Page 47 of Cage of Starlight

Iri. He stands, shoulders squared. Why are all the decent people suicidally reckless?

“That’s ridiculous,” Tory says. He waits for the chorus of agreement, but it doesn’t come.

“You know what that entails.” Riese’s voice is solemn, steady.

“I’m not afraid to give my life for a cause I believe in. I’m the one who drew their attention. I should be the one to divert it.”

“Iri . . .” Riese moves toward him but runs into a rifle. It skids and clatters over the wagon’s bed. He stops.

“You know as well as I do I’m the only real choice. I’m the newest to the group and the least prepared to help you execute your plans—and look at me.” He gestures over himself. “I’m exactly who they’d expect to see out here. You would have volunteered me if I hadn’t.”

Riese looks away. “Travin. ’Port him out and get your ass back here. Iri, I—it’s unfair of me to ask you to do this. If your father were here, he’d kill me for allowing it.”

“Then don’t allow it!” Tory says. Surely Riese can’t be serious. Iri can’t be serious.

“No one’s letting me do anything. I’m choosing it.” Iri’s expression is cocky, but Tory can’t help noticing the feverish desperation in his eyes, the press of his teeth into his lips. He’s too young to throw himself away. “But you know what, you bastard? I’m taking a rifle with me.”

“I’d expect nothing less. Burn ’em down.”

“That’s the plan.”

“If you take ’em all out and need a ride, light something up and we’ll swing by.”

Iri shrugs. “Nah, might head to the Box and get started without you instead. It’d serve you right.”

Riese smiles, reaching to ruffle Iri’s long hair, but then his expression hardens. “If they overpower you—”

Iri’s chin goes up. “I won’t let them.”

“I know. But Iri, I can’t put another weapon in their hands. So if they overpower you . . .” Riese stops, fighting a grimace. He looks straight into Iri’s eyes. “Don’t let them take you alive.”

The brutal significance of his order hangs, scythe-sharp, in the air until Iri says, “I won’t.

” Motions wooden, he slings the rifle’s strap around his neck, leveling an even gaze on the wagon’s occupants.

He stops a moment too long on Sena, his humorless smile an apology.

“I had hoped to speak with you more. Don’t let those bastards make a weapon of you, all right? You’re better than that.”

“Iri—” Sena starts, voice broken, but Travin settles both hands on Iri’s shoulders from behind.

“Ready to go?”

One dry, mocking bow, and Iri disappears. Moments later, Travin flickers back in.

“Let’s head out!”

“Wait,” Tory says, but everyone’s bustling to obey.

Tinny and small from somewhere far away, Tory hears Iri’s running feet fading into the distance. A whoosh and crackle of flame. The soldiers who were drawing closer call out and follow, getting farther from the wagon. Someone beside Tory sighs.

The wagon begins to move, and Tory scrambles over supplies to get to Riese. “You can’t leave him out there. We can go back. This is wrong . Riese—”

He doesn’t move. Tory grabs Riese and tries to pull him around.

A strong arm whips out and knocks Tory to the ground. He lands on rations and rifles, knocking ammunition to the floor with a shower of clinks.

“He’s just a kid! He can’t take on that many soldiers! Not with Null.”

The sharp report of a rifle punctuates his words, followed by an answering spate of bullets. Through the flap, a rush of flame grows bright in the distance, then extinguishes with horrible suddenness and a shocked cry.

“No.” Tory bolts to his feet, but Riese grabs his wrist.

“ Stop it , Tory . ”

Tory’s legs lose strength and he staggers, but Riese’s grip stays tight.

“Riese, they’ll look at him and see only an enemy. They won’t take him, they’ll kill him .”

A final shot rings out, and Tory flinches at the unfeeling crack that splits the silence. If he knows anything from all his painful years of healing, it’s how breakable the human body is.

Riese claps a hand around his mouth. “Exactly,” he whispers, pained.

Exactly.

There’s something terrible and knowing in that word. Tory can’t help but recall what Iri said: You would have volunteered me. The words crawl like bugs beneath his skin.

Would he?

“Iri made his choice.” Riese says. Then, louder, “We’ll survive today because of him. Remember that.”

Tory gets as far as he can from Riese, dropping down at the back of the covered wagon with Sena, well away from the rest of the Seeds.

“You hearing this?” Tory says. “He’s already fucking eulogizing him.”

Sena’s lips thin, gaze fixed on the scenery intermittently visible through the heavy flap over the back of the wagon.

“It was . . . a solid tactical decision. Iri is not the only Pyrokinetic Seed in Riese’s group, and he’s right—they will almost certainly shoot first rather than take an Arlunian Seed into custody.

