Page 108 of Cage of Starlight
But his stomach sinks, mouth sour.
Sena is gone.
This is the most awful feeling yet. An acid, wrenching emptiness. The worst part is, he goes straight to bargaining.Surely, he’ll be back. Maybe someone needed to talk with him; maybe he was confused—
Or maybe he bailed.
Sena’s pack, after all, is also gone.
The sizzle of relief in Tory fades to numbness. He forgot that his choices have so often been whittled down to these: leave or be left behind.
Maybe Sena knew it, too, decided to make it easier for both of them. He probably did. It hasn’t been easy for Sena, either. Like Tory, he can’t afford the pain of holding onto things that could ruin him. Maybe he was afraid, too, of wanting. Those last words he said before Tory left with Riese—“You go on.” He was sick. He was so awfully sick.
Maybe that was a benediction. Maybe those stories were his way of saying goodbye.
Five days, he promised, and Tory believed him.
This should be a good thing, shouldn’t it? An easy break, bloodless. Itis. It’s just that there’s not nearly enough air out here.
Something sharper and more caustic than shame burns in his belly.
A hand settles on his shoulder, heavy and warm, and like a traitor, his mind jumps first toSena?
He crushes the thought and turns.
*
Sena can’t stop running—doesn’t dare.
Fresh blood slips in lazy lines down his right arm and dyes his glove red. His hands—he feels the urge to hide them, even more than usual, and there’s a reason why, but his buzzing thoughts refuse to yield an explanation that makes sense.
This is why he runs: an acid burst of horror; the flap of his tent slipping open behind him; grasping hands; frightened, wide eyes mirroring his own; light glinting off metal; pain, localized and sharp like a bee sting; an apology.
This is why he runs: like a fool, he wants to live.
His blood roars in his ears and his uniform rasps at fever-hot skin. He’s never wanted anything more than he wants to rest, but he can’t. If he does, he won’t rise. He forces leaden legs to move.Awayis the only way that matters.
It’s light and dark and then light again, like a magic trick, and acid nausea bubbles through him. Branches and eerie blue flowers sway in front of his face, and roots lash out of the earth to grab him. His skin strains over his bones, like he might burst.
Fading vision fixed on the ground, he finds a path and follows it.
His feet twist in deep ruts.Wheel tracks, his head tells him after he’s followed them maybe for miles. Sena staggers past whispering trees, between rocks like blades, and out into open air and hills wreathed by low fog.
Roots rise in the distance, a cathedral or a great ribcage—the bones of the Beast inviting him to his final slumber among the stars. If Sena passes through them, he can be at rest. But what a lonely rest it would be.
No, he’s running for a reason. Toward or away from something, to keep or to save something.
Tory.
Sena turns away and loses his breath at the wasteland beneath and beside and all around him. He chokes on the sour-sweet odor of blood and decay and the tang of saltwater, blinks and opens his eyes to a deathscape pocked with bodies like flowers, swollen and cold on red-dyed grass. Somehow, he’s walked himself all the way to a graveyard.
It’s appropriate.
He forges a path through the dead, their faces rigid with fear, eyes flat and whitish. Dull, bruise-colored sunrise glints ghostly silver off hundreds of bracelets just like his. This place is a mortuary of numbers, not names.
(I-S)VS/0001. Sacrifices to a war of his father’s devising, Sena the first of thousands—not a son but a sword. He’ll lie among them soon. Maybe he already is. Fog plays around his ankles and beads on his skin. He shivers.
He burns from the inside out.
