Page 134 of Cage of Starlight
Kirlov screams. The skin wrinkles and thins and grows spots that spread, then darken, thenblacken, decay rushing like flames to his upper arm.
Not enough.
He wrenches his ruined arm away before the decay can get to his heart, and Sena falls. The last thing he sees is his superior officer clutching his arm and stumbling off, gun in hand.
I’ll kill them in your name.
Kirlov is nothing if not a man of his word.
Rasping and coughing in the smoke from the burning Compound, Sena stares through the ruined ceiling at the sky. Black shapes writhe over the low-hanging gray ceiling of the world, sick and insidious like blots of ink, spreading.
The pain from the bullet wound—through and through, more insult than death sentence—blends into an electric throb that blends into something quiet and slow-spreading and faraway.
He could close his eyes here.
A laugh wrenches its way from his throat. Except he can’t. Not yet. He’s not done.
He told Tory—
Sena grits his teeth and tries to rise. Fails, legs liquid. Again.
He doesn’t want this to be the end, a bare sliver of gunmetal sky between billows of choking smoke. He doesn’t want it to end at all.
Again.He bites his lip against the noise that wants to escape him. His own blood smooths the way as he pushes himself up along the soot-smeared wall, vision fading. He doesn’t know how he’ll get his leaden feet to move, but that’s nothing new. Sena has been practicing his whole life to move when his body says no.
He lifts the pendant his mother gave him, and even in the smoky grayness, it glitters like the night sky. The little chunk of stellite takes the world’s light and beams it back brighter, turning the cage of his bare fingers to a wash of brilliant starlight.
Sena is neither trinket nor tool, but there’s nothing of the Celestial Beast in him, either—star-strewn and crystalline, sacred and so at peace with sacrifice. Sena can’t stride into war unarmored and unafraid of death like Arlune’s soldiers.
He’s so afraid of losing this precious thing he’s gained that he can barely breathe.
With a sick lurch, Sena understands why Tory hated that story about kuhlu and the stars so much. Being torn apart, reaching but never having—it’s awful. There’s no beauty in it. It can’t be over so quickly, before he’s even had a chance to treasure it.
I’ll meet you outside, he said.
Tory must be waiting, ready with hands on his hips and a rant aboutself-preservation, as if there’s a single thing Sena wouldn’t give up to stay with him.
He takes one step, swallowing a noise of pain, and then another. His vision shutters, and he grips the guide-rail along the wall and lets it carry most of his weight.
He walks because there’s someone to walk toward.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
As Tory staggersinto gray daylight, lending his hand to lead survivors over the rubble of the outer wall of the intake lab, he finds chaos.
Familiar faces flicker into view before he can call a warning: Travin and Spark, the team that dropped him in the woods what feels like years ago. They’re just as effective now. Spark closes a hand around the neck of one of the survivors. Her victim convulses and falls—then she’s gone.
“Shields up,” Tory cries. An instinct from training.
A forcefield flickers to life, but the range is limited—they don’t have a full set of Fielders. A woman on the outskirts screams. The few who weren’t inside the parameters of the shield when it was raised fall shortly after.
The rear end of the shield flickers and glimmers, and Tory swears under his breath.
The Fielder at the back is on his knees, choking from smoke inhalation. He won’t last. As soon as his part of the shield falls, the survivors are sitting ducks.
Sena’s still inside. Tory bites his lip. “Come on, comeon. . .”
He can’t abandon them.
