CHAPTER 21 KORI
CHAPTER
KORI
Neo offers feeble comforts between my embarrassing snotty sobs.
“I’m sure she’ll come back,” he tries; and then: “You did a good thing, interrupting me, when I don’t know what I might’ve done to her”; and finally: “You two certainly seem to have a connection,” which is the sentence that somehow revives my voice.
“You saw us speak once,” I snap back, even knowing my rage and sadness is hardly meant for him. “And she tossed me in here, with you, like a bag of trash.”
“I’ll do my best not to take offense to that.” Neo half laughs.
He has no arms to rest upon my shoulder, so it takes me a moment to process the similarly intended comfort when the side of his cheek brushes my helmet, resting briefly in the crook of my neck.
“I’m sorry,” I manage to say, activating a gust of air in my helmet to clear my eyes. “None of this is your fault. I don’t even know you.”
“Awkwardly enough, it seems I know something of you, though. Rumors slide through the shadows, even into the prisons. The queen called you Kori.” He inclines his head, a gesture of unexpected respect
so sincere, it nearly activates my tears all over again. His shock of overgrown ginger hair shifts into his eyes with the movement. “It seems I’ve met two heirs to two thrones. My name is Neo. I think I’ve probably lived almost as many cycles as you, give or take a few hundred.”
“Neo. Adria never did want to tell me about you. Your sister, she’s the reason I ended up in the Shadowlands to start with. A memory trade—”
“My sister?” Neo’s eyes are milky pools of desperation.
He seems like he would seize me with fists, but he has none, so there’s only an odd sensation of phantom tugging at my arms, my legs, even the sides of my helmet, like competing gale winds in the Passage.
I stumble back, overwhelmed. “Have you seen her? Is she all right?”
I thrust my arms out to create some personal space.
“Adria said she was imprisoned, like you. They made a deal for her Morpheus sphere, the one I was originally here to obtain. But I haven’t seen her myself since then.
That’s all I know.” Neo’s lips quiver. In a less than impressive attempt at consolation, I add, “I don’t believe Adria would hurt her. ”
Neo gives his head a little shake, his scarlet hair shifting every which way once again.
“In truth, I believe much the same. Already, Adria is a greater queen than she gives herself credit for. Haunted by violence, yes … but more afraid of her capacity for mercy. She was kind to you, after all. I can only hope she was similarly kind to Lail.”
His gaze pierces my own, saying without words, Even though that isn’t the same sort of relationship at all.
An impossible, unsustainable thing bloomed between me and Adria, and now I can feel it withering, dying, petal by wilted petal falling limp and lifeless at my feet. Never meant to be.
I force myself to square my shoulders, measure my breaths. “And I don’t think Adria would risk turning you against her, Neo. That alone is a reason to keep Lail alive.”
“You may be right.”
“Adria was so hesitant to tell me about you, about what you could do. Desperate to forget …” I mean to say to forget her parents, but to forget me bubbles up beneath that and pulls me underwater, chokes the rest of the sentence altogether.
I sigh. “Your elder sister told me about your powers, when we met. But I still don’t understand how you can just …
move memories … without any Morpheus tech at all. ”
“I defied my queen’s law,” Neo says, as if that explains everything. “I embraced the Diakópsei’s glory, and I was changed.”
I remember Adria’s fearful explanation when I beheld the gleaming, pulsing asteroid for myself. It made me what I am.
“When I was caught in my sin,” Neo goes on, “I hoped at least to be useful. But it seems my overcharge was not enough to free my queen from what haunts her.”
I swallow a lump in my throat. “How long has she been asking you to … erase me?”
“Only this time. This bond between you two, for better or for worse, is still new and brilliant. The queen sought me to purge her guilt.” Neo bites his lip. “But that is not my story to tell.”
“I saw it when I touched her, when I was pulled into the memory.” I grit my teeth. “Her parents. She killed them, didn’t she?”
