Page 109 of Cage of Starlight
His eyes settle on a gangly figure near the trees, face covered with a scrap of cloth. There’s blood in a long, wandering line in front of it, like someone cared enough to try to drag the body away.
Whoever the boy is, he is loved.
The thin wrists, folded over the ruined chest, look so much like Tory’s. The tone of the skin, pale like the sun never touched him a day in his life, the spatter of light freckles—
It can’t be Tory. This land of the dead is no place for him. Tory is achingly, awfully alive.
Sena staggers toward the still figure, breath stoppered by the knot in his throat, and stumbles to his knees beside the body. He wheezes and tastes rot. His fingers find the edges of the cloth over the boy’sface and sit there. A voice inside him tells him ofcourseTory is fine. He’s—somewhere. The details are hazy. Firelight and warm smiles and a cloak—that cloak he loves so much.
It warms Sena now, and there’s aslicein it and Sena’s dirtying it with his blood and—
Tory is not the boy underneath this cloth. Sena steels himself to lift it. One, two . . .
“Don’t you touch him!”
A shadow races out from the tree line, knife in hand, and Sena’s head whips up. His vision does an awful cartwheel at the suddenness. The angry stranger rushes up. She and the ground and the grass and the body tip and roll, but Sena catches the important things.
The girl—short and uniformed and bloodstained from hands to chest—crouches over the body like she’ll die beside it. “Don’t you dare touch him.”
Then she goes still, and her face is as much a muddle as the rest of the world, but her voice comes out odd and cautious. “L-Lieutenant Vantaras?”
He squints. “I . . . do I . . .?” Then, with a flap of his hand toward the body, “Tory?”
The girl huffs. “No.”
From the woods, a young man’s voice rises up, slurred and faint. “Niela? What’s happening?”
The angry, bloodstained girl’s eyes flick toward the woods. She shifts to stand between Sena and the voice. She calls, “Stay where you are. Don’t move again. You know what happens when you do.”
“My friends, are they . . .?”
“Long gone, thank the stars. Stay there.”
The voice in the woods goes silent.
The girl—Niela—frowns. “This is Randall. I tried to heal him, but . . .” Her lips go tight and thin, bloodless.
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be. Youandthe bastards who sent him here.”
Sena flinches.
Niela hisses a breath in, mouth opening like she’s not finished with him, but before she can start, a petite young man, barely upright with a tangled mess of long wavy hair, stumbles through the tree line and collapses against a rough trunk on the fringe of the woods. He sways where he stands, eyes dipping closed in a slow blink. And that determined set to his mouth, the burnt orange sweater several times too big for him, the burn scars on his hands that Sena now knows must be from the fire he set when his Seed blossomed at six—
Niela throws her bloody hands up. “You’ll reopen it!Why?I onlyjust—”
The boy breathes, “Knew it was your voice I heard.”
Sena’s vision tips and turns and maybe he’s turning with it, but he finds his feet again. “Iri?”
Just like he last saw him, except the sweater is more black-red than orange, pocked with five or six holes, his skin the bloodless bluish-pale of the dead. He’s gone because of Sena.
Words stumble from his lips and his eyes burn. “Sorry,” he slurs. “Sorry I couldn’t . . . save you.”
Iri makes a sound like a laugh and lifts a shoulder in a shrug. He winces, turning his smile to a grimace. His free hand flutters over the holes in his sweater.
Sena doesn’t realize the flesh beneath the holes was smooth until it opens in front of his eyes like a ragged mouth, weeping blood.
