“I can breathe. My breath moves in and out. I can breathe on my own. It moves in and out of my body at my choice.” It takes minutes of repeating these words. My arms begin to warm up and when I open my eyes, the forest has turned to day—not just day, but a rather brilliant and burnt orange covers the sky behind the tall trees. Geo is still several feet away, but now I can see that there is someone in front of me, even though it is a blur. I reach out for him. Instantly, something happens, and the ground begins to shake. I look around as dark figures come out of the shadows—men with weapons. The rays of the nearly fluorescent orange shoot off the shiny metal in their hands. I back away as the ground shakes.
“Geo. Who are these men?”
But when I turn my eyes to Geo, he stares back at me with wrinkled eyes. It isn’t Geo anymore.
“Japha?”
The old man steps forward. “Remy.”
The ground shakes and the cold is reaching for my heart. I can’t breathe. The blur ahead of me comes into focus. Navin is staring at me with his granite eyes, angry like the first night. Instantly, I fall back onto the quaking earth. Navin turns to the old man. “Get her out of this!”
Within seconds I realize it is my body that is shaking, not the ground—my eyes close—and the cold is gone.
“Willow . . .” I hear Arek’s voice.
My heart is a brick of ice.
“Willow,” Geo forcefully commands in my ear, “the shaking will go away when you take control of where you are. Figure out the truth, Willow. There are ways to separate yourself from this physical body. If you think this is real, you will lose.”
The men with weapons turn into monsters . . . the kind that paralyzed me as a child. They stand higher than seven feet, their skin pasty white and flaky, but the most terrifying part of them is that they have no faces. They walk like the dead, and moan with deep anguish. Their wailing mimics their lost souls. They are difficult to even look at, so I bore my eyes into the ground. Yet, I can feel my body and mind moving—changing with no regard to the comfort of my being.
Suddenly, we are no longer in the forest, but a dark, dilapidated house. Everything is the color of charcoal, with no windows and no doors. Broken floorboards beneath me catch my attention—the small cracks coming alive. It isn’t until looking closer that I realize there are fingers, dirty and rotting, reaching up through the cracks for me. I spring to my knees and crawl away.
“Get me out of here!” I yell.
“If it’s not real, there’s no way for it to hurt you,” Geo calls from somewhere beyond.
As the beings work on breaking up the floorboards to get to me, I begin to focus on my body and try to regain control of my movements. Channeling my mind toward regaining discipline, my chest stops constricting and the pain in my head quiets.
Then unexpectedly Arek feels near. “Arek?” I beg.
“You’ll have to do this without me,” he answers quietly.
Just as a floorboard begins to crack at the pressure of the demon’s hands beneath, and dark gray fingers wrap around the weathered wood, I wrap my head in my arms to shut off the world around me. I can hear the monsters crawling to me. “Stop!” I beg.
“Open your eyes,” Geo instructs. I am back in the comfort of the cabin, yet my heart has not let down. Geo steps forward. “Unfortunately, that’s the easiest Tracing you’ll get.”
“Tracing?” I ask.
Geo nods, “Tracing the lines between your subconscious and conscious mind. Velieri have learned that the subconscious mind only devours the information in our life that is emotional and raw; therefore it stays in our subconscious until the conscious calls on it. Emotion, while necessary for everyone, is also one of the weakest states of being that any of us can ever remain in. So the elders of my line studied this quiet yet crucial part of a being and they found that it’s the line between the conscious and subconscious that’s the easiest way in. There you can control what someone sees, what they believe, what their mind tells them to feel.”
“Why did I see all of that? None of it made sense.”
“When you are in such a vulnerable state, your fears materialize into reality, and you—Willow, not Remy—live in a state of fear. As most Ephemes do. People can use that against you and the only way to battle this is the Void.” Geo answers. “The Void, is where the mind finally releases control over how much one sees, or how much one feels in order to protect them from excess. The Void of our own trenches where we lie in wait for the next tragedy or the shackles of our own fear.”
“Can she get past that in the time we have?” Sassi asks as she sets a hot drink in front of me.
Geo shrugs his shoulders. “I’d like to believe that I’m that good.” He grins, then continues, “Willow, until you realize it is fear that keeps you from having control, there is no way to fight it. You have to become your own enemy.” But even with Geo’s explanation the tension is palpable.
For hours I try to learn. Every time my fear overwhelms me, the beasts keep getting closer and closer. Just to hear the difference between voices takes all night. Fatigue, as though I’ve been in battle, begins to mount when they continually have to pull me out of the subconscious.
“I’m not Remy,” I whisper.
“What?” Geo asks.
“I’m not Remy,” I say louder. “You all expect me to miraculously become her, to be fearless. That’s why she was so powerful right? Because she was fearless?” I give a sardonic laugh. “Well welcome to Willow’s world, where there is nothing that doesn’t give you fear.” I stand up. “I need a break.”
Sassi touches my arm as I pass, “Willow, we need to do this.”
I shake my head and exit through the front door. Instantly the wind chill of negative-twenty takes my breath away as I step off the porch to the snow-covered ground.
“You’re doing well.” Arek is behind me, most likely with his arms crossed and a serious expression, but I don’t want to know.
“I can’t do what you’re expecting of me. And I can’t go back into every fear of mine . . . facing them again and again.”
“Yes, you can.” He walks within inches of me just so that we can see each other in the dark forest. “Discernment is the main difference between Velieri and Ephemes. Knowing how to make the divide from emotion to fact and knowing when to take action or be still is a fine balance. Immaturity muddies the waters and makes all action and emotion the same.” He hesitates, “Do you want to know what the Red Summit was?”
“I don’t know.”
“One thousand four hundred and ninety-three men, women, and children who were a part of the Reds—a group that has sworn to protect us for years despite knowing who and what we are—were all gathered together under the illusion that the Powers and Prophets wanted to discuss the future and what it held for the Velieri and Red contract. In the middle of the night at the camp where everyone was supposed to stay, every single person but two—a man and a woman—were slaughtered.” He sighs deeply at the memory, which I am sure is like the Twin Towers of 9/11 for me. “They were gated in so they couldn’t leave, then one by one were demolished in grotesque ways. All because they were Ephemeral. One little difference between our brain and theirs was enough to slit their throats. They had chosen to protect us, yet Navin and Japha didn’t care. They hate anyone who’s not like us. You chose to stand for something else. It didn’t matter that you agreed with them that we shouldn’t have to hide. It mattered most that you didn’t agree with their hatred.”
“So, I knew about the Summit?”
“You were obsessed to prove that they had done it with help from someone in the government. Instead, they sent you to the Cellar and to your death . . . and I had no time to prove it.”
“I don’t know how to just turn off the fear. You’re asking me to do something that I don’t know how to do. Some memories have come back, but that’s it! I’m every bit of Willow as I ever have been, and I don’t see that changing.”
With quick hands, Arek suddenly takes a knife from his pocket, the ting of the blade echoing as he opens it. He presses it across his palm, slicing the skin.
