CHAPTER 23 KORI
CHAPTER
KORI
The planet’s poison floods my veins. Impossibly, instead of experiencing a curtain call, I come awake.
My muscles draw tight against my bones, all suddenly stiff and cold, moments before impossible strength radiates from every joint. It feels like I’m screaming, but I must be the only one who can hear the roar between my ears. Adria’s eyes are blurry.
“Adria.” My voice feels like it comes from someone else. “It doesn’t hurt.”
She kneels beside me, robes stained with blood from my arm. She reaches, reflexively, to cover the wound, before catching herself, afraid of worsening the radiation poisoning that should’ve already begun. But I don’t feel poisoned. I don’t feel sick.
The power rumbling through my veins is so fierce, I can hardly bear it—like direct sunlight in an unguarded pupil, like fresh, cold water in a stomach too long deprived.
“By the Beyond.” Adria shakes her head, so overcome that words can hardly escape. “Kori, what color are your eyes?”
I blink, not comprehending. “Brown.”
“Not anymore, they’re not.”
I look to where Aspect lies unconscious, their surface still freshly shined enough to reveal my reflection. My own familiar eyes look back at me, but bathed in brilliant, electric blue, like Adria’s flames, like the planet’s beating heart.
The Diakópsei has claimed me, finally, after so long waiting for a gap in my armor—but it’s supposed to feel like dying, and it doesn’t.
Every dayfolk child is shown an animated guide of what would happen if we ever dared to venture outside without a complete protective set.
The first figure’s skin melts off like wax.
The second screams until their blood vessels burst, eyes popping out of the skull.
The third writhes and twists until their bones rearrange themselves into something utterly inhuman.
If the video wasn’t enough, teachers (or in my case, Chloe) sometimes brought in those who had lost family to the planet’s poison, to describe what they had witnessed—or what unrecognizable corpse had been left by relentless Pagonian mutations.
None of those afflicted by the radiation gleamed with alien strength and stood up, their legs remaining rock-solid, as I do now.
“It’s … not killing me.” Despite the insanity of it all, I listen to my body and suck in a deep, free breath of unfiltered air. It’s crisp, clean, on my tongue and in my lungs. It’s more than the absence of pain; I feel like the embodiment of power. “I don’t know how, or why, but I’m not …”
The sentence trails off in the absence of a satisfactory answer.
“You’re not dying,” Adria breathes in utter disbelief.
“I’m not dying. I feel …” I deliberately unclench my fists, stretching my fingers, blue sparks leaping between them despite my gloves.
“Awake. Like I could …” I click the wrist sealant buttons on my armor, prompting another panicked cry from Adria, and toss both gloves away.
A little shout escapes me as my hands start to glow, too, galaxy bright, every fingertip overwhelmed with energy. “Stars above.”
Adria simply stares, slack-jawed. “It takes countless sleep cycles to master energy manipulation like that. Even if you did become like me, which would take more than a moment … dayfolk should die, but even nightfolk should collapse.”
Wild curiosity overwhelms my good sense.
After a whole lifetime of fear, by some strange twist of fate, the planet’s poison is to me only power, and I’m desperate to test the limits.
I must be something … else. Something as forbidden as a stubborn fissure between the light and the dark.
It’s a terrifying thought, but it hardly registers over the energy roaring through me.
I collapse my remaining armor, both top and bottom, leaving only my borrowed, crudely trimmed nightfolk garments beneath it. My skin tingles and shimmers with strength. Adria watches, hardly blinking, streaked with tears and dirt and dust and blood, jaw still hanging open.
If we get Aspect somewhere safe, I can help Adria fight the other serpents off while the energy surge lasts—take advantage of whatever is happening to me before we waste time trying to explain it.
I open my mouth to suggest as much, when all at once the energy flares, burning much brighter, my body a candle struck to life.
Then, almost as soon as it began, it collapses and dims. I’m nothing but a dead wick.
Gasping, coughing, but unexplainably, definitely not dying as science should dictate, I fall to my hands and knees.
“Kori,” Adria gasps, catching me as I fall forward.
I sag into the support as we both realize that Adria’s hands are wrapped securely around my bare arms. Our skin-to-skin touch feels like lightning, almost as strong as the planet’s grip on my unveiled body.
