Slipping through the heavy canvas flaps of our family’s tent, I find my mother and sister sitting on bed pads on the floor. Mother is brushing Clara’s hair, and they’re both facing me, their faces glowing with light from the lamp that rests on the small crate beside them.
Though they look alike, like mother and daughter, like me, with large blue Seer’s eyes and heart-shaped faces, their expressions couldn’t be more different.
My mother is smiling. She was talking, as she pulled the brush through Clara’s long hair, until I entered. Now her hand has stilled, and her excited, joyful face is lifted to me.
For the past year, I listened to her cry every night. I wondered if she’d ever be happy again. I wondered if she’d ever stop.
I won’t be here tonight, but I know she won’t cry.
Her daughter is back. Her little girl. Her sunbeam, as she calls Clara.
And Clara is a sunbeam. Bright and golden and cheerful. The child whose shrieks of laughter could always be heard in the compound. The one who always ran from one place to another, never walking. Never doing anything without an extra kick of energy.
The girl whose hair is being combed doesn’t look golden or cheerful anymore.
Clara’s face still has baby-fat roundness, but her blue eyes are serious, adult eyes. I glimpse the fearful, lost look in them just before she covers up with a smile.
“Hi, Brookie,” she says, a sunbeam again. So bright she is blinding. So bright you can’t even see her.
I cross to my mother and plant a kiss on top of her head.
She laughs. “What’s that for?”
I don’t hand out affection easily. “Just because.” Because I want to keep you happy.
I hold out my hand. “Can I take over?”
“Sure.” My mother gives me the brush and scoots away. “I’m going to get us some water and a few more blankets. It’s going to be cooler tonight.”
It’s not. The temperature in here doesn’t fluctuate. It’s always uncomfortably cool. But I know she wants everything to be perfect for Clara’s first night back.
Mother pauses at the tent flap, looking from me to Clara. The love in her eyes is so strong it feels like an embrace. “My beautiful girls,” she says, and then slips out.
I sit behind Clara and pull the brush through her hair, letting the silence settle. People are bedding down in the tents around us. With each drag of the bristles through my sister’s butter-blond hair, the sounds of footsteps and voices grow quieter.
“Do you miss Liv?” Clara asks. Her voice is so soft I almost can’t hear her.
I don’t know how she learned about Liv. From Talon? From Mother? And what else does she know that will surprise me? Once, I could anticipate everything Clara said and did. A year apart has changed that.
“Yes. I do miss her,” I answer.
“But are you going to be all right? Without her, I mean?”
My eyes well up. Clara is the only one who has asked me that. Everyone else is too worried about the Aether, or about the Dwellers, or about Cinder and Roar. “You’re back, Clara. So, yes. I will be.”
“I should be too. Because I’m back.”
I set the brush down on my lap. What she isn’t saying is much louder than what she is saying. I can’t pretend I don’t know what she means. “But you aren’t, are you?”
Clara shakes her head.
A lump rises in my throat. “Why, sweetie?”
Her narrow little shoulders shrug. It was a stupid question anyway.
Clara wasn’t harmed in Reverie. The Dwellers treated her well enough, it seems. But she was taken away from us for a year and made into a test subject. Now we’ve gotten her back, but the world is burning, the sky is one great blanket of Aether, and we’re living in a rotten, dark, horrible cave.
Clara isn’t the only one who has changed in the past year. The Tides have. Everything has.
She has every reason in the world to be scared and lost.