Tyde pauses. “And you, Commander?”
“I’ll be behind you,” I say. “CaptainTyde.”
His eyes widen at the new title. “Me?” he asks in shock.
I nod. “You’ve earned it.”
With his black helmet tucked under his arm, he shifts on his feet for a moment before clearing his throat. “Thank you, Commander.”
He offers me a salute and then turns to Lu and Os, offering a deferential nod as he presses a fist to his heart. “We honor the fallen,” he murmurs. “Captain Judd will be missed.”
Lu sucks in a breath at his name, and Osrik seems to pale. My throat feels like someone is clawing it.
As soon as Tyde turns and walks away, Lu appears at my side. “What are you doing? Why did you tell them to go ahead?”
“Because I can’t just leave,” I say, the words ripping out more harshly than I intended. It’s been a rush of collapsing earth and tending to our wounded, but now that everyone is leaving, I can finally focus on the bridge. On what happened.
Slade left us proof that he came through Sixth and Seventh. I know he crossed the bridge. I know he’s there. Just like my mother.
So this bridge can’t be just fuckinggone.
I glare at the fog that rolls and presses like kneading dough beneath unrelenting fists. It used to be only gray, but now, the fog is as white as the snow, with streaks of ice-blue swirling through it.
“I just don’t understand what the fuckhappened…” Lu says, seeming to pick up on my thoughts. “If it was Queen Malina,how?” Sweat coats the dagger shapes shaved into the sides of her head, and her eyes are drawn with exhaustion.
“Good fucking question,” Osrik growls. He has his hand clamped around Rissa’s, whose face is half-buried behind a thick scarf, her blue eyes haunted. She hasn’t said much since it all ended, but she’s been practically stuck to Osrik’s side.
Digby too stares straight ahead at the bleak emptiness, his brown and silver stubble peppered with frost.
Behind us, Argo whines.
A lump the size of my heart gets stuck in my throat as my molars gnash together. I know this was a good thing for Orea, but for me…for us…it’s a disaster.
Why couldn’t the bridge have explodedafterSlade returned with my mother and Auren?
It’s not right, and I don’t fucking accept it.
“You all go catch up with the Elites, but I’m going to go look,” I bite out as I turn and start walking.
Maybe there’s still a piece of it. Maybe there’ssomethingthere.
“The bridge is gone, Ryatt,” Lu argues as she flings out her hand in that direction. “It’s not broken, it’sobliterated. There’s nothing there anymore.”
“I know,” I snap as I halt beside Argo. I let out a sigh before looking at her over my shoulder. “I know, okay? But Ihaveto check.”
She studies my face. I can see the devastation in her expression, and the stretched-out breath that spills out of her says everything. “Fine. I’ll go with you.”
“I want to see too,” Rissa declares, and everyone looks over at her, making her shoulders lift defensively. “What? If Aurenreally is stuck in the fae realm, I want to be certain that she has no way of coming here before we just leave.”
Osrik moves his gaze from her to me. “We’ll fly over there where it was. Just to check.”
Digby stares, and I can see the acceptance of misery tightened around his eyes and mouth. He has championed Auren, insisted on staying by her side, wanting nothing more than to protect her, and with the bridge now gone, he can’t.
He’s a cut-and-dry sort of man, accepting hard truths. But even he nods. “Let’s check.”
Because hope, however false, does something for a trodden soul. Sometimes false hope is all you have, so you cling to it for as long as you can.
And I’m going to fucking cling. Because it’s not over until I check. Until I see with my own eyes that it’s gone.
