Chapter XXII (22)

  Mitsuko picked out the hundredth thorn out of her leg and flicked it off to the side. She dug into her flesh with her fingernails for the next one. She felt no pain from the action. Only her eyes knew that she was removing the thorns. Not because her legs had numbed or she’d broken her spine. Instead, she felt no pain from the thorns because her shattered legs blazed with too much pain for her mind to compute anything else.

  Holly had run off in hopes of getting both a stretcher, and people big enough to carry a stretcher. So Mitsuko was left alone in the dirt. In pain. Digging out thorn splinters. Her lower body was ravaged in a thousand different pricks and scrapes. None would likely scar, but they looked horrendous. Like an acne covered teenager who’d picked apart every pore. Actually, definitely none of the wounds would scar because apparently her entire body would be restored and recreated in a couple more days. Along with the rest of everything under the dome. She should have just waited in the city with Holly. They could have had a jolly time practicing spells and chatting. Instead, she was utterly broken at the bottom of a cliff and covered in soot.

  At least the bush she’d landed on hadn’t fared any better than herself. It wouldn’t be recovering from the impact anytime soon. That bit of vengeance on her bestower of thorns granted her some measure of vindication.

  Above her, a plume of smoke continued to blow by. Down here, she felt not even a breeze. It was uncanny. The entire wall of ash and wind gave her an unsettling feeling. An unease that went beyond the simple fact of the wall of ash being structured from magic. There was something sinister about that entire city. Sadly, she doubted this would be her last visit to the dead city of Tempus.

  When Mitsuko first arrived at the island she assumed that the plume of smoke was coming from an active volcano. That was the logical conclusion when looking from afar at a cloud of ash at the peak of a mountain. But now she realized there was no abyss at the apex of the mountain, but instead a city on a plateau. A city frozen in time. So where did the smoke come from? Did some artifact create the ash? She hadn’t seen anything like that while traveling through the city. Granted, she hadn’t been looking for that, but she saw nothing even hinting at the fact that she was at the mountain’s peak until she descended.

  “Another question,” she muttered through clenched teeth. “Dammit, Sterling.”

  She passed out from the pain after an hour of prying and squeezing more thorns out of her legs.

  When she woke back up, Holly was fretting over her, saying something about her being dead. Mitsuko definitely wasn’t dead. Unless she was now some unique type of undead that felt pain from their old wounds. Which would be a really sucky version of an undead.

  “Holly,” Mitsuko croaked. She paused, surprised by how hoarse her voice was. She needed water. After her brief hesitation, she licked her lips and continued. “I’m fine. You found town?”

  “Yes, of course. Have more faith in me. They have all sorts of questions about Theo, but Carlton and one of his buddies came with me to help bring you back to town safely.”

  Carlton? Ah. The lumberjack that had been housing them before they departed. She thought back to their brief stay in town. It was no wonder others were asking questions about Theo. Mitsuko had plenty of questions about the boy herself. Was the way he acted part of Sterling’s guardian’s influence lingering? Sterling said that Rodrick was ‘banished.’ He definitely hadn’t used the word ‘dead.’ Theo had led her to the temple before trying to kill her. Or…perhaps he was being drawn there. And once there he tried protecting it. He barely acknowledged them until after they arrived. Except when Rodrick used him as a mouthpiece to speak. And the guardian had called Theo and Hideo ‘acolytes.’ Did that mean that each guardian would have acolytes working against Mitsuko? How much did the guardians remember of past loops?

  Her spiraling into tangential thoughts helped distract her from the pain as the men from town carried her on a large, mostly flat, piece of wood. She gripped the edges as she bumped along at the broken rhythm of the men’s steps. She stared up at the ashen cloud above. It reminded her of an event so long ago. A funeral pyre. Her mother being consumed by the flames as smoke wafted up into the sky. She’d spent hours upon hours weeping beside the ash left behind. Then suddenly something clicked in her mind.

  “There’s no people in the city,” Mitsuko said quietly, her voice still hoarse.

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  “What?” Holly asked, leaning closer to her.

