He’d created a link between us and his actions had altered the way my body and powers worked. It went so much deeper than a single wound he’d left, like he’d ruined me, made it so I could never truly escape.
“Here.” He threw the practice cube toward me, and I caught it out of habit.
When I touched it, it seared my fingers, a familiar pain, onefartoo familiar. It wasn’t Corsa’s energy, but fuck, it was close. Worse, I couldn’t remove my hand from it, my body clasping it tighter as though it couldn’t bear to let it go.
The corruption burned. The sickening heat said it came not from an esper but from a corrupted. It was foul, stagnant, and it filled me in a rush that made me sick.
My knees buckled and this time I couldn’t hold myself up. I couldn’t stop myself from collapsing to the ground, from hitting the tile hard. Fuck, I couldn’t even brace myself, my face smacking right into the hard floor.
The sting of my lip, the blood from where my tooth ripped into it, I noticed those things as only background noise, as detailsthat didn’t matter. Instead, I only felt that corruption, the way it was both painful yet familiar, hated yet welcome, horrible yet home. It pressed the point that Corsa had changed me, that I was forever broken, that I was fundamentally altered.
My eyes closed, and I went with it.
It took me to a nightmare. A memory? I didn’t know for sure.
Corsa stood there, not a shadow, but fully illuminated as though I’d finally remembered everything.
Ifelthim, but it was a weaker link than before.
“You surprised me,” he said. “I never thought you had it in you to break the link.”
“If I did, how are you still here?”
He smiled and tapped his finger against my temple, the nail sharp. “I’m still here, Yun. The only difference is that you temporarily evicted me. You threw me out for a short time, but you can’t fully break the link.”
“HowdoI break it for good?”
“Even if I knew, why would I tell you?” He smiled, walking around me in a circle. “However, I don’t think there is a way. Do you knowwhyI could do what I did to you?”
“Because I’m different?”
His laugh hurt, vicious and mocking. “No, Yun, you aren’t different. You were new, that’s all. A new, fresh little guide who hadn’t truly understood her powers. Think of it like you being fresh clay—malleable. If I had done that to a more seasoned guide, their mind would have shattered under the pressure. You, however, bent so wonderfully. You were crafted at a stage when you could still be molded into a more useful form. What were the odds that I could have stumbled upon you then, of all times?”
I closed my hands into fists, hating everything about him, about this, about the way Ifeltthat truth.
I wasn’t unique in any way, so nothing I had was truly mine. I was just broken, a damaged toy too young to have realized what had happened.
“Don’t look like that, love.” The way he used the nickname made my stomach roll, but I tried to ignore it. “I feel the veil nearly gone. The Pitt will open soon and I will have you back.”
“You won’t. You can’t leave the dungeon, so you can’t do anything to me.”
“Who says I can’t leave?”
I opened my mouth but no response left me. I’d just…assumed? Why, though? He wasn’t a monster—not in the creature way—so he could leave it. Nothing was trapping him there except a closed portal.
Sweat broke out over my skin, my head fuzzy, my thoughts broken.
“See, this is another reason I adore you—you’re so stupid as to be charming. I still remember finding you.”
The space around me shifted, and suddenly we were backthere.The darkness of The Pitt, and I knew what he would show me.
Before us, the scene played out like a movie, and I saw myself there, so young it nearly made me cry. I’d been a child, really, just a kid who had lost everything, alone and afraid in a world I had somehow survived.
I sat against a tree, my knees pulled to my chest, sobbing. I’d just lost the last of the survivors I knew of, watching them grow sick and die. It had been a man of forty, a detestable asshole who had spouted racist slurs like he considered it a second language, but I’d still cried when he’d taken his last breath because it had signaled me truly being alone.
The old Corsa approached, but the old me didn’t see him at first. When I finally lifted my gaze to see him, the relief on my young face had me wanting to cry all over again.
“You look so happy,” the real Corsa whispered to me.
