“Are you truly so happy with what you are?” I counter. “Do happy people run away from the only home they’ve ever known, hurl themselves headlong into the dark without checking if there’s a bottom?” Kori stills, narrow shoulders rigid, arms crossed protectively against her ribs. “That’s what I thought.” I turn the corner and press my palm to the scanner lock, opening the sliding door to the archives. “We’re here.”
“Stars above,” Kori gasps.
Her words accompany all the oxygen whooshing out of her lungs. Again, I find myself wishing that I could see through her protective mask, her eyes no doubt wide and starstruck right now.
The archives are indeed a sight to behold, only accessible to nightfolk royalty or approved historians and recordkeepers. The average citizen under my parents’ (or now my own) rule will never set foot in this room. Every wall is constructed entirely of shelves upon shelves, data tablets lined up like so many paper books. The narrow metallicedges are striped with identifying layers of color, depending on how recent each record is and its primary topic. To me, it’s order—more comprehensible than anything else in my life right now. But I know what Kori sees is a miasma of color, a mosaic of knowledge never once accessed by a dayfolk citizen.
She turns to me, one gloved hand nearly catching my wrist before she remembers herself, remembers what the overcharged power in my veins could do to her. “Why would you bring me here? Me, of all people?”
“It’s difficult to tell through your mask, but that almost sounds like an accusation. You could stand to be grateful.”
I’m taunting her, the furthest thing from authentically offended, but she takes a cautious step back anyway.
“Forgive me, Adria.” Hearing my name on her tongue, even flattened by the voice filtration, still does something strange (though not entirely unpleasant) to my stomach. “I just … This is …”
“The collected history your people forgot, yes.”
Kori gives her head a little shake as if to clear it. “I’m a trespasser in your realm. A prisoner, at that. Why lead me to knowledge that could be used against you and your people? Don’t you already have enough threats?”
“Why give me a glimpse of the proper sun?” I counter. “Why not simply continue to throw insults at me through the cell’s freezeshot barrier? Treat me like the monster your people believe every nightfolk to be?”
“I’ll treat you like a monster when you act like one.” It’s delivered like a threat, but this time I’m the one who feels the breath knocked from my body.
I have felt more monstrous than ever since the overcharge, since … everything I hope Neo can help me forget. But nevertheless, this small, bold, incomprehensible girl who should never have set foot in the Shadowlands at all sees something more in me than pulsing power orsharpened teeth. I never meant for her to see the haunted parts of me, the void that stares into me when I consider what comes next. But now that shehasseen it—seen it utterly and fully, in my moment of weakness before the remembered sun, and chosen not to look away—I find I don’t want her to.
And that’s terrifying.
Kori goes on as if she didn’t just knock the axis of my universe askew, proceeding to tug everything even further out of proper orbit. “After I left my room, I heard your soldiers, en route to the gate. I heard the fighting outside. They said it’s your own family staging this rebellion, too. Your uncle.” Her eyes flick back to mine. “I’m sorry.”
I want to be angry that she’s already obtained such sensitive information about my newfound leadership’s fragile state, but instead, my whole stomach clenches aroundyour own family.Kori has no idea how bad things with my family can really get, not even an inkling of how my parents’ final breaths torture my waking moments and my sleep alike. I find, to my own confusion, that the thought of Kori finding out what I did multiplies the shame tenfold.
My whole mouth tastes bitter. “I don’t need yourpity.Lest you forget, Kori, I’m no mere suffering soldier. I am aqueen.” And she should show some more respect, stop unapologetically prying her way to the most sensitive, vulnerable parts of me, but she isn’t inclined to stop.
“A queen,” Kori says, “but not a monster. When you threatened my life by the Second Spire, tore Aspect’s leg from its socket—I saw a monster then. But the girl I saw in my cell, the girl who saw the sun and could hardly bear it …”
Kori looks away, staring at the wall of records without seeming to see it. “I can’t speak to your people. And I sure as hell can’t repeat any of this to my people, when you send me home. I mean it when I say I’m not sure you know how to be kind. But I’m even less sure that you know how to be cruel. I could be starving, dehydrating, abandoned in that cell right now, and I’m not. Why? Why am I here?”
My mind seizes on a phrase she most definitely delivered by accident. “When I ’send’ you home?” She doesn’t answer me, only stares more intently and with less apparent attention at the wall of records. “I brought you to the archives,” I say, striding farther into the rows of records, “because I thought you came to the Shadowlands for a glimpse of my people, our minds, our way of being. But I’m beginning to wonder if you want to go back at all.”
“I can’t stay here,” she says quickly, a reflexive parry of a thought she doesn’t dare entertain. “Dayfolk bodies aren’t built for the Shadowlands. I’d have to live out my days in this sun-forsaken suit, save for sleeping or waking. I’d lose myself.”
“Is that really the only reason? No friends would miss you?”
“My mother detests distractions from my learning.”
“And your mother?”
Kori scoffs, dismissively flicking a hand. “What about you? Don’t you have anyone to spend your waking hours with beside a withering dayfolk prisoner who can’t keep her mouth shut?”
“My soldiers know better than to talk back to me.”
Except for Thaane, that is. We have a lifetime of childhood scuffles and purely playful conflict behind us; I would never let another of my subjects talk back to me the way he does.
But it’s a profoundly uncomfortable thing, to be feared so severely that all criticism ceases, save for verdicts delivered by the Shadow Court.
“I find I miss having someone with the boldness to argue,” I say, and I mean it.
Thaane’s refusal to withhold his true opinions is, while frustrating, deeply reassuring. And Kori’s presence already absurdly feels much the same. Even when I feel at my most monstrous, this girl can’t bring herself to be afraid of me.
