“I’m sorry,” he says, and I think he means it.
“I want to think she got out, but the odds…”
Mordecai crouches in front of me. “If she is half the omega you are, she gave them a run for their money.”
I sniff and squeeze the letters to me, trying to push the emotion back down. I don’t want them to see me like this.
“I don’t know what I hoped, but I guess that she’d died in some stupid and painless way somewhere far from here. Who will remember their names? Hers? Ava’s? Ours?”Where is Cadel? Is he alive? Where did he go?
“The Resistance will, if we survive,” Mordecai says. “We will remember their names and say them over and over. Their sacrifices and suffering weren’t for nothing. Even if we forget their names, we’ll still remember them. All the omegas and alphas who suffered here.”
I hold the letters for another long moment and refold them, slipping them back in my pocket where they’ll be safe.
“Her name was Valryn.”
“Valryn. I’ll tell them,” Legion says.
I close my eyes, and I think I drift then. I’m not asleep but not quite awake. My mum and I are walking, and she’s got my hand tight in hers.
She’s speaking to me, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. I try to keep up with her, but she gets further and further away until my hand slips from hers, and then she’s gone.
I wake up with a start, drawn out of sleep by a familiar nightmare of my captor’s smirking face. To my surprise, I find Legion staring at me. He forces a smile, but it’s dull and flat.
“My brothers disappeared. I don’t remember my parents, but they were just gone one day. My older sister was my responsibility, but she presented in front of about thirty betas in a market. There was nothing anyone could do. They just took her. My old neighbour held me while I screamedand eventually forced a drug down my throat, and he kept doing that every time I roused. When I woke up, it was all over. She was in Foreen.”
“What did you do?” I whisper, no longer wondering why he has such deep shadows in his eyes.
“I came to Foreen. I tried to get in. But I was a kid; I wasn’t an alpha in my prime, I was too new, untested. They beat me and threw me into a ditch. A few weeks later, they rode away, and I approached the city. I could smell blood and death in the air. The bodies they’d hung had started to rot, and the four-winged crows had descended on them, eating their flesh. I stood there at the chain cage in front of that massive gate, and I couldn’t go in. I was too scared of what I would find.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So you know why I will do everything I can to save everyone I can. Because I couldn’t save my brothers, and I couldn’t save her.”
I shift until I’ve got my legs crossed. “What was her name?”
“Merril. You want to know the worst part? I don’t remember my brother's names, and I don’t think there’s anyone left alive who could tell me.”
We sit in silence for a couple of minutes with story and pain sitting between us.
“You want me to help the Resistance?”
“I do. I believe in them, not in everything they are doing.” Legion chuckles. “I’m not blindly devoted like Mordecai is, but I believe that we can do some good with them.”
“What makes you think I could possibly offer anything?”
“Keres, please stop selling yourself short; it's getting tiresome. You know how they work; you intimately know the Beta’s Fang. You know the Warden.”
I flinch.
“Oh, yes, I know all about your relationship with him. Who he was to you.”
“There is no relationship,” I snap, but there’s something in his eye, a knowledge and pity that has me sitting stiffly, waiting for a fatal blow. How does he know about us?
“There was. And that’s my point; you know you have more to add than you are letting on. I’m not sure why you are holding back, what reason you could possibly have, but I’m willing to bet you really do want to help, and your reason for not is based in fear.”
“Who are you doing this for now, Legion? Who are you trying to save?”
Legion smiles wider and inclines his head, giving up the argument. Unwilling to spill anymore of his secrets.
