“Just hold it.”
She lifts it between two tremulous claws, and then her eyes go completely white. Usually, while the buyer experiences their desired memory, I’m checking my half of the merchandise. This is the first time I simply stand and watch someone else experience a Morpheus sphere—and a nightfolk, at that. They don’t have the Morpheus chips installed in the dayfolk. Instead, the memory plunges directly, brutally into her brain.
Adria is utterly rigid, a statue, an outgrowth of the mountain around and about us—her wings spread wide with shock, her eyes blank, milky orbs, her mouth open just enough to show her sharp teeth.
She collapses like an avalanche. Sobs, their sound swallowed up in her shame, rack her whole body, her wings curling as if to obscure her from view. She isn’t watching me. Her claws aren’t drawn. Her blue flame flickers out, leaving us in total darkness. If I ran right now, I could be halfway down the hall before she recovered herself.
The floor shakes alongside her hulking form. She gasps for air.
I don’t move a muscle.
“Adria?” I say, barely audible.
The most absurd desire washes over me, to lay a hand on her shoulder and wait for her shuddering to cease. Tocomfortthis beast who holds my life (and Aspect, my only friend) in her clawed hands. I wonder, distantly, if my own hands could find her without my sight. I almost move, and not to flee.
“You.” A sob; a scream. Black and blue flames tremor around every edge of Adria’s body. The Morpheus sphere lies abandoned at her feet. “Why aren’t you running?”
I shake my head, faster and faster, trying to clear it, getting nowhere. “I don’t know.”
She snarls, then. Suddenly, instead of a tangle of shivering limbs, she’s securely on all fours, scrambling to reactivate the freezing wall between us. An instant of useless, too-late clarity pierces through me. I bolt for the threshold. The freezeshot wall plunges down, and I collide with it face-first.
Adria stands eight feet tall again, teeth bared. I’m the one who cowers, sobbing and shuddering, frozen to the floor.
She doesn’t ask me what memory lies within the second sphere. She doesn’t threaten me for my admittedly pathetic escape attempt. She bellows, more monster than mortal, and then she barrels down the corridor on all fours, leaving me alone in the dark.
CHAPTER
14
ADRIA
I‘m so lonely.
Without a Morpheus chip of my own, Kori’s memory is already a fleeting imprint, a curtain of thought just barely brushing my brain. But every point of contact stings.
I am bathed in sun. After so long underground, sick and wan, I’ve returned to the surface. Its brilliance beckons and rebirths me, saying,Come out, come out,and every piece of me longs to lunge back into the day. My lungs want to scream, but I know the sun won’t scream back. I’m free again, but only ever free to be alone. I close my eyes. The heat, even dimmed by my protective gear, could melt me down like the rivers of lava beneath the planet’s surface. I want to let it happen. I want to feel something. I’m so lonely. I’m so lonely.
I’m so lonely.
The shadows beckon, promise to hide me away from even myself.Soon,I tell myself, gloved fingers curling into fists. Soon I’ll go beyond these sun-streaked plains, beyond even the scattered ruins of the Passage. Soon I’ll build something worth remembering.
Even if I have to do it alone.
“Damn you,” I snarl, leaning against the corridor wall, struggling to catch my breath.
Kori tried to offer me a glimpse of daylight, and yes, it was beautiful. It was more than I could’ve ever imagined. Albeit secondhand, I’ve now felt the sun’s all-seeing gaze, its heat flooding my veins with brutality matching the Shadowlands’ cold. I’d wondered why anyone, even a fully accustomed dayfolk girl, would willingly remove a memory of the sun. But now I understand.
Beneath the comforting sweep of sunlight, the chasm at Kori’s heart yawns canyon wide.
I’m so lonely.
I lean so hard against the wall, my wings leave indents in the stone. Every part of me screams. I lock my jaw shut against the sound. If it starts again, I don’t know if it’ll ever stop.
I caught this girl as a bargaining chip, a transaction valuable enough to fund my new regime and crush the insurgents. After negotiating with the Shadow Court, we’ve determined an asking price to transmit back to the Daylands: an armory of newly assembled heatshot guns, a type of weaponry that Azarii’s people will be utterly unprepared to contest. Such weapons won’t be able to recharge in the Shadowlands’ freezing temperatures, but there’s enough blazing sunlight in the Passage to do it, and the terms of the agreement dictate that should a regiment of my army be spotted there, the dayfolk are to leave us unmolested.
That’s all I should be thinking about right now: brokering a weapons deal for Kori’s life. I didn’t ask for sunlight to dawn on my doorstep. I didn’t ask for my own silent torment to whisper across the freezing wall between us, sharp enough to stab.
I’m so lonely.
