Page 31 of Guardian of Exile

“Then I am fine.”

She forced herself to look up. From behind the counter of her empty shop, Mary stared at Nyx. The woman should have looked afraid—and perhaps there was a tinge of fear in her eyes—but what she truly looked was hungry. The lack of pinging against the Harvester’s Hiding told Nyx the woman didn’t know by what means Nyx had done what she’d done, but the blatant covetousness told her that Mary would take it in a heartbeat if she could see it.

The ruthlessly logical side of Nyx’s brain whispered that she should kill this woman. That leaving her alive after what she’d seen was a very, very bad idea. Mary knew who they were trying to find, so it wouldn’t be hard for her to trail them. Up to now, this interaction had gone as smoothly as it had because they’d had the advantage of surprise. Because Nyx had expected Mary to attack and had descended into A-Queltr to prevent it.

If Mary bided her time and followed them, Nyx would not know when to expect the next attack, and she couldn’t remain always in both this world and A-Queltr. She didn’t yet have that much control, the way Jevryn did. He could remain there day in and day out, and from what she had observed, he did, only surfacing from its depths when he needed to sleep. When an attack came for him, he didn’t have to merge himself with A-Queltr—he only had to direct it. She would have to merge, and no matter how much quicker she was at it now than she had been before, she wouldn’t be fast enough. It would be like trying to dodge a bullet after the gun had gone off—once you heard the shot, it was already too late to dodge.

If Mary decided to come after them, her attack would be like that—quick and out of sight, with no time to prepare. “We can’t leave her here,” Nyx said, quiet enough her words wouldn’t carry across the shop.

“There is no one to take her to.” Evra’s training—years spent working for her mother’s private security company—had meant there was always a protocol to follow in situations like this. When someone broke intergalactic law, her license through the company gave her the authority to arrest them and ship them off to the authorities to be someone else’s problem.

Nyx had heard a lot of those stories in the early days at the Station, when she’d wanted nothing more than to hear tales from the wider universe, and her friends had obliged. All those stories had that in common—clear protocols to follow, rules in place to handle these situations.

But this was Dead Earth. All Council law did not apply here, and even if it did, neither she nor Evra was in a position to enforce it. Leaving Mary Turner behind meant, at best, that she would rebuild her cache of magical objects and continue selling dangerous things to dangerous people. At worst, she might end up getting Nyx or her friends killed.

One of those things, Nyx couldn’t do anything about. She couldn’t change the way the woman thought or how she lived her life. But the other… “Can you knock her out?” Nyx asked.

Evra gave her an offended look.

“Fine, please knock her out.”

Evra sprinted across the shop. Mary’s eyes widened and she took off for the back of the store. Evra vaulted over the counter and snapped a kick that connected to Mary’s head with a solid thunk. The shopkeeper dropped like a rock, and Evra did her the courtesy of catching her on the way down.

“What now?”

It occurred to Nyx that her friendships were not normal, when she could just ask Evra to knock someone out and the Amazon didn’t even bother to ask why before doing it, only what the plan was after.

“Do you have anything that can keep her out longer?” Passing out from a blow to the head usually only lasted between a few seconds and a few minutes, and if it lasted any longer than that, odds were good permanent damage had been done.

Evra slipped a slender needle from the bracelet she wore around her wrist and pricked the woman’s skin with it. “That will give you half an hour. What are you going to do?”

Nyx didn’t really want to say it out loud, because she didn’t like it. In some ways, the idea of killing Mary Turner felt less reprehensible than what she was going to do. “I’m going to Hide her memories of us.”

Evra looked at her sharply. “You are certain you can manage it?”

“Yes.” She was intimately familiar with the structure of the Hiding that had been placed over her own mind. She’d felt her mother go through and disassemble it. And she now had all the memories of her childhood training back regarding the use of her Hidden ability.

She wiped sweating palms on her jeans. “I might end up taking a little more than I mean to. My mother had it easy. She took everything. Trying to take an hour is harder. I might end up with a few days instead.”

“That…might be for the best. There will be less chance of her piecing together what did happen before we are gone.”

Nyx knelt beside Mary. Her Hidden magic surfaced, answering her call, but everything in her rebelled against using it to do this. In her mind she was back in that cabin in Montana, squirming in Elena’s grip, trying desperately to hold onto her life—her memories, her identity—as Elena ruthlessly took it away.

You’re not taking it all away, she reminded herself. And it will only be temporary. She had no need to maintain the Hiding once they left Dead Earth. It was a temporary partial amnesia to prevent someone who would stab them in the back without hesitation from doing just that. Once they were safely back in Earth Between, Mary could have her memories back.

Nyx closed her eyes. When she Hid an object or a person, she focused on them—the shape of the object, the space the person took up in the world—and she wove a cloak capable of covering them. The cloak was only her expression of her ability, her manipulation of the magic, working it in a way that allowed that magic to do what it naturally wanted to.

The opposite side of her magic’s desire to Hide things was its desire to find that which was hidden to it. Memories were hidden, secret things, and when Nyx’s desire to find them merged with her magic’s desire to find, it barely took a nudge from her for it to spin off, searching.

Mary’s memories were unguarded, in her unconscious state, and Nyx’s magic found them readily. They spread out in Nyx’s mental vision like a map that was constantly being drawn yet would never be finished. Some pieces were so old they were fading. Others had been drawn long ago yet remained clearly marked. But it was the freshest ones Nyx wanted, those where the ink that marked their boundaries was still wet.

She pondered that new section, considering how best to Hide it. A memory was not a figurine or a person. It wasn’t a sound that made vibrations in the world. It was not, in short, something she could weave a cloak around. To cloak it, she would have to sever it from the body of the map and she refused to do that. She had felt the map of her own memories fracture as she’d fought to hold on to them, remembered the horror of her mind splintering.

She would not similarly cause that pain, no matter what this woman would no doubt have willingly done to her. So she could not sever the memory in order to encompass it, but…she didn’t have to. All she needed to do was cover it.

Nyx’s mother worked her magic in nets, in order to capture and control. Nyx worked hers in cloaks, in order to cover and protect. But her little sister, once she had been shown how to take control of her own pattern, had worked in blankets.

Following her sister’s lead, Nyx manipulated her magic with mental fingers, weaving a blanket together. A small one, a simple one, which she threw on top of the memory map spread before her mind’s eye, covering the most recently drawn portions. It was simple and easy, and it wouldn’t damage anything. She finished, letting her unused magic recede, trading the view of Mary’s memories for the interior of the shop.

Her hands shook. Not because it had been difficult, but because it hadn’t. Because it had been so easy to take away something as fundamental to a person as their own experiences.

“Are you all right?” Evra asked.

Nyx shook her head. “Let’s go before she wakes up.”

She pulled out her phone as they left the shop and texted Kaden and Morgen. New plan. We’re looking for flyers.

Nyx and Evra were only fifteen minutes from the store when a force slammed Nyx’s Hiding like a sledgehammer. Mary Turner was awake. She was pissed. And she very desperately wanted to remember what she had forgotten.