No competent leader would put a weapon in the hands of his enemy, so Riese chose to give them a weapon they would not dare to use. ”

Anger sings through Tory. “How can you—” He breaks off when he notices how Sena’s teeth grind. He’s shaking and damp with sweat, a flush of restraint high and hot on pale cheeks.

“The utilitarianism of it disgusts me. It’s .

. . it’s exactly what my father would have—” Sena pulls his knees against his chest, buries his face in them, and dissolves into wracking coughs until Tory thinks he might shake apart.

“Fuck,” he moans, and wheezes out a laugh more like a sob.

“It was his choice. Earlier, he told me . . .”

“What?”

He waits a bit too long before he speaks again.

“He said there are causes worth dying for, said he’d do anything to see Riese’s vision through.

I could’ve saved him. Riese would have let me go if not for you.

Did you see? That look. He . . . couldn’t make an enemy of you, so he couldn’t agree. He—he wouldn’t . . .”

Tory swallows.

“It should have been me.”

Tory can barely breathe. “Don’t talk like that. You’ll be fine. You just have to—”

Sena’s words come muffled from between his knees, faint and getting fainter. “I won’t go back. I won’t . They’ll have to kill me first.”

“You’d die either way!” One of Riese’s Seeds up front startles and glares, so Tory leans in and lowers his voice to a whisper. “If you go back, at least you’ll live. If you stay here, all you can do is wait for them to kill you. That’s worse . I won’t let you.”

Sena laughs, but it chokes off and he knots a shaking hand in his shirt, face bright with sweat. “ Let me? You can’t make me.”

“This is stupid! You’ll kill yourself to make a point!”

“I thought the same of you,” Sena says, so quiet he’s barely audible.

“Beating at walls you could never break. Couldn’t understand .

. . why you’d do something so useless.” Beneath the dusting of dark hair, his eyes are bright as flames, lips curling into a weak smile.

“But it . . . feels good to choose it. To stop being afraid.”

“Sena, please. I’d go back for you. I’d find you and get you out. I swear I would.”

“You don’t get it. I’d . . .” Sena shakes his head, gaze hazy and faraway. “I really would rather die than see Kirlov again. I can’t . . .”

Sena doesn’t keep going.

“Hey.” Tory jostles his shoulder. Sena only rocks, makes a plaintive mumble. “ Hey .”

Tory reaches out, but he doesn’t have to touch Sena to feel the wildfire heat radiating off him. Sena’s burning up, his breaths fast and shallow.

Tory scrambles upright and moves along the wall toward the back of the wagon, where Riese is cataloging supplies and organizing them into empty boxes.

“You guys have a doctor, right?”

“Did your friend not tell you about Yized?” Riese frowns. “Are you unwell?”

“Sena’s sick. Was there anything in the supplies we can use? Or anyone—”

Riese’s expression goes blank. “I doubt there’s anything in the supplies, and Yized won’t be back until this evening at the earliest. So far, I’ve only seen rations, canteens, ammo, guns—”

“Give me a canteen, then.”

“ Tory. ”

There’s one tangled around a rifle barrel on the ground, and he snatches it up. Several heads dart up at the clatter.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sena is . . .”

The eyes move toward Sena and come back colder. They murmur variations of should’ve left him there.

He hurries back and drops down beside Sena, uncapping the canteen. “You need to drink.”

Hasra used to force water into Tory when he was feeling like crap—as much as he could bear.

Three sips after he healed Kelly. A cool hand guiding him down to sleep.

Gotta hydrate a fever, right? Not that he appreciated it like he should’ve.

Always too busy trying to keep himself from getting attached.

Oh, and like a fool, he’s attached. To Sena with his earnest stories of stars and stubborn trees penned in by the Compound, with such steadfastness in the face of fear, with infuriatingly terrible self-preservation instincts and a bone-dry sense of humor.

Sena who carried him to the infirmary after Gavin attacked him, who dragged him from the sea with broken ribs, who knows Tory’s fears and dreams by name because they’re Sena’s, too.

What was that story Sena told? Stellite, and kuhlu, and a reckless, helpless reaching for something ages dead. It’s like a prophecy. Tory’s such an idiot.

How didn’t he notice? He looked down on Randall, and here he is in the same place without realizing his feet were taking him there. This feeling is the sort that rips people open. It’s the lethal landing after a short, brutal fall.

But he wants, unreasonably, to take the leap anyway. He wants—

The things he wants terrify him.

Tory healed the broken for years. But this—selfishly, awfully, painfully, he wants Sena to live, because he wants Sena to stay .

