Chapter 205: Drink Your Skincare

Chapter 205: Chapter 205: Drink Your Skincare

The spring ran clear and cold through the middle of the space, and Aunt Mary was the first to reach it. She knelt at the bank, cupped water in both hands, and drank. Then she rinsed the blood from her split lip, and Penelope watched the cut close in the time it took to blink.

"You could have done that an hour ago," Dahlia said.

"And missed the look on your father’s face when I put him on the ground?" Aunt Mary dried her hands on her trousers. "Never."

Silver stood a few feet back, blood drying along his forearm, watching the water with the flat, unhurried suspicion he gave anything he hadn’t vetted himself. "I don’t put unknown things into my body."

"It’s water, Silver."

"It’s water that rebuilt you from the inside out. I’ve watched you for two weeks. You move like you’re twenty-two."

"Then you understand why I’m telling you to drink it." Aunt Mary gave him a look that had, clearly, been winning arguments against him since childhood. "I’m forty-eight. I’ve been up since dawn, I just fought you with a knife, and I’m not even winded. That’s the spring. Stop being stubborn."

Silver held her gaze a moment longer, then crouched at the bank without another word. He drank one handful, paused, and drank another.

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then his jaw locked.

It started low, Penelope could tell, some deep heat gathering in his core and spreading outward in slow, deliberate waves. He set one hand flat against the grass and breathed through his nose, controlled, silent, his other fist curling tight against his thigh. Sweat broke along his hairline. The cut on his forearm knitted itself shut, and he didn’t so much as glance at it.

"Dad," Dahlia said, moving forward.

"Stay where you are." His voice came out level, but strained at the edges. "I’m fine."

"You don’t look fine."

"It’s not pleasant," Aunt Mary said calmly, folding her arms. "Give it a minute. It’ll hurt worse before it stops, and then it’ll stop."

Host, Oddy whispered in Penelope’s mind, giddy. Host, he is cleansing. Observe his posture. He has not made a single sound.

I see him, Oddy.

Decades of impurity. Decades. And he is enduring it like a man waiting for a train.

Silver’s left wrist twitched, the one Nicholas Azar’s blindfold lesson had broken three decades ago and that had never quite healed straight. It ached visibly, then went slack, and he flexed the hand slowly, staring at it as though it belonged to someone else. His breath caught on something in his chest, and he coughed once, sharp and dry, his shoulders easing a fraction afterward as though a weight he’d carried so long he’d forgotten it existed had finally been set down.

The sweat running down his temple was faintly gray.

He sat back on his heels, exhaling slowly, and looked at his own hands again. Then at Aunt Mary.

"Well?" she said.

"My knuckles don’t hurt," Silver said.

"They’ve been hurting for years."

"Yes." He flexed his fingers again, frowning at them with an intensity Penelope realized was his version of astonishment. "I’d stopped noticing."

Penelope slapped a hand against her forehead.

"What?" Dahlia asked.

"I completely forgot." Penelope dragged her palm down her face. "The spring. I got so used to drinking it that it stopped feeling like anything special. You should have had it the day you got here." She turned to Dahlia. "Drink. Now. Your leg, the ribs, whatever else the journey did to you. Everything you’ve been carrying since the mudslide."

Dahlia hesitated. She’d watched her father’s face for the last two minutes. "It’s going to hurt."

"Yes."

"How badly?"

"Badly," Aunt Mary said cheerfully. "You’ll survive."

Dahlia gave her a long look, then knelt beside her father and drank. She did not take it as well as he had. Her breath hissed through her teeth and she bent forward over her knees, one hand pressed to her thigh where the old stiffness had lived since the mudslide. Penelope crouched beside her and rubbed a slow circle between her shoulder blades until the tension in her back finally went slack.

"Better?" she asked, after a while.

"Yes." Dahlia straightened carefully and flexed her leg, a look of pure astonishment spreading across her face. "It doesn’t hurt. Penny, I haven’t walked without that limp in weeks."

"I know. I’m sorry. I should have said something days ago."

"It’s fine." Dahlia laughed shakily. "It’s very fine."

