Page 74 of Nyx
Xeni chews on his lip, and when he meets my eyes, I force myself to hold his gaze. He spent many years at Ljómurduring my time there. Handled needles and instruments while I was pinned to those tables, and shoved a tube down my throat when I tried to starve myself.
But contrary to what everyone here believes, not all the workers in that place were cruel. Some were. We were the playthings of far too many evil souls, but to lump them all into that category would be wrong. Some detached themselves from their reality just like us prisoners did. Others were sympathetic, though they never stayed very long.
The best we could hope for were the carefully neutral ones—the ones that never held on too tight and tried their hardest not to cause more pain than necessary. Xeni was one of those. I still remember the way his hands brushed over my forehead as the other medic strapped me to the table, and the regret he couldn’t hide when he forced my jaw open. “They won’t let you starve,” he whispered in my ear, speaking the old language and feeding me words I could understand. Tears had blinded me to anything but pale hair and skin as I gagged on that tube. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you know what they are doing at the rifts?” I ask him, and everyone falls into silence. If the surprise on Xeni’s face tells me anything, he didn’t expect me to speak to him… and by the close way the others watch, neither did they.
“Not enough for me to give any guidance, no. The medical staff only handled… procedures.” He cringes apologetically. “Anything beyond what happened in those rooms was a mystery to us, too. In that sense, I don’t know any more than you do.”
“But you said the scientists and medics talked,” Elas argues, and Xeni nods slowly.
“Some of us were friends, and we talked some, yeah, but we never knew who was listening, or who supported what they were doing there. Someone could turn you in for a leg up and not think twice about it. They also took security very seriously. The duties were split, so no one person worked on the whole picture. We probably could’ve sat ten of us down in a room and only had a quarter of the information.” He pauses, and takes a deep breath. “We did talk, though. The scientist I was closest to was responsible for trying to isolate the essence—”
“Wait, back up,” Ronan interrupts, and Xeni is guarded as he looks at him. “Whatisthis essence, anyway?”
Xeni nods towards my hand intertwined with Reyes’s, and even with the bright afternoon sun, the glow is visible. “Whatever marks the mates. Magic of some sort, as best we could tell. They pulled it out and studied it, but it is unlike anything in written history. The working hypothesis was that the Fates created it when they created the mates.”
“What do you know about the prophecy?” Elas asks, but Xeni shakes his head.
“I was born on this side of the rift. Anything I’ve learned about that is what I’ve been taught, same as you.”
“You were born here?” August asks.
“In Atlanta,” Xeni says. “My parents were military. They, uh, worked for Project V, so when I was old enough, I was offered a position as well.”
“That name was in the files,” Reyes says from my side. “What is it?”
Xeni sighs, rubbing his palm with his thumb as he stares down at his hands. “Ljómur had agents in every city. You saw some of the propaganda that they pushed onto the public.”
August nods. “They made it sound like the glowing marks were a virus that needed to be contained.”
“Correct. By the time I joined, the people who lived in the city were used to being told what to do. It wasn’t hard to convince them to follow orders. The earlier generations were more suspicious, but the humans inside those walls are docile now. Hells, even our civilians are used to taking orders.”
“How old are you, exactly?” August asks.
“Forty-one. Not that much older than you, unlike that dusty blue thing beside you.”
“Xeni,” Elas warns with a growl, but the Cavese only rolls his single visible eye and continues.
“A member of the project was stationed at every hospital and clinic. Any time someone came in with a mark, we were the ones to isolate them and start the protocol to transport them to Ljómur.”
“How did it not get out?” Lillith asks. “Granted, I’m pretty young, but whenever I heard the prophecy discussed, it was as a hypothetical, not as fact.”
Xeni continues to stare at his hands. “When enough people disappear for talking about things they aren’t supposed to know, you learn to keep your mouth shut. Ask too many questions, and the best-case scenario would be a transfer to Ljómur. They’d get their questions answered, all right.”
“And the worst-case scenario?” August asks, and Xeni lifts one shoulder in a helpless shrug. He doesn’t have to say it out loud for the rest of us to understand.
“While this is all very interesting,” Ronan interrupts with a haughty sniff, “it doesn’t answer the question we asked in the first place. How were they going to use this essence to open the portals? Andwhywas Nyx so important that they used him more than the others?”
I wince, and Ronan tosses me a silent apology. His words are the ugly truth, though. The other prisoners were kept in their cells, and only pulled out once or twice a week. They took me almost daily. Poked and prodded, injected and sliced open until I was too weak to handle more. Those were the only days I had any rest.
My thumb drifts absently over the dotted scars and track marks along my skin, and Reyes leans over and places a soft kiss on my temple. I lean into him, absorbing his comfort as he puts an arm over my shoulders.
“Nyx is the only one who ever caused the rifts to react,” Xeni says, and my pulse ramps up.
“What?” I whisper, and every eye falls on me. “That is not true. I never… I could not…”
Xeni gives me a sad smile and dips his chin in a nod. “Early on, when you were still with the humans, there was a report of golden sparks in the middle of the field when you were… very upset. It was when…” His gaze drifts to Reyes, who hugs me tighter, then back to me. “Your… mate… did some pretty awful things to you.”
