In the dimness she felt Meara coil against her, the reassuring weight of the other girl’s dark hair on her arm, like the coolest water. Her face was somehow brilliant even in darkness, the insolence of it sharp enough to wound.
“If you let anyone do anything to you,” said Meara, softly, “Then you have more power over them than they’d ever like to admit.”
Liadan exhaled softly, trying to smother her sense of dread at Meara’s implication. “That’s not true. You just tell yourself that because—“
“You’ve always judged me,” said Meara sharply, and Liadan felt the jagged edges of the other girl’s hurt, the all-too-familiar loneliness. It blossomed in Liadan’s chest where her happiness once had, and that stark contrast, the acknowledgment that she would never again see a sky so pure or water so heartbreakingly blue, never again wake with Meara’s hand in hers, was nearly enough to steal the tears from her eyes. “You always have—because you know people want me and you can’t stand the thought of me belonging to anyone else—“
“No one belongs to anyone,” said Liadan in quick response, with a severity that was more hurt than anger. “Do you honestly think these people—that Soterios, or Erasmus—that any of them really care about you?”
It wasn’t fair, when Meara’s judgement was born more from naivete than spite. But Liadan wasn’t ready to forgive her.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Meara in a sudden, clipped tone. “They’ll give me what you won’t.”
And all the breath went out of Liadan: just like that. She drew into herself on the narrow bed, suddenly grateful for the shadowed darkness, the dimness that sheltered her wounded sense of shock. If people didn’t belong to one another, like she’d always been so adamantly sure of, then why did Meara’s admission feel like betrayal?
As if from very far away she felt the other girl trace the line of her cheekbone, that sweetest most elusive sensation, as if they were coming back to one another at last.
“I’m tired of always devouring you,” said Meara, very softly now. “So tired. Maybe I’ll let them devour me instead.”
“You’re too young to be so cynical.”
“And you’re too old to be so naive.” Meara was gentle again, fond, looking at Liadan with that sweet reassurance that had comforted her so when they were on the Island. But Liadan felt cold suddenly, washed in apprehension.
There were bruises on Meara’s skin that she’d never seen before; she watched the other girl trace them slowly, mapping out her own flesh with no hesitation in the dark. Some were whorls, imprints of clouds, almost like the memory of hands. Thumbs, Liadan realized with a beautiful thrill of fear — and then pale circles around the other girl’s wrists, so unmistakable, so casually ignored by those who had imparted them. Rosebrown and violent against her skin, which had lightened in the absence of the Island’s sun.
“They told me,” confessed Meara, through lips that barely moved, “That they’d help me remember.”
“Remember what, Meara?” Liadan asked slowly, though she thought she already knew.
“Who I was. Who you used to be. How old we are—whether we were ever young—why we were put on that Island and then taken away.” Her dark lashes were suddenly lush with unshed tears, and Liadan knew that they weren’t due to Soterios or Erasmus but the unmistakable feeling of losing something you knew that you could never replace. “I miss it, Lee. I want to go home again.”
“We can’t,” said Liadan.
“Because they won’t let us?”
“Because we were never really there.”
Meara said nothing, just stared at Liadan with her enormous eyes, the fan of lashes like black petals, irises vivid and forest-dark. Liadan couldn’t remember the color of anyone’s eyes like she could Meara’s. Pretty, pretty Meara, she thought with a sinking heart; in truth, Meara never had to speak because her beauty, in its turn, spoke volumes. Liadan knew she should be jealous — envious, even — but she couldn’t be. Adoration obscured the pettiness of her shame.