Earthbound

“We may not have a few minutes. Someone’s got to know about this place.” My words are slurring and I take a deep breath and concentrate harder. “Don’t underestimate the brotherhoods. It’ll kill you.”

Rebecca’s memories flit through my head like fireflies, shining and dimming almost at random. Meeting Quinn, our life, our escape, the dugout, writing the journal.

The journal.

“I need the journal,” I say. “Rebecca’s.” I’m moving toward the car door and Benson is scrambling to help me stay upright. “I need to make sure …” I snatch it up and rifle through the pages until I reach the strange language, and a smile curls across my face. A grin. A chuckle. Then I throw my head back and laugh, the sound filling the trees. “I can read it! Oh, Benson, she was brilliant! This is Latin—not exactly Latin, like you said. A common Latin. It’s—” I think, trying to get the specifics from a memory bank that’s like a closet I can’t open more than a crack. “It’s from Rome—ancient Rome.” My head pounds from the effort of retrieving that tiny fact.

I look up, surprised, when Benson snorts. “Vulgar Latin?” he asks. “You can read Vulgar Latin?”

“It’s not vulgar,” I counter.

“No, that’s what the common Latin is called—I read about it last semester. It’s from like 800 A.D. when the Romans were trying to create a universal language throughout the empire. It’s basically the parent language of all the Romance languages. And you can read it.” He grins. “That’s awesome.”

I sober as I look down at the journal. “This is where my answers are. She left it in the dugout for me. It’s our own personal pyramid, just like Quinn’s journal said. A place where we stashed all our stuff so we could remember someday. We created it just for something like this. So we could rely on each other, not on either of the brotherhoods. After that night, we left. We never came back.”

“But you escaped. You didn’t die. What happened?”

“I died eventually,” I say, and something snaps within me and the memory trickles back and I want to gag and clench my fists against it, pushing it away. Please don’t ask, please don’t ask. If he asks, it’ll re-ignite the sensations and I’ll have to feel it all over again and I’m not sure I have the stamina for that.

“How did you die?”

I look up at him as the all-too-familiar, body-numbing chill crashes over me. “I—” I brace myself against him as the cold that exists only in my mind paralyzes me. “I drowned. In a lake.”

The nightmare of my last moments as Rebecca replays in my head until my whole body is quaking with cold. I can’t sense any details—don’t know why, where, when. All I know for sure is that they did it—the Reduciata. That fact burns in my mind like a searing fire, melting a tiny layer of ice. “They’ve been hunting me. For over two hundred years. Me, specifically. They’ve killed me so many times. I … I think they’re the ones who made my plane crash.”

Benson’s hands tighten on me.

My body courses with crazy energy now. “Of course, Benson, it makes total sense.”

“Total,” Benson says dryly.

“I’ve been reborn. Not just now, a hundred times. A thousand times.” I lean against him with a groan as the scope of that thought makes my brain ache. Then my eyes pop open. “And they’re chasing me through lifetimes, trying to keep their secret—whatever it is—quiet! The Curatoria located me—lured me to them with the promise of a fancy art school, to protect me until they could awaken me, just like Elizabeth said. But the Reduciata found out —brought the plane down. All to silence their secret.” My eyes widen and the implication sinks in. “They’ll kill anyone to get me. Anyone who stands in their way.”

Anyone like him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“You need to find him, don’t you?” Benson says after a while, his face a tableau of anguish.

“Who?”

His hands are chilly to the touch. “Quinn. Whoever he is now.”

“Quinn?” I’m not sure how we even got to this subject. It feels foreign. Wrong. I don’t need Quinn, I need Benson.

Don’t I?

When did even the barest doubt enter into my mind?

And how can I get rid of it?

“If you’ve been reborn, then he has too, right?”

“Yes, of course,” I say, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world. And right then, it is. “The Earthbound are never dead—their souls simply move from one body to the next.”

His hands are tight around my fingers and I can hear his heart beating.

Not beating. Racing.

Pounding.

“You have to find him, then. It’s … it’s the only way you’ll be safe.”

I stare up at him part in horror and part in wonder. I won’t leave Benson—but my mind is screaming that I will be safer with Quinn. How does Benson know that?

“And—and I won’t stand in your way,” he continues in a whisper. “I knew things would change when you remembered. And even though I—”

“No,” I interrupt. “No, Benson. That’s not what I want.” I force these feelings, this doubt away. I am my own master. I may be a goddess and the brotherhoods may think I have a path I’m not allowed to stray from, but they’re wrong. I can choose, and I will.

“These people are chasing you because of a secret you knew two hundred years ago—do you think they’re just going to give up now?” Benson shakes his head, as if frustrated with himself. “You two need to be together. And I—” His voice breaks off and his hands tighten even more and the next words he says seem to take physical effort to force out. “I’ll help you.”

My head feels too heavy on my neck, but I force my face up so I can meet his eyes. “No, Benson, no. I don’t want him. I want you.”

“But—but you’re Rebecca now.”

I lift my hands to frame his face. “I am not Rebecca. I was, absolutely. But I’m not now. I’m Tavia and I love you, Benson.”

He’s silent for a long time before he whispers, “It’s not as easy as that.”

“It can be.”

“People are trying to kill you, Tave. That’s more important.”

My thumb touches his cheekbone, just under the cut. “Nothing is more important than this.”

His voice sounds frantic, and icy fear clenches at my heart. “But at the house, after your vision, you said —”

“I didn’t say anything,” I counter, a little pissed that he believes I would turn on him so easily. “Rebecca said a lot of things before I got control back. It’s what she wants, Benson. But she’s not in charge this time around. I am.”

Benson’s eyes are wide and then he closes his mouth and clenches his teeth, the muscles standing out on his cheeks. “I just … I assumed, I mean you’ve had lifetimes with him, right?”

“I guess, but—”

“Everything you’ve done the last three days has been about you trying to get to Quinn, to figure out Quinn, to complete this mystery task Quinn had for you. Not Rebecca—you.” His hands are tight on my arms, not holding me back, more like holding himself back from me. I loosen his hands, and his expression turns chastened until I step forward and lay my head on his shoulder, wrapping my arms around him as lightly as possible.