Adria’s answering curse cuts like a knife.
I haul myself up to my knees, chest heaving. She told me her parents had fallen, not that she’d been the one to kill them. She told me we could help each other, not that letting anyone help her would drive her to the end of herself.
“Is this who you really are, Adria? A parent killer? A planet killer, if you aren’t stopped before its power consumes you altogether?”
“You had noright,” Adria goes on, our sentences running over and around each other, competing, crashing waterfalls of words that make the whole room rumble. “I gave my body to Pagomènos. I gave my sleep to the ghosts of my mother and father. But the shame, the grief—that wasmine, you insolent fool.”
“And the want?”
“By the Beyond, Kori, did you have to seeeverything?” She whirls away from me in a rush of wings, electing to face Neo instead, who cowers against the back wall of his cell. “Answer me, Neo. Does your power stretch further than you ever admitted? Did you summon her here, in a reckless hope to stop what I demanded you do?”
My mouth tastes like salt. “Is it so hard to believe that I followed you here?”
“At whose command? One of my ghosts? One of my soldiers? Thaane, perhaps, in one of his ill-advised pranks?” It’s impossible to tell if she’s talking to me or Neo or both.
“I followed you,” I blurt, before I can think better of it, “because I felt you slipping away—not even from me, but from yourself. Wishing Zalel hadn’t knit you back together so much as rewoven you into someone with no light left, no hope. No want.”
Adria doesn’t turn to look at me, but I watch every muscle in her back tense through her robes before her wings fold in to cover it. Barely perceptible in the dim room, she shivers by the freezeshot wall’s light.
“I’ve tried that already, Adria,” I say. “I buried myself in my studies. I shut my eyes till dreams took them over. But I am still more tinkerer,more wanderer, more dreamer than heiress, let alone queen. I still want to see everything on this forsaken planet so badly, I think it’ll kill me. I still want to feel something so badly, it’s agonizing.”
I keep waiting for her to interrupt, maybe even to finally slice my armor open, but Adria only turns, stiff-jawed, broad-shouldered, rigid with unnamed emotion, and looks down at me while I keep talking.
“And good sense aside, shadows and sunlight and ransoms aside, there’s a part of me that wants you, too. Wants to stay close to you. Wants to learn your waking and sleeping, your wishes and worries, your everything. It could kill me, damn it. You could and you should and fate probably will if you don’t, but I won’t apologize for any of it.”
I’m on my feet now, though they quiver beneath me. I can feel my heartbeat in my collarbone. “And I certainly won’t bury every memory of you in a Morpheus sphere, even if you send me home and make me swear to never return, because I want to remember, damn it. I want to remember all of you, even when it hurts.”
The words settle like ash over all of us. Even Neo is struck silent, unable to look at either myself or his queen. At long last, when I think the silence may be what kills me after all, Adria says, “Keep your memories. That doesn’t give you license to poison mine.”
“The thoughts I felt were far from poison.”
“This is a land of monsters, Kori. Only the worst of them can rule it.”
“But you’re not a monster, Adria.” Against every logical impulse in my body, I reach out a trembling hand, pleading for her to take it. “You’ve tried, I’ll give you that. But I’m still breathing because you don’t want me dead. You’re still pining because, frankly, you want me by your side. You’re not the world that made you. And you’re a queen, Adria. You could still remake it as something else.”
Her tone is as deep and dark as the bottom of a well. “I’m not who you think I am, Kori.”
“Is it truly so terrifying that someone could want you as you are, that you would make every attempt to become someone else entirely?”
Adria’s violet eyes shimmer. For an instant, I’m afraid they’re gleaming with summoned power, like Neo’s when he reached into her mind. Another instant, and I realize the sheen is tears. Her voice is soft and scraped raw when she speaks again.
“Come here.”
I step forward on legs I can hardly feel. She doesn’t take my hand, but her fingers form a loop around my wrist at the pulse point, my heart skittering against her fingertips. I look up at her, and her down at me, the air electric and aggressive between us, and it’s suddenly very hot in this prison quarter and very constricting in my armor and very awkward that Neo is still here trying not to look at either of us.
I’m so overcome, I barely register when Adria’s right wing snaps wide to hit a button embedded in the wall just behind her.
The freezeshot wall of Neo’s cell flickers and dies. Before I can process what’s happening, Adria spins and lurches, launching me by the arm into the cell. I slide across the floor in a shower of loose stones and gravel, coughing and gasping.
“Adria—”
The energy field between us roars back to life.
“If I can’t forget you entirely,” Adria says, her violet gaze piercing through the barrier and into my ribs, “then I suppose we’ll go back to the beginning.” She crosses her arms across her muscled chest. “You’re my prisoner, heiress. Nothing more.”
“Adria, please.” I can barely form words. “You don’t have to do this—” Pointless adrenaline hurls me into the freezeshot wall. It only catapults me right back, and I’m shuddering, maybe even bleeding, but all I feel is numbness. I try to curse; it comes out as a sob.
“I promised your people a living successor. I can promise precious little else.” Adria swallows hard and turns away from me. “I’ll return as duty dictates. Neo, take care of her, and I’ll see to it that you and your sister find freedom all the same. And please don’t fight, Kori of the Daylands. Too much freezeshock is a truly terrible way to die.”