Aunt Mary caught Silver’s eye across the bank, and a slow, wicked smile crossed her face. She winked.

"Drink your skincare, brother."

Silver looked at her. "I don’t have skincare."

"You do now." She laughed, bright and unrestrained, the sound carrying across the whole field. "Look at you. Your face is glowing."

"It is not."

"It’s a little bit glowing."

"I regret every kind thing I’ve ever said about you," Silver said.

"You’ve never said one."

"Then I regret the absence of practice."

Dahlia put a hand over her mouth to hide her grin. Penelope failed to hide hers.

Once the first shock of it had passed, Dahlia sat back on her heels and unhooked the small pouch from her belt. Penelope had noticed it before without wondering about it, the leather worn from weeks of travel. Dahlia tipped its contents into her palm, and a scatter of small dark stones rolled out, each about the size of a walnut, gleaming faintly.

She dipped her hand into the spring.

The water swirled around the stones and grime lifted off them in gray threads. Then the cores began to glow, softly at first and then brighter, pulsing with a slow internal light that turned the clear water around Dahlia’s wrist a faint, luminous gold.

Penelope stared.

"Those look familiar," she said slowly.

Dahlia glanced up. "You’ve seen them?"

"I think so." Penelope frowned, digging through a memory she’d never bothered to catalogue. Small dark stones. Warm to the touch. She’d found them after fights, tucked in the wreckage of certain zombies, and swept them into her storage along with everything else without a second glance. "I think I have some."

She reached into her space and let a handful drop into her palm. There were more than she’d expected, a dozen at least, dull with dried blood and grime. She held them out, a little embarrassed.

"I assumed they were debris. Some kind of tumor, maybe. Gemstones. I swept them up with the rest of the supplies and forgot about them."

"You’ve been carrying these around in a bag?" Dahlia asked.

"In a corner of the warehouse."

Dahlia let out a bark of laughter. "Rinse them."

Penelope crouched and dipped her hand into the spring, and the stones came alive the way Dahlia’s had, the grime lifting off in threads, the cores brightening until her whole palm glowed. Silver watched from a few feet away, his expression unreadable.

Dahlia selected the largest stone from her own pile and offered it to her father. "Here."

Silver accepted it, turning it in the light. "I’ve been saving mine for something. Apparently for this."

"For what?" Penelope asked.

Dahlia didn’t answer right away. She picked another core, settled cross-legged on the bank, closed her eyes, and let her breathing slow. The stone in her palm began to pulse in time with it.

"What is she doing?" Penelope asked.

"Absorbing it," Silver said, seating himself and closing his own hand around the stone. "Watch."

A faint warmth gathered around Dahlia, and the water in the spring beside her lifted in a slow spiral, thin and precise. Penelope watched the core in Dahlia’s palm dim, its light draining into her skin, and the water rose a hand’s breadth higher than it had a moment before.

"These come from the evolved ones," Dahlia said, without opening her eyes. "The faster, stronger infected. They’re lodged in the skull. We started collecting them on the way here without knowing what they were, just instinct. Then I fell asleep holding one while I meditated, and it dissolved into me. My water’s been sharper ever since."

"Dad’s snake got heavier," Silver said. "Faster. Victor said his awareness reached farther."

"You mean they make you stronger," Penelope said.

"Permanently," Dahlia said. "As far as we can tell."

Penelope sat back on her heels. All those horde fights, all those evolved zombies she’d cut down with her katana, and every one had been carrying strength she’d walked away from. She thought of the corner of her warehouse, of the dozen small stones in her hand. She thought of Kai’s unstable fire and Ben’s careful earth, and of the two roots she’d taken that had never grown as strong as the originals.

I wonder if a borrowed root drinks these in the same way, she thought.

She glanced at Silver, who watched her with a knowing patience.

"Try it," he said.

Penelope closed her hand around a core and lowered herself to the bank. The stone was warm against her palm, warmer than it had any right to be. Aunt Mary stood over the three of them with her arms folded, her lip fully healed, her expression satisfied, and Penelope closed her eyes and reached inward.

The light gathered slowly, gold against the dark behind her eyelids, and somewhere across the field, a baby laughed.