Kori lurches forward so that we ought to be chest to chest, if only I weren’t so much taller. Neither the bulk of my shadow nor the breadth of my body is enough to make this girl neglect having the last word.
“No matter how many of your people you terrify, or how many rebels you kill, or how many times you pretend you’d like to silence meforever,” Kori says, “you’re utterlyalone, Adria.” And I want to swear or swing my claws or just cover my ears until I can’t hear her, but she keeps talking anyway, and I’m frozen in place, cold down to the bone marrow. “Alone in the dark, crushed under the weight of your empty crown. And even more afraid of yourself than anyone else is.”
I want to laugh, but my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
“I think you’d like to see my face,” she breathes, the words tickling the shell of my ear despite the distance between us, “before you try to erase all memory of me.” She presses one gloved hand to my chest, where my heart pounds, where I know she can feel my pulse skittering against her open palm. “And I think no matter what you tell yourself, you’d still remember. Because if you forget me … you’ll have nothing at all.”
Zalel, bless him, chooses this precise moment to interrupt us and check on his favorite patient, swaggering out of the shadows with all the oblivious confidence of his youth. He doesn’t ask what business Kori had standing so close to me, her fingers on my rib cage, her breath like an electric shock even though it can’t reach my skin, her words eviscerating me as surely as the freezeblade did.
The truth of her words makes my chest ache and throb, but not entirely with displeasure. Kori is right. She’s left her mark on me, like a handprint in molten rock, permanent as soon as her memory solidifies. I could kill her here and now, have the body burned, intimidate all my advisors into erasing her from history, but she would persist like a parasite in my mind, her voice my final conscience, beating back the dark even when all I want is to surrender to it.
If I forget her, maybe I really will have nothing. But what wouldn’t I give for nothing, instead of the violently brewing hurricane between my ears?
Luckily, I know just the thing for memories that won’t let go.
The Shadowlands need a ruthless queen, a metal fist, more duty than desire, more loneliness than longing—anything but this haunted,somewhat-hopeful girl I’m becoming, aching with impossible want. As I offered myself to the Diakópsei, so, too, will I tear out and offer the Shadowlands the thorn that my connection to Kori has become. Like my mother, like my father, I’ll bury this last tether to an Adria who would never survive the endless night.
I will embrace the monster the darkness demands.
So I assure Zalel of my renewed health. I direct Kori to be escorted back to her chambers, and Aspect properly repaired and brought there as soon as possible as well. At long last, despite my heavy eyes and relentlessly pounding head, I fly through the halls and to the prison quarter.
Neo alone can make me forget. I’ll make him do it, whether he likes it or not, even if the memory tears blood and flesh out alongside it, even if the exorcism leaves me with nothing at all.
CHAPTER
19
KORI
Idon’t know what comes over me. Whatever god had the questionable impulse to create me in the first place clearly forgot to install self-preservation software, or else let a virus run rampant in my code.
As the Daylands’ heiress, trained from my earliest memories to make measured, tactical decisions, I should know better. As Aspect’s creator and primary example of how to be a person, I should know better. Simply as a human being who (as far as I know) hasn’t suffered a catastrophic head injury anytime recently, I should unquestionably, undeniably know better.
But the moment Zalel is beyond earshot, I follow Adria anyway.
If she were anyone else, or even just herself in a marginally better mood, it would be impossible to follow without having to get far too close, inevitably exposing myself along the way. But because it’s Adria—and because I can almost see a giant thundercloud churning with angst and directionless rage above her head—I just follow the damage.
Her boots left deep grooves in the floor; her claws did, too, as the impulse to run on all fours apparently took over; even her apparentflight was clumsy and left her wings’ edges scraping long, jagged grooves along the walls and ceiling. It’s easy enough to track Adria’s trail. Just have to keep swallowing back the bile through my tight, raw throat, unable to deny how obviously Adria is in pain.
I did this. The knowledge beats through my blood like a drum. Not the freezeblade, which she healed from impressively well. Not even the psychological weight of the surprise attack, which she shook off like a royal adjusting their cape.I did this.Me and my big mouth and malfunctioning filter and aching insistence onfeelingso much, when I have no business feeling anything but fear regarding the monster queen who holds my fate.
And this, right now, is the first time Adria has fully, properly instilled fear in me. Not with her empty threats, her bold bravado, or her insistence on reminding me that her biceps alone dwarf most of my body. I’m afraid from the cold, creeping sense that if I don’t follow her, if I let her go, I may never see her again. Or if I do, it won’t be anything close to what it’s been.
As someone unhinged enough to fly into the shadow-cloaked unknown to get an illegal memory for my robotic bestie, I recognize the frenzied glint in Adria’s violet eyes when I see it. She may just be desperate enough to cut the tension between us with her own knife, even if it feels like an amputation—even if, unlike the freezeblade, the bleeding may never really stop.
How? A great question … for which I have no answers. So, stomach bubbling with panic, throat clenched even tighter than my insufferable body armor, I follow her. Eventually, I recognize the path she took, winding though it may be. She headed back to the prison ward where we originally reached our tentative peace.
At first, I’m left at a loss. Unless Adria has been flirtatiously threatening other prisoners with a good time (which makes my heart twist in an inexcusably ridiculous way), I can’t imagine why she would be here now, her anguish splayed openly across her face for her prisoners to openly behold.
Then she speaks—or shouts, really—to awaken the captive she’s approaching, and everything starts to make sense. “Neo.”
So this is the one she was so hesitant to tell me about during our ill-fated combat training. I peek around the corner to observe. Adria looks at Neo with pleading. A peerless queen, a warrior born of the planet’s very heart …pleadingwith yet another prisoner, this one visibly younger than either of us.
Neo shudders and wakes at the intonation of his name. Unlike bulky Adria, he is a thin, wan creature, and not only from imprisonment. He doesn’t have arms, though he seems used to it, likely born that way.
His affect is flat, voice worn thin from disuse, when he replies, “My queen, have I not shown my penitence? Have I not tried enough to revoke that which haunts you? If I dig too much deeper, I may do damage that cannot be undone.”
“You presume too much,” Adria says, leaning close to the freezeshot wall between them, her violet eyes glittering in the icy, semitransparent barrier. “I’m not afraid of what I’ve done. Not anymore. It’s what I might do that chills me.” Her gaze bores into the prisoner’s. “I have a different memory for you.”
