moonar Yulenear. She sits beside Adaine as Mrs. Barkrock preps the kitchen for tamales, perching on the arm of the comfiest armchair in the living room, the one that she usually pushes Adaine out of.
She doesn’t say anything, but anger radiates off her. The kind of anger that a younger Adaine would have provoked, or maybe dodged (depending on the number of spell slots she had), but now isn’t entirely sure how to handle.
“I found Mum,” she says after a solid half hour of silence, watching as Jawbone lets in various members of their family and friend group. “And the van with hands. It’s still chasing her.”
Adaine hadn’t known where her sister went. Her only guess was that she was distancing herself like she always does, trying to separate herself from unpleasant emotions.
She didn’t expect that at all.
After several moments of floundering, she asks the only question she can come up with. “Did you kill her?”
Aelwyn frowns ruefully. “No,” she says. “I thought I would. I didn’t. Do you want me to?”
“I—not unless you want to,” Adaine says, utterly bewildered. Why did she find their mother if it wasn’t to kill her? “I’d rather have you here, though.”
Aelwyn nods slowly. She falls silent again, but she doesn’t leave. She sits on the arm of the chair, long beyond what must be even moderately comfortable, exchanging barbs with Fabian and Kristen and even Mrs. Gukgak as they enter.
When they all move to the kitchen to watch Mrs. Barkrock demonstrate how to make tamales, Aelwyn stands so close to Adaine that their shoulders bump if either of them moves.
It strikes her, suddenly, why Aelwyn left.
What did her mother say, when Aelwyn informed her that her youngest daughter was going to die soon?
Why was her response anything other than coming to be at her side?
It doesn’t matter, Adaine decides fiercely. That isn’t her real family. Her real family is the people here, laughing as they spread corn mush onto husks with their fingers. Ragh and the Thistlesprings and her party and Gilear and Ayda and everybody else, not least of all the sister at her side.
“I love you,” Adaine whispers to her sister, fully on purpose and without caring about how that might make her look. Aelwyn doesn’t respond, but her face does turn red and she lightly bumps her with her elbow.
This is her family, and they are here.
An unexpected storm rages, and the ship is going down.
Adaine stands in the middle of it, a memory of a past life, and wonders how on earth she didn’t see it coming.
It is the end, and it is inescapable.
Adaine starts to miss days of school.
The first time, she’s too tired and has the worst headache of her life. Jawbone gently shakes her awake, asks if she’s going to school, and she sits up and waits on the edge of her bed for some of the headache to retreat. When it doesn’t, she lays back down and falls right back asleep.
She tries not to do that often. She pushes herself to get up anyways, to get dressed in a half-awake daze, eat something and take her meds and let Fig ferry her out the door. Every once in a while, though, it’s utterly insurmountable, so she stays home and completes whatever make-up assignments Riz brings her.
One morning she wakes up with a fever.
Jawbone takes off work the moment he sees the thermometer. He helps Adaine to his car and brings her straight to the emergency room.
They bring her fever down quickly and scan her brain for any unusual activity from the tumor. They don’t find anything out of the ordinary—it’s progressing as expected. Fevers are an unfortunate side effect that will only become worse and more frequent as time passes.
Adaine doesn’t talk on the ride home. Jawbone tries at first, but drops it when her answers are nothing but monotone hums.
Sure, there had been other symptoms, but they were mainly mitigated by the medication. When she was tired, she could write that off as being up too late the night before. This is different. This is illness. This is the beginning of the end.
It’s two days off that week, one right after the other. Then she’s back until the weekend, then she stays in bed until Monday.
She doesn’t want it to be the New Normal, like Sandra Lynn calls it. Nothing about it is normal.
But it is hers. This is her life—what’s left of it, at least—and she has to accept that.
Ayda tried to find cures, digging desperately through her library. Riz did the same. Adaine had to talk to both of them, explain patiently that no cure has yet been discovered or developed for this, particularly when located in the brain. Riz had said she was giving up hope, but agreed to stop spending all his free time hunting down clues in favor of hanging out together.
She knows that it isn’t going to change. She knows, better than anyone, that her fate is set.
The next Oracle is a boy. He does not know, yet, that he is the Oracle. He is younger than she, but his eyes match her hue exactly.
He lives in Bastion City. Another win for the Oracle of Everyone.
She sees him in his future, happy and full of life, falling in love with a half-orc boy, researching Adaine and vowing to be an Oracle that would make her proud. She sees his hardships, too, but those pale in comparison to his joys.
He does not know it, but his time comes soon.
Their last quest isn’t anything monumental. It’s just one that they picked up for extra credit, helping some mage clear out his basement. None of them knew it would be their last quest before they go on it.
It goes well, but before the last remaining creature (a giant centipede with nasty fangs) can be defeated, the world shifts under Adaine and she’s suddenly blinking awake in the van, Boggy resting on her chest and her whole body heavier than a boulder.
Her head is in Fig’s lap, and the van is shaking and rumbling—her eyes flick forward, taking too long to focus, and she sees that Gorgug is driving. She feels so . . . foggy. When did the fight end? How did they get here?
