Folding the Sky

-43-

The night Aldric had told Jem about the boy he'd liked—and, depending on how deeply he pondered it, perhaps even loved—there were notable parts of the tale he'd left out.

The boy's name, for one. It was Wilhelm, but every kid in the neighborhood had a nickname, and his had been Wil. His eyes and hair were dark, a deep woodsy brown, and yet he had a way of lighting up a cold night without even trying to, with just a crack of his lopsided smile or a spontaneous bubble of laughter.

Just about everyone in Meathe knew Wil wanted to be a botanist, mostly because he never shut up about it. Aldric knew nothing about plants, and nor did he care for them in any particular sense, but he would willingly traipse along behind Wil on his morning walks through the woods, if only to catch one glimpse of the utter glee on Wil's face when he located some species he'd never seen before.

"Look at the petals on this one, Ricky," he'd say, grabbing Aldric by the sleeve, yanking him forward hard enough that Aldric nearly stumbled into the underbrush. "It's one of the few plants I know to bloom in such frigid weather as this. Isn't it beautiful?"

"Sure," Aldric said, though he'd barely been paying attention to the flower. "It's quite beautiful."

Once the meteor struck, however, everything would change, and much faster than eleven-year-old Aldric ever could have anticipated.

The first day after the impact, his parents and his sister Aurora had thought he'd fallen ill, perhaps as a result of whatever cosmic debris the meteor had scattered across the Kirovian sky. His temperature fell dangerously low, his whole body racked by violent chills that made his bones and muscles ache with even the slightest movement. For three bizarre days he drifted in and out of consciousness, waking long enough to glimpse Aurora's golden hair in the twilight, or his mother's pensive face, or once—and to this day Aldric still didn't know if he'd been dreaming or not—Wil, sitting with Aldric's hand cupped against his mouth, as if trying to breathe warmth back into his fingers.

On the fourth day, he reached for a cup of water on the nightstand and watched the trembling liquid within it solidify the moment his fingers met the glass. That was when it dawned on him, that this strange illness was neither hypothermia nor the flu, as were the common guesses. It was simply his own body, warring with the new power that had been bestowed upon it.

He glanced at himself in the mirror and shrieked at the sight of his hair, once pale, now a deep indigo the color of the night sky. Everything is different now, he remembered thinking. Whatever this is, there is no going back from it.

It was awful how correct he'd been.

After that, he didn't see Wil for five years. In fact, for five years he saw no one except his parents and sometimes Aurora, on the rare occasions he was allowed to eat dinner with the rest of them rather than alone in the dismal confines of the basement. To make good money as an assassin, he had to get used to dark places, his parents said. Their most favorite line was, You have to adjust, Ricky.

So he did. When his father wound Aldric's shoulders in chains and fastened a bolt on the door and told him to "figure it out unless you want to starve," he adjusted. When his parents brought him rodents, and then dogs, and then town pariahs for him to "practice on," as they called it, he adjusted. When he begged his mother for a new mystery book for his fifteenth birthday and she brought him his first official assignment instead (a court judge, whose terrified face as the ice filled his veins still visited Aldric in dreams from time to time), he adjusted.

Even as he watched himself sink away, the curious, starry-eyed boy he'd once been fading into the background with every heart he encased in ice, he kept adjusting, because he simply had no choice.