Page 25 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER TWELVE

I t takes a few moments, once Vantaras staggers to his feet and flees the room, for Tory to follow.

Out the lab, down the hall, around, around, around the wide circle of the Compound, past places he’s never been, and through a door—at last—into a clearly not-public-access hallway he can only enter because Vantaras’ tab unlocks the door and Tory grabs the knob before it closes.

The hallway is empty when he steps inside, but the door to one of the rooms hangs open. Naturally, the thing is twice as large as the glorified closet Tory shares with Gavin. Inside, Vantaras sits on the end of a bed made with unsettling precision, gloved hands in his hair.

“What was that just now?” Tory demands, pacing inside.

He’s a few steps away when Vantaras finally looks up, wide-eyed. His hands leave his hair to push out in front of him. “Don’t!”

He’s shaking, and after a moment he seems to realize how close his hands are to Tory, because he makes a noise and drags them back, wrapping them around himself and tucking them under his arms. “Don’t,” he whispers again.

He rocks forward—toward a window, the bastard has a window—eyes fixed on its light. “You can’t be in here.”

It occurs to Tory, with a sudden lurch in his belly, why Vantaras has so carefully avoided touching him all this time. What happened in there—what he did with those hands—Tory takes a reflexive step back. “I’m not leaving until you tell me what you did.”

Vantaras flinches. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does! Could you have done that to me? Could you have just, like—fucking erased me ?”

Vantaras bows toward his knees, hands still tucked around himself. “ Stop. ” It might’ve sounded like an order if his voice weren’t frayed, his breaths coming too fast. “Leave.”

He wants to, is the thing. This is wrong. This isn’t what Vantaras is like. This isn’t what they’re like.

Sena Vantaras captured Tory, brought him to this disgusting place.

He’s taken his freedom several times since, in large and small ways.

But right now, he’s trembling so bad his teeth are chattering and his hands look less like he’s hiding them and more like he’s trying to hold himself together.

This isn’t the untouchable Lieutenant Vantaras. This, Tory supposes, is just Sena.

Tory crosses his arms, pacing to bleed off nervous energy. “You need to stop breathing like that or you’re gonna pass out and I won’t get any of my answers.”

“S-stars forbid I should inconvenience you.” Sena sucks in a shallow breath and shakes his bowed head, and Tory can’t help noticing how that long, thin scar snakes between the short hairs at the base of his skull and down his neck into his uniform.

Tory wonders who did it to him, how far down it goes.

He wonders, for the first time, if Sena deserved it.

“If you want me to calm down,” Sena manages. “Then move out of the way of my window. ”

That’s when he notices it. A pendant hangs from a hook above the narrow window—the pendant he saw when Vantaras put the blindfold on him.

Even from where Tory stands, it’s easy to tell that the crystal is the purest specimen he’s ever seen outside of the Legion unit he touched today.

The rare nebulescence that stellite is famed for creates a river of color at the crystal’s center that puts everything in this cold facility to shame.

The fading sun shines through and casts its light onto the floor—star-specked galaxies of it in blue and magenta and forest green, transforming as the crystal twirls and swings; Vantaras’ hands must not have been steady when he hung it there.

The light paints itself onto Tory’s simple shoes and up his slate-blue trousers.

He steps out of the way of the light, and Vantaras doesn’t say anything. He just stays where he is, hunched forward and staring at the shifting array of vibrant nebulae. His breaths gradually slow.

Tory shuffles, clears his throat to scare away the sudden silence. “Come on. That level of purity? You’re just bragging.”

“It was a gift,” Vantaras says, wooden. He sits up and begins to unbutton his uniform jacket. Tory has the strange urge to look away. “From my mother. It was for my Dedication.”

Tory sniffs. “Rich kids and their fancy parties.”

“Fancy,” he repeats, but doesn’t elaborate.

Tory could go, probably, but he came all the way here and he still doesn’t have any answers. “About that thing with Helner—”

Sena isn’t looking at him. “You made it work.”

Tory startles. “I didn’t make anything work. It went batshit on me.”

“No.” Sena sits up. “Whether it was subconscious or not, it was under your control the entire time.”

“It fucking wasn’t —”

“I noticed when I first apprehended you. You don’t like being contained, do you?”

Tory’s skin crawls. “What do you mean?”

“The vines arched above you and kept even a single piece of stone or debris from hitting you. They weren’t destroying indiscriminately.

