Page 15

I don't reach for any of them, just lie still and let them come in. Between the gates and the hill, the only heartbeat I could hear was my own, and some nights I had to press two fingers to the side of my neck to be sure of even that much.

Later that morning I find out I can turn them off. When it gets too loud, I stop listening, the way you stop hearing a radio in the next room, and every heart goes quiet but mine until I want them back. I've never been able to do that in my life.

None of them have any idea what I can hear. The cook will finish his shift and go home to sleep, and the waitress will drink too much coffee and complain about her feet, and neither of them has ever been asked to give anything to a Well.

Lying there, I wonder who I'd be if the gift hadn't come when I was fifteen. I'd have finished high school at home with the kids I grew up with, and I'd have some ordinary job where being tired just meant I was tired. I don't let myself finish the thought. I couldn't say it to the others anyway. They'd hear it as me wanting to leave them.

Felix's heart is right under my ear, steady and a little fast, the way his always runs. He's still asleep. His deck has slid out of his hand and scattered across the floor mats without his noticing.

I listen to his heart until the cook starts banging pans, and then I keep listening, because I can.

We take two rooms at a motel on the edge of town, with a drained pool out front full of dead leaves and a manager who doesn't look up from his crossword when Everly pays in cash. We end up staying for days. Someone has to work out what we've got now, and I guess it's going to have to be me.

Atlas is too busy making it rain on things to even wonder how he's doing it. The first afternoon he made it rain on the vending machine, because it ate his dollar, and then on the manager's car, just because he could, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the curb.

Callum keeps losing his shadows. They wander off whenever he isn't watching them, and he finds them pooled in the bathtub, or under the bed, or once on the ceiling over Everly while she slept, spread flat above her. Every time it happens he looks offended, as if his dog bit him. Felix sits on the end of the bed dealing hands to no one and cackling at them.

When I ask him what's funny, he just grins. "I'll tell you when it happens."

So I take notes. I'm good at that.

Before Helena left the hill, she gave Everly a map, and Everly gave it to me: an ordinary road map of the state, folded so many times it's gone soft as cloth, with lines penciled across it in Helena's cramped hand. I carry it everywhere and check everything against it. Felix calls it my treasure map, which is why Felix isn't allowed to touch it.

The magic rises through the ground, and the closer I stand to one of Helena's pencil lines, the more of it there is. On the hill, right on top of the crossing, there was more of it than I could use. In the motel parking lot, a long way off any line on the map, it's weaker, and I have to stand still and wait for it. On the bridge over the river at the bottom of Main Street, there's nothing at all.

I find that last part out with Atlas. He scraped his knuckles punching the motel's ice machine after it jammed—a very Atlas way to lose a fight with an appliance—so I take him down to the bridge to test it.

"This is stupid." He holds his hand out to me anyway.

"Probably," I agree.

I put my palm over the scrape and reach. The wind off the water is cold and smells of mud, and nothing rises to meet me. I can feel his blood under the skin, warm and stubborn, but it stays exactly where it is, and I can't do a thing with it. It's the first time the magic hasn't come when I called, and my stomach drops so hard I have to grab the railing.

"Ren," Atlas says quietly.

"Walk with me," I tell him, and let go of the railing.

We walk back to the end of the bridge, and as soon as my shoes leave the concrete for the dirt at the bank, the magic comes back. The scrape closes under my hand while Atlas is looking at the river; he glances down at his knuckles, then at me.

"Huh. So don't get hurt on bridges."

"Don't get hurt on bridges," I agree, and write it down.

Everything about it is slow. I used to reach for blood and it would just be there, waiting at the surface. Now I reach, then I wait while it climbs up through my feet and legs into my hands, and by the time it arrives there's sometimes more of it than I asked for and sometimes hardly any.

More than once I've closed a cut and felt the skin around it go hot and flushed because I sent too much, then had to pull back with my hands shaking.

The new magic is also the best thing that's ever happened to me, and I have no idea how to say that to anyone without sounding kind of insane.

I've spent my whole life pushing. Wheeler sat me in front of his mensura all year because I was the one who gave the most, and I'd give it, then sleep straight through lunch. I thought that was simply what it cost.

Now I don't really push at all. I put my hand where it needs to go and let the ground do the work. When I stopped Atlas's nosebleed on the hill, it cost me about as much as climbing a flight of stairs, and that was all. Afterward I lay back down in the grass next to Everly, who watched me with her eyebrows drawn together, waiting for me to pass out. I didn't.

I don't have to bleed for it anymore, either. I don't need my knife. I feel my own heartbeat and the heartbeat of whoever I'm healing, and that's all it takes.

It does cost me something. Every healing uses up magic, and the lines don't always give me more right away. More than once I've closed a cut, reached again, and found nothing there, and for a while afterward everything goes quiet: no hearts but mine, and no magic at all. I'm not dying the way I was after the gates. Everything just goes quiet for a while, and then it comes back.

I haven't told her about the quiet. She'd worry, and I like the rest of it too much.