I stare up at the nearly unhinged snake jaw before me, its tongue flicking at the venom-burned black gums, and my stomach plummets.
“By the Beyond.” I leap over a reptilian tail whip, nevertheless catching a sharp blow across the back of one wing. Every breath feels like knives on its way out my throat. “You’re here for Kori, aren’t you? You have orders to bring her home, even if only as bones?”
The snake gives its massive head a very wiggly nod.
My chance at the ransom—enough funding to secure my new dynasty—has collapsed in an instant, as evidenced by this reptilian emissary’s murderous intent. More than wanting her alive, it seems Kori’s mother is desperate to keep her controlled. And barring the ability to maintain control …
“Well, I have bad news for you,” I warn, spreading my wings and claws alike, finding my center as the adrenaline settles in. Blue energy ripples along all my edges, setting me alight with galactic fire. “You have to go through me first.”
If her mother is willing to forsake paying a ransom and kill her altogether, Kori holds no value for my kingdom or my war anymore. I should step aside and let the beast take what it came for, rather than risk my army suffering casualties that leave us even more exposed to Azarii’s poisonous rebellion. So why does it feel like the sun serpent is already strangling me?
Why does it feel like that massive fanged mouth is unhinging its jaw to swallow my sun?
CHAPTER
21
KORI
Neo offers feeble comforts between my embarrassing snotty sobs. “I’m sure she’ll come back,” he tries; and then: “You did a good thing, interrupting me, when I don’t know what I might’ve done to her”; and finally: “You two certainly seem to have a connection,” which is the sentence that somehow revives my voice.
“You saw us speakonce,” I snap back, even knowing my rage and sadness is hardly meant for him. “And she tossed me in here, withyou, like a bag of trash.”
“I’ll do my best not to take offense to that.” Neo half laughs.
He has no arms to rest upon my shoulder, so it takes me a moment to process the similarly intended comfort when the side of his cheek brushes my helmet, resting briefly in the crook of my neck.
“I’m sorry,” I manage to say, activating a gust of air in my helmet to clear my eyes. “None of this is your fault. I don’t even know you.”
“Awkwardly enough, it seemsIknow something of you, though. Rumors slide through the shadows, even into the prisons. The queen called youKori.” He inclines his head, a gesture of unexpected respectso sincere, it nearly activates my tears all over again. His shock of overgrown ginger hair shifts into his eyes with the movement. “It seems I’ve met two heirs to two thrones. My name is Neo. I think I’ve probably lived almost as many cycles as you, give or take a few hundred.”
“Neo. Adria never did want to tell me about you. Your sister, she’s the reason I ended up in the Shadowlands to start with. A memory trade—”
“My sister?” Neo’s eyes are milky pools of desperation. He seems like he would seize me with fists, but he has none, so there’s only an odd sensation of phantom tugging at my arms, my legs, even the sides of my helmet, like competing gale winds in the Passage. I stumble back, overwhelmed. “Have you seen her? Is she all right?”
I thrust my arms out to create some personal space. “Adria said she was imprisoned, like you. They made a deal for her Morpheus sphere, the one I was originally here to obtain. But I haven’t seen her myself since then. That’s all I know.” Neo’s lips quiver. In a less than impressive attempt at consolation, I add, “I don’t believe Adria would hurt her.”
Neo gives his head a little shake, his scarlet hair shifting every which way once again. “In truth, I believe much the same. Already, Adria is a greater queen than she gives herself credit for. Haunted by violence, yes … but more afraid of her capacity for mercy. She was kind to you, after all. I can only hope she was similarly kind to Lail.”
His gaze pierces my own, saying without words,Even though that isn’t the same sort of relationship at all.
An impossible, unsustainable thing bloomed between me and Adria, and now I can feel it withering, dying, petal by wilted petal falling limp and lifeless at my feet. Never meant to be.
I force myself to square my shoulders, measure my breaths. “And I don’t think Adria would risk turning you against her, Neo. That alone is a reason to keep Lail alive.”
“You may be right.”
“Adria was so hesitant to tell me about you, about what you could do. Desperate to forget …” I mean to sayto forget her parents, butto forget mebubbles up beneath that and pulls me underwater, chokes the rest of the sentence altogether. I sigh. “Your elder sister told me about your powers, when we met. But I still don’t understand how you can just … move memories … without any Morpheus tech at all.”
“I defied my queen’s law,” Neo says, as if that explains everything. “I embraced the Diakópsei’s glory, and I was changed.”
I remember Adria’s fearful explanation when I beheld the gleaming, pulsing asteroid for myself.It made me what I am.
“When I was caught in my sin,” Neo goes on, “I hoped at least to be useful. But it seems my overcharge was not enough to free my queen from what haunts her.”
I swallow a lump in my throat. “How long has she been asking you to … erase me?”
“Only this time. This bond between you two, for better or for worse, is still new and brilliant. The queen sought me to purge her guilt.” Neo bites his lip. “But that is not my story to tell.”
