Page 51 of Cage of Starlight

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

R iese scrambles out behind him, calling his name, but Tory outpaces him. Riese might have been on the run for the last few years, but Tory’s been running almost as long as he’s been alive. It’s nice to move toward something, for once.

Helner can take his Core out. They’ll trash the Monitor Room so Sena won’t have to worry about being tracked.

They’ll figure this—this thing out, whatever it is, and it’ll be fine.

Sena will get better and Tory can stop having to worry because worrying sucks and he’s over it, can’t imagine for the life of him how Thatcher put up with it.

But things will be good. Near-perfect.

Nothing is ever this perfect, but maybe he’s due an easy win. Maybe they both are.

“Sena! Hey, listen! You won’t—”

He’s not by the fire where Tory left him. The embers flicker livid red. Sunrise makes spindly shadows of the silent congregation of trees.

He hurries to Sena’s tent, hesitates only a second before pulling open the flap.

He coughs. Smoke, sweat, and the biting tartness of coffee heated too long make his eyes water. There’s a pitcher on its side, its sludgy contents poured over a circular singe mark where the pitcher’s heated bottom must have set the edge of the blanket alight.

If Sena were there in the midst of it, maybe Tory could laugh, joke about how Sena isn’t allowed to touch anything even remotely hazardous while sleepy or unwell.

But his stomach sinks, mouth sour.

Sena is gone.

This is the most awful feeling yet. An acid, wrenching emptiness. The worst part is, he goes straight to bargaining. Surely, he’ll be back. Maybe someone needed to talk with him; maybe he was confused—

Or maybe he bailed.

Sena’s pack, after all, is also gone.

The sizzle of relief in Tory fades to numbness. He forgot that his choices have so often been whittled down to these: leave or be left behind.

Maybe Sena knew it, too, decided to make it easier for both of them.

He probably did. It hasn’t been easy for Sena, either.

Like Tory, he can’t afford the pain of holding onto things that could ruin him.

Maybe he was afraid, too, of wanting. Those last words he said before Tory left with Riese—“You go on.” He was sick. He was so awfully sick.

Maybe that was a benediction. Maybe those stories were his way of saying goodbye.

Five days, he promised, and Tory believed him.

This should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? An easy break, bloodless. It is . It’s just that there’s not nearly enough air out here.

Something sharper and more caustic than shame burns in his belly.

A hand settles on his shoulder, heavy and warm, and like a traitor, his mind jumps first to Sena?

He crushes the thought and turns.

*

Sena can’t stop running—doesn’t dare.

Fresh blood slips in lazy lines down his right arm and dyes his glove red. His hands—he feels the urge to hide them, even more than usual, and there’s a reason why, but his buzzing thoughts refuse to yield an explanation that makes sense.

This is why he runs: an acid burst of horror; the flap of his tent slipping open behind him; grasping hands; frightened, wide eyes mirroring his own; light glinting off metal; pain, localized and sharp like a bee sting; an apology.

This is why he runs: like a fool, he wants to live.

His blood roars in his ears and his uniform rasps at fever-hot skin. He’s never wanted anything more than he wants to rest, but he can’t. If he does, he won’t rise. He forces leaden legs to move. Away is the only way that matters.

It’s light and dark and then light again, like a magic trick, and acid nausea bubbles through him. Branches and eerie blue flowers sway in front of his face, and roots lash out of the earth to grab him. His skin strains over his bones, like he might burst.

Fading vision fixed on the ground, he finds a path and follows it.

His feet twist in deep ruts. Wheel tracks , his head tells him after he’s followed them maybe for miles. Sena staggers past whispering trees, between rocks like blades, and out into open air and hills wreathed by low fog.

Roots rise in the distance, a cathedral or a great ribcage—the bones of the Beast inviting him to his final slumber among the stars. If Sena passes through them, he can be at rest. But what a lonely rest it would be.

No, he’s running for a reason. Toward or away from something, to keep or to save something.

Tory .

Sena turns away and loses his breath at the wasteland beneath and beside and all around him.

He chokes on the sour-sweet odor of blood and decay and the tang of saltwater, blinks and opens his eyes to a deathscape pocked with bodies like flowers, swollen and cold on red-dyed grass.

Somehow, he’s walked himself all the way to a graveyard.

It’s appropriate.

He forges a path through the dead, their faces rigid with fear, eyes flat and whitish. Dull, bruise-colored sunrise glints ghostly silver off hundreds of bracelets just like his. This place is a mortuary of numbers, not names.

