“I know enough,” I said. “I know you like to pretend you’re the only one who can carry the fire through the forest without burning. Come carry it in a circle where your hands will be counted and watched.”
“You want me bound,” he said, amused again. “How cozy.”
“I want the path ended,” I said. “You can stand at the edge and make commentary or you can stand inside it and help. You like being necessary. Be necessary for the thing that keeps people fighting.”
“People always fight, and their hunger only grows as temptation dangles,” he said.
“And when the plate is empty,” I said, “they remember who hoarded the bread.”
“What would you even require of me?” he asked lightly, but his eyes had lost their play.
“The truth, spoken here and elsewhere,” I said. “The knowledge you’ve refused to hand over because it would make us less afraid of you. The names of the hands tugging on the knot from darkness. The places you’ve taught the shadows to listen. Your work, in daylight, with witnesses.”
He went very still, something inside him settling into a posture I rarely saw—no swagger, no theatrics, just a man standing still enough to hear the sound of his own breath.
“Keegan will never allow it,” he said.
“Keegan will let me choose,” I said, and the Hollows liked that enough that the cold around my wrists warmed by a degree. “He will hate it and still let me choose.”
“And if I say no?”
“Then you will tell me why,” I said. “In a way that respects the fact that I came here on Luna’s word and stayed on mine. You said yourself that the Hunger Path needs to be stopped before you can move on to getting back what is yours, whatever that is.”
He studied me for a long count of heartbeats and looked beyond me to the shroud where the silhouettes of my people waited.
“But you know that the curse is pulling tighter, and while there might be a small reprieve, it will end you.” I stared at him.
“And Keegan,” he said curtly.
“I want to end what Malore set in motion before any of us had a chance.”
“You want to end the path,” he said finally, and it wasn’t a question.
“I want to end a habit that makes us think swallowing each other is the only way to be alive.”
“A pretty sentence,” he said. “You should be careful about becoming the poet you accused me of being. It’s catching.”
“Answer me,” I said, and the last of my patience set down its cup.
He did. He said a sentence I had not prepared for, and the Hollows, neutral, measuring, winter, agreed it counted.
And his answer changed everything.
Chapter Eleven
Keegan was the first shape I saw when I stepped back to the shroud, with his broad shoulders, winter-hazel eyes, and jaw set like he could hold the whole hexagon together with grit alone. He didn’t ask what Gideon had said. He didn’t need to. The Hollows had pressed the echo of those words into the air like a watermark.
Twobble barreled into my side with earmuffs askew, arms open for a hug, and snacks already in the offering position.
“Alive?” he squeaked, then peered around me, stage-whispering, “Did you throw anything?”
“Only my patience,” I said, mouth dry and somehow smiling anyway.
Stella took my other elbow and drew me a step farther into the circle’s warmth, the frost around her hem glittering like sequins that had learned manners.
“How did he phrase it?” she asked, because she knew the way a sentence sits in the mouth matters more than people think. “Like a man offering amends or like one making a reservation?”
“Like a man choosing a door, knowing there was another escape exit,” I said.
