CHAPTER 19 KORI #2
“Don’t stop,” she gasps, animalistic. “Not until it’s done. Get it out, Neo.” Withdrawing her claws from her hands, she presses them to the sides of her skull instead, digging into the increasingly wild curls of her ink-black hair. “Get it out.”
Neo’s voice is terribly far away. “If this is the thread you spoke of—”
“It is.”
“It’s already woven into everything, my queen. If I pull too hard, dozens of sleep cycles may unravel. And if those tear further threads with them, you may be left ragged, without place, without name—”
“Don’t you dare stop, damn it.”
“If I break the Shadowlands’ last royal heir—”
“If you cease to try, Neo, so help me, I’ll hand you over to the Shadow Court, and when they’ve had their way, you’ll welcome execution.”
Darkness flickers across Neo’s gaze, terror beyond words, before he unleashes a cry of his own, intensifying whatever he’s doing to Adria.
Adria shrieks again, wings splayed now, broken down to collapse on both knees, voice reduced to only curses, blood from her hands and head alike already drying under her nails.
One thought dashes through me: He’s killing her.
And I’d love to say the second thought is She’s my only ticket home, or She’s my only protection in the darkness, or Aspect could be scrapped for parts without her, but it’s my heart and not my head that propels my
legs forward, seizes one velvety wing I can hardly reach, and cries out, “Damn it, Adria, stop before you get yourself killed!”
If she replies, I don’t hear it. Because right now, Adria is an open conduit, somehow letting Neo sift through her memories, and I’ve had the audacity to touch that live wire.
Shock sparks through my blood and bone alike, and I tumble into a tumult of tangled recollection.
My name is Adria, and I am reborn.
The Diakópsei writhes and roars inside my veins. My pulse is an animal, my body a predator. I take hold of the throat that named me, the voice that raised and trained and berated and bruised me, to silence it. Instead, I feel it collapse like powder in my grip.
Her face is next to consume my vision, the first face my eyes ever saw, the face I sometimes swear I see in the mirror, too, and when I push it away, it caves in on itself like an infected growth, viscera gushing between my claws. My hands alone were enough to unmake my makers.
My whole skeleton shakes like an uncertain marionette, puppeteered by someone else, when I gather the bodies. Someone has to bury—
My name is Adria, and I am buried.
Every meal presented to me, whether the Shadowlands’ own wild crops or dutifully hunted animal meat, tastes no better than mere water. I eat because my soldiers are watching. More often than not, what I manage to swallow expels itself again when I’m alone.
Evading sleep is like avoiding my own shadow.
It chases me down, seizes me in its jaws, and shakes me about like one of Russ’s rope toys.
I wake screaming for my parents, knowing they’d call me pathetic if they could.
Even their deaths would disappoint them.
All three heads of my dog push and nudge at me when I finally wake, calling me back to myself. It’s all too much; it’s not enough.
I break every mirror in my quarters, play with the pieces even when they draw blood.
When Zalel attends to me, all youthful optimism, I break his spirit.
When Azarii’s rebels come, I break their assault.
The first time I try to carve their titles into the graves, I break the headstones. When the heiress of daylight descends—
My name is Adria, and I don’t break her. Not yet.
I toy with her, like a sun serpent with an already-downed batbeast, amused by a sky-born creature brought low to the ground.
But she does not cower from me. She swipes at me, too, with her small gloved hands that would shrivel and suffer at the tiniest exposure to the planet’s true nature.
I could break her. But I don’t think I hate her nearly enough for that.
She crawls too close to me when I avert my eyes.
Curls like tendrils of blazing sun into every crack in my unholy armor.
Turns my threats into empty taunts, my claws and fangs to a farce, my simmering rage to a frozen-over river.
Since the gravestones, even in my sleep, I’ve felt nothing but unending torturous motion, yet she draws me tense as a bowstring and holds me fast and still—without a word, without a touch, suspended by eyes I cannot even see—and I don’t hate her nearly enough.
