The succulents shook their spiny leaves at the sky.
Forty
THE HEIR
Kite watched Cam as he looked around the barren landscape. The skin around his eyes crinkled and then smoothed again. He reached down to pull a cracked dinner plate out of the sand. He brushed it clean, and then set it down again, carefully, as if to avoid cracking it further.
He was fascinating. Kite was mesmerized by the way he played with his moustache and rocked back and forth on his heels. His face was alive with feeling. And he never tried to hide his emotions, either: he let confusion and fear and wonder play across his face and body and sing through the stones on his skin.
“What?” Cam frowned at her.
“Sorry?” She tilted her head, feeling the swish of her shorn hair brushing her ears. A gentle, low hum filled her ears. The strands were mourning.
“You’re staring at me.”
“You’re just so good at being human.”
“Um. Thanks?”
“Are you setting a dinner table? Are you expecting company?” Kite sat cross-legged before the single porcelain plate. A pattern of blue roses stretched around the edge. She thought the crack through the centre added elegance to the otherwise too-symmetrical piece.
“I don’t know. No, I’m just … I don’t understand. How are we supposed to find allies here? Everything is buried.”
Kite, following Cam’s example, reached into the sand and drew a tarnished silver spoon from the earth. She placed it beside the plate. “So is much of the wall.”
“So?” He tugged on his moustache. “You have the sword. Is there even anything else useful here?”
The wind picked up, an insistent hand tugging at stray threads and souls. A warning.
“That’s not how you behave at a dinner party,” scolded Kite, retrieving a gold-and-glass goblet from its place of burial and setting it upright at the place setting. It was fuzzy with mould.
“I didn’t ask to come to your dinner party. I’m not even supposed to be here.” Cam kicked a patch of sand into a glittering gold arc. Then he sat down and put his head in his hands.
The stones made a gentle keening sound, and then fell silent. Even stone could get lonely sometimes.
Kite hummed softly, bringing forth a melody of remembered waves and the perfect curve of a fish spine. She set a stainless-steel fork on the other side of the plate.
Cam looked over at the girl with the halo of bluegreen hair, her fingertips dusted with gold sand. She picked up the plate, polished it on her sleeve, and set it down again.
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you to find them. You seem to have a better affinity for the buried than I do.”
“Don’t hold your breath. I’m the useless one.”
“What do you mean?” Kite began polishing the goblet.
“I’m not like Eli or Tav. I’m not magic. I’m not good at anything except parallel parking and using my body as a shield. And making jazz playlists. And now I’m trapped in your world and I’ll probably die, and my body will be perfectly preserved in this junkyard forever.”
“There are worse places to be. You’d be in good company.”
“Yeah, that plate looks really chatty. I’m sure we’re going to be best friends.”
“Is that something you need? Friends?”
“It’s what everyone needs.”
Kite turned her lamp-like eyes to him, those bright and pupil-less orbs of undersea light. “Witches are taught to need power and nothing else. My mother taught me that the first time she threw me into the wilds as an infant and told me to not come home until I had proved my value.”
“That’s … intense.”
“No,” she sighed, “it was perfectly normal. I sometimes envy you humans — all the feelings that I can see on your body, the intensity of mortality, how much you care about Tav and Eli and the stones that are now part of you. Everything matters so much, and it’s always now. For witches, there is rarely a now; there is always later, and time doesn’t matter. Love doesn’t matter. Death doesn’t matter. Only power matters.”
“That sounds … lonely. Do witches get lonely?”
Kite’s mouth twitched slightly. She did not understand.
Cam shifted a little closer to her. “If only power matters, then why are you here?”
“Oh, that’s an easy question.” Kite smiled brightly, and then paused to lick sand from her forearm. “The time is now.”
The plate, fork, spoon, and goblet picked up the melody of Cam’s stone-sutured body.
Kite stood, gestured toward the place setting, and then skipped aside, so light on her feet that she left no footprints in the sand.
Witches were more magic than substance — especially when they had been weaned by the Witch Lord.
Cam inhaled sharply. “I can’t do this.”
“You can.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Kite let her hand drift to the sad, short hairs on her head, and soothed them with slow, gentle strokes.
“Because I’ve seen what humans can do. And because Eli trusts you.”
Cam’s face hardened, and in the sharp line of his cheekbone Kite could see the stone that lived under the skin, as well, the layer of hardness he had used to protect his soft heart and fragile bones. Armour woven from laughter and music and moustache wax.
Witches were not the only creatures who could cobble together a life from scraps. Kite saw in the tremble of Cam’s throat that he had crafted a life out of bits and pieces, and this mosaic of identity had become strength, flexibility, survival.
So many bodies struggling to survive.
It was time for them to live.
Like Kite, the wastelands could feel Cam’s emotions, could hear his knuckle bones rubbing against one another, the friction generating heat and energy. Could smell the sweat of his body mixing with the calcium of stone. There was no one in the worlds like him.
He crawled closer to the place setting, tucking his legs under him. The sand swirled up at his movements and stuck to his slick sticky salty skin. Humans carry places with them.
He closed his eyes, and Kite watched with interest as his eyeballs
