Page 101 of Cage of Starlight
Sena slips forward and Tory catches him, presses him back against the wall. Tory joins him there, knees tucked up under his chin. WhenSena’s head falls onto his right shoulder, he lets it stay. He unbuttons his jacket and slips it off one shoulder and then the next, awkwardly tugging it past Sena and finally pulling it off his arm. He uses his left hand to toss it over Sena. He’s plenty warm, and he still has the grungy, short-sleeved undershirt on, so it’s not a big deal.
Sena shakes, the depth of the tremors clear even in the brokenness of his breaths.
How did he get like this? What did Tory miss?
“Didn’t you say you don’t get sick? Shit. Wake up, I can’t do this.”
The wagon rattles along, the only sounds the whistling of the wind, the crunch of rock beneath its wheels, and Sena’s too-fast breaths against Tory’s skin.
Tory squeezes his burning eyes closed.
They’ll make this right. They have to. Tory isn’t sure he can bear the alternative.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sena sleeps onice and wakes to darkness, on fire.
He shudders halfway-upright in his tent and chokes until he’s nearly retching. Pain bursts white-hot behind his eyelids and clears the haze of confusion. He really shouldn’t have slept on his back.
He’s never once missed these things: the anchor-weight of his bones that comes with high fever; the whistle of breath from overtaxed lungs; the molasses-like slowness of disjointed thoughts, each its own isolated emergency. He’s glad to have left them behind when he was nine.
He can’t remember how he got here.
He has fragments. The communicator. Bumbling through a halfway-competent explanation of their circumstances and begging for time.
Five days.
Talking with Tory in the truck. Being dragged out, arm around someone’s shoulders. A steady stream of complaints, their token sharp edges dulled by the warmth and steadiness of the hand on his waist, the way the voice would crack sometimes and say,hey, not much farther, okay? Just keep walking.
Getting to his feet is a nightmare in gradation, every movement broken down into steps.
This, like so many things, he’s gotten better at with practice.
He finds himself on his feet and doesn’t stop to wonder how he got there. He steps through the tent flap and into star-studded dark. A fire burns a little ways away, and Sena recognizes the lone silhouette in front of it. He drops down on one of the vacated stumps around the pit and focuses on breathing. Through the trees, faint blue glows at the horizon. Sunrise. He slept a long while, then.
Tory tosses a twig onto the embers. “You look like you were chewed up and shit out twice.”
“Then I look better than I feel,” Sena rasps.
It startles a laugh from Tory, a tightness in his shoulders easing. “Hair’s amess. It’s like a bird’s nest. You should wear it like that all the time.”
Sena frowns, but Tory grins, soft, in the direction of the flames.
Sena wouldn’t mind keeping that smile on his face. “You should see it in the mornings before I wet it down. Lay a towel over it. Sometimes my bird sits on the towel while I get ready.”
Tory’s eyes dart to him, dancing. “So your head is sometimes anactualbird’s nest? I love that. What’s its name, your bird?”
“Kierney.” Jeffra always takes good care of him when Sena is away. Perhaps she’ll adopt him when he can’t return.
“I wouldn’t . . . Wow. Yeah, I can’t imagine that.” Tory turns to Sena, cheerful as Sena has ever seen him, and says, “You’re pathetic, you know.”
Sena blinks. He dives deep into his well of standard responses and finds nothing to match that, so he stays silent. Tory will keep talking. It will make sense soon, probably.
“I’ve been wanting to say that to someone forso long, you have no idea. See, I was always the one getting variations on that theme from, uh.From Thatcher or Hasra. Hasra, mostly. Hasra entirely, actually. Thatcher’s way too nice. She’d be all,poor little thing, legs wobbling like reeds,or, sad creature, what do you expect me to do with you? It’s nice to be able to try it on someone else.”
Thatcher. Hasra. He says the names with such gentleness. Those are the people he left behind when Sena dragged him into this. Sena leans toward the heat of the fire and squeezes his eyes closed.
A face drifts up in his vision—graying hair and smile lines. “Thatcher,” he murmurs. “The one with the tea. Terrible liar.”
