“Sonara…”
His words trailed off as Azariah groaned. Then she shifted and began to blink back the sunlight.
Sonara’s body calmed with relief. She grinned, the kind of smile she hadn’t felt graze her lips in a long time. It felt a little like waking. A little like stretching after a long, curled-up slumber in the lonely dark.
What Azariah had done in that ship, facing that atlas orb, and whatSonarahad done, to rid the princess of her last ounces of doubt, of fear, would forever bind them.
The Princess had asked Sonara to take up a place in her court someday.It was not a decision to be made lightly. And not one Sonara was yet ready to make, but nevertheless, she felt she owed Azariah a life debt for destroying the Wanderer’s power source.
“Karr is alive,” Markam said suddenly, lifting his chin to Sonara as he found his waterskin and poured some onto Azariah’s dried, cracked lips.
Karr sat twenty paces away, facing the Bloodhorns. They’d crash-landed on the opposite side, not far from the mouth of Miner’s Hope: the entrance to the network of tunnels that eventually led back to their hideaway.
Sonara felt for Soahm’s necklace, alarm rising in her for a moment as she remembered. But the weight of it was still there upon her chest, reassuring as she pressed a hand to Jaxon’s wrist, then went alone to greet Karr.
For a moment, she sensed nothing in his aura. He stared ahead, glaring into the sunlight, unblinking. Not moving as he said, “I saw it.”
“Saw what?” Sonara asked.
He turned, and there was an open gash on his forehead. The wind spiraled past at the same time, gentle. Timid. But it still carried with it a new aura on his black blood.
There wasKarr, like grease and wet ink,and then there was a second aura.
One that was exactly like Soahm’s.Sand dunes and Soreian air and the glorious sea.
Sonara wasn’t entirely surprised any longer. For it had happened before, whenever Karr bled. And the more she began to piece the mystery together, the more she no longer wanted to solve it.
“I saw my parents take him,” Karr said. “Your brother. You were there, too. I went to the half-place, and the Child of Starlight showed it to me, like a dream.”
“You… saw it?” Sonara asked.
Karr turned to look at her, his expression grim. “Every detail.”
“Then you saw that I left him behind,” Sonara said.
She carried that truth with her like a dead weight upon her back. A moment in time, where fear had grasped her and she’d given into it fully.
If they’d run all the way into hiding together—if she’d waited and helped Soahm reach the cave—perhaps he would not have been taken. They knew the caves like they knew their own homes, Soahm’s twisting halls in the Soreian palace, and Sonara’s claimed space in the steed barns.
Karr nodded, but did not speak of what Sonara knew he’d seen.
I’m so sorry,she thought, as she reached up and closed her fist over Soahm’s necklace.I’m so sorry I left you behind.
“It was like the Child of Starlight, whoever she is, needed me to see it,” Karr said. His aura was full of fresh sorrow. “My parents were Travelers. Freelancers who went from planet to planet, usually the hardest ones to reach, and brought back goods for traders. Not the illegal kind, like me and Cade. They were good people. They never would have stood forthis.”
Sonara felt empty inside, even as she breathed in that double aura of his and knew it was impossible, for he was not Soahm, and Soahm was not him. So why did the two share an aura that mingled like the moons and stars?
“But in that vision…” Karr swallowed. “Sonara, you were so young. So afraid. You did what anyone would have done.”
“Don’t,” she shook her head.
“You watched as my parents abducted him. That beam of blue light, his scream, the wind blasting from the engines…” His eyes narrowed. “He had on that necklace. The day he was taken.”
The chain felt sharp against her palm suddenly. But still, she held onto it, and for a moment, she was thrust back into that night. So many times she’d relived it over the years. She didn’t want to again. But shemust.For there were answers here. Secrets unburying themselves, shaking sand from their backs like beasts awakening.
“This child,” Sonara said. “What purpose would she have in showing my memories to you?”
She could have been a goddess. She could have been some emissary from the planet itself, for now all of Thali’s and Azariah’s beliefs seemed to ring true.
