Kori saunters cautiously forward, gun raised, gaze steady on our enemies but voice stable and tethered to me. “And what makes you think I won’t save it for the Daylands library?”
“I think you feel you owe me,” I say without thinking.
Kori’s own laugh is wicked. “Oh, there are other ways I can repay that debt.” Her next shot misses the rebels entirely, nearly freezing my own hairline and horns as it whizzes by.
But I don’t think she was talking about combat, anyway. The heat in my face and sudden rigidity in my body have nothing to do with adrenaline anymore.
I’m so distracted, in fact, that when the next rebel launches herself headlong into me, freezeblade great sword steadied with both hands,I react a whole instant too late. I twist, shift. Start to raise an arm to guard my throat.
Not enough.
Cold splinters through my sternum, then a hot, liquid flood that I know must be blood. A curse slips through my teeth. The alloy of nightfolk blades is of similar composition to freezeshot canisters, except it’s been heated in a Passage lava crater forge to a stubbornly solid form. Solid, that is, until it’s plunged into an opponent’s flesh, and the rapid shift in temperature turns the blade back to liquid freezeshot that immediately floods the veins.
Given the many gifts of the nightfolk, from energy blasts like my own to telekinesis to telepathy to empowered healing—not to mention our evolved battle reflexes, vital for surviving in the dark—it’s rare for a blade to actually get close enough to break the skin. But I know, from military demonstrations by my father that I was forbidden to look away from, how terrible a way it is to die.
At first, I think I’m screaming, but I know my own screams to be guttural, animalistic things, and what I hear is a high, thin, splintering sound.Kori.I should tell her to fire again, her terrible aim aside. I should tell her where to go to signal my soldiers for help.
The only word my tongue can form is “run.”
Pain lances through my body, followed by chills. I roar, incoherent. Something is slamming, heavy and relentless, like a battering ram into my side, and it takes a long, cloudy moment before I recognize it to be Russ’s heads, desperately fighting to keep his master awake and out of death’s encroaching claws. Language failing me, I try to wave him away, but my arms feel—no, my whole body feels—like a memory.
Then there are cold hands on my chest, neither the stubbornly armored hands of the rebels nor the necessarily gloved hands of the Daylands’ heiress. I blink to clear splattering black spots from my vision. When the room comes back into focus, I’m lying on the floor, one hand pressed weakly against my spurting sternum, while Thaanetowers above me. The formerly knife-wielding rebel coughs and kicks as he holds her aloft, squeezing the breath from her throat.
He shouldn’t have known I was here. I was loath to admit my weapons training with Kori, given Thaane’s initial disapproval of her continued presence here at all. But old friend that he is, my brother-in-arms, at my side before and after everything changed, he knew where I’d be despite my calculated silence, knew me better than I know myself.
Vaguely, I process that behind Thaane is a newly arrived regiment of my soldiers. Most are focused on fighting—blades and guns raised, blasts of gifted energy primed to launch, wings splayed, teeth and claws bared to slice and tear—but a few take direct notice of me on the ground, wounded and gasping. General Isek’s voice rises above the din: “My lord! Hold fast, a healer is coming!”
In Thaane’s vicious grip, the gagging rebel goes deathly still. Thaane tosses the body aside with the others scattered about, blood splattering when it lands, and turns back to me. But my head lolls. My vision clouds. I can’t keep a steady gaze on him; I can hardly keep my eyes open at all. My sternum tingles and shudders and burns.
Russ howls, and my heart splinters.
“Look at me.” Thaane pants, kneeling somewhere beside me. “Zalel is on his way. It won’t be the first freeze-wound he’s healed. You’re going to be fine, Adria, all right? Please look at me.”
I almost smile, but spit blood instead. My voice stings on the way out, each syllable an icicle behind my tongue. “Get … Kori … safe.”
Darkness cloaks and carries me into nothing.
I fade in and out, a struggling dwarf planet on the brink of collapse, suspended only by gravitational pull. At first all I know is that the pull is toward warmth. The gentle brush of synthetic fabric barely concealsthe living heat beneath, a pulse that syncs with my own and bids me to keep fighting.
When I was barely a child, when my parents yet lived and I yet slept without seeing their ghostly faces, I remember testing my growing wings to see if I could fly high enough to brush a star with my fingers. Mother restrained her laughter, and Father chided me for not training myself in more useful skills, bellowing that no one since the Cataclysm had traveled far enough to brush a star’s very surface.
But it hadn’t stopped me from wondering. Back before I dreaded dreaming, I dreamed of stardust, always waking without words to describe the sensation of galactic dust, the fabric of the universe, sliding like so much Passage sand through my outstretched fingers.
But that’s what the warmth feels like now. In contrast to the scrambling cold hands of my own kind, and the exquisite cold of Zalel’s healing gift restoring my body, these gentle, testing touches make me shimmer and spark, a dark star reborn from the collapse of another. It takes a while for the touches to register as those of a hand, not a star. And when I open my eyes to Kori’s mask, bent close to my formerly sleeping face, I feel her eyes look through the helmet and into mine.
I’m a goner. In my hazy, wounded mind, it’s among the only things I know for sure.
I fell like a comet the moment Kori plummeted into my dark world, and no matter what troubles followed her here, no matter what ransom her mother offers for her safe return, I’m afraid this strange, nameless light in my chest will flicker out forever when she leaves.
The room around Kori swims and ripples before coming into focus. I was hoping I’d be back in my own bed, or at least the infirmary, but I don’t recognize the strange, twisting expanse of the malformed tunnel I now find myself in. The improper bed at my back is just a slab of rock padded with spare fabric. Footsteps, both the scattered footfalls of various servants and the rigid, regimented march of my soldiers drilling,sound somewhere far above and echo down through the ceiling before reverberating about the chamber.
The cloying, icy scent of freeze-burned flesh lingers in my nostrils, but when I tentatively press an open hand where the rebel’s blade entered, I find only a thin, half-faded scar—certainly Zalel’s work. I’m lucky to have him on my side, after everything. Almost as lucky as I am that Thaane found me before the frozen blade’s infection had time to get worse.
But Zalel is nowhere in sight now, and neither is Thaane. There’s only me and Kori, whose gaze bores into me despite the barrier between us, whose gloved fingers ever-so-lightly trace the half-moon of my new scar.
“Careful.” I cough, my throat raw from disuse. “That scar … could still … split.” And spill lingering freeze, potentially costing Kori the same finger with which she so carefully outlines my wound, my throat, my collarbone.
“I wear protective gear for a reason,” Kori says, utterly undeterred.
