Page 43 of Xantera
I tie up my hair in a knot, using the mirror to make sure all of my dark red pieces are in place. Then I readjust my cloak and debate whether or not I should keep my scarlet badge on. For the first time, the sight of the badge fills me with disgust. It’s just another marker of control—of how the Guardians have dictated every part of my life. Even who I’m supposed to love.
Saskia, stop,Lucan tries to command, and I swear I hear the start of him panting. As if he’s begun to run. As if he can actually get to me.Let’s talk about this.
There’s nothing to talk about.I turn away from the mirror and drop the key into my inside pocket, my fingers trembling.
There’s probably five hundred things to talk about, actually. You seem to have missed several crucial steps between warranted disbelief and… whatever the hell this is.
I start toward the door.This is me doing the right thing.
This is objectively you doing the wrong thing, little nightmare. All you will accomplish is getting yourself killed if you go right now without preparing.
I want to scream at him for daring to tell me the truth but trying to stop me from chasing it.
You keep it up and I won’t take you with me after all, Monster.
He ignores my threat.You can’t throw yourself right into our enemy’s hand without a strategy.
I can do what I want.
No, you can’t.His voice wrenches at something buried deep within my bones.You can’t do what you want because the Guardians have taken away all of your choices. That’s the point.
Thereisno point unless I do something.My eyes squeeze shut.
Do something, then,he growls.But let’s make a plan first.
There’s no time for a plan!I scream in my head, my hand grasping my bedroom doorknob.My mother might be dead right NOW!
There it is. The secret that has finally burst from the deepest cracks in my heart. The reason I’m so desperate to be Chosen—not because I care about worthiness or honor, but because I’m sick to my stomach about what might have happened to my mother since the very last time I saw her leaning over a balcony, waving to me from high, high above.
Lucan’s surprise bolts through me for only a moment before his tone cascades into something low and soothing. Like he’s urging me to step away from the edge of a towering rooftop.
Talk to me, baby.His mind skips, almost like that slipped out of his mouth, but he continues softly before I can fully process it.Sit down and tell me about her. I want to hear.
I pause with my hand still clasping the doorknob.
Nobody—not once—has ever asked me about my mother after she followed the Third Guardian into the Blood Moon Palace almost ten years ago, her chin high, her steps slow. It’s as if the Chosen Ones are as much of a taboo subject as they are an honor. People want to congratulate you for your loved one being rippedfrom your arms, but they don’t want to ask how it made you feel. How you’re coping.
How it feels like grief.
Now theMonster, of all people, is asking me to sit down and tell him about her.
I release the doorknob, slumping down onto my knees until my forehead is resting against my door.
My mother was sick.
A decade’s worth of a carefully-built facade crumbles away as I pick through the past I have tried so hard to keep at bay, even from myself. Lucan is silent, but it’s a heavy kind of silence. The kind that tells me he’s listening.
My mother was sick, but nobody else noticed besides me. I saw the bags under her eyes and the way she was slowly losing weight and begged her to go to the Healing Center, but she refused. I began to wish that I was a professional healer so that I’d know how to analyze and mend her. But then right before I turned fifteen, right before we could start requesting apprenticeships…I scrape in a deep breath.My father died, and she was Chosen not long afterward, and I was alone.
Of course, nobody considered me parentless—not when every other fifteen-year-old left their family unit within the same month that my family leftme. As soon as my age group received our blue badges, we were whisked away to new complexes, where we roomed with each other and cycled through different apprenticeships so that the Guardians could begin to monitor our skills. In the flurry of excitement, nobody cared that my life had changed so drastically.Everyone’slife had changed drastically. And just as it is today, just as it’s always been since the Guardians took over, it was improper to ask unsolicited questions. Especially about a girl’s dead father and Chosen mother.
Your father died?
Lucan’s question is prodding, but gentle. There’s also a shiver of empathy there, and I remember how he said that his own father had died, too.
Yes,I whisper, my forehead sinking into my hands.I saw it happen. It… nobody knew why he had died, just as nobody knew my mother was sick.
I still remember the sounds my father made when he took his last breaths, though. His face has blurred in my memory, and I can’t recall anything about his other features, either: whether he had soft or calloused hands, how tall he was, or even what shade of eyes he had. I just remember those last few breaths. Labored. Wheezing. Then a horrible gurgling as he crashed to his knees in the middle of our housing unit, scrabbling at his throat while my mother screamed.