The realization leaves him dizzy.

Suddenly, he understands his mother’s warnings in a way he never could before. He doesn’t know what she wanted back when she was free, but he knows with a certainty that sucks the breath from his lungs that losing it hurt her badly enough to turn her eyes only to survival.

To want something is to give that thing permission to hurt you; it’s so much easier to remain whole when you’re alone.

Tory hasn’t even lost anything yet—stars, he doesn’t even have it—but it hurts already, a dizzying throb that steals the heat from his fingers and lips and leaves him shivering, his head a rockslide of catastrophes.

Tory forces them away before they can crush him.

He can fix this. Somehow, they’ll fix this.

Sena’s hand slips off the canteen when he reaches up to grab it.

Five days.

Tory shoves the thought someplace dark and small and far away.

“Here.” Hasra did this so much better, cupping his head and pouring sip after sip into Tory’s mouth when he was too weak to move.

Tory’s movements are stilted. He pours water on Sena’s face twice before he gets the speed of it right.

It’s worthwhile, though, because Sena gives him one of those dry, unimpressed looks that has to mean he’s not doing too badly.

The third try, Sena supports the canteen with one of his own hands and tips it up, nearly draining it in a series of desperate gulps.

“Hey, Sena?”

The silence between question and response stretches taut.

“Mm?”

He’s spent his whole life swallowing words. Turns out speaking the ones he really means hurts just as bad. “You don’t get to die.”

Sena hums, thoughtful. “Not your choice.”

He can choose not to watch. “I wouldn’t make you go back, but—something. We’ll figure something else out.”

Sena tries a lopsided smile Tory translates as fat chance. “Maybe.”

“Tell me you won’t go off and die. I’ll—I’ll keep looking for answers until the last minute. I’ll even do all the heavy lifting since you’re such a mess. You hear me? We’ll fix this.”

“In five days?”

“Promise me you’ll try.”

Sena mumbles something close enough to promise for Tory to hold him to it.

Sena’s eyes slip closed, his thick, dark lashes a startling contrast to the pallor of his face. Underneath his eyes and in the hollows beneath his brow, by the bridge of his nose, the thin skin lies bruise-purple.

Tory scoots back, reaches inside himself for his healing energies.

He finds them, alive and thriving. But what use are they if he can’t use them?

A broken rib, a fever and cough would be so easy to fix.

The body is a stubborn thing. It wants to be well.

Tory would barely suffer at all to make it like they never happened.

But he can’t sense Sena’s healing energies beyond the chaotic crackle of his Seed. He doesn’t dare to expand them again and earn the wrath of everyone here, but perhaps he can crush them down instead, maybe small enough to be able to heal Sena—

“Hold on,” he murmurs. “I’m going to try something.”

The energy responds to him as readily as it did with Iri, but it’s dense beyond imagination.

It doesn’t want to shrink. He pushes it, but Sena starts trembling before Tory gets it down to half its size, fingernails scrabbling at his skin like it hurts.

Tory lets it go, and it snaps back. Tory grits his teeth.

Maybe he can heal around it. Make it withdraw from Sena in a localized way so he can heal him bit by bit.

Nothing. There’s too much. Far too much. “Damn it, Sena.”

Maybe Iri will have some idea—

Tory aches. Iri can’t help them anymore.

Even eight inkhstones weren’t enough to fully suppress Sena’s power. Tory presses his hand over Sena’s uniform and reaches for his own healing energies. He’s the Worldseed, one of the First Children. He and Sena are supposed to be able to do the impossible.

But there’s nothing.

“ Useless .” Helplessness carves hollows in his gut.

Sena slips forward and Tory catches him, presses him back against the wall.

Tory joins him there, knees tucked up under his chin.

When Sena’s head falls onto his right shoulder, he lets it stay.

He unbuttons his jacket and slips it off one shoulder and then the next, awkwardly tugging it past Sena and finally pulling it off his arm.

He uses his left hand to toss it over Sena.

He’s plenty warm, and he still has the grungy, short-sleeved undershirt on, so it’s not a big deal.

Sena shakes, the depth of the tremors clear even in the brokenness of his breaths.

How did he get like this? What did Tory miss?

“Didn’t you say you don’t get sick? Shit. Wake up, I can’t do this.”

The wagon rattles along, the only sounds the whistling of the wind, the crunch of rock beneath its wheels, and Sena’s too-fast breaths against Tory’s skin.

Tory squeezes his burning eyes closed.

They’ll make this right. They have to. Tory isn’t sure he can bear the alternative.