Page 99 of Cage of Starlight
“It should have been me.”
Tory can barely breathe. “Don’t talk like that. You’ll be fine. You just have to—”
Sena’s words come muffled from between his knees, faint and getting fainter. “I won’t go back. Iwon’t. They’ll have to kill me first.”
“You’d die either way!” One of Riese’s Seeds up front startles and glares, so Tory leans in and lowers his voice to a whisper. “If you go back, at least you’ll live. If you stay here, all you can do is wait for them to kill you. That’s worse.I won’t let you.”
Sena laughs, but it chokes off and he knots a shaking hand in his shirt, face bright with sweat. “Letme? You can’t make me.”
“This isstupid!You’ll kill yourself to make a point!”
“I thought the same of you,” Sena says, so quiet he’s barely audible. “Beating at walls you could never break. Couldn’t understand . . . why you’d do something so useless.” Beneath the dusting of dark hair, his eyes are bright as flames, lips curling into a weak smile. “But it . . . feels good to choose it. To stop being afraid.”
“Sena, please. I’d go back for you. I’d find you and get you out. I swear I would.”
“You don’t get it. I’d . . .” Sena shakes his head, gaze hazy and faraway. “I really would rather die than see Kirlov again. I can’t . . .”
Sena doesn’t keep going.
“Hey.” Tory jostles his shoulder. Sena only rocks, makes a plaintive mumble. “Hey.”
Tory reaches out, but he doesn’t have to touch Sena to feel the wildfire heat radiating off him. Sena’s burning up, his breaths fast and shallow.
Tory scrambles upright and moves along the wall toward the back of the wagon, where Riese is cataloging supplies and organizing them into empty boxes.
“You guys have a doctor, right?”
“Did your friend not tell you about Yized?” Riese frowns. “Are you unwell?”
“Sena’s sick. Was there anything in the supplies we can use? Or anyone—”
Riese’s expression goes blank. “I doubt there’s anything in the supplies, and Yized won’t be back until this evening at the earliest. So far, I’ve only seen rations, canteens, ammo, guns—”
“Give me a canteen, then.”
“Tory.”
There’s one tangled around a rifle barrel on the ground, and he snatches it up. Several heads dart up at the clatter.
“Sorry,” he says. “Sena is . . .”
The eyes move toward Sena and come back colder. They murmur variations ofshould’ve left him there.
He hurries back and drops down beside Sena, uncapping the canteen. “You need to drink.”
Hasra used to force water into Tory when he was feeling like crap—as much as he could bear. Three sips after he healed Kelly. A cool hand guiding him down to sleep. Gotta hydrate a fever, right? Not that he appreciated it like he should’ve. Always too busy trying to keep himself from getting attached.
Oh, and like a fool, he’s attached. To Sena with his earnest stories of stars and stubborn trees penned in by the Compound, with such steadfastness in the face of fear, with infuriatingly terrible self-preservation instincts and a bone-dry sense of humor. Sena who carried him to the infirmary after Gavin attacked him, who dragged him from the sea with broken ribs, who knows Tory’s fears and dreams by name because they’re Sena’s, too.
What was that story Sena told? Stellite, and kuhlu, and a reckless, helpless reaching for something ages dead. It’s like a prophecy. Tory’s such an idiot.
How didn’t henotice?He looked down on Randall, and here he is in the same place without realizing his feet were taking him there. This feeling is the sort that rips people open. It’s the lethal landing after a short, brutal fall.
But he wants, unreasonably, to take the leap anyway. He wants—
The things he wants terrify him.
Tory healed the broken for years. But this—selfishly, awfully, painfully, he wants Sena to live, because he wants Sena tostay.