  “I…I think I know where the people in the streets went.”

  “Where? You think they escaped?”

  Mitsuko’s head flopped to the side and she looked past Holly at the trees and bushes all covered in ash. Unlike within the homes, there was nothing organic left in the streets of the city. Not wagons, not animals, not people, not children. Only the forever reliant objects of stone.

  “I suppose you could say that.”

  The entire city was trapped in a bubble of stasis. Except for the edges where there was that horrible wind. She dearly hoped that she was wrong. Or…at the very least, if she was right, that the people at least weren’t conscious as they were incinerated repeatedly for eternity.

  Wait no…there was no fire. No scorch marks on the stone. Flames should have dealt at least some lasting damage. That made no sense. But…there was another way to disintegrate objects. Time.

  “What’s the difference between ash and dust?” Mitsuko asked Holly.

  “What?”

  “Do they look different?”

  “I mean, a dust cloud on a road looks different from a burnt campfire. You know that Mitsuko.” Holly examined her, clearly worried. Then she reached up and set a hand on her forehead, taking her temperature.

  “That’s dust from dirt,” Mitsuko continued, ignoring Holly’s hand. “What about from people? From dead bodies? It’s gray, isn’t it?”

  “I…suppose so,” Holly said slowly. “You’ve been graverobbing just as often as I have. Which isn’t often. But I imagine it might be a grayish color.”

  Gray dust. Not ash at all. Mitsuko barked a laugh, then devolved into coughing as she got a lungful of the gray dust. A lungful of the long dead people. She turned to spit and her legs erupted in more pain. She jerked back and ended up drooling out the gray saliva on the wood by her face.

  Despite her wishes, Mitsuko did not pass out again from the pain. Instead, she felt every bump as she was carried back into the town. It took hours, but it passed in one massive blur. Holly spoke to her, but Mitsuko struggled to keep a conversation.

  Once back in town, Carlton dumped her on his bed. Then sent his buddy to find the town’s healer.

  “Drink,” he said. He passed her a bottle.

  Mitsuko gulped greedily, but barely got the first swallow down.

  “Whiskey?” she gasped.

  “Strongest I got. Helps with pain. Drink more.”

  A healer stumbled into his cottage. Despite Theo’s earlier fib about not having one on the island, their small town did in fact have a healer.

  He was a wiry man. His long fingers danced across her mangled legs, like spiders, as he reset the bones with confident presses. Mitsuko stuffed her sheet into her mouth and bit down to keep herself from screaming. Her vision went blurry as tears welled. Even drowned in whiskey, it was far worse than the original throbbing pain from the break.

  But then it was over. The healer stepped back and nodded at her legs, satisfied with his handiwork. He said a few more words to Carlton that Mitsuko didn’t quite comprehend, then exited the cottage.

  Despite the pain completely disappearing, it took several minutes for Mitsuko to steady her breathing and sit up. Propped up by the two stiff pillows, Mitsuko looked at her legs.

  Bare skin all the way up to her mid-thigh. Without a single blemish to be found. On the blanket next to her, she spotted over a hundred thorns lining her legs. The healing had pushed them out of her leg, ejecting them from her skin.

  She wiggled her toes and watched her feet lethargically respond. She smiled. Obviously not perfect. She’d still need a crutch to not place too much weight on them. But they were at least back to a functional state. Quick and easy. That was a really damn good healer for being out in a random lumberjack village. She’d have to remember to thank him later.

  Swinging her newly healed legs off the bed, Mitsuko boosted herself up with the assistance of the wall and stretched. Then a thought occurred to her. Why hadn’t she tried using her Mend spell on herself? She’d been so busy distracting herself and desperately trying not to think about the breaks in her leg, that she’d never cast her spell. It probably wouldn’t work, but why not give it a try. She snatched up one of the thorns from her sheets and pierced her thumb deep enough that a bead of blood came out.

  “Okay, now Mend!” she commanded. Nothing happened. She flicked the thorn onto the sheets to join the others. She supposed healing would make the spell too convenient. Her luck would never allow that.

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