“If we don’t reach it,” I say, “then in a hundred years our descendants will have to try all over again.” And in truth, we won’t make it another hundred years.
There won’t be anyone left.
Noah narrows his eyes on me—impossibly green, sorrowfully green, crush-me-into-a-hundred-pieces-of-glass green. It hurts to feel his eyes on me, knowing I’ve taken so much from him.
A river of silence grows heavy between us, and my heart clobbers my chest, my mind remembering the moment when I saw him striding down the center of the schoolhouse, his eyes focused only on me, a fury in him I’ve never seen before. Determination and angerburning across his skin. He tore Holt away from me, knife burrowed into Holt’s side, then took my hand in his, a tremor in his fingertips, like he thought he might have been too late, like he had feared he would find me already dead. There was relief in his eyes, and something else: a different kind of pain. And I remember what Holt said to him just before Noah pulled the knife from his gut.
You… betray me, forher.
I had thought he meant the kind of betrayal from a traitor, because Noah fled the Theorists years ago. But there was something else in his words. A hidden meaning. And the next thing he said seemed to make no sense.
“What did Holt mean,” I ask, “when he said,This blood is yours?”
Noah’s mouth parts, a soft exhale releasing into the night, and his eyes tip up to the sky. For a moment, he looks like a boy who’s lost more than I even know. Who is breaking right in front of me. “I wasn’t just a member of the Theorists, a soldier like most of Holt’s men,” he says. “I was going to be their leader one day.”
I swallow and my stomach clenches.
“Holt was grooming me to lead, to command his men.” Noah’s eyes fall to me, jaw flexing, his dark skin somehow even darker in the firelight, in the waves of shadows and light. “I betrayed him when I left, when I escaped and never came back.”
The heat from the fire suddenly feels like too much, and I brush my hands up my arms, narrowing my eyes on Noah, trying to see what else is there. What tiny secrets hide beneath his twilight skin. “Holt could’ve just found someone else,” I say. “It didn’t have to be you.” But I hear the doubt in my own voice.
Noah’s gaze darkens, bottom lip pulled tight, and he removesthe elm stick from the fire, digging it into the dirt at his feet. “I grew up as a Theorist, Vega. I was always one of them, born into it.” He breathes, a pain in his eyes, as if each word is costing him something, a part of his skin shed, a piece of his heart broken. “I was destined for it.”
He shifts his eyes to me, like he thinks I already know, like I should be able to see it in his face. The truth. Always there. Always right in front of me. If I had only looked—really looked. But I need to hear him say it, need the word to leave his parted lips, even though my head is already pinwheeling, the trees seeming to tilt too far toward the ground, the sky set upside down.Everything made wrong.
“I tried to kill him when I left the Theorists,” he says, a waver in his voice, every part of him hating the thought that is about to become words, resisting, his voice catching against his teeth. “I tried to kill my own father.”
I suck in a breath, my jaw clamping down. I touch the ground with my palms, needing the hard soil to steady me, but afraid to look away from Noah, afraid the words he just spoke will split him apart. Break us both.
“Noah,” I say gently, his name slipping out, carried on an exhale. But how do I say the thoughts rioting in my mind—how do I knit all of it together?
Holt is Noah’s father.
And although Noah tried to kill Holt when he fled the Theorists, he might have just killed him for good inside the schoolhouse. And he did it for me.He chose me, over his own father.
The air is gone from my lungs.
Words gone from my throat.
The hurt growing inside Noah is too big to be eased by anything I might say.
The campfire throws sparks up into the sky, and a moment stalls between us, as if we’re both trying to gather together the missing parts of our pasts, the secrets we each keep. Noah rubs a hand across his neck, another memory shivering through him. “After I left the Theorists’ camp, after I cut my own father’s throat, I didn’t know where to go. Wells was dead, and I didn’t know anything other than my life within the group.” He releases a trembling breath, memories spiking through him now. “I spent a few cold nights outside,” he goes on, keeping his eyes on mine, sinking in, letting them settle deeper and deeper into my skin. “I slept behind a blacksmith’s shop in some no-name town, starving, but with a Theorist brand burned into my flesh, I knew no one would take me in. I wouldn’t survive on my own.”
He’s telling me everything. Showing me the shadows he keeps tucked into his darkest corners. His secrets are mine now.
“I knew I had to find August. He was the only one who would take me in.”
This catches me off guard. “You knew who August was?”
He nods, eyebrows tented, and digs the stick deeper into the soil. “He and my father were friends once. Best friends.” He blows out a quick gust of air. “August even told my father some of the old stories, about the first Astronomer and the first Architect. He trusted my father, confided in him. And my father vowed to protect August, keep his stories secret. But all that changed when my mother died.” Noah leans back from the fire, his features cast in shadow. I’ve never heard him mention his mom, and I can see the latent grief rising tothe surface. “She was pregnant with me when she started showing signs of the sickness.” Noah swallows, starts again. “My father begged August to help him. He thought if they could find the Astronomer, she would be able to find a cure for my mother. He believed the Astronomer could save her. But August refused, told him there was nothing that could be done.
“My mother died only a month after having me. The consumption took her quick.”
Noah swallows and I want to touch his arm, his chest, his face. I want to wrap my arms around his strong shoulders and tell him how sorry I am. That I know the pain of losing a mother. That I know how wretched his hurt feels. But I worry he wants no sympathy from me. The girl, anAstronomer, whose family was partly blamed for his own mother’s death. The girl who has caused him so much of the pain he feels. But now I understand how Holt knew so much—about me, about everything. Because at one time, August told him.
“My father blamed August for her death,” he continues. “And he vowed to find the Astronomer himself, to save those who were left. He started gathering men to join his group; he started promising a cure for the consumption. Word spread fast, and soon they were tormenting anyone who they thought might know where the Astronomer was hiding. They were violent, and I saw my father murder countless people.”
His hand tenses around the stick he still holds, and I try to imagine what it must have been like to be raised by a man like Holt, to grow up within the Theorist camps, and then to leave it all behind. To know it’s not the life he wanted—to end up like his father. It would take courage to abandon everything you know, to risk death. And Ithink of the valley, the cabin, Mom’s grave beside the river—I left everything behind too.