“She’s awake,” Fig calls up to the front. Gorgug shoots a thumbs up. Adaine tries to sit up, but gives up after mere seconds, letting herself rest in Fig’s hold (which has never been easy, giving up, resting, but there’s something in her that has come to accept that there is no other way). Fig’s lithe fingers brush away a strand of hair from Adaine’s forehead, and the grin on her face is a little too strained to be real.
“Do you remember what happened?”
Adaine makes a small noise in the negative. It still feels like too much effort to move her head, or even to form words.
“You . . . you passed out,” Fig says, and Adaine knows that isn’t the truth. She knows in Fig’s shifty glance sideways, in the way nobody speaks up to elaborate, in the glimmering of a portent on the back of her tongue that urges her to call them out.
She doesn’t. Later, though, when Jawbone asks her if she’s okay, she asks that they get special permission to waive any required quests. The others don’t ask when they all get the approval.
In the weeks that follow, the spots in her memory grow to be proper holes, and too often Adaine isn’t sure if she’s been asleep or if she just does not remember what happened before her awareness. Nobody else likes to talk about it, which makes it all the more frustrating. She clearly acts differently, otherwise people would be jumping to explain the gaps, wouldn’t they? Why can’t she remember how she acts?
Does she even want to know?
The choice is made for her at her next doctor’s appointment, when Jawbone reluctantly informs the doctor that they’ve seen mood swings and irritability from Adaine, which she never seems to remember afterwards. It’s the first she’s ever heard of it, in fact, and her head whips to stare at him and he refuses to look her in the eye.
The doctor frowns, marks some things down, and the life expectancy on the discharge papers that they give her has a noticeably more restricted window than it did in the past.
There is no way out.
Was it futile to hope that one would appear? Was it wrong to wake up every morning, believing that something might change?
Standing on a cliff at the edge of the Nightmare Forest, gazing down at an ocean she once drowned in, she tries to take a step back and finds that her legs refuse to obey her.
She can only move forward.
She graduates with honors.
The whole party does, because Aguefort does graduation based on parties not individuals—which irritates Riz to no end, who would have been valedictorian in a typical high school.
The Bad Kids are pretty close to the front of the line, sorted alphabetically. Adaine’s really grateful for that, because she’s already been sitting in this plastic folding chair for an hour listening to Arthur Aguefort and Gilear and Kristen give speeches, and if she has to sit through much more she won’t be able to stay standing long enough to make it up on the stage. Her head is killing her (normal, she doesn’t remember the last time it wasn’t at least a dull background ache) and her body feels like jelly (unfortunately becoming normal—she can barely hold on to a pencil anymore), so they’d better get this show on the road.
She doesn’t want to think about all the adventuring parties that she’s going to have to sit through afterwards.
At long last, the Bad Kids are called up. Gorgug subtly supports her in the walk to the stage, his arm around her back. His fingers grip her bandolier when she stumbles, preventing her from falling in front of everyone.
Sandra Lynn had encouraged them to dress up, but the Bad Kids had conferred and decided to wear their nicest battle gear—which is still very dressed up, to be fair. Adaine rarely wears the belts full of spell components that she’s buckled over her chest, but it looks fire and this may be the last time she gets to wear them, so suck it. It gives her friends somewhere to hold to keep her upright, anyways.
“. . . the best of the best,” Arthur Aguefort continues, handing each of them a diploma as he walks down the line. “Named the Bad Kids after they all spent their first day of school together in deten—now, where is Figueroth?”
Adaine glances to her left. Sure enough, the line simply ends with Gorgug, their sixth party member spontaneously missing.
“Oh no,” Fabian says loudly. “Not Fig!”
“She must have been kidnapped,” Riz says just as loudly. He withdraws his sword with a ring that echoes through the large hall, points it straight up. “Photosynthekids, out!”
“Adaine, teleport us to Mordred!” Kristen insists, grabbing her arm. Adaine glances around, certain that this is some sort of unhinged ploy.
Arthur Aguefort winks at her. When she looks past him, she notices the conspicuous absence of everyone who came to see them graduate, leaving an empty space in the audience.
She grins.
When they appear in the living room of Mordred Manor, everyone is already waiting for them. She wants to remember that moment—looking out over so many loved ones surrounding her, celebrating her, cheering for her—for the rest of what remains of her life. Her memory has been a bit patchy, but she refuses to lose this.
Jawbone in his nicest suit, one arm around Sandra Lynn as they both blow into noisemakers. Aelwyn, holding one of her many cats and discreetly wiping her eyes on its fur. Mrs. Barkrock with a cake in her lap. Zayn leaning on the back of her wheelchair. Ayda, perched on the bannister. The Thistlesprings and Gorthalax and Mrs. Gukgak and Ragh and Gilear and Fabian’s mom and—and Fig, of course, standing in front of all of them, his face threatening to split with the size of her smile.
It’s perfect. It’s everything she never thought she would have, and everything she’s ever wanted.
Does it really matter that her life is being cut short, when it had been so full?
“Surprise!” shouts Fig, launching into a group hug. Before she knows it, Adaine’s surrounded by everyone she loves, her family pressed right up against her.