Neo hangs his head. “She did.”
“And she wanted you to remove the memory.”
“She did.”
Despite myself, I can’t help but press further questions. “Why did she do it?”
“Does a firstborn inheritor of the shadow throne need a reason? By eliminating them, she secured the imminence of her own succession.”
“But what she did … I felt it all, in the memory. There was no … exultation. It was like watching someone else kill them,” I say.
“It split her in two.” Adria did tell me that her parents were tyrants, their defeat a necessity.
But was that really the whole truth? And did their deposition truly necessitate killing them? I lean forward, placing my hands
on Neo’s armless shoulders, unable to stop the words from spilling out. “You’ve seen that memory more times than I have. Tell me what you know, Neo. Please.” I blow out a shaky breath. “Tell me the girl who’s wrecked all my plans didn’t spill family blood for the hell of it.”
Eyes drifting shut, Neo inhales deeply. “All right, dayfolk princess. I will tell you a story.”
He leans his head back, eyes open now and staring blankly at the ceiling above us. Or where I imagine the ceiling would appear, if I could see more than an arm’s length through this suffocating dark—lit only by the shimmering blue freeze wall that traps us both.
“The queen’s late parents wanted to inflict the Diakópsei’s unfiltered strength on their entire army.
They planned to march on the Daylands, killing its citizens and seizing its preserved memories for the nightfolk.
” A vein in Neo’s neck visibly tenses. “So the queen became that which she feared anyone else being forced to become. She committed the ugliest act that cannot be undone. But she meant to save us, her people, and even yours.” He blinks hard, and it takes a moment for me to realize he’s now the one crying. “It tortures her soul.”
The words land with tangible substance, pressing down on me, but it’s a relieving kind of heaviness, like a weighted blanket, grounding me to this moment despite my racing heart and ragged breaths.
“She can’t carry that alone. No one could.
” I groan, covering my helmet-masked face with my hands.
“She wanted to share the burden—to let herself care for someone with no connection, no stake, in any of this bloodshed—and be cared for in return. I know she felt it. I saw it, before she cast me in here with you.”
“She has chosen her path.” Neo’s soft voice scrapes like sandpaper anyway. “One that diverges from yours. Unless she turns back, I’m afraid there is nothing you can do—nothing but hope to arrive home in one piece, and perhaps use your own technology to forget any of this ever happened.”
Jaw rigid, I shake my head. “I don’t want to forget.”
“Forgetting is easier.”
“I don’t want easy.”
“Then I am sorry for your pain,” Neo says, every syllable dripping with compassion that somehow still feels like condescension. “But I cannot change your choice, any more than I can change the queen’s.”
I want to argue with him. I want to scream and punch and throw myself into the freezeshot barrier until everything hurts so much that I just black out again.
Instead, a fresh wave of sobs rises and overtakes me, and I don’t know how long I lie here on the floor, rocks biting into my armor, throat constricted with grief.
Suddenly, the cell’s foundation lurches and undulates beneath us.
Adria’s fortress is under attack again. And unlike last time, neither of us is there to protect the other. I’m trapped in a prison cell with a stranger—with the walls, warped floor, and freezeshot barrier all exasperatingly intact—and she’s … stars above, I don’t know.
“This is all my fault,” I blurt without thinking, even though it patently doesn’t make sense.
I’m taken aback when Neo counters, “Actually, Princess, it’s mine.”
The blood drains from my face. “What?”
“When Adria touched the Diakópsei herself and became what she is, the Depths were in turmoil. Adria fighting off her parents and their soldiers. The Elysians scrambling to defend the asteroid from further misuse.” Neo’s whole body shakes.
“I was among them. The Elysians. Devoted myself to them, many cycles ago, rather than fulfill my duty to the military. But in Elysium’s greatest moment of trial, called upon to defend our god … ” He shrugs heavily. “I had to know.”
“And you overcharged yourself.”
