Page 141 of Cage of Starlight
Then nothing.
Sena’s weight against him is at once too little and impossibly heavy. Tory wraps his arms all the way around and forces his aching knees to lift them both. Smoke turns the dim hallway to a tunnel of red.
“I’ve got you,” he says, too late. “I’ve got you. I’m right here.”
He tugs one of Sena’s arms around his back. Sena supported him like this on the way to the infirmary, back when he feared touch and Tory still mostly loathed him.
“You can’t do this. Youtoldme—” He told Tory about that stupid tree. The plaque the tree swallowed, the roots that chipped away at solid stone, a story where justlivingwas a triumph. Tory says, “We’re almost out, okay? Ugly as anything, this place. This is a terrible place to—to . . .”
And, “You really are the worst at self-preservation, I can’t keep pulling your ass out of the fire.”
And, “Sena, please.”
No answer. Sena’s blood soaks into his clothes.
He gets three rooms away from the typing and registration lab before he can’t navigate the rubble with Sena’s dead weight. He lets Sena down on the filthy floor on his back. This can’t be right. Sena was talking to him a second ago. Tory presses his fingers against Sena’s wrist, against his neck, hard enough to bruise living flesh. No pulse.
“No, no, fuck—” Helplessness crushes the air from his lungs.
His hands press against Sena’s still chest. He can’t bear this, not again, and he’s useless, can’t even heal—
He reaches out, instinctively, like he did in Riese’s wagon on the way back from the battlefield, ready to run up against that impossible barrier.
He runs up against nothing, and it’s so much worse. Helner said traditional Healers can’t heal the dead because there’s nothing to amplify. It was an easy thing to know in theory. In practice, it’s unspeakable. All of Sena’s vast, wild energy is gone, nothing Torycan expand over miles or try and fail to collapse. There’s no reservoir in him that a Healer could take and mend him with.
Adrenaline sears through Tory, because that’s not all Helner said.
Tory, after all, is not a Healer.
He doesn’tneedSena’s energy. He can channel his own.
Restoration, Iri called it.Time.The one thing Sena never had enough of. Tory can give it back to him.
He reaches out, the unpleasant shift of time flowing in a direction it wasn’t meant to hitting him like a slap, as always. Tory shudders at the assault of information it reveals. Sena’s body is broken, bruised, poisoned—everywhere. This is not just fever, nothing as simple as a broken bone. Restoring Kelly enough to allow the possibility of survival left Tory immobile for days.
Doing this will kill him.
In the smoky dimness, Tory laughs. He waits for the clawed clench of fear his mother created in him. For so long, he’s tied himself up in knots just to survive. To die here would be meaningless. Tory’s not a fool. The fear’s there, but on the other side of the chasm it carves in his chest is a solid place, unshakable.
Some things matter more than survival. Sena said it back then, before Tory was ready to understand. This is one of those things.
Senais one of those things. Sena who told him about kuhlu, who loves the sad stories, who looked like a child, so bright with joy after he made something grow. Tory spent so many years trying to follow his mother’s advice, but all this time, he should’ve followed her example instead. It’s not a bad feeling, not really, to love someone to the point of ruin.
Because this feelingislove, one of a thousand shades. There’s a love that would give itself away on a battlefield, a love that would die to offer a child a chance at freedom. A sharp-edged, clumsy love thatwould have stolen the Madam’s earrings and bled to pick those damn tree berries back in Hulven. A love like in the story Sena told him, habitual and hungry, reaching for the stars.
Andthis, sunshine-bright—deep-rooted and wrenching, woven through him so well it might tear him apart when it goes.
Tory’s lungs sit like stones in him. His traitorous heart pounds in his chest.
His healing, since he discovered it, has always been a tool, a way to ensure acceptance and silence. He’s never needed so badly for it to work.
He’ll die to fix this. He will. And it’s fine.
Tory lets himself go. He closes the gunshot wound first, in through Sena’s lower back and out through his gut in the front. His blood, when Tory presses his hands to the sodden cloth of his shirt, has grown tacky and lukewarm, but the flesh and viscera respond like an extension of Tory’s body, knitting together as he urges them to remember what it was like to be whole.
“You’re gonna be fine,” he murmurs, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a promise or a lie. He works because he can’t imagine making any other choice.
He’s freezing when he finishes with the wound. Tory clenches his teeth to keep them from chattering and reaches out to identify more damage. It washes over him faster than he can process it.