“We planned a bit of a more restful afternoon,” Jawbone confesses, carding a hand through her hair. “Some lunch and then a movie, all right?”
Adaine’s eyes burn. She nods, suddenly too close to tears to speak a single word. After a moment and several attempts to swallow the lump in her throat, she manages to croak out, “Thank you.”
Jawbone’s eyes crinkle. “We love you, kiddo,” he says gently, then pulls her into another hug.
As her fists bury themselves into the fabric of his shirt, she knows he understands that she says it back.
There is no way out.
It is not written in blood this time. The words are pressed into a stone, just the right size to fit into her palm. Sun-warmed and smooth, she turns it over, her thumbs tracing over the words.
There is no way out.
Standing on the grassy shore beside a lake that sparkles in the late afternoon sun, Adaine winds her arm back and tosses the stone, skipping it across the water.
A hand on her shoulder shakes her awake.
“Adaine,” someone says. “Adaine, guess what?”
She groans, dragging open her heavy eyelids. In front of her is Riz—and she remembers, vaguely, that the Bad Kids were all scattered across her room when she started dozing.
It isn’t her wizard’s tower that she shares with Aelwyn, but a bedroom on the first floor that had once been a guest room for when Ayda stayed over, converted into a space for Adaine before the school year even ended. Once her sense of balance started to go, Jawbone had become concerned about the multiple flights of stairs and had enlisted Ragh and Gorgug to help him move all her things downstairs.
She had fallen asleep with everyone there, but now she only sees Riz. She raises an eyebrow, relieved when it doesn’t trigger a migraine.
“Fireflies,” Riz says excitedly. “The first fireflies of the summer. You wanted to catch one, right?”
She never did that as a child. It was beneath the station of their family.
She smiles sleepily at Riz. “Yeah, of course. One second.”
Riz grins, then bounds out of the room.
Fabian appears in the doorway, cracking his knuckles. “I heard you needed an uber to the back porch?” he says, opening his arms wide.
Adaine snorts. “That depends, how much?”
“For you? On the house.”
Fabian scoops her up before she can begin to sit up on her own, holding her bridal style in his arms as he heads to the back door, following right after Riz.
Adaine shrieks, but manages to get her arms around his neck, clutching on for what feels like dear life.
“Fabian Aramais Seacaster, if you drop me—”
Fabian laughs. His chest vibrates against her, warm and very alive. “I won’t,” he says easily. His arms are strong from years of combat training and agile from dance—he holds her like she weighs nothing more than his battlesheet.
“You’d better not,” she grumbles, but she does loosen her grip a little. A flash of white-blue in her eyes tells her all she needs to know.
There is not a single possible future in which Fabian drops her.
He sets her down on a cushy chair on the veranda, clearly dragged out of the house just for her. Adaine settles in to look out over the yard as dusk falls, various Bad Kids scattered through the grass.
Then, a blink of yellow light, quick enough that she might have imagined it. She didn’t, though, because Kristen straightens from where she’s criss-cross applesauce in the grass, pointing toward it.
“There’s one!”
“There’s another!” Riz leaps forward, clasping his hands quickly (though gently) around something. Fig hurries over to see, the two of them huddled together as he spreads his palms.
“Do you think I can catch one with my battlesheet?”
“Dude, you’ll literally kill them.”
Adaine watches. Her head is a little cloudy and her whole body feels heavy, like someone has tied weights to every limb, but she doesn’t really notice it. Her heart is lighter than ever.
Another flash of yellow, blinking three times before going dark. Then another. Then two at once, slightly off-set from one another.
“Adaine!”
Gorgug comes up to her, the wood of the veranda creaking under his steps. His hands are clasped together delicately, and when he opens them, he’s holding a firefly, tiny in his large hands. He holds it out to her; the bug’s wings flitter a little bit before it takes flight, blinking once.
Adaine reaches up, using one hand to cup over the firefly and softly bring it down onto her other hand. It crawls over her fingers onto her palm, tickling just the slightest bit.
“I wonder why they flash,” she says idly. Gorgug takes a knee beside her, eyes fixed on the little piece of life on her hand.
“To attract a mate,” Gorgug tells her. “The female lightning bugs are sitting in the grass, watching the males put on a show.”
“Well, then, this little guy probably needs to go get his kisses in.” Adaine tries to encourage it to fly away, holding her hand out, but the bug stays put, flashing yellow twice. “Go on, go find a girl. Or guy, if that’s the way you swing.”
It takes literally brushing the firefly off to get it to fly away, but it does, returning to hover over the grass, flashing bright yellow every so often. Adaine watches it, watches it and her friends, watches.
If a firefly’s lifespan is anything like most other insects, it probably isn’t long for this world. The firefly knows that, yet here it shines for two short months, declaring its life and love to the world.
It’s beautiful, isn’t it?
She can run, now, and run she does.
She runs through the field, the grass damp under her bare feet, and the air is alight with fireflies all around her, like lights on a runway pointing toward home.
She laughs and runs, and her head is clear and painless, and her body is lighter than ever, and Boggy croaks happily from her backpack and it is beautiful.
The stars come to life in the dusk above, and Adaine comes to life as one of them.