When the rebels come, their ice weapons drawn, their hatred for me an unsettling echo of that which I hold for myself, she can hardly hoist a gun, hardly take direction without a swift retort, and as our end stalks hideously close, I think I don’t hate her at all. I think perhaps I want—
My name is Adria, and I want.
I want to thread the softness of her fingers through mine. I want to gather her fragile body into the shadow of my wings and keep all her light for myself, warm my half-frozen fingertips over her dauntless fire.
I want to break her one bone at a time. I want to wear them like a talisman around my neck.
I want to tear out every part of me that wants to tear her apart.
I want to be the monster my kingdom needs.
I want to be the blade that fells the monster and the kingdom and the planet’s very orbit for a glimpse of its sun reflected in her—green? brown? blue?—beautiful eyes.
I want to know the scent of her sun-streaked hair. I want to learn the curves and dips of her reckless mouth, want to drag my own along all her hidden places—
My name is Adria, and I cannot afford to squander my waking moments on want.
Birth me again, if you must. Break me if you must. Hate me afresh if you must. But do not let the shadows’ last hope collapse and dwindle into a creature that wants anything at all.
Get it out of me, Neo.
Get her out of me, and leave not a single stray thorn of memory that she was ever here.
We shatter apart.
Adria doesn’t rip through my protective gear, but she throws me to the floor with crushing force, one wing followed by an arm smacking me aside like an unwelcome insect on a starship’s window.
“How are you here?” Her voice invades me, bounces around my skull without ever finding a path out. She takes me by the shoulders and hoists me clean into the air, my legs dangling a solid foot above the ground, my tongue stunned into stillness. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
“My queen,” Neo gasps, but he’s trapped in his cell, and his words are nowhere near enough to temper the rage I’ve unleashed. “Surely she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Removing a memory is one thing,” Adria snarls through her teeth. “But invading it—reliving it, embedded in my head, as if you would ever have the right—” She drops me altogether. It’s so sudden, I collapse into a trembling heap on the stones. “You could’ve scrambled my self, Kori.”
Somehow I find my voice, though the air has been rattled from my lungs. “You agreed to risk that already,” I gasp, “when you asked him to wipe your memory.”
Adria’s answering curse cuts like a knife.
I haul myself up to my knees, chest heaving. She told me her parents had fallen, not that she’d been the one to kill them. She told me we could help each other, not that letting anyone help her would drive her to the end of herself.
“Is this who you really are, Adria? A parent killer? A planet killer, if you aren’t stopped before its power consumes you altogether?”
“You had no right,” Adria goes on, our sentences running over and around each other, competing, crashing waterfalls of words that make the whole room rumble.
“I gave my body to Pagomènos. I gave my sleep to the ghosts of my mother and father. But the shame, the grief—that was mine, you insolent fool.”
“And the want?”
“By the Beyond, Kori, did you have to see everything?” She whirls away from me in a rush of wings, electing to face Neo instead, who cowers against the back wall of his cell.
“Answer me, Neo. Does your power stretch further than you ever admitted? Did you summon her here, in a reckless hope to stop what I demanded you do?”
My mouth tastes like salt. “Is it so hard to believe that I followed you here?”
“At whose command? One of my ghosts? One of my soldiers? Thaane, perhaps, in one of his ill-advised pranks?” It’s impossible to tell if she’s talking to me or Neo or both.
“I followed you,” I blurt, before I can think better of it, “because I felt you slipping away—not even from me, but from yourself. Wishing Zalel hadn’t knit you back together so much as rewoven you into someone with no light left, no hope. No want.”
Adria doesn’t turn to look at me, but I watch every muscle in her back tense through her robes before her wings fold in to cover it. Barely perceptible in the dim room, she shivers by the freezeshot wall’s light.
