“Kori, Kori …” Her palms cup my face, pull it close to her mangled mess of wires. “My darling, my daughter, I knew deep down you had to understand.” She strokes my hair with burn-pricked fingers, smothering me with the stench of rising smoke. I’m limp and raw and shuddering in her embrace. “When it’s all over, when the new world is born, it’ll be everything you wanted,” she says, almost singing in her reverie, almost laughing in her depraved hope. “I only want what’s best.”
“I … know,” I breathe into her neck. “I know.” I force one hand’s fingers to curl into a fist, squeezing every ounce of my pain and fear and rage and hope into energy that shimmers along the knuckles. “But you don’t get … to decide that … for everyone else.”
I launch the punch with everything I am. It drives directly into Chloe’s damaged skull, leaving a visible indent, scattering loose gears and wires and sparks. She screams like starships colliding, metal on metal, grating. She collapses at my feet, some critical sensor damaged, trying and failing to stand again.
My entire right arm glows blue, imbued with the same radioactive power that once terrified me in the nightfolk. All along, the planetPagomènos was fueling me, too. All along, who we were was never about whether we’d been raised in light or darkness, birthed frail or strong, deemed royal or rebel. The choice was always ours.
I look down at my mother—broken, sputtering—and rage fills me from head to toe. My shining arm slowly transfers the light entirely to my fist, synthetic muscle and bone and tendon all craving justice for everything that’s been done here. For all the lies and control Chloe imposed on me. For all that she tried to inflict upon her own citizens, her own neighbors.
I could finish it here.
“Kori!”
The shout came from the doorway.
I spin on my heels to meet Adria’s terrified gaze as she barrels through the entryway, both wings clearly straining, tearing both the doors clean off their hinges in her haste. Her robes are dipped in blood, her muscles soaked in sweat, but all she seems to see is me.
“I’m all right,” I breathe, before turning back to where Chloe lies defeated. “She’s lost.”
I don’t know when I raised my fist, but sparks leap between the knuckles now, my hand like a cluster of brilliant starlight. I could drive it through Chloe’s already-wrecked face. I could end the life that aging ought to take from her anyway.
Chloe glowers at both of us, lip curled in disgust. “So finish it.”
Adria’s bulk at my back casts me into shadow again. Slowly, she drops to one knee, her breaths tickling the shell of my ear. Gently, hardly putting any pressure at all on my exhausted bones, she lays one hand on each of my shoulders. “I can’t be the one to stop you.” She sighs against me. “But if you do this, Kori … Take it from someone who knows—you will never be the same.”
I swallow. Set my jaw, square my shoulders, push a stray hair out of a tearful eye. I look from Chloe’s fury, demanding I gratify her with a death, to Adria’s deliberate softness—touching me just enough topromise her presence, loosely enough to let me decide for myself what’s right.
We are not our mothers. My final insult to Chloe, my greatest victory since I first dared to leave home, is that I’ll turn every knife she plunged into my chest into a chisel. From this sun-scorched, shadow-cursed planet, torn apart by its own people, I’ll carve out something new. I’ll mold a place for possibilities.
Heart steady, stomach settled, I lower my fist.
My radioactive energy blinks out. The red glare of Chloe’s exposed eye doesn’t—and on my watch, it never will.
“We’ll lock her in the Shadowlands,” I whisper, stepping away, “where you’re equipped to contain an Evolved. When the time is right, she’ll stand trial here—before the very people she tried to kill. And they’ll decide what righteous law demands.”
Chloe’s lower lip (or what’s left of it) quivers violently. “Pathetic child. You will never have the strength to lead.”
“Not like you,” I say.
“You ally yourself withmonsters.”
“I see only one monster here.”
“Kori, that’s enough,” Adria says. It’s almost a snarl, but she holds it back, tethers her rage, anything but the monster I once believed the nightfolk to be. “You’re better than her. The best of all of us.” I feel her smiling mouth against my ear when she adds wistfully, “And the Daylands are going to need you.”
“And what then?” I ask.
Adria presses her lips to the nape of my neck, a promise without words. She smiles and says, “Then we build something new.”
Once upon a time,
sunlight and shadow
called a truce for their children.
CHAPTER
32: AFTER
