With a nod of his head, he agreed.
“Hey.” I poked Onyx with my elbow, the leaves and sticks crunching beneath each footfall. “You wanna be my second-in-command?”
Onyx bumped me with his shoulder, a sad grin weighing his handsome features down. “It’d be my honor, my queen.”
“The honor is mine,” I responded with a shoulder nudge back to him.
A few hours passed before we finally found a clearing in the woods. Trusting that Shadow’s shields worked, we parked ourselves so we could eat. It wasn’t much, but Katia had managed to grab the essentials: fruits, raw vegetables, bread, and the like. The food wouldn’t last long, but it was enough for now.
Once I made sure everyone was taken care of, I grabbed an apple and a piece of bread and found a tree trunk to sit against. Slate slid down beside me, not saying anything as we ate in comfortable silence.
“There should be a speakeasy not too far from here.” Slate’s knees were bent with his forearms dangling off the edges.
I winced. “Yeah…so, I’m pretty sure the humans in that one recognized me and aren’t a fan.” I remembered the last two times I’d been inside a speakeasy—particularly the one where I’d confronted Chrome. The pain from the Elemental blade resurfaced as I remembered how I nearly died from the black crystal poisoning. Word would’ve spread about me after that incident and the time I’d fought the human woman.
Slate chuckled. “I remember that. You almost had him, though, didn’t you?”
I punched his shoulder, trying to ignore the fact that he’d been watching from a distance the whole time. “I did!”
“It was cute…” Slate’s laughs came harder, which lightened my soul just a fraction by the sound. I’d missed that so much.
“Wait.” I froze, realizing something. “Did you give me the antidote on the train that night? When I’d been unconscious?”
Slate shook his head. “No. That was Chrome.”
“He never told me that.”
“At the time, he was slipping further into devolution; his mind was going. He didn’t remember most of the important people at times, including me. And especially not you, which, if you had known him when he was still living at the King’s Palace, you would understand how shocking that was. But I suspect there was more to that than devolution at play.”
“He said he could always feel my emotions.”
Slate plucked a blade of grass and began picking it apart as he spoke. “He did. Even back then, he was hellbent on keeping you safe from your father’s wrath.”
The wind breezed through my hair, brushing it into the corner of my eyes. “He thought having you train me would keep me safe from him.”
“Yeah,” Slate admitted. “It was better than you being completely defenseless and at his mercy.”
I reflected on my earliest memories of Slate. How he had seemed to pop up out of nowhere in my life. “I know it was all planned now, but that day you found me in the gym is still a special one. It’s the day that changed my life.”
Slate grinned a soft, crooked smile. “I got out of class early that day and looked for you. I hadn’t expected to find you upset.” He grabbed my hand, which was resting in my lap. “Please don’t think it’s all been a lie since the start. I’ve always meant every word I told you.”
I still had so many questions, but I was too exhausted to keep pushing.
“Don’t worry about the humans in the speakeasy. I’ll handle it,” Slate assured me. “I built a rapport with them a while back.”
“So, can you explain something to me?” I asked, having enough energy for one more question, after all. “How have you been able to travel back and forth between Arcadia and Terraguard so easily all these years?”
“Portals.”
I angled my head. “Like the one that Chrome and I could create?”
“Yeah, similar to that, but it came from Valik. He’s able to open them whenever he needs.” Slate squeezed my hand. I forgot he was holding it. “But it requires a lot of energy for him. And it drains him for a while. So once I came through, I stayed here for days or weeks, monitoring things and keeping Chrome from depleting. During those times, I got to know the human militias in the speakeasies quite well.”
I still couldn’t help the sting of betrayal when he spoke of his time behind the scenes. “Happen to know when the next scorse is coming through? We’re gonna be out of food if we don’t find one.”
Slate thought on it for a moment, mindlessly swiping away gnats that buzzed around our heads. “I might, actually. Chrome spent some time in the underground fights, so we figured out the rotation patterns and where they’d likely crop up. It took some time, but we also learned how to decipher most of the codes that they’d spray paint on the buildings.”
“Gods, he really held back so much information from me,” I said, running my fingers through my hair. I felt as small as the gnats flying around us.
