Page 112 of Cage of Starlight
Whereishe? Where was he?
Images flood his mind, sharp and free of context: surprise, pressure, andrunning, running, running.Broken images. Andfear, not for himself but of himself.Nothing before that, but plenty after, ghostly and dreamlike. Blood and the bodies of the dead. Roots arching from the ground like something sacred.
Iri.
He found his way back to the battlefield on the cliffs.
“Iri!” His last words ring in Sena’s head:They’ll kill him.“Tory, where’s . . .” Those hands again, reaching for him. “Don’t touch me!”
His head throbs, too full. The hands retreat, and Sena drags in a shaky breath, vision wavering. He forces himself to his feet. “H-have to find Tory.”
Tell him—something. He didn’t mean to leave. He wants to live, tostay.
Sena wants so many things he can’t have. All he can do now is choose to chase them.
“Yeah, I don’t think you’ll be finding anyone in your condition,” a no-nonsense voice offers. “You’re bleeding, by the way. Stab wound, looks like, though you didn’t give me enough time to assess it. I tried to heal it, but no luck. Both of you, problem patients. I swear . . .”
Sena blinks down to his right arm and the blood soaking his glove, oozing from a wound he doesn’t remember getting. He falls back against the tree, sliding to the ground again. “S’fine.”
“It’s not,” says the voice. Niela. That’s her name. Niela who loves the freckled boy with the cloth over his face, who couldn’t save him. Sena hopes that’s not a prophecy. “But itisthe least of your concerns right now.”
“Please. Iri said . . .”
Another voice echoes toward him from farther away, so faint the wind nearly overcomes it.Iri. “Welcome back,” he says, and Sena squints until he sees him—forcing himself upright with a shaking hand cupped over a still-bleeding wound, skin nearly translucent with blood loss and shot through with green-blue veins.
Niela grumbles and moves across the clearing again, pressing her hands to the wound. She growls as she lifts Iri’s bloody hands away and replaces them with her own. “You won’t make this easy on me,will you? Gimme a break, I’m anapprentice, I’m not—” She wipes her forehead on her upper arm. “Something’sneutralizing my work, and it circulates the more he exerts himself. It’s almost out of his system, but it’s a bit of a game now to see which will last longer—his life energy and my ability to force his body to produce more blood to replace what he’s lost, or the toxin that’s preventing my healing from sticking.”
Null.It has to be. Sena must make some sort of noise, because Niela’s eyes dart to him.
“You know something about this, Lieutenant Vantaras?”
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
Iri’s chin falls against his chest like he can no longer support it. “S’not your fault,” he murmurs. “S’your asshole dad.”
His blood oozes between Niela’s splayed fingers and floods over.
Sena might not have to be a weapon—but Nullis. The tests used to expose Seeds, made from his blood, have become a sharp weapon in the Grand General’s hands. Iri showed him beauty and creation and crushing hope, showed Sena how he could make things grow, but it’s the compound made fromSena’sblood tearing open his wounds over and over.
Sena presses the heels of his hands to his eyes and pulls his knees up to his chest. His breath quickens, vision bursting with color from the pressure. He shouldn’t be here.
Iri’s voice, far away and gentler than he deserves: “Sena?”
“Don’t you dare move and undo my hard work again. You should stay well away from him right now, anyway. Look.The tree.”
Sena looks. Beneath him, the dark, healthy roots he clung to sit grayish-brittle and pitted, aged a hundred years in a moment. He brushes a twig growing from the tree as he turns. It cracks and crumbles, drifts down on him like ash.
“I didn’t—”
His hands are gloved, the right one stiff with his blood. It should besafewith them on.
His head throbs, iron-weighted but cotton-filled. His eyes burn. He’s breathing in and in andinand he’s dizzy with it, unsafe and surrounded by people he could hurt. “This isn’t . . .”
“You need to calm down.”
He draws a breath in so fast he loses it in an agonizing fit of coughs and reflexively pulls his hands back to himself. He tucks them against his belly and curls over to hide them.
Niela walks toward him on her knees, and Sena pushes himself farther back. Sena’sneverdone anything like this through a barrier before. His whole life—all this time—
