Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
ELAINA
Elaina paced the length of her room, nervous energy driving her steps.
Why the hell did she even bother talking to Cyan? The repairs were a necessity, that much she knew. But the conversation? It had only made everything worse. She had no intention of staying on Earendel, and definitely not for him. And now she’d been stewing for sols, wondering what the dead drift happened to him out there. Why he was even back here.
And something was coming.
She didn’t know what it was. Or when it would get here. But she could feel its approach, sure as the sandstone.
She swore as the lights went out, a rapid fade plunging her into darkness. In the silence that followed, Elaina became acutely aware of something else missing—the faint hum of the solar batteries had vanished. Everything was dead.
Elaina peeked through the horizontal slats of her window. Streetlights still cast cool glows on the sandstone asphalt, and some of the windows in the neighboring houses were still lit from the inside. It was only her .
It’s here.
She shuddered and looked out to the dark sky, where a storm brewed in the distance. The charge in the air made her skin prickle. It was the same feeling that had lingered the night Cyan showed up again, standing on her doorstep like a ghost from a past she’d been trying to bury.
That storm had been building for a long time, she realized. It just never seemed to reach its destination, as though the universe were holding its breath.
Any other time, Elaina would have climbed up on the roof and patched the batteries herself. It’d have been a piece of cake.
Now she would probably going to blow them up if she tried.
She squeezed her eyes shut, permitting herself a single frustrated growl. She’d never felt so fucking helpless.
She turned to the door before the pounding actually came.
She knew who it was.
Cyan looked older. Lines were etched between his brows, beneath his eyes, across his downturned mouth. Priad stood still at his side, glowing orbs tracking her as his master hesitated on the threshold.
Elaina stepped aside, and Cyan entered slowly, each step heavy with invisible burden.
She dragged the door shut, plunging them into near darkness. Only the faint light from the street illuminated the angles of Cyan’s tired face.
Unspoken questions hung thick between them.
“What’s going on?” Elaina asked. “What happened out there? What’s happening now? I deserve to know. My broken hands… it isn’t just in my head, is it? There’s something more. The storm out there?—”
Am I losing my mind ?
Each question seemed to slice at him, his shoulders tightening, jaw clenched. He still didn’t look at her, his eyes locked on his hands as though the answers were etched into the scars on his knuckles.
“There’s so much that I learned,” Cyan said finally, barely above a murmur. “About me. About you. About fate.”
Elaina took a step forward, advancing, sick of his evasiveness. “Tell me.”
The silence stretched on and her patience was fraying, but there was a fragility in his presence that was on the verge of collapse. She didn’t want to be the one break it.
Finally, he looked at her.
“The craft took me to an entity called the Architect,” Cyan began, his voice low. “Out of the quadrant. Out of the known universe.”
Elaina took another step. Closer.
“It claims to have created this world and embedded itself in it. It claims to be… No,” Cyan frowned shaking his head. “It is … fate itself. But not in the way I thought. It calls this universe its simulation . We’re not just its creation…”
“We’re its code…” Elaina realized.
Cyan nodded.
“It guides you?” Elaina asked. “Through the sword?”
Cyan’s shadowed face twisted into a grimace. “No,” he said gruffly, sinking onto her bed. He leaned his elbows on his knees, shoulders sagging with defeat. “The sword was meaningless. This entire time, I thought… It was nothing.”
“But you wield it still,” Elaina pointed out, noting the weapon strapped to his back.
Cyan dipped his head low, staring at his hands. “It is hard to let go of things you found important, sometimes.”
“But not of us.” Elaina regretted saying it as soon as the bitter words left her mouth. There were more important things, now. There should be more important things .
Cyan shook his head. “Elaina, you don’t even know.”
“Tell me then.” She sank to her knees before him and looked up into his eyes, needing more. Needing clarity.
“Over time, the Architect’s creation—us—began to slip from its grasp. It is losing control. It will do anything to regain it.”
“The maintainer is losing power over its own program…”
“The Architect is broken, Elaina. Corrupted… Instead of ordering the universe, it has started to break it apart. Pull the world back into itself and reshape it. These technological glitches on Earendel are only the beginning.”
“What do you mean?” Elaina propped her hands on his knees, willing him to meet her gaze. This was all too vague. “Cyan, what does that mean ? Look at me.”
Finally, he did, and she knew the longing in his frightened eyes wasn’t for her. She felt like a voyeur, prying into a part of him she wasn’t supposed to have access to. She wanted to fix it—to make him know it was all going to be okay. But she didn’t even know that herself. What if it was a lie, and nothing would ever be okay again?
“It offered me a place by its side. To be part of remaking its universe,” Cyan said, then looked away once more. “But I couldn’t accept it.”
“Why not?”
“It demanded a sacrifice I cannot make.”
“What did it want?” Elaina whispered.
Cyan’s hands flexed and she couldn’t help herself—she reached out to cover his fingers with her own, trying to soothe away the tension in his fists.
“You have some piece of it inside you, Elaina. Not just a piece. An important piece. I think that’s why things keep breaking when you touch them. That’s why you can’t fix anything anymore. You are… an unwitting manifestation of its destruction. It wanted you.”
“A piece?” she managed, trying to understand.
What did he mean? Was she broken? All those times the mysterious virus had changed right under her fingers soon as she tried to patch another component… was her very touch the thing that was making it mutate? Elaina couldn’t stand to believe that. All the malfunctions. The sense that everything she touched turned to chaos—it all crashed over her like a sandstorm, dragging her under.
Cyan looked at her with pity she didn’t want. “You are a raw vessel for its corruption, naive enough to follow its temptations with your curiosity. And it wants to get you back under its control.”
Elaina balked.
Naive?
She was hardly that. The things she’d done—the people she’d discarded. There was nothing naive about her. Or was that the Architect too? Where did she end and the evil begin? Was there any difference?
She pushed herself back, pressing a fist to her chest. All this time, she’d been trying to patch things, and all along she had been the problem.
“So no matter where I go,” she whispered, “I’ll never get better. I’ll never patch anything. I’ll only destroy it.”
Cyan’s silence was answer enough. There were no words he could offer to ease reality, and she wanted no false comfort.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I came back to protect you, somehow. You need to leave, at least. To buy yourself time.”
“And do what?” she snapped, tears pricking at her eyes. She blinked them back before they fell. Not in front of him. “I’ll fuck things up wherever I am, like always! ”
He sank to the floor beside her, and before she could protest, she was dragged into an unyielding embrace. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Elaina. I’ll keep you safe.”
“How?!” She gasped against him. “How are you going to keep me safe from… fucking fate ?”
“As long as I am here to fight, it will not take you.”
His words opened the gates to everything she’d been holding in for longer than she’d dared to admit. When the first sob wracked her body, Elaina tried to pull away and hide to no avail. Cyan crushed her tighter to his chest. Her chin was tucked painfully into his neck, and she sucked in a deep breath, inhaling his scent like it was all the oxygen she’d ever need.
She cried for an eternity, until her body was spent. By the time there were no tears left to expunge, she was curled on the floor beside him, her head resting on his thigh as he stroked her hair with fingers that had no business being so gentle.
“We have to leave,” Cyan said softly, just as the subtle hum of the generators kicked back in around them.
“To Zeta Prime?”
“No,” he said. He took her hand, tracing the lines in her palm before lifting it to his lips. His beard scraped her skin, a stark contrast to the softness of his kiss. “Nowhere in this quadrant. The corruption is spreading, and Earendel is just the first piece of the burnt edge. We have to go farther. Somewhere where I have an advantage.”
“Where?”
“We have to go to Gaia.”