Holli's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

Holli came back to the shore at low tide, the black-and-blue book still heavy in her coat pocket. She had closed it once. She meant to try the current again without it. The lesson Gotim gave her had shown the cost, but not how to carry it. If she could hold the pull for even a heartbeat and survive her own mind, she would know she was closer. She knelt on the wet sand and set her palm flat. The old current answered faster this time. It rose through the seafloor like a rope pulled from the other side. Holli caught it. For one clean second she felt every shore it touched at once — every boat, every child asleep near a window, every low field. Her mind began to thin. She felt herself spreading out along the water, growing wider and shallower, until there was almost no Holli left inside her body. She let go. The current whipped free. It struck the coast half a mile down and tore a trench through the sand. When the water pulled back, she saw what it had uncovered: a huge anchor twisted with dark coral and green light, half-buried in purple lichen and shell, standing upright where nothing had stood before. Beside it, the tide had scoured open an old grave. A crusader in dented armor lay on his back in the wet sand, sword still across his chest, as if the sea had set him down gently and then walked away. Farther inland, a fishing shed was gone. Holli did not know if anyone had been inside. Void stood at the treeline. He had followed her, or Gotim had sent him. He looked at the anchor, then at the body in the sand, then at her. "You held it longer," he said. "You also broke more." He paused. "I don't know if that counts as progress. I think it might." Behind him, quieter, another voice — Chao DeVoid, arms folded, watching the crusader's face. "You can't hold it as yourself," he said. "You have to become smaller inside it, or larger. You picked neither." He did not offer to teach her which. Holli walked to the anchor and pressed her hand to the cold iron. She marked the place in her memory: this was where she had stopped. Not where she had won. From her pocket she took a small piece of cracked stone she had pried loose from the carved figure the night before — a chip of a weathered, hollow-eyed face, mossed and split. She closed her fist around it until the edges bit. This was the price she had felt and refused. She would carry it until she could feel it without flinching. She would not touch the current again until she could stay inside her own body while it moved through her. That was the next thing to learn. The anchor and the dead man would stay where the sea had left them, as her marker.