A Fractured Light (Beautiful Dark)

taunting. Whose was it? Could I have really written this? It seemed so unbelievable.
    It had to have been a relic from a different time. Another hand had held the pen that formed those words. Another set of Guardians had stalked those woods. In a time before I was born. A time—I realized, staring harder at the date— right before I was born. Then a strange, new thought lit up my mind, and I sat down hard on the floor where I had been kneeling. What if it wasn’t my handwriting that I was staring at? I stared at the page as the words came to life in my mind, and a whole story for the cabin and the little notebook wrote itself in my head. What if it was someone whose handwriting I had recognized?
    What if it was my mother’s?

Chapter 17
    I an came through, after all. The Mysterious Ellipses had a gig at the Bean on Saturday night. Cassie sent me a thousand and one texts informing me of this.
    I had an early-morning ski practice with the team. Asher was right: each day I felt myself growing stronger, learning to control the power that surged through me in the most mind-blowing ways. My times were getting better, too. I knew my chances of making team captain were looking good. I’d always had a great relationship with Coach Samuelson, and even though I’d left the team, he didn’t seem to be holding it against me.
    When I got home, the energy still crackling off my skin, Asher was leaning against the front porch with his arms crossed.
    “Hey,” I called. “What are you doing here?”
    “I miss the old days.” Asher grinned, some of the familiar playfulness returning to his voice. “I thought we could go out back and practice together.” He laughed. “I miss you getting all huffy and yelling at me.”
    “Aunt Jo’s home,” I said. “We can’t go out back.”
    “Then let’s go for a hike or something.” He winked at me. “Where no one will see us.”
    I felt my cheeks redden. “Let me just run in and drop my stuff.” It took me a few minutes to convince Aunt Jo I was responsible enough to go on a hike with Asher, but I finally met him out back, and we hiked out to a trail I rarely used. It was a warm morning in early March, and the sun crept through the heavy evergreen trees, throwing beams of light across our path. We hiked single file, not speaking much. Every now and then, Asher would grab my hand and spin me around for a kiss. When he did, the sun burned brighter, making the trees shimmer with thousands of tiny evergreen flames. So much snow had melted and the purple alpine flowers were blossoming once again. I tried not to think about what they meant to me, but the purple flowers, like seeing Devin in the halls at school, reminded me that I wasn’t just a Rebel. There was Guardian blood in me, too—my mother’s. No matter what the Order stood for or what they had tried to do to me, the more I thought about the notebook—that small piece of her, the only piece I had left—I felt I couldn’t just abandon the part of me that she was responsible for.
    Just because that part was harder to see didn’t mean it wasn’t there.
    I was now sure that my visions were my mother’s powers flowing through me in some way. Those were powers of the mind, vaguely precognitive in some sense, even though I wasn’t manipulating anyone else. It was my own mind I was controlling. My own thoughts. I just had no idea how, or what they meant.
    “Have you had any word from the Rebellion?” I asked Asher as we neared a clearing in the trail. “Do they know what the Order is planning?”
    He avoided my gaze.
    “Asher?”
    “No, nothing yet. They’re biding their time, waiting for you to get stronger. Killing Oriax was sort of the first shot fired—the official end of the truce. But the Rebellion will come back with something fierce, don’t worry.”
    “How will we know when they do? Aren’t the Guardians nervous?”
    “We’ll know,” said Asher. “And yes, I imagine the Guardians are just as concerned about the coming war as we are. They know we’ll retaliate, but they don’t know how—because of you. Don’t forget, Skye, your powers are making it impossible for them to foresee the outcome of this war. Thanks to you, they don’t know what we’re planning. That’s one of the reasons why the Rebellion needs you.”
    An uneasy feeling made the hair on my arms prickle. I’d known this in the clearing in the woods the night that the Order had tried to kill me. Whichever side I chose to align