Page 35

“You are,” I say. “And we're allowed to notice when the shape of it's different.”

She looks at me then. The mask makes it harder to read her the way I've been learning to, the small tells, the particular set of her mouth. But her eyes are visible through it and they're doing the thing they do when she's got something she doesn't want to say.

“Prince.” A warning in it.

“Snow.” I match her tone exactly and watch the corner of her mouth move despite herself.

The fire pops behind us. From the other side of it I can hear the low murmur of Cinder and her guys, their own quiet world.

“What happens when we get off this island,” Snow says.

Very even. Controlled. Which is the tell.

“That's what you've been sitting with?” Doc asks.

“I've been sitting with a lot of things.” A pause. “My father. The evil bitch. What state the kingdom's in. Whether there's anything left to go back to or whether she's spent this time taking it apart so completely that walking back through the gates only gives her another target.” The fire moves and the light shifts across her mask. “Whether I'm enough for what comes next.”

“You are,” Bash says. Flat and immediate and completely without qualification.

“You don't know that.”

“I know you.” He says it simply, like it settles the argument, which for Bash it does. “That's not nothing.”

“That's not all of it,” Doc hedges.

The silence stretches.

The lighthouse sits dark on its cliff in the distance and the clouds drag themselves slowly across the sky above it. The fire breathes and Snow looks at that dark shape for a long time before she speaks again.

“What if we get off this island and the world outside it doesn't have room for this.” Her voice is quiet enough that it belongs only to the four of us. "For whatever this is. The four of us." A breath. “I've done this before. I had something and the world outside of it decided it wasn't acceptable and I lost it. I lost all of you.” She doesn't look away from the lighthouse. “I'm terrified of that happening again. Of standing in front of my father and my court, with my crown and everything the queen's done, and being forced to choose.”

“Between your kingdom and us,” I say.

“Yes.” The word costs her. I can hear the price of it in the single syllable. “And I know what you're going to say. That you're coming regardless. That you've already decided.” A pause. “But I was told things before and then you were gone. I spent eight months looking and I couldn't find you and I can't—” Her voice catches. “I won't survive it a second time. I know how that sounds from someone who's survived everything this island's produced, but it's the truth and I'm done not saying it out loud.”

Bash reaches over and finds her hand in the dark between them. She looks down at it, then up at him through both their masks. The expression around her eyes is the most unguarded I've seen it since she arrived.

Doc turns to look at her and when he speaks the armour that's always in his voice isn't there. “I've spent two years on this island being angry,” he says. “I believed it was the safest thing I had left.” A pause that carries two years in it. “I'm not interested in safe anymore. I'm not making this choice quietly and I'm not making it once and then allowing the world to talk me out of it.” His eyes hold hers through the mask. “We're not a consequence of this island. We're a decision. I'm making it.”

Snow stares at him.

“Doc,” she says softly.

“I'm aware that was more words than I typically produce,” he says. “Don't make me repeat them.”

The sound that comes out of her is halfway between a laugh and something that isn't a laugh at all, and lands somewhere more honest than either.

I lean forward and look at her across the firelit dark. “You want to know if we mean it when the gates open and the world's got something to say about it,” I say. “Ask us.”

She looks at me through her mask. Direct, quiet and completely without performance.

“Do you mean it?” she asks.

“Yes,” Bash and I say in unison.

Doc says nothing. He reaches out and tucks a strand of dark hair back from the edge of her mask with one careful hand. From Doc Florian that gesture's the equivalent of a speech.

Snow closes her eyes behind her mask for a moment.