One thought dashes through me:He’s killing her.
And I’d love to say the second thought isShe’s my only ticket home, orShe’s my only protection in the darkness, orAspect could be scrapped for parts without her, but it’s my heart and not my head that propels mylegs forward, seizes one velvety wing I can hardly reach, and cries out, “Damn it, Adria, stop before you get yourself killed!”
If she replies, I don’t hear it. Because right now, Adria is an open conduit, somehow letting Neo sift through her memories, and I’ve had the audacity to touch that live wire.
Shock sparks through my blood and bone alike, and I tumble into a tumult of tangled recollection.
My name is Adria, and I am reborn.
The Diakópsei writhes and roars inside my veins. My pulse is an animal, my body a predator. I take hold of the throat that named me, the voice that raised and trained and berated and bruised me, to silence it. Instead, I feel it collapse like powder in my grip.
Her face is next to consume my vision, the first face my eyes ever saw, the face I sometimes swear I see in the mirror, too, and when I push it away, it caves in on itself like an infected growth, viscera gushing between my claws. My hands alone were enough to unmake my makers.
My whole skeleton shakes like an uncertain marionette, puppeteered by someone else, when I gather the bodies. Someone has to bury—
My name is Adria, and I am buried.
Every meal presented to me, whether the Shadowlands’ own wild crops or dutifully hunted animal meat, tastes no better than mere water. I eat because my soldiers are watching. More often than not, what I manage to swallow expels itself again when I’m alone.
Evading sleep is like avoiding my own shadow. It chases me down, seizes me in its jaws, and shakes me about like one of Russ’s rope toys. I wake screaming for my parents, knowing they’d call me pathetic if they could. Even their deaths would disappoint them. All three heads of my dog push and nudge at me when I finally wake, calling me back to myself. It’s all too much; it’s not enough.
I break every mirror in my quarters, play with the pieces even when they draw blood. When Zalel attends to me, all youthful optimism, I break his spirit. When Azarii’s rebels come, I break their assault. The first time I try to carve their titles into the graves, I break the headstones. When the heiress of daylight descends—
My name is Adria, and I don’t break her. Not yet.
I toy with her, like a sun serpent with an already-downed batbeast, amused by a sky-born creature brought low to the ground. But she does not cower from me. She swipes at me, too, with her small gloved hands that would shrivel and suffer at the tiniest exposure to the planet’s true nature. I could break her. But I don’t think I hate her nearly enough for that.
She crawls too close to me when I avert my eyes. Curls like tendrils of blazing sun into every crack in my unholy armor. Turns my threats into empty taunts, my claws and fangs to a farce, my simmering rage to a frozen-over river. Since the gravestones, even in my sleep, I’ve felt nothing but unending torturous motion, yet she draws me tense as a bowstring and holds me fast and still—without a word, without a touch, suspended by eyes I cannot even see—and I don’t hate her nearly enough.
When the rebels come, their ice weapons drawn, their hatred for me an unsettling echo of that which I hold for myself, she can hardly hoist a gun, hardly take direction without a swift retort, and as our end stalks hideously close, I think I don’t hate her at all. I think perhaps I want—
My name is Adria, and Iwant.
I want to thread the softness of her fingers through mine. I want to gather her fragile body into the shadow of my wings and keep all her light for myself, warm my half-frozen fingertips over her dauntless fire.
I want to break her one bone at a time. I want to wear them like a talisman around my neck. I want to tear out every part of me that wants to tear her apart. I want to be the monster my kingdom needs. I want to be the blade that fells the monster and the kingdom and the planet’s very orbit for a glimpse of its sun reflected in her—green? brown? blue?—beautiful eyes.
I want to know the scent of her sun-streaked hair. I want to learn the curves and dips of her reckless mouth, want to drag my own along all her hidden places—
My name is Adria, and I cannot afford to squander my waking moments on want.
Birth me again, if you must. Break me if you must. Hate me afresh if you must. But do not let the shadows’ last hope collapse and dwindle into a creature that wants anything at all.
Get it out of me, Neo.
Get her out of me, and leave not a single stray thorn of memory that she was ever here.
We shatter apart.
Adria doesn’t rip through my protective gear, but she throws me to the floor with crushing force, one wing followed by an arm smacking me aside like an unwelcome insect on a starship’s window.
“How are you here?” Her voice invades me, bounces around my skull without ever finding a path out. She takes me by the shoulders and hoists me clean into the air, my legs dangling a solid foot above the ground, my tongue stunned into stillness. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“My queen,” Neo gasps, but he’s trapped in his cell, and his words are nowhere near enough to temper the rage I’ve unleashed. “Surely she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Removing a memory is one thing,” Adria snarls through her teeth. “But invading it—reliving it, embedded in my head, as if you wouldeverhave the right—” She drops me altogether. It’s so sudden, I collapse into a trembling heap on the stones. “You could’ve scrambled myself, Kori.”
Somehow I find my voice, though the air has been rattled from my lungs. “You agreed to risk that already,” I gasp, “when you asked him to wipe your memory.”
