Her thoughts found her soon after, crashing into her like waves brought on by a storm. The only thing that kept her from giving up and curling into a defeated ball on the ground was the rock in her hands. Light streaked out between her fingers and the calming warmth of it on her palm managed to keep the demons at bay.
She crawled into the nearby plants until she was surrounded on all sides. It wasn’t much protection, but it was enough, and it made her feel safer.
Yahiro closed her eyes and pleaded. Something had to happen—needed to happen—because she didn’t think she could take any more of the fugue that was her stale life.
She pleaded that the other girls had fled and found safety, that they were now behind the metal walls of the wreckage and well away from the forest and the bog.
Preta and Charlie, they had been the only two people who had the same haunted look that matched her own. Granted, the rest were theConcord’ssleazy guards, but if she had learned any lesson, it was strength, and she knew it when she saw it.
Maybe...
Maybe if fate hadn’t spat on her once again, she could’ve made genuine friends. Yahiro held back the laugh of absurdity that rose within her.Friends with criminals. That’s a good one, Hiro.Hero Yahiro or Yah-hear-the-hero? Missy Hero’s in the building.
I’m a godsdamned cop.Memories of her past came to her then and this time, she didn’t have a daily dose of medication to banish them. She reached down and cupped her bleeding foot, swollen and raw from overuse, dirtied by alien wildlife and dreg that could kill her.
Once again, she broke an oath to herself and prayed that the nightmare would finally let her rest. That if she was destined to die, that it would happen soon, and that it would be painless.
Chapter Two
SUNDAMAR
“Feeling!? That. Feeling!”
Sundamar looked out over the vast expanse of Sonhadra right as an electric shock struck him down to his knees. Galan, his brother of light, clutched his chest beside him but he couldn’t focus for long as his vision blurred. Pain seized him, plumes of it crashed over him, and for the first time since his earliest memories, hefeltagain.
“Yeessss,” he choked out. What he felt—at least what he thought he remembered—was desperation and sadness mixed with fear, and to top it off, a sense of comfort. He focused on the last one. It bloomed until it eclipsed the others and slowly, as he sucked in a strangled breath, he rose back to his feet.
Emotions.
He clenched his fist over his chest and pounded the empty spot where his heart used to be.
‘The Creator.’Sundamar blasted the thought into Galan’s mind.
‘No.’
He looked over at Galan who was still kneeling on the floor with his vast wings shielding his frame. With heavy steps, Sundamar approached him and stroked the sharpened edges of his extracted feathers—deliberately—cutting himself and wondered at the pain. The blood.
