The king stares at my reflection. “Fine. Bring her.”
His voice echoes and my back scrapes against the wall behind me. One blink, my reflection is there, the next, it’s gone. She’s gone.
Or am I?
I close my eyes and shake my head, rocking back and forth as I clasp my hands over my ears.
It’s dark inside my head. But I can’t fear the dark. I’m the light.
“I’m the light,” I whisper, the words peeling past cracked lips. “I’m the light. I’m the light.”
A sob chokes me.
I have to be the light, so I can break through this dark.
When I open my eyes again, there are no guards, no king, no striped-eyed woman. No reflection. But I jolt when I see the one-eyed man crouching in front of me.
Staring.
The room hums with unsettling silence, thickening as I watch his startlingly black eye. It’s so at odds with the bright red cloth at his throat.
Looking at him makes pinpricks of heat stab through my hands. Makes my palms go slick.
I open my fingers on my left hand instinctively, and his gaze drops. We both see the beaded moisture gathered there.
The man hums. “A few drops. But you shouldn’t even be able to do that in your state. Not with the dampener put on you.”
I don’t know what that means.
The back of my neck prickles, and I raise my hand and scratch the spot. There’s a scab there. It feels hardened. Patchy. His gaze homes in on my movement, and his hand lifts. I flinch away, but his fingertip presses over the spot, the touch making me shudder. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me, don’t like the way his expression sharpens with excitement.
“Thank you for confirming so fully,” he says.
I smack his hand away.
He smirks. “I should have known you’d be strong.”
His voice grates. Shreds me to pieces like frazzled thread. I drop my sight to the floor so I can see the spread of deep green instead of his black gaze.
“You’re still broken though, aren’t you, pet?”
My spine stiffens.
“Doesn’t matter. You’re the perfect bait.”
Bait, like worms on a hook. The worms that you find inside the soil. Digging down, feeding off the very matter it tunnels through…
My neck cricks with an uncomfortable feeling. Something shifts in my head.
He stands, footsteps dragging across the stone floor as he leaves. My muscles unclench only after the cell door clicks shut, and I let out a shaky breath.
Now that I’m alone, I open my right hand that was still clenched shut. I glance at the small beads of runny liquid gold gathered against my palm. Notice the dark lines that run through every droplet.
But my gaze settles on the ring I’m holding—a ring too big for my fingers. There’s dried blood on the top, but I scrape it off with my finger. Flakes of red peel away, and beneath it, I see an emblem of a bird. Its wing is bent and crooked.
Broken.
A shard of a vision abruptly slices down the center of my skull, bleeding out through my eyes. I see this exact symbol—hundreds of different versions, laid upon a rubbled road. I see the symbols again, down a city street, on posts and shop windows.
