Page 114 of Daughter of No Worlds

She said this as if it was supposed to be a relief. Arelief, instead of the confirmation of all my worst fears.

“A blood pact?” I rasped.

My fingers unintentionally tightened around Nura’s arm. She looked at my hand, then my face, and sighed.

“Walk with me,” she said, jerking her chin down the hallway.

“Nura, Ascended help me if—”

“Just— walk with me.” For one brief moment, so brief it was little more than a brush, she laid her hand over mine. Then, she pulled away and started down the hall.

A blood pact. A fucking blood pact.

I felt like my body had forgotten how to move.

And then I followed.

* * *

Nura ledme down a series of twisting white hallways until we reached a plain door far, far from the activity of the lobbies. Her apartment, I realized, as she unlocked it and waved me inside. It was just as clean and sparse and oppressively empty as everything else in this damn place, all white furniture on white floors against white walls.

Nura nudged the front door closed, then crossed the living room and went to her bedroom. I stood in the doorway, watching her back as she began unbuttoning her bloody jacket.

“Where is she?”

Maybe there was still hope. Maybe there was still time. Maybe I was wrong.

Nura lifted one finger to point to the ceiling. “Up there. Recovering.”

Recovering.

I had to force my next words up my throat.

“You gave her Reshaye. That’s what you were asking her to do.”

It was the first time I had said my theory aloud, and I wanted so desperately to be wrong.

But Nura said, “Yes.”

Fuck.Fuck.

“She’s a good candidate,” she went on. “And we need it now. We’re on the brink of something worse than the last one.”

I couldn’t speak. My hands clenched at my sides until they trembled. The room brightened in a grotesque lurch as all of the lanterns in the room flared at once.

I had never been this angry, this horrified.

“Even for you,” I choked out. “Even for you, this is— This is—”

“Calm down.”

“Calm down?” Another flare. “That thing should bedestroyed, and you know it.”

“It’s too useful.” Nura cast me a sidelong glance, and there was something about that look that I hated — hated how much it made her look like the girl I fell in love with when we were twenty and much happier and stupider than we were now. “It won’t be like last time, Max. And she didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do.”

“She doesn’tknow, Nura.”

“She would have done anything to save her people. It wouldn’t matter if she did.”

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