CHAPTER 19 KORI
CHAPTER
KORI
I don’t know what comes over me. Whatever god had the questionable impulse to create me in the first place clearly forgot to install self-preservation software, or else let a virus run rampant in my code.
As the Daylands’ heiress, trained from my earliest memories to make measured, tactical decisions, I should know better.
As Aspect’s creator and primary example of how to be a person, I should know better.
Simply as a human being who (as far as I know) hasn’t suffered a catastrophic head injury anytime recently, I should unquestionably, undeniably know better.
But the moment Zalel is beyond earshot, I follow Adria anyway.
If she were anyone else, or even just herself in a marginally better mood, it would be impossible to follow without having to get far too close, inevitably exposing myself along the way.
But because it’s Adria—and because I can almost see a giant thundercloud churning with angst and directionless rage above her head—I just follow the damage.
Her boots left deep grooves in the floor; her claws did, too, as the impulse to run on all fours apparently took over; even her apparent
flight was clumsy and left her wings’ edges scraping long, jagged grooves along the walls and ceiling. It’s easy enough to track Adria’s trail. Just have to keep swallowing back the bile through my tight, raw throat, unable to deny how obviously Adria is in pain.
I did this. The knowledge beats through my blood like a drum.
Not the freezeblade, which she healed from impressively well.
Not even the psychological weight of the surprise attack, which she shook off like a royal adjusting their cape.
I did this. Me and my big mouth and malfunctioning filter and aching insistence on feeling so much, when I have no business feeling anything but fear regarding the monster queen who holds my fate.
And this, right now, is the first time Adria has fully, properly instilled fear in me.
Not with her empty threats, her bold bravado, or her insistence on reminding me that her biceps alone dwarf most of my body.
I’m afraid from the cold, creeping sense that if I don’t follow her, if I let her go, I may never see her again.
Or if I do, it won’t be anything close to what it’s been.
As someone unhinged enough to fly into the shadow-cloaked unknown to get an illegal memory for my robotic bestie, I recognize the frenzied glint in Adria’s violet eyes when I see it.
She may just be desperate enough to cut the tension between us with her own knife, even if it feels like an amputation—even if, unlike the freezeblade, the bleeding may never really stop.
How? A great question … for which I have no answers.
So, stomach bubbling with panic, throat clenched even tighter than my insufferable body armor, I follow her.
Eventually, I recognize the path she took, winding though it may be.
She headed back to the prison ward where we originally reached our tentative peace.
At first, I’m left at a loss. Unless Adria has been flirtatiously threatening other prisoners with a good time (which makes my heart twist in an inexcusably ridiculous way), I can’t imagine why she would be here now, her anguish splayed openly across her face for her prisoners to openly behold.
Then she speaks—or shouts, really—to awaken the captive she’s approaching, and everything starts to make sense. “Neo.”
So this is the one she was so hesitant to tell me about during our ill-fated combat training.
I peek around the corner to observe. Adria looks at Neo with pleading.
A peerless queen, a warrior born of the planet’s very heart …
pleading with yet another prisoner, this one visibly younger than either of us.
Neo shudders and wakes at the intonation of his name. Unlike bulky Adria, he is a thin, wan creature, and not only from imprisonment. He doesn’t have arms, though he seems used to it, likely born that way.
His affect is flat, voice worn thin from disuse, when he replies, “My queen, have I not shown my penitence? Have I not tried enough to revoke that which haunts you? If I dig too much deeper, I may do damage that cannot be undone.”
“You presume too much,” Adria says, leaning close to the freezeshot wall between them, her violet eyes glittering in the icy, semitransparent barrier.
“I’m not afraid of what I’ve done. Not anymore.
It’s what I might do that chills me.” Her gaze bores into the prisoner’s. “I have a different memory for you.”
Neo quirks a single eyebrow. (I always wished I could do that, even tried it in the mirror a few times, but my eyebrows are determined to work as a team.) “What am I looking for?” he asks.
Adria exhales a shuddering breath. “Want,” she says, barely audible from where I’m standing. “Useless want.”
“That may not be enough information, Adria. If I grasp the wrong memory—”
“Don’t make me spell it out as though you were a fool,” Adria snarls, lips pulled back from her teeth.