Her own gathered power spears through me so sharply that my vision flashes white, but there’s something else, too, a hot tension that I know we both feel at our proximity.
“I can’t fight like this,” I pant, leaning further into her muscly arms for support. “We have to get somewhere safe—you, me, Aspect—before another sun serpent realizes where we are.”
“I can still fight,” Adria protests, hauling me back up to a standing position. “My soldiers need me—”
“Alive,” I finish the sentence for her, recovering my posture as I speak. “If their queen gets snake strangled, that’s the end. All your fight, all your sacrifice … for nothing. You can’t let that happen.”
Adria’s brow furrows. “The fortress is in dire need of repairs. The serpents are tearing it apart, just barreling through walls and floors like they’re paper. I don’t know where to hide you. I don’t know how to keep you safe—”
I raise a hand for silence. “Wait.”
“What?”
“Listen.”
In the distance, the scattered battle clamor grows louder, closer, then proceeds to recede back toward the Passage.
Slithering bodies, snapping jaws, the hellish hissing of forked tongues.
Damaged pillars crash, crack, and collapse all around us, but the area we’re in, decimated though it may be, seems to hold. The serpents make a combined exit.
Quiet, unbroken, blankets the Shadowlands again.
“If they came looking for me,” I realize aloud, “a desperately armored, wasting girl who was as good as dead already, then their target no longer exists. This thing that’s happening to me …
” Shudders rack my frame at the gravity of what’s just happened.
“Stars, I should be dead. I should …” I stare at my naked hands, still slightly sparking with planetary power.
My eyes, faintly reflected in Aspect, are brown again, but with a dim crackle of pure blue. “I’m so confused.”
Adria is still kneeling, so even as I stand, we’re eye to eye. “We’ll figure it out,” she insists, moving both hands to my shoulders, grounding me. “You were impossible from the moment you crashed into the shadows. Whatever you are, I know who you are. Kori, Kori …”
She takes my face in her big hands, claws carefully not breaking me, the pads of her fingers instead wiping away tears I didn’t realize were
falling. She looks at me like a star fell into her open palm. She looks at me like I’m the sun.
“I’m not afraid of you, Kori. Not anymore. And you’ve never been afraid of anything.” She leans her forehead forward, pressing it ever so gently to mine, and I let my eyes drift shut, listening to the combined huffs of our breathing. “Not even me, the worst monster of them all.”
“Not a monster,” I sigh, overcome by the palpable heat of her breath on my face, trembling. “Never a monster, even when you tried.”
We stay like that, a mere exhale apart, eyes closed, fingers tangled in each other’s ruined hair, for a seemingly interminable moment. At last she draws back, lifts my chin with the blunt side of a claw, and breathes, “I could kiss you.”
Her lips, gently parted, are red as blood.
Her violet eyes hold mine through a sheen of fresh tears, slowly blinking to clear the haze, never looking away from me.
She’s the planet’s most brutally designed mutant.
She’s my rival royal. She’s my azure torch amidst the dark, my reason to keep fighting for the light.
My enemy, my equal, maker of the greatest memories I have.
“Then fucking kiss me,” I say.
She shouldn’t. But while she may not be a monster, in this moment she’s only a girl, breathing as hard as I am, stained with dust and blood and stray serpent scales, fingers shivering against the curve of my cheek, voice swallowed by need, so she does.
I don’t know how to kiss her. The press of her lips to my lips turns my brain to static, my blood to a spiking pulse.
She tastes like salt and rust and sweat and want.
We both hardly move, testing each other’s limits, Adria terribly aware of her own strength and keeping it tightly leashed.
But when her tongue slides just barely forward, tasting my mouth, a little groan breaks from me, and I dig my fingers into her ragged, overgrown curls, one hand wrapped around a well-hewn horn, pulling her closer, deepening the kiss, knowing nothing will be close enough.
Her body is on my body everywhere. And it’s more than the planet’s unholy power passing between us, a live electric current.
I may know less about myself than I ever thought, fueled as I am by the energies that should’ve killed it, but I know I was made for this.
I know that no matter what brought me here, no matter where we go next, I was meant to kiss Adria, queen of the nightfolk, shadow of my own aspirations, echo of my own loneliness, answer to a question I’d never even had the words to ask.