Isolated, alone, in alliances but empty ones.
I stick to the cold warrior who, as I look around the burning rage of destruction swallowing the town, I don’t find.
I stick to him because I must, and he decides it.
Maybe he can’t just throw me in with the captives. Might be more dangerous down here with them. Maybe he can’t throwme onto a cart and just feed me when he needs to, because the general denied the request.
It’s all guesswork.
But I know that echoing void of empty alliances, isolation, and yearning—yearning for my normalcy, for the world to be returned, for the dark and its fae to be banished.
I yearn further than that.
I yearn all the way back to my mum, and at the thought of her, that fucking memory flashes in my mind, seared forever into the grooves of my brain.
I flinch against the intrusion.
It’s a strike to the soul, that memory of her face, painted in a way she never would have done to herself, surrounded by satin cushions, because I couldn’t afford silk, and under the ghastly glare of fluorescent lighting.
No one should see their mum like that, painted and prepared in a coffin.
My hand finds its way to the collar of my Kathmandu. Fingers slip into the gap and feel around for the familiar touch of the silver chain on my skin.
There.
A cheap chain, but not so poorly done that it will fall off me in a strong wind. The real treasure is what’s attached to it.
I finger it out of the collar, up to the dip of my clavicle, then fist my hand around it.
The pendant.
The locket.
And I hold it.
I hold it all the while it takes for the dark fae to ravage the town, and I release it, tuck it back into the collar, when the unitrepositions down the road, and fires are blazing all around, thick smoke gathering in the streets, and the army marches out of the town.
It’s only then, standing, moving with the captives, caged in by the silent guards, that I let the locket rest on my breastbone, against the beat of my heart.
SEVEN
Fire eats through every building in the town with a ravenous hunger. The siege is so violent that it billows tunnels of black smoke up into the darkness.
But the smoke doesn’t reach us here at the top of the hill. It should. The breeze that whistles over us comes from downhill, from the town, but as if some invisible force redirects the smoke, we are untouched.
Yet the heat of the blaze sears my face.
My cheeks burn hot, that chill in my bones is warming, the stubborn damp spots on my leggings are drying, and it’s the first scrap of comfort I’ve had since I left the hospital.
My jacket crinkles as I wrap my arms around myself and rest the bone of my chin on my knees.
Since we followed the main road that splits the town to here, up the wet hill, I lost Connie in the throngs of captives.
The new woman sits with the tattered ones.
I count them.
A group within a group. A haggard, exhausted clique of thirteen humans.