“It’s close to the surface, woven into countless sleep cycles of recollection.
You’ll know when you’ve found it. I want it gone.
All of it. Only the most essential thread untouched. The rest, tear it apart.”
“If this memory you speak of is embedded in so many others,” Neo says, hesitant, “then removal may do unforeseen damage.”
“Look at me, Neo.” Adria spreads her wings, every edge of her crackling with planetary energy, eyes gone nearly blue with the surge.
“I am well past avoiding damage. When you find this memory, I want it shredded. I want it unrecognizable. I don’t care what else comes of it, out of me.
If I don’t remove it now, soon I’ll be positively sick with it. ”
Neo takes a deep breath in through his nose and then slowly out through his mouth, the way Aspect instructs me to do (and I almost never do) when I’m panicking. I could really use a deep breath now, but I can barely seem to get any oxygen at all.
“If I hurt you, my lord,” Neo says, “the Shadow Court will have my head.”
“I’ll forgive your every trespass,” Adria says in a rush.
“Set you free the moment it’s done, and your sister, too.
You can go home together and pluck this very memory from your skull and try to pretend none of this ever happened.
Just cut this out of me, Neo. Please.” The brokenness of her voice makes my chest ache.
“I swear it on my mother, on my father. I know no greater vow.”
Neo inclines his head, his overgrown, unkempt red hair covering small round horns and drooping into his eyes. “As you wish. But I must warn you, I would be far more precise without a barrier between us.”
Adria half laughs under her breath. It’s not really a laugh, more the crackle of old branches underfoot. “A clever escape plan, I’ll give you that, but I’m no fool.”
“I speak only the truth. I have no known father to swear on, and a mother I hardly knew, but I will swear on Lail, my sister, my heart, if it pleases you.”
That’s when everything finally clicks for me. Lail. I know that name. Lail—Alpha. This Neo, also Adria’s prisoner, is her brother, the one whose mental torment Lail hoped to ease with my memory of the sun.
So why is he still being held here? Entirely to remove memories from Adria? Her feelings for me are a recent development—was he originally kept alive for another purpose?
What memory did Adria, the eternal night’s unbreakable queen, experience that broke her so brutally, she wanted it surgically extracted?
Enough to hold a boy prisoner, with his sister as collateral?
Enough to hide any knowledge of this memory-removal quest from me entirely, despite having shown me the nightfolk archives, the Diakópsei, and so much more?
I watch Adria’s eyes flick from Neo’s tired ones to the freezeshot wall to the control panel just to her right.
For my part, I think I believe Neo. His every syllable is weighty with sincerity, and I think Adria believes him, too.
But I think again of every time we have brushed, not even skin to skin, and how I felt Adria’s whole body seize in defensive protest, sealing up like her fortress before an invasion, freezeshot walls slotting reflexively into place.
She may believe him, but that doesn’t mean she wants him any closer to her than necessary.
“Don’t hold back on me,” Adria says with unnecessary force that only further confirms my theory. “My mind is open to you as we stand now. Now do your work, Neo, please. And when it’s done, I’ll set both you and your sister free.”
Neo nods. Boldly, I lean farther around the corner, nearly exposing my presence to his sight—but if he notices me, he doesn’t believe it warrants mentioning to Adria.
Neo squeezes his eyes shut, which is somehow how I expect them to stay, but instead, they snap back open as pools of liquid azure, replacing the soft brown irises that had been there only moments before.
If he had arms to extend, I think he would reach them out, but as he doesn’t, he merely holds Adria’s gaze, unblinking, unfiltered, blue on blue on blue, and leans toward her like a rotted tree conceding to the wind.
Adria meets his stare with her own. But from the sheer force of the effort, the agony of the wordless intimacy, little shudders roll through her from neck to toes.
Silence pervades the room save for the electric flicker of the freezeshot wall, stretching out to fill every square foot of empty space, until finally a scream tears from Adria’s throat.
Her legs buckle. She falls to one knee, obeisant before her own captive, teeth rattling in her jaw, claws digging into her own palms, nearly to the point of drawing blood.
“My lord—” Neo starts, but Adria’s scream rises to cut him off.