Page 48 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

S ena sleeps on ice and wakes to darkness, on fire.

He shudders halfway-upright in his tent and chokes until he’s nearly retching. Pain bursts white-hot behind his eyelids and clears the haze of confusion. He really shouldn’t have slept on his back.

He’s never once missed these things: the anchor-weight of his bones that comes with high fever; the whistle of breath from overtaxed lungs; the molasses-like slowness of disjointed thoughts, each its own isolated emergency. He’s glad to have left them behind when he was nine.

He can’t remember how he got here.

He has fragments. The communicator. Bumbling through a halfway-competent explanation of their circumstances and begging for time.

Five days.

Talking with Tory in the truck. Being dragged out, arm around someone’s shoulders. A steady stream of complaints, their token sharp edges dulled by the warmth and steadiness of the hand on his waist, the way the voice would crack sometimes and say, hey, not much farther, okay? Just keep walking.

Getting to his feet is a nightmare in gradation, every movement broken down into steps.

This, like so many things, he’s gotten better at with practice.

He finds himself on his feet and doesn’t stop to wonder how he got there.

He steps through the tent flap and into star-studded dark.

A fire burns a little ways away, and Sena recognizes the lone silhouette in front of it.

He drops down on one of the vacated stumps around the pit and focuses on breathing.

Through the trees, faint blue glows at the horizon. Sunrise. He slept a long while, then.

Tory tosses a twig onto the embers. “You look like you were chewed up and shit out twice.”

“Then I look better than I feel,” Sena rasps.

It startles a laugh from Tory, a tightness in his shoulders easing. “Hair’s a mess . It’s like a bird’s nest. You should wear it like that all the time.”

Sena frowns, but Tory grins, soft, in the direction of the flames.

Sena wouldn’t mind keeping that smile on his face. “You should see it in the mornings before I wet it down. Lay a towel over it. Sometimes my bird sits on the towel while I get ready.”

Tory’s eyes dart to him, dancing. “So your head is sometimes an actual bird’s nest? I love that. What’s its name, your bird?”

“Kierney.” Jeffra always takes good care of him when Sena is away. Perhaps she’ll adopt him when he can’t return.

“I wouldn’t . . . Wow. Yeah, I can’t imagine that.” Tory turns to Sena, cheerful as Sena has ever seen him, and says, “You’re pathetic, you know.”

Sena blinks. He dives deep into his well of standard responses and finds nothing to match that, so he stays silent. Tory will keep talking. It will make sense soon, probably.

“I’ve been wanting to say that to someone for so long , you have no idea.

See, I was always the one getting variations on that theme from, uh.

From Thatcher or Hasra. Hasra, mostly. Hasra entirely, actually.

Thatcher’s way too nice. She’d be all, poor little thing, legs wobbling like reeds, or , sad creature, what do you expect me to do with you ?

It’s nice to be able to try it on someone else. ”

Thatcher. Hasra. He says the names with such gentleness. Those are the people he left behind when Sena dragged him into this. Sena leans toward the heat of the fire and squeezes his eyes closed.

A face drifts up in his vision—graying hair and smile lines. “Thatcher,” he murmurs. “The one with the tea. Terrible liar.”

Tory jolts upright on his log. “You saw him?”

Of course. As ranking officer, Sena made sure he was the one who questioned him. “He knew you were acting illegally and still protected you.”

Tory curses. “Idiot! I told him to—”

“He’s fine. My report asserted he knew nothing. I had to capture you,” Sena says. “No one else needed to get involved.”

“I . . . thank you.” Tory hums something, staring into the fire, before turning back to Sena. “Hey, what do you think you’ll do next?”

Responding with die seems a little macabre. “What do you mean?”

“After all this. What’ll you do when all this is said and done, and you’re free?”

“If,” Sena corrects him, gently.

“When,” Tory repeats. “Humor me.”

Irritation ripples through Sena, then sorrow. “Don’t,” he whispers. “Tory, please.”

“I just want to know. It’s a simple question.”

It isn’t. Sena’s never met anything with a sharper double edge than hope. Making that tree grow with Iri—seeing the fruit he made that dead branch bear—

This feeling is a thousand times too large for him.

Sena has mere days to live and hands he wants to bare before Tory.

He wants to touch Tory, skin to skin. Reckless Tory, bright Tory.

Tory who tried to heal Sena even when he knew he couldn’t.

It’s such a terrible, unfamiliar feeling, one he never dared to embrace before.

It’s so much harder not to want now that he knows his hands are capable of making things grow.

