Legacy to Zero

Interlude - Canary

Crash

"Hello?" I called out, lifting my hands to adjust the hood of Sage's sweater. In the weeks since I'd last been, his tree was as wide as my wrist, like a half-moon shadow over me.

My voice bounced off the pier, getting distant and distant, sounding less and less like me—or maybe more and more—as it degraded, getting swept into the air. The shattered stones stared me down. It was silent now, utterly so, while the cracks of its foundation marched onward to spread the disease.

I tried again. "Sage can't see through his plants. It's not a camera."

"But can he hear?" a voice asked from behind me.

I spun around, my hands forming fists at my sides. The girl from the store building grinned at me from her position on the path. Which was the direction I'd approached from. How she'd gotten there, I didn't know. My pulse thudded, loud and racing in my chest.

"No."

"Wow, that's the truth, too." She evaluated my face. Neither of us moved. Her tone turned cutting. "Why are you back?"

I pulled at the hood of the sweater. The river lapped behind us. Heat stuck to my hair and pooled on my palms. Maybe coming here had been a bad idea. Maybe I hadn't been able to justify it, not even with all the time I had on the walk.

The girl—River, that was her name—paced closer. "You could have told her I was there, on the bridge. Is that why?"

So it was her. "Sort of," I admitted.

"Sort of," she repeated, softer than I had. She was near enough that I could see her clothes better, all solid colours and long, bright pink socks making a sun beneath her boots. The zipper was fitted with spikes that had ripped out grass, spun it thinly into a green spool.

Sage would have been unimpressed.

I casted my gaze down. With me, too. But that was nothing new.

"Did you—did you see me?" I asked. My heart continued to slam against my chest. My throat. There were days like this—days, sometimes—where it would start on the tirade and refuse to stop. Deep breaths couldn't save it. Standing only made it spike more. Astra used to tell me it was her reminder that she was human—that sometimes when she forgot how to breathe without forcefully inhaling and exhaling, that was how she burrowed her way into the core of the world.

Something called grounding, maybe. I'd never deigned to tell her it did the opposite for me. The rush of blood in my ears only ever made me want to rip my skin. I hated everything about it, anyway.

"You saw me first," she said.

"Are we still talking about actually seeing?"

Her head tilted. I had to urge to copy her. To meet her eyes and try to understand. The words were scarce when I didn't have to verbiage; couldn't explain it and didn't want to. Not to the Tetra, not yet.

"Is that what you call it?" River asked. Her hand stuck into the nebula between us like she was going to offer it for me to shake. But her wrist bent, twisting to show me her palm.

I stared at her. My eyes pinged from my hand to her face. It could have been a trap. It could have been a way to get me to admit that I could do something I shouldn't have been able to do.