A Fractured Light (Beautiful Dark)

you said you never married.”
    Aunt Jo looked sad for a moment, then seemed to snap out of it and shook her head. “I didn’t.”
    “Then what . . . ?”
    She just pushed the box toward me. “Here,” she said. “Open it.”
    I lifted the lid off the box with the edges of my fingers as if it was a photo I didn’t want to smudge. Inside, tufts of tissue paper were layered on top of one another like a sugary, sweet cake. I gently moved each layer aside, and eventually my fingers touched fabric. But it didn’t feel like any fabric I had ever worn. It didn’t feel quite like fabric at all. I pulled out a long, flowing dress.
    My jaw dropped.
    It was the dress from my visions. But instead of streaked with salt and blood, it was ethereal, perfect.
    The only word for it was diaphanous . The dress was a sweeping floor-length with layers of white melting into the sheerest blue silk and chiffon. I held it up to myself and grinned, suppressing images of the sand, the sword, the body crumpled on the ground. “What do you think?” I asked, twirling around. “Do I look like an angel?”
    “I think you look just like your mom when it was hers,” said Aunt Jo. She was beaming. “I never got to wear it, but you should save that. You know, for prom.”
    I pictured myself at prom in a couple of months, the beautiful gown sweeping the floor like a boat trailing stardust through a moonlit lake. It wasn’t the kind of thing I would usually wear, but when I pictured myself in it, something clicked inside me and it felt right. Who would I be with at prom? My friends, of course. Cassie, in something fabulous with sequins and feathers. Dan and Ian, in tuxes. Would I go with Asher? Would we slow-dance together like a normal couple in front of the entire school, like we were the only two people in the world?
    I closed my eyes and let myself imagine it. The soft material of the dress fell over my skin in drapes and folds, grazing the floor as I walked across it in dangerously high heels. There was a beautiful boy in a tuxedo standing on the other side of the dance floor. And as I walked to him, I knew in my heart that this was the person I was supposed to be with. This was my destiny, my one epic love. I reached out my hands to take his, and he pulled me into his arms. The music whirled and lilted as if being distorted.
    But no matter how many times we twirled, I couldn’t see his face.
    “Babe,” Aunt Jo said. “You okay? Do you like it?”
    “Oh,” I said. “I love it.” She smiled, pleased, proud.
    “Your mom would have wanted you to have it. And I certainly got no use out of it. It’s angelic silk, sheer as clouds.”
    It was the only thing I had that belonged to my mom. I held the dress to my chest, and pretended she was the one who had given it to me.
    “I’ll wear it to prom,” I said, leaning in to give Aunt Jo a kiss. “It’s perfect. Thank you.”
    “She’d be proud of you, Skye,” she said. “They both would.”
    I lay in bed that night and tried not to think about the connection between the beautiful dress and my violent vision. Instead, as I hovered somewhere between dreaming and waking, I wondered if Aunt Jo had left the notebook in the cabin by accident—or if she’d left it there on purpose.
     
    The morning of the race dawned, bright and clear. Coach was skeptical about my miraculous recovery, but I managed to prove to him that I was fine.
    After my discoveries from the night before, I felt more ready than I ever had to hold my power in the palm of my hand, like fire, like snow, like freezing rain. Aunt Jo was there, with Cassie, Dan, and Ian. The four of them had scrawled a different letter of my name in puffy paint on T-shirts that they wore over sweatshirts. Cassie was S, Dan was K, Ian was Y, and Aunt Jo held up the rear with E.
    A little ways off, Asher stood with Gideon and Ardith. The two Rebels talked to each other, smiling as they watched me prepare. But Asher looked so serious, so wholly focused on what was going on in his head. What was he thinking? Probably he was just praying for me not to royally screw up. My pulse quickened as I thought of how embarrassing it would be to accidentally reveal my powers in front of everybody. The key, of course, was control.
    As I scanned the crowd, I noticed Devin was there, too. Watching me. A spasm clenched my heart. The memory of our kiss still haunted me, but it wasn’t that I longed to feel his lips on mine again or his fingers graze down