He’s full of so much hope it could choke him, growing in his chest like nuisance vines.

There’s far more than five short days of it banging to get out.

“Sena,” Tory echoes. “Please.”

Sena laughs, and it cuts at his throat, raw from coughing.

His ribs stab at him with pain that lights up his whole side.

“Fine.” He stares into the fire. Tory stares at him.

“ If I’m still alive five days from now, and .

. .” Free. He can’t say it. “I don’t know.

A quiet place, with trees. A friend for Kierney.

” Short sentences because he’s short of breath.

These are easy things to hope for, because they are easier to let go of.

He can’t bear to tell Tory how much he’d like to see his mother and sister and catch up on a decade of conversation he avoided because he was afraid they might look at him and see the weapon he saw in himself.

He can’t tell Tory you’re foolish and reckless and impossibly warm, and you make me want to hope for things again.

Tory laughs. “Come on, that’s boring! Think big. Like—you and I, we’ll break down those ugly walls your dad loves so much. We’ll empty the labor camps and remake this place into a country worth living in.” His hands clench in front of him, firelight catching on thin, slick lines. Scars.

“What happened?” Sena says. “To your hands?”

“We’re telling nice stories now. It’s not a nice one.”

Sena has never minded the sad stories. “Tell me anyway.”

Tory shrugs. “I was clumsy when I was six, and there were lots of sharp parts on the assembly lines in the camps. If folks messed up too often or got too slow, the soldiers would motivate them.” He taps the backs of his hands. “Never on the palms. Didn’t want to prevent us from working.”

Bitter rage boils up in Sena, squeezing the breath from him. “Those camps should be destroyed.”

Tory grins. “Right? I’d pay to see it. You’d just touch those awful fences and turn ’em to so much rust. Like I said, we’ll burn the world down. When we’re done, I’ll drag you to Hulven, reintroduce you to Thatcher. Then we can find your boring house with trees.”

We . Sena could poke a million holes in that ridiculous dream. Instead, he says, “It’d take a lot of time.”

It’s cruel, that Tory is the past and Sena is the future but neither of them can make five short days last longer.

Tory whispers, “I suppose we’d need a lot of help.”

The wind picks up in the trees, low flames flickering as ice skitters through Sena’s bones. He starts shaking and can’t stop.

“You cold?” Tory’s hands skate over his shoulders, feather-light touches that make Sena shiver, but not from cold. Something must come to Tory as he sits there, considering. “Hey, wait here a second.”

Sena’s raised eyebrow does its best to communicate I wasn’t planning on moving .

Tory retreats. Sena leans as close to the fire as he dares.

He loses time, he’s pretty sure, because next thing he knows, there’s someone behind him yelling, “Catch!”

His body is too slow to respond. He stares at the blurred, firelit curiosity of his empty hand until he registers that he’s supposed to have something inside it. He squints into the dimness and finds something rumpled on the ground.

Tory grabs up the item and dusts it off, suddenly sheepish, before extending it.

“Treated leather,” he says. “Pretty much waterproof. Warm as anything, but pretty light and thin. You can use it.”

Sena examines the item. A cloak.

The cloak—kuhlu vines lovingly but imperfectly sewn along the bottom, worn slick with years of wear. “I can’t. This is . . . important to you.”

Tory shrugs. “All the shivering you’re doing is making me cold, and anyway, I don’t want you to get me sick. Go ahead. Be warm. Use the thing.”

“I was the one who took this from you.”

“The one who gave it back, too.”

Sena sighs relief as he shrugs the cloak around his shoulders.

The glow on the horizon is brighter. No sun yet, but the promise of warmth. The cloak traps the heat of Sena’s body inside and thaws the ice in his bones. “S’nice,” he says.

“I know. That’s why I brought it.”

Sena wraps the cloak tighter around himself with his left arm.

He must have done something to his right.

It aches. Maybe Tory dropped him once or twice, dragging him back to his tent.

He lets his eyes close, enjoys the light show of the fading fire through his eyelids.

He could sleep here. This was not how he envisioned his last few days of life.

He imagined it would be a quiet, dignified affair, with no one in attendance to see him struggle.

“Sena, listen.”

He tries an “Mm?” Hopes it’s audible over the wind and the crackling fire.

“What you said earlier, in the truck—about your Core.”

Sena keeps his eyes closed at the tentative words. Tory is not used to caring, but Sena is even less used to being cared for. It’s a strange feeling. Worse, it’s not a terrible one.