They ruined the instruments meant to measure you and went at the walls that contained you.

They didn’t kill anyone. You were panicking, so their movement was violent and damaging, but .

. . Dr. Helner was not wrong. You’re uniquely suited to controlling them.

“The first thing you did when you woke up in the livestock cart, when you shouldn’t even have been able to stand, was to get up and beat at the doors. Helner’s mistake was not in testing your ability to control them, but in asking you to make a sphere all the way around yourself.”

“Then why did you—whatever you did. Destroy it like that?”

“Because you were making a mess. And because I’m not sure it’s a good idea if they know what you can do.”

“We’ve talked about this. You’re one of them.”

Sena doesn’t answer. He slides his dark jacket off, and the stark white of the button-up makes the dark circles under his eyes seem even darker.

Tory turns his attention to the room. It’s wide and mostly empty, aside from the crystal hanging on its hook in the window and two small ceramic pots on the sill.

The contents of the first pot are clearly past saving but seem to have been freshly watered, and the plant in the second—a squat, furred, unkillable little thing of the sort that thrives in rocky dirt in high places—seems to be holding on.

Vantaras’ bed is flawlessly made, the table beside it empty of anything personal.

The door in the corner—a full closet, Tory imagines—is closed, and nothing hangs from it.

There’s one thing, though, as he completes his slow revolution. Something at odds with the otherwise perfect organization. A letter pokes through the mail slot on the door, fat with its contents and addressed with looping blue ink on fancy, cream-colored paper.

“Oh?” Tory lopes over to snatch the letter from the slot. It smells overwhelmingly of perfume.

“Give me that.” Vantaras trips to his feet—he’s halfway out of his boots, one unlaced and the other standing beside his mattress.

He kicks the second one off as he strides toward Tory, but Tory lifts the letter away from Vantaras’ grasping hands, reading the sender’s information by the light from the window. “Hina? Who’s Hina ? Would not have pegged you as the sort of person to be loved by anyone—”

“My little sister,” Vantaras grits out, grabbing for it.

The letter sags in Tory’s grip as he processes that, and Vantaras takes the opportunity to snatch it from his lax fingers. He tightens his grip at the last moment, and the force, between the both of them, rips the top corner of the envelope.

Pressed leaves and flowers tumble out, and Tory feels abruptly guilty. “Sorry,” he says, though it’s more an old impulse than anything.

“Apologies are useless,” Vantaras spits, kneeling to gather the pressed flowers in one gloved hand.

To fill the weighty silence that ensues, Tory says, “You’re not allowed to have a sister. That’s just weird.”

Vantaras scoffs. It’s the usual holier-than-thou coldness, all sharp edges, but it fits wrong in this room, where the only light is the fading sunset through the window and the gently rocking nebulae from the pendant. “I’ll be sure to let her know, if I see her again.”

Tory rolls his eyes. “You’re not allowed to be funny, either. I still hate you.”

“As long as we have that settled.”

Once he’s gathered all the flowers, Vantaras sets the small pile and the unopened envelope on the table beside his bed.

Tory frowns. “You not going to open it?”

“I imagine she’d like me to attend her Dedication. I’ll need to decline.”

“ Why ?”

“I can’t—” Vantaras doesn’t turn. “I’d prefer they remember me as I was before.”

Restless heat surges in Tory. “That’s ridiculous.”

He didn’t even say it loudly, but Sena looks away, wincing. “You don’t understand.”

“Don’t I? You have a living mother and a sister who wants to see you, and you’re—what? Hiding from them?”

Sena’s gloved hands clench at his sides. “The last time I saw them—”

“I don’t care if you’ve grown horns since the last time you saw them!

You should—” Tory cuts himself off, and shame is a sick thing in his belly.

Does he have any right to talk? He left Hasra and Thatcher behind like they meant nothing, and even if his mother could be in front of him right now, he’s not sure what they could talk about. His eyes find Sena’s window.

Plants, maybe. When the meals in the camp weren’t nearly enough for a growing boy, much less a working one, she’d take him into the woods.

Whenever he lingered too long on the high fence visible through the thick trees in the distance, she turned his eyes to the ground instead.

She taught him the names of every wild edible inside that fence.

It saved his life more than once when he was free.

His mother acted like the trees were the wall between him and all the ugly things in the world, but she was.