(I-S)VS/0001. Sacrifices to a war of his father’s devising, Sena the first of thousands—not a son but a sword. He’ll lie among them soon. Maybe he already is. Fog plays around his ankles and beads on his skin. He shivers.

He burns from the inside out.

His eyes settle on a gangly figure near the trees, face covered with a scrap of cloth. There’s blood in a long, wandering line in front of it, like someone cared enough to try to drag the body away.

Whoever the boy is, he is loved.

The thin wrists, folded over the ruined chest, look so much like Tory’s. The tone of the skin, pale like the sun never touched him a day in his life, the spatter of light freckles—

It can’t be Tory. This land of the dead is no place for him. Tory is achingly, awfully alive.

Sena staggers toward the still figure, breath stoppered by the knot in his throat, and stumbles to his knees beside the body.

He wheezes and tastes rot. His fingers find the edges of the cloth over the boy’s face and sit there.

A voice inside him tells him of course Tory is fine.

He’s—somewhere. The details are hazy. Firelight and warm smiles and a cloak—that cloak he loves so much.

It warms Sena now, and there’s a slice in it and Sena’s dirtying it with his blood and—

Tory is not the boy underneath this cloth. Sena steels himself to lift it. One, two . . .

“Don’t you touch him!”

A shadow races out from the tree line, knife in hand, and Sena’s head whips up. His vision does an awful cartwheel at the suddenness. The angry stranger rushes up. She and the ground and the grass and the body tip and roll, but Sena catches the important things.

The girl—short and uniformed and bloodstained from hands to chest—crouches over the body like she’ll die beside it. “Don’t you dare touch him.”

Then she goes still, and her face is as much a muddle as the rest of the world, but her voice comes out odd and cautious. “L-Lieutenant Vantaras?”

He squints. “I . . . do I . . .?” Then, with a flap of his hand toward the body, “Tory?”

The girl huffs. “No.”

From the woods, a young man’s voice rises up, slurred and faint. “Niela? What’s happening?”

The angry, bloodstained girl’s eyes flick toward the woods. She shifts to stand between Sena and the voice. She calls, “Stay where you are. Don’t move again. You know what happens when you do.”

“My friends, are they . . .?”

“Long gone, thank the stars. Stay there.”

The voice in the woods goes silent.

The girl—Niela—frowns. “This is Randall. I tried to heal him, but . . .” Her lips go tight and thin, bloodless.

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be. You and the bastards who sent him here.”

Sena flinches.

Niela hisses a breath in, mouth opening like she’s not finished with him, but before she can start, a petite young man, barely upright with a tangled mess of long wavy hair, stumbles through the tree line and collapses against a rough trunk on the fringe of the woods.

He sways where he stands, eyes dipping closed in a slow blink.

And that determined set to his mouth, the burnt orange sweater several times too big for him, the burn scars on his hands that Sena now knows must be from the fire he set when his Seed blossomed at six—

Niela throws her bloody hands up. “You’ll reopen it! Why? I only just —”

The boy breathes, “Knew it was your voice I heard.”

Sena’s vision tips and turns and maybe he’s turning with it, but he finds his feet again. “ Iri ?”

Just like he last saw him, except the sweater is more black-red than orange, pocked with five or six holes, his skin the bloodless bluish-pale of the dead. He’s gone because of Sena.

Words stumble from his lips and his eyes burn. “Sorry,” he slurs. “Sorry I couldn’t . . . save you.”

Iri makes a sound like a laugh and lifts a shoulder in a shrug. He winces, turning his smile to a grimace. His free hand flutters over the holes in his sweater.

Sena doesn’t realize the flesh beneath the holes was smooth until it opens in front of his eyes like a ragged mouth, weeping blood.

“I’m so sorry.” Sena presses a gloved hand—already wet with his own blood, from a wound he doesn’t remember getting—to Iri’s red-soaked sweater. Blood seeps through the cloth and warms him, but all he can do is shiver.

Iri smiles at him with the forgiveness of the untethered dead.

“It’s okay,” Sena offers. “I’m dead, too.” Dark blots close in from the corners of his vision.

“Oh, you really are a mess, aren’t you?” A hand reaches for him.

He rears back before Iri’s cold fingers make contact, and Iri staggers, shocked. Sena trembles where he stands. This must be his punishment, to watch Iri die again.