“I’ve tried that already, Adria,” I say. “I buried myself in my studies. I shut my eyes till dreams took them over. But I am still more tinkerer,
more wanderer, more dreamer than heiress, let alone queen. I still want to see everything on this forsaken planet so badly, I think it’ll kill me. I still want to feel something so badly, it’s agonizing.”
I keep waiting for her to interrupt, maybe even to finally slice my armor open, but Adria only turns, stiff-jawed, broad-shouldered, rigid with unnamed emotion, and looks down at me while I keep talking.
“And good sense aside, shadows and sunlight and ransoms aside, there’s a part of me that wants you, too.
Wants to stay close to you. Wants to learn your waking and sleeping, your wishes and worries, your everything.
It could kill me, damn it. You could and you should and fate probably will if you don’t, but I won’t apologize for any of it. ”
I’m on my feet now, though they quiver beneath me.
I can feel my heartbeat in my collarbone.
“And I certainly won’t bury every memory of you in a Morpheus sphere, even if you send me home and make me swear to never return, because I want to remember, damn it.
I want to remember all of you, even when it hurts. ”
The words settle like ash over all of us. Even Neo is struck silent, unable to look at either myself or his queen. At long last, when I think the silence may be what kills me after all, Adria says, “Keep your memories. That doesn’t give you license to poison mine.”
“The thoughts I felt were far from poison.”
“This is a land of monsters, Kori. Only the worst of them can rule it.”
“But you’re not a monster, Adria.” Against every logical impulse in my body, I reach out a trembling hand, pleading for her to take it.
“You’ve tried, I’ll give you that. But I’m still breathing because you don’t want me dead.
You’re still pining because, frankly, you want me by your side.
You’re not the world that made you. And you’re a queen, Adria.
You could still remake it as something else. ”
Her tone is as deep and dark as the bottom of a well. “I’m not who you think I am, Kori.”
“Is it truly so terrifying that someone could want you as you are, that you would make every attempt to become someone else entirely?”
Adria’s violet eyes shimmer. For an instant, I’m afraid they’re gleaming with summoned power, like Neo’s when he reached into her mind. Another instant, and I realize the sheen is tears. Her voice is soft and scraped raw when she speaks again.
“Come here.”
I step forward on legs I can hardly feel.
She doesn’t take my hand, but her fingers form a loop around my wrist at the pulse point, my heart skittering against her fingertips.
I look up at her, and her down at me, the air electric and aggressive between us, and it’s suddenly very hot in this prison quarter and very constricting in my armor and very awkward that Neo is still here trying not to look at either of us.
I’m so overcome, I barely register when Adria’s right wing snaps wide to hit a button embedded in the wall just behind her.
The freezeshot wall of Neo’s cell flickers and dies. Before I can process what’s happening, Adria spins and lurches, launching me by the arm into the cell. I slide across the floor in a shower of loose stones and gravel, coughing and gasping.
“Adria—”
The energy field between us roars back to life.
“If I can’t forget you entirely,” Adria says, her violet gaze piercing through the barrier and into my ribs, “then I suppose we’ll go back to the beginning.” She crosses her arms across her muscled chest. “You’re my prisoner, heiress. Nothing more.”
“Adria, please.” I can barely form words. “You don’t have to do this—” Pointless adrenaline hurls me into the freezeshot wall. It only catapults me right back, and I’m shuddering, maybe even bleeding, but all I feel is numbness. I try to curse; it comes out as a sob.
“I promised your people a living successor. I can promise precious little else.” Adria swallows hard and turns away from me.
“I’ll return as duty dictates. Neo, take care of her, and I’ll see to it that you and your sister find freedom all the same.
And please don’t fight, Kori of the Daylands.
Too much freezeshock is a truly terrible way to die. ”
“No,” I gasp, tears actively rolling down my face now. “Adria, no. You’re better than this. If you felt it, too …”
But my voice trails off into awful, racking sobs. By the time they cease, it’s only me and the memory-moving mutant, abandoned in a solitary cell, swallowed up by the untamed night.