Page 111 of The Space Between Stars

Her blood seethed. “You have him in chains?”

Without warning, a mangled scream erupted from the man in the brig, sending her throat into her stomach. She jumped back as he struggled against his bindings to claw at her, fingers reaching for her throat.

“And that’s sedated,” Turiel said.

Heart thumping with incomprehension, Fankalo peered at the figure—naked except for ill-fitting sirwal, body rippling with muscle, broken by a hideous smattering of scars. He bled openly from both his leg and a gash along his head. The blood matted cropped dark curls into a smear that marred an otherwise familiar face. Familiar—and haunting and beautiful.

Her chest tightened. She stepped closer anyway. “Calver?”

The man did not respond. His breath came erratically, causing his chest to spasm like a sea in a storm.

“Calver, it’s me.” Her throat choked. Her eyes stung. “Arleena.”

Those behind her shifted. She was vaguely aware that Mitek had joined their party, standing beside her father. She’d never told anyone her name. She was Fankalo—the Captain’s fate-touched boy—the occasional “Brat” thrown in by Mitek.

Calver did not move.

Fankalo closed her eyes and opened herself to the swirling wall of dark Fates around her. She searched for him, but he was as empty from her sights as ever. How was that possible? He was nearly close enough to touch.

“Calver. Answer me. You’re… You’re safe. I’m here. I’ve—”

The creature behind the bars, so deceptively like her sibling, lifted his chin. It was those eyes that did her in. They looked the way she felt: so very far away from everything that was good in life. Icy tendrils ran the length of her spine.

“He won’t respond to you,” her father said, voice sterner than she’d ever heard. “He doesn’t have a tongue.”

Fankalo gagged. It was all she could do to remain upright—to breathe in heady wafts to steady herself—but her vision blinked into pin-pricked darkness. A hand supported her elbow as she sank to the floor—Mitek’s.

“Head between your legs, Fankalo,” she heard her father say. She obeyed instinctively.

She gasped, pulling the moldy air in like it was honey-sweet. Slowly, her heart returned to its normal pace. She lifted her head to stare at the man inside the brig. He moaned in that same, guttural timbre and hung his head.

Her father looked at her for a moment. “See that marking beneath his collarbone?”

She squinted. There were so many markings, but over his lungs were unmistakable lines: two a thumb’s width apart and an oblong slash through them.

Her newfound breath came short. “You think this was done to him by the Shadewalker?”

Her father’s face darkened. “Based on location, timelines, physical form and… demeanor, I mean to say that he is the Shadewalker.”

The words throbbed in her ears.

No.

No no.

Her feet found purchase beneath her. She latched onto the bars and pleaded, “Calver. Calver. Look at me—Arleena. The pain in your ass. The tagalong. The sugar fiend.”

His eyes held her face, but nothing looked back. She kept babbling. “Arleena. The one Mother was always mad at. The one who bit your sparring partner and half beat him senseless when he got you into a chokehold.”

No response.

She slumped against the brig, tears bleeding freely now. “Calver,” she sobbed. “Calver…”

Her chest spasmed, and it took her several breaths to realize that the man just beyond her reach had stretched his chains to lean in closer.

She was getting through to him.

“Calver?” She smiled, wiping her tears away with her tunic sleeve.