mirror shards // matthew fairchild {1}

twenty-one // gateway

The moment James is gone, Sydney takes the blade she used to cut her hand and slices a long swath of fabric from the petticoats beneath her skirt to bind up her still-bleeding hand. She's put two runes on it, but thanks to the Khora poison, they're not taking.

"I shouldn't move too much," she rambles, "that'll make this worse, we need to slow the poison down, I need to stay lucid. Here." She sits down in the grass, pulling Matthew with her. "If I start to pass out I need you to make sure I stay sitting up. It'll get worse if I lie down."

"Can I ask you something?" says Cordelia.

"Go ahead," says Sydney. "Shoot."

"Why did you do it?" she asks. "Why take the poison yourself? Why open the gate? We both know the wounds were meant for your brother."

"Because I didn't want him dying in that other world," Sydney says. "And because now I have a valid reason to stay behind. And I need to stay behind, because I have work to do here."

"What kind of work?" asks Cordelia.

"When James was trying to convince me not to follow him into the Silent City," Sydney says, rummaging in her handbag, "some of the things he said – and the way he phrased them – got me thinking about what I was doing in Romania. Not what I found there, but the research itself." Sydney hauls a  wooden box out of her handbag, flips open the lid, and scatters a mess of notebooks and papers across the grass. "The process of doing that research, specifically. And what we were told in the Silent City all but confirmed it for me."

"What do you mean?" asks Matthew, as Sydney spreads her research out on the grass.

"This whole thing was me going out somewhere – Romania – to find something – my demonic grandfather. A lot of initiation rituals involve going somewhere to find something."

Matthew and Cordelia stare at her with wide eyes.

"You don't think..." Cordelia says slowly. "Târgovişte was a demonic initiation ritual?"

"I don't want to say it," says Sydney. "But it's the most likely scenario. Only, I never pledged allegiance to anything, or struck any kind of deal, unless you count my...negotiation process with Pavel, which only counts if my demony grandfather wants to kiss my feet, and then the deal is in my favor not his and he is a pervert as well as a psychopath."

"I did not come for that piece of information," says Cordelia, staring at the sky. "I did not come here for that at all."

"So I don't think the initiation was about binding me to my demony grandfather in any way," Sydney says. "So now I can't figure out what it was for, or if I even completed it. I hope I didn't. But if I didn't, I can't help but wonder if the words spoken to me in the Silent City were a part of it. 'You are the blade. Take the hands of the fox and the bear and they will sharpen your dull edge.' I think those words might be an attempt at guiding me to the next step."

Sydney turns around and looks back at the gate. "Speaking of which, where's James?"

"I don't know," says Matthew. "The rope is still slack." He glances from Sydney to Cordelia and back. "What if something's happened to him?"

"You told James to yank on the rope if he needed to get out," says Cordelia. "He knows what to do."

"Yes," says Sydney, "but if you're in the middle of a fight, if you're preoccupie –"

She never finishes her sentence. The rope around Matthew's waist cracks taught and yanks him backward, dragging him across the ground and slamming him hard into the gateway. He flops over, groaning.

Sydney leaps to her feet, swearing in three or four different languages, and sprints across to him, skidding to her knees, lapsing again into foul words as she helps him to sit up.