Don’t.
Those sparks catch. Melt. Like candle wax, it overflows and drips down the lengths of every ribbon. Each strip melding together with gold and warmth.
Because I don’t want to fall anymore. I have been falling my entire life.
So this time, I don’t.
My ribbons combine in a searing burst of light, and suddenly, they’re not strips anymore. They’re not streaming uselessly. No, they come together. Forming into something else.
Forming intowings.
Slade wrenches me back as they stretch behind me. “Auren?”
I hear him, even with the rushing wind. I smile as tears are torn from my lids.
He quakes around me. “What—”
“It’s okay,” I tell him.
Because this time, it really is.
I clutch onto him as tightly as he’s clutching me, and then, I let instinct take over. He blinks in awe as my wings flare, spreading to their full length. It makes Slade and me snap up in the air from the shift, but I grit my teeth and hold on.
I echo those words Slade first said to me, so long ago.
Don’t fall.Fly.
And I do.
I move my wings as I’ve moved my ribbons, with an innate familiarity and ease. They beat against the rushing air of the void, pulling at the muscles in my back, clawing at the grip of gravity.
Until finally, instead of going down, Slade and I start to riseup.
Up.
Up.
My stomach bottoms out from the change in direction, but I tilt my head to look above with razor-sharp focus. Every limb is tense, each muscle along my back straining.
Invisible, greedy hands seem to try to swipe at us from the void.
But the void can’t have us.
With determination locking my jaw and stiffening my spine, I angle us faster, speeding through cloying fog, eyes stinging, fingers grasping Slade with a steely grip.
And then, we burst out of the haze.
Like the arc of a shooting star, we launch up and then curve back down before we crash into the land. Our bodies roll to a stop, with Slade below and me above.
My breathing is labored, my back muscles screaming, but none of it matters.
Slade grips my face between his trembling hands, eyes so wide I can see my reflection in his green irises. “Am I dead?” he whispers hoarsely.
I shake my head and grip his face too, relishing the stubble that scratches my fingertips. “No. I came back to find you.”
He pulls in a shredded breath, in strips and pieces from a tattered heart. His eyes grow wet, his expression fracturing. And then he speaks with the most devoted, heartbreaking tone. “You flew, Goldfinch.”
My own heart seems to fill up, every inch that’s ever been pinched or prodded or drained. “I did.”