“Yes. In the chaos, I touched god, and the power was every bit as overwhelming as my elders had forewarned. I could hear … everything. The soldiers. The Elysians …” He shudders.
“All the way to the prison quarters. Where a tortured tendril of thought branched out, and wrapped itself around my skull, and squeezed. Mourning half a lifetime
spent paying for crimes against the old crown. Pleading with me to give him another chance to be reborn on the surface.”
My stomach drops. “Azarii.”
Ashamed, Neo avoids my eyes. “The rebellion would not exist without me. Overcome with the onslaught of voices, I unleashed its catalyst. That was why Lail sought to trade for your memory in the first place, Kori. To ease my mental chaos. To … balance me.”
Just as I used Lail’s sphere of raw, undiluted hope to balance Aspect. Neo and I aren’t so different after all.
Neo shakes his head rapidly. “Azarii’s rebellion cast Adria as the ultimate abomination.
Considering her parricide, my sister and I were inclined to believe it.
But just as Lail still saw me as her brother, despite the terror of my overcharge …
” He sighs. “So I found, when I plunged into my queen’s mind, ordered to purge the memory of her murders …
that Adria, too, was not merely monster. That she and I were quite alike.”
The floor beneath us bucks again. I move to catch myself against the wall with one arm, but I don’t have to; Neo’s telekinesis prevents my skull from slamming into stone.
Beyond our shared cell, the attack is only getting worse.
For all I know, Adria could be pinned down already, surrounded and outgunned, broken wings pinned to the floor, a fresh freezeblade poised above her throat.
I shouldn’t care. But that’s never stopped me before, and it’s sure as hell not going to stop me now.
“By the Dreamgiver.” I curl my hands into fists. “Adria’s going to get herself killed. And I can’t even make my best attempt at a battlefield distraction.”
“About that,” Neo says. When I turn to look at him, his smile beams like a flaming brazier in the dark, cold cell. “A standard telekinetic must have clear sight of that which he intends to manipulate. An overcharged telekinetic …”
Outside our cell, the button on the wall audibly clicks.
“… can break many rules.”
I throw my arms around Neo’s frail form before I can think any better of it. I’m probably crushing him with my explosive joy, but I’m too euphoric to be sorry. “Neo, you wonderful criminal genius, you’ve given my stubborn ass a second chance I shouldn’t take.”
“But you are, of course, going to take it.”
“You know me so well already.”
Another miniature earthquake rocks the floor beneath us. I catch myself with both arms flung wide, while Neo does the same with an uncomfortably bent leg. He manages a laugh anyway. “It was a pleasure meeting you for myself, Kori of the Daylands.”
“Wait.” My head suddenly aches. “If you could’ve hit that button at any time … why the hell were you still in prison?”
Neo smiles faintly again. “I sinned against my god. Then I broke the laws of my queen, and also freed her greatest rival from his cell—Azarii, whom I have now also betrayed by not scrambling the queen’s mind entirely.
Everything I thought I knew has inverted upon itself.
When I was dragged before Adria to answer for my crimes, it seemed the least I could do …
to try. To do something good.” He heaves a heavy breath.
“I hoped, truly of my own free will, to alleviate Adria’s pain, as my sister sought to alleviate mine; and barring that, Kori, I hoped to ease yours.
You had the look of someone who badly needed to talk. ”
“Is it that obvious?” I step away from Neo and toward the now-nonfrozen cell exit, but catch myself and turn back to ask, “What about you? Where will you go?”
“I’ve done what I can for my queen, and perhaps for her last tether to hope. I’ll go to find my sister, and perhaps … perhaps, Kori, I will take a lesson from you, and I will not forget. I will carry this all with me. And I will try to make something of myself.”
I can’t help but smile at that. “Best of luck, Neo.”
“When you find Adria,” he says, “she may rage and thrash against fate, but I think she’ll be happy to see you.”
I can only hope so.