“There’s always a choice,” Sage replied, something hard and sad in her eyes. “But I understand why you made it.”
Alina swallowed. Her voice was thin, unsteady. “You look tired. I’ll be fine on my own for the night. You should rest.”
Sage searched Alina’s face for a long time before replying. “When I was your age, I didn’t have anyone to tell me when to stop. I nearly burned myself out of existence. I don’t want that for you.” She hesitated, the mask of composure slipping for the first time Alina could remember. “I know what it’s like to lose everything. I don’t want to watch it happen to you.”
Alina stared at the ceiling, tears pricking her eyes. “Did you ever… hate it? The Gift?”
Sage’s laugh was a dry, brittle thing. “I hated it so much I tried to cut it out of myself. Didn’t work. Just left scars.”
They sat in silence for a while, the only sound between them the slow, ragged rhythm of their breathing.
Alina turned, meeting Sage’s gaze. “Will it always hurt like this?”
Sage considered the question, then nodded. “It gets easier. Or you get stronger. Maybe both.”
Alina closed her eyes, hot tears slipping down her cheeks and into the pillow. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, not sure if she meant the words for herself, or for Sage, or for the world that had forced them both to become something sharp and dangerous.
Sage squeezed her shoulder again, fingers cool and steady. “Don’t be. Just get up tomorrow, try again, and know that you are not alone.”
She stayed there until Alina’s breathing slowed, the pain receding enough to let her drift. When she left, the room feltemptier, but also lighter, as if some of the darkness had been named and banished.
Alina slept badly, waking every hour to a new pain or a dream she couldn’t remember. In the early morning, she lay on her side and watched the light change from black to indigo to pale, hopeful gray.
She thought of Kael, of Sage, of Finn and even of Elara. She thought of the faces that watched her in the corridors, the suspicion and hope and fear all tangled together.
She made herself a promise, there in the cold and the silence. She would not break. They would not break her. Tomorrow, and the day after, she would keep getting up. She would try again, and again, until she was stronger than the pain.
She would fight, not because someone had prophesied it, but because it was the only thing left that made sense.
As the Caves came alive the next morning, with sounds that bordered on homely, Alina closed her eyes and let herself believe, just for a moment, that the future might be something she could claim for herself.
14
You Were Angry
The rebel camp flickered with several small fires, each one ringed with shadows that sharpened and blurred as dusk gave way to night. The trees at the edge of the clearing watched in silence, black and unmoving, while humans did what they always did before battle: they pretended there was comfort to be found in routine. A string of lanterns, scavenged from who-knows-where, hung between two stunted birches to cast yellow halos on the mud. Beneath them, rebels stood in small clusters or sat on logs around campfires, oiling blades, muttering over maps, and passing dented cups between callused hands.
There was a rhythm to it: thump, scrape, murmur, the occasional burst of laughter thin and ragged as old cloth. Alina watched from the fringe, not part of the scene but not apart from it, either. Her job was to do nothing right now but stay out of the way and not make things worse.
She rolled her left shoulder in slow, careful arcs. The burn marks had faded from an angry red to a dark auburn, a tangle oflines bursting down her arm from a knot on her shoulder. The ache in her side still lingered, a warning shot from her own body every time she forgot herself. Sage had warned her that scars were to be expected, and she was oddly indifferent about it. Not so long ago, scars on her perfect skin would have been something horrible. Now, it didn’t really matter. She pressed two fingers to the flesh below her ribs and exhaled, testing the boundaries of the pain. The physical pain at least did have those.
Finn caught her eye as he threaded through the camp, a battered flask dangling from his hand. He offered her a grin and a lazy salute, as if they were just two friends at a garden party and not two half-trained soldiers waiting to be thrown at a supply convoy with a better-than-average chance of dying by morning. Alina smiled back—or at least, she tried to. The muscles didn’t quite cooperate.
Kael stood by the largest fire, accompanied by Marcus and Maven. He wasn’t speaking; he didn’t need to. His presence was enough to anchor the others and draw their orbits closer, like the sun behind a heavy sky. He was bundled up against the cold, as they all were, yet his mismatched and patched-up clothes did nothing to dampen his air of command. They never did; he always seemed like a general in his best uniform. His eyes were hard to make out in the firelight, but Alina knew them all the same: gold with flecks of amber, always watching, always calculating.
At the periphery, Tamsin moved with a predatory slowness, her long braid swinging as she traced the camp’s edge, pausing at intervals to etch strange marks into the dirt. Every few minutes, a lamp flickered, then flared blue, a sign the wards had taken hold. The others avoided her, but Alina found the stillness oddly soothing. Tamsin never wasted a word, or a motion. You always knew where you stood.
A briefing was called just after sunset. The crowd drew in close, the heat from their bodies turning the air muggy and raw. Marcus rolled out a battered hide map and stabbed it with a stick.
“The convoy will cross the river at Nesbridge Pass. That’s here.” He drew a line. “We hit from the ridge. Kael’s squad goes first and disables the standards, then everyone else converges.”
Seraphina Brightwood, hair scraped back with military precision, stood at the edge of the circle as if daring anyone to contradict her. Alina hadn’t spoken to her in some time; Seraphina wasn’t involved in her training, and they had no real point of contact anywhere else. She flicked a gloved hand toward the map, voice honed to a scalpel’s edge: “And if the convoy brings more than three guards per wagon? Are you sure about this intel?”
A beat of silence, then Marcus shrugged with the fatalism of a man raised on lost causes. “Then,” he said, “we improvise.” He said it like it was a joke—a joke everyone had heard before, one that never got funnier.
A ripple of laughter chased the words, hollow as a cracked bell. Maven snorted, then quickly scanned the crowd to gauge where everyone was standing opinion-wise. He seemed to have an exact register in his head of every person’s views and leanings and how to best use them for his own purposes.
Seraphina’s mouth twisted, almost smiling but not quite. “You realize they’ve vastly increased their numbers everywhere. That’s not improvisation, that’s suicide.”
