A feeble bout of giggles exploded out of me, swiftly transforming into a fever of choked sobs and a burst of sniffles. “I’m…” My lips trembled.
“It’s okay not to be okay.” Gedeon squeezed my thigh, scrunching up the synthetic material of the soldier’s pants, the sole clothing item I could bear to wear these days. “War is never without consequence.”
His admission loosened my grip, and my pencil rolled down my legs, across the stretch of asphalt, and straight into the welcoming embrace of a funeral fire. “How can you call our”—I swallowed—“family, a consequence? As if they were a thing to be discarded. A number in a game.”
Zion took my hand, careful not to graze my stumps. “When you watch them disappear one by one throughout many years…” he trailed off, kissing my knuckles, lightening my blackened soul. “It starts to feel different.”
“You just…learn to live with the hurt.” Shadows battled each other in the dips and swells of Gedeon’s chin, the column of his neck, the bags under his eyes. “We may look detached, but it rips my heart apart to look at what remains of our people, ourfriends, to see the gaps that will never close, never fully heal. Realizing that those who used to laugh with us and tease each other are now gone is like a knife slicing my lungs with every breath I take.” His throat bobbed. “It hurts. It may not look like it does, but that’s the truth.”
Without second-guessing myself, I gave his shoulder a peck. “I’m sorry.” Nuzzling the firm muscle, I pushed my pride aside and sighed. “It’s just with everything…”
“I know.” He cupped my face, the touch warm and placating. “It’s hard. And it’s not going to get easier for a while.”
I’d been warned countless times about what war entailed, but I hadn’t considered how it would bring survivors to their knees. In theory, a fight was an exchange of fists and blows, of bullets and blades, but in reality…
It was a game of cards, each representing a person. War yearned for lives, its maw insatiable. It didn’t matter which side ended up with more cards remaining—they were never going to look the same.
Watching how the glow in the embers ebbed, how they died, one by one, I asked, “What now?”
Gedeon scratched the four-day stubble gracing his jaw. “We live.”
Zion waggled his eyebrows. “We fuck.”
My snort blended with Gedeon’s grunt, and I rubbed the area under my right collarbone, where two silhouettes of birds, a blackbird and a raven, were inked into my flesh, a permanent marker of who I belonged to and who belonged to me. “What did you mean by saying ‘we live’?”
“We simply…” Gedeon picked up a piece of kindling. After a moment of observation, he launched it into the blaze. “Exist. No raising the children for war, no classification based on the state of your reproductive organs, no divide. Now, we live. See if there’s more to this world. If there are others somewhere farfrom here. If they are free or not. We can finally venture out. Explore.”
Widening his knees, Zion spread his arms as much as he could with the cast limiting his range of motion. “You can explore me as much as you want.”
His theatrics drew a smile out of me and a chuckle from Gedeon, the rumble carrying notes of danger.
Without a doubt, I knew that going forward, things were not going to be easy. Not by far. But the last seven months had shown me I wouldn’t have to face the challenges alone.
I had my men at my side, today, tomorrow, and all the days after that.
Plucking a particularly sharp fragment from under my ankle, I lowered back onto my heels. Debris littered the roads as none had been cleaned, and a small part of me wished they never would be. The wreckage Ilasall had become could serve as a promise of what awaited those who dared to defy the laws of freedom.
In tandem with a flame shooting into the sky, the firewood popped, like an echo of the fallen. I followed its call, raising my head and studying the horizon, snagging on the half-collapsed Spire looming in the distance.
With funeral fires lighting up the maze of ten-story dwellings, citizens peeking out the closed windows, and our people moving freely outside, Ilasall resembled a city of ghosts. Of a haunting past.
We’d razed the land so cruel, its atmosphere of nightmares would take years to dissipate. We’d soaked the city in blood so crimson the streets had turned into rivers. We’d torn the chains off the citizens’ wrists, the shackles both green and black, the shades so dividing new laws would have to be established to unite the residents.
But as we knelt in the ruins of Ilasall, I rolled the crumb of concrete between my fingers. Rough edges prodded my skin, as though seeking to burrow into my bloodstream to weave the threads they could control me with.
I’d been born in an unlucky world, a woman with no future, a human with a fighter’s spirit, but no support.
Until I’d metthem. The two cold-blooded creatures with hot-blooded hearts I’d called to me that fated afternoon when I’d lain in the doctor’s office as a teenager about to go through fertility testing.
To cope with the terrifying experience, I’d imagined a night sky, the stars flickering in different colors in response to my prayers.
Red, a demon, its bared teeth dripping blood. Silver, a god with a crown, ignoring my pleas. Blue, a human drowning in the night’s ocean between the other two.
Thirteen years later, Zion, a demon fascinated by scarlet and pain, had stumbled upon me outside the city, and Gedeon, a human strangled by the darkness of his past, had stolen me out of the place once called Ilasall.
Together, no matter how lost or broken, we carried out. We kept fighting. We persevered.
And although our story of survival would fade in history like the night’s wind at dawn, I was never going to stop chasing the stars.
