“Jace!” Seth caught him, alarmed, warm hands against his ribs and back. Seth’s fingers brushed over his knobby spine, clenched in the robes that hung too large on Jacen’s frame. “You can’t go on like this. You need help.”
“What makes you think I want your help?” Jacen’s pulse thudded in his ears. It was all too much, far too much. “I couldn’t be bothered to speak to you for the last three years.”
Seth watched him with some awful mixture of pity and frustration. “I can’t imagine learning what you’ve learned. I know I’ve said many things about your faith over the years, but I have never wished that part of you gone.”
Gone.
To hear it out loud, to be forced to admit it . . . Jacen felt the loss of his faith like pain in a phantom limb, an agony with no cure.
And from Seth, he sensed no vindication. No smugness. Nothing of the sort from the man Jacen had spent so many late nights debating about faith. Odd as it might seem to anyone on the outside, this had been a foundation of their friendship. Seth’s ability—his willingness—to test and challenge Jacen was rare, and Jacen held it priceless. Forbidden as he was to say the words, let alone act on them, he had fallen in love with it.
To find it absent today was what broke him.
He could not stand for anyone to see him like this, let alone Seth. He needed himout.And so, he said something he knew he would regret.
“You’re right. You can’t fathom what I’m going through. You’ve never believed in anything, never had to risk anything. Your brother is right—you should be glad someone has the courage to do what you won’t.”
Finally,finally,Seth recoiled. “You know as well as I do that Ged only cares about his own?—”
“I’m not talking about Ged,” Jacen said. “I’m talking about Neri.” Seth stared at him. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Maybe!” Jacen burst out. “But what’s the alternative? You couldn’t possibly know; you don’t see it all up close like I have to—” His voice broke.
“You are talking about sacrificing a child,” Seth said through gritted teeth. “And unleashing forces none of us understand.”
“What makes Neri more valuable than every other child taken by the Harvest?” Jacen demanded. Now that he’d started, he could not stop. “There’s no path forward in which we don’t make compromises. We’ve all been complicit. Would you have Neri do the same, or become a victim of the Harvest because of what we both know he is? You said so yourself—that is the alternative.”
“No. Of course not. I—I don’t know.” Seth’s shoulders slumped. He looked like he’d been struck. But he said no more, because the clinic’s proprietor pulled the curtain aside.
Seth stood. He hesitated a moment, bereft.
“I was just leaving,” he said to Ogden, and promptly did so. It did not make Jacen feel any better.
Ogden faced Jacen, arms crossed, waiting for him to speak. But why . . .
Jacen’s stomach turned over as he finally remembered what he’d seen in the basement.
“I should go, too.” He rose, but Ogden grasped him by the shoulder and pushed him back down. The old man had a grip like steel.
“That was impressive,” he said. “Truly. I’ve seen denial and displacement, but that was remarkably committed.” He took a cup from the table beside the cot and offered it to Jacen. “Drink this.”
Jacen wrinkled his nose at the thick yellow liquid. “What is it?” Ogden refused to explain beyond “Medicine.”
Jacen didn’t take it.
Ogden sighed. “It is not in my best interests, nor that of my patients, to draw attention to myself by poisoning a Priest of the Black Sun.”
Jacen gathered his faculties enough to assess the words for truth. He found it. He drained the cup with a grimace, then looked down. “These aren’t my clothes.”
“You pissed yourself,” Ogden explained, and Jacen nearly perished on the spot. “Semira has a point. If you want to live, this is not the way to go about it.”
“I had a bad night.”
“I’ve heard that one before.” Ogden took the seat Seth had occupied and folded his gloved hands. “Your gifts might help you remain remarkably functional, but they won’t save you when your body has had enough.”
Unwilling to respond, Jacen changed the subject. “Are we going to talk about your basement?”
“Are we going to talk about why you broke into my home?” “We’ve established that I was drunk off my ass.”
