Chapters (51)
She took it out from beneath her dress and Leo found his eyes drawn to it. The stone was a white purer than a swan’s wing, shot through with delicate ribbons of color.
“Is it as smooth as it looks?” he asked. He’d never touched it before, never even dared to ask.
Sera smiled and held it out in her palm. “Would you like to feel it?”
Their hands touched as he ran his fingers over it, Sera’s skin igniting a greater thrill in him than any magic stone ever could. The moonstone was like an ice cube that wouldn’t melt—Leo found himself compelled to stroke it over and over again, its smoothness almost compulsive. Sera laughed, a richer, kinder sound than Rahel’s giggles.
“It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she said. “My friend Leela found it on the banks of—”
All of a sudden, the moonstone flared up in their hands, so hot Leo wanted to pull away but found that he couldn’t. Sera’s palm began to glow and Leo had the same sensation he’d had when he and Sera had blood bonded and shared memories—a disorienting weightlessness, a feeling of heat zipping through his veins until it finally reached his heart. Sera gasped, and he knew she felt it too but he couldn’t unstick his jaw to ask her what was going on.
There was a crackling sound, like static through a radio, and Leo’s vision blurred—for a second he saw a different place, almost like an overlay across the opulent room, shadows of another location with columns and paths and clear pools of water.
“Did you see—” Sera began, and then there was a hard jerk behind his navel and he felt like he was being pulled upward very quickly through a narrow tunnel. He found himself rising through one of the pools, except that it wasn’t filled with water and he no longer had any sense of his body at all. Glowing blue columns loomed all around him and a chain of silver-gold-blue was shooting up through the pool he was in, or maybe down from the cone of moonstone that was protruding from a circle of pure white vines covering the ceiling.
At the edge of the pool stood a girl with silver skin and blue hair, a few inches shorter than Sera and with a rounder face.
“Sera?” she whispered, staring at him. And he knew he was seeing through Sera’s eyes, her magic linking them, or maybe it was the moonstone they had been holding—this had to be the City Above the Sky.
“Leela?” Sera said.
Tears were tumbling down the girl’s cheeks, even as her face broke into a wide smile.
“It’s me,” Leela said, and her voice cracked, but there was a clear ring of triumph in it. “It’s me, Sera. I found you.”