“If we’re keeping count, Fi, you’re still several points ahead.”
“And since when are you a Voidwalker?”
Something tight coiled Astrid’s lips, a knife slant to her brow. “I do what my daeyari asks of me.”
“Aren’t you precious? But to become a Voidwalker, you’d have to…”
Quiet. This Shard was too quiet. Astrid, staring at Fi with hollow eyes, was too quiet.
“You’d have to die…” Fi said. Too quiet.
Astrid charged with a war cry. Fi met her sword, a spark-strewn parry, a messy grapple as Astrid tried to pin her arm.
“Voidwalkers make more useful Arbiters,” Astrid snarled. “Shouldn’t you know that, Fi? It took a few tries. Not all of us get as lucky as you on the first go.”
Fi hated holding only half the cards. She hated that slipping feeling of catching up to something she should have realized sooner, as lurching as the slip of her boots against the ice. In their grapple, the sleeve of Astrid’s shirt pulled back. Aurora light slanted against bare skin, milk-smooth when Fi had held it years ago, now coated in scars.
Slashes. And claws. And teeth.
Teeth. OnherAstrid. So much rage in her friend’s eyes. Fi had found a daeyari who didn’t use his claws on her.
Astrid hadn’t been so fortunate.
“Why did you stay with Verne?” Fi’s words came out more plea than accusation. “How could you help her do all this?”
“What else was I supposed to do!”
She swung.
“Verne would have hunted me down if I left her!” Astrid shouted.
Another swing, a spark against Fi’s sword.
“She’d raze our entire town just to make a point, would spike my family from the gates of the power factory!”
Fi’s parry slipped, the blade grazing her hand.
“You have no idea what I’ve had to do to protect the home you left behind!”
Astrid kept shouting. Kept swinging. “The people I had to bring to her, Fi. Parents and dissenters and children. Fuckingchildren!”
Fi couldn’t hold her sword steady. She couldn’t focus on anything beyond the rage cracking Astrid’s words, the fractures in her heart.
A boot hooked Fi’s leg.
She fell, smacking ribs to frozen ground. Then Astrid was on top of her. In a panicked scramble, Fi wrestled the sword from Astrid’s hand, a hiss of energy on snow as it tumbled away. Astrid twisted Fi’s arm, forcing her to drop her weapon with a shout. Fi dug nails into cloth instead, into the soft skin of Astrid’s arms as she held Fi down by the throat.
A spark of maroon. Astrid raised an energy dagger, aimed at Fi’s neck.
Then stopped.
They both fell still. Fi: wide eyes on the dagger, scarcely able to breathe past the clamp of Astrid’s fingers. Astrid: straddled atop her, halted mid swing. The weapon trembled in her grip.
“You left,” Astrid hissed. “You left, and I had nowhere to go. No one to help me.”
On the train, Astrid hadn’t swung. In Nyskya, she hadn’t shot.
“Astrid?” Fi whispered, a plea to a panicked beast.
