Sofia’s stomach plummeted. “With the chief commander?”
“He’s still passing information to Vato when he can,” Lumi added. “He’s on our side, supposedly.” They turned to Clarita, their eyebrows hitched up. “The little fox is a junior major in the king’s army. Something I don’t remember Sofia mentioning while he was rolling out tortillas for us.”
Sofia tried to keep her face neutral, but her lip twitched all the same. She wondered if Lumi had noticed their slip—they’d saidourside.
“That’s not all,” Lumi continued. “Fox said the chief commander has a dragon and her child locked up somewhere in the city. They’re using her son to control her as they experiment on her.”
“Eha,”Chalia said, breaking through Sofia’s thoughts.“He has Eha and Zuni.”
Sofia’s stomach roiled, and her jaw clenched. She wondered what the chief commander had done to Eha’s son in order to convince the dragon to massacre the shapeshifter tribe.
The others continued to talk, strategizing on how they could use Lumi and the other shifters to move in and out of the city. Slipping in and out was easy enough for an animal, but they couldn’t exactly walk out with a sack of grain in their jaws. And there was still no way to help the others escape. Sofia stopped listening after a while, her head too filled with thoughts she didn’t want to examine.
Fox was working directly with the chief commander. How many times had he had the chance to stab the man in the back, and would she want him to? After all, Harlow was hers to kill. She hated the idea of Fox helping that man, even if it was in their best interests.
Once the tea had been drunk and the fire had cooled, they dispersed. Their plans didn’t evolve much past Lumi checking in with Vato every week until they knew more. It wasn’t the most sophisticated of schemes.
“Sofia!” Lumi called before she could stray too far from the fire. “Can I talk to you?”
She exchanged a look with Javi and Flor, waving them off before she turned back. “Of course.”
Lumi escorted Sofia across the cenote, toward the exit where the sun painted the tiles and lake in an alluring palette Sofia had only seen in these woods. Once they were away from the others, Lumi turned to face her. Sofia’s shoulders tensed at the look in Lumi’s eyes.
“I didn’t want to say in front of the others—it didn’t seem like their business,” they said slowly. “I also spoke with Fox directly.”
Sofia’s posture straightened, even as she tried to quash any expectations that were building inside her.
“He wanted you to know he hasn’t found your parents yet,” Lumi said. “There’s no record of their deaths, but he said that might not mean much.”
Blood rushed through Sofia, and it felt as though the tiles under hersandals were quaking. Or perhaps that was just her. She nodded slowly, knowing Lumi needed acknowledgement.
“Thank you for letting me know and for not telling me in front of the others.” Sofia’s voice sounded softer than she wanted it to be. “Can you tell Javi and Flor I’m going to talk to Chalia?”
Lumi gave her a pitying look but eventually nodded and withdrew.
Hearing the shapeshifter’s pattering footsteps grow distant, Sofia stretched out her mind, sensing Chalia’s presence not too far from her.
She found the dragon in a small clearing blanketed with flowers. The blooms sparkled in the morning dew, pinks and oranges and reds, the ground seeming afire.
Only when she was next to Chalia did Sofia collapse, folding in on herself on the ground as Chalia curled around her, a wall of protection. Her scales were soft against her skin, and Sofia pressed her face into the feathers along her spine, hot tears against icy scales.
They were dead.
She’d never again hear the soft timbre of her mother’s voice as she sang Sofia a lullaby or hummed over a steaming pot of beans. She’d never again map the calluses across her father’s hands from his time woodworking. How different had they been? Had they changed over time or stayed the same? Did her mother still sing even after she thought her daughter had died? They hadn’t been perfect parents, but she’d never been a perfect daughter.
A part of her knew they were dead. She’d actively not sought out information on them for five sun cycles, and here she was, suffering the consequences. She hated herself. Blamed herself. As if she’d have been able to stop any of it from happening. Who knows how they’d died? Perhaps in a raid, or even in their sleep. A plague of scalepox had ravaged the city a few sun cycles back, and it was more than likely they’d been caught up in it. The northeastern slums had been hit the worst. She’d never looked the records up though. She’d never checked.
Because she’d been a terrible daughter. She’d been too busy in her own world to care if her parents were dead or alive.
“You’re not a bad person,”Chalia said, voice a soft whisper in her mind.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, though. It’s not just your thoughts. I can sense your mind. I can sense you. And you are good at heart. I feel it in you even now.”
“I killed them through my own negligence.”
“You don’t know if they’re dead.”
