CHAPTER 23 KORI #2
Even if I had been born when days and nights still tracked time, all sense of it would elude me with her mouth on my mouth, her hands woven into my disheveled hair, her cold blue-white skin faintly warm with blood flush—cradling me when she could break me, craving me when she could crush me, my heart fluttering so hard against my ribs, I’m almost afraid it’ll burst.
When the kiss ends, it’s only so we can both catch our breath. Adria holds my gaze through fluttering dark lashes. “What’s happening to you … I’m afraid the lies may go deeper than you know.” Her eyes fall to the floor. “Deeper than you could bear to know.”
I cradle her strong jaw with an open hand, lift her face so her gaze meets mine again. “After all I’ve already survived, I’m not afraid of the truth. So don’t mince words now. What do you know, Adria?”
Her words spill out in a panicked flood.
“The snakes were explicitly sent for you. Your presence imprinted on them like a brand. Not to destabilize my army, not even to threaten me, but to retrieve you. Who would do that, Kori? Certainly not my uncle. Even if he could manipulate sun serpents, he would’ve used them to overthrow my rule altogether, not simply go after a valuable prisoner.
So who else knows you’re here? Who else would’ve been so invested in snatching you out of the shadows? ”
My head feels like it’s doing pirouettes. Struggling for balance, I shift my hand down to Adria’s shoulder, gripping hard at the muscle underneath. “You think my mother sent the serpents.”
“If not her, then who?”
“They could’ve killed me.”
“It seems that would’ve been a more acceptable outcome,” Adria says through her teeth, “than your continued presence here. But as soon as this … power … overtook you, they stopped trying to retrieve you. They didn’t even try to kill you.
They all retreated from whence they came.
Almost as if they knew it was game over. ”
I squeeze my eyes shut, shaking my head. “I don’t understand.”
“You said yourself that you could’ve been killed.
Your mother knew you were a hair’s breadth from radiation exposure at any moment in the Shadowlands.
One misstep from discovering that the planet isn’t poison to you at all, but power.
And paying your ransom, if she ever intended to pay it, is far from a single-sleep-cycle process.
Every passing moment, meanwhile … more risk of exposure. More risk of the lie being exposed.”
I feel like I’m drowning in Adria’s violet eyes, unable to pull in any air. But her gaze holds mine fast, no longer shielding me from even an inkling of truth. Believing I can carry it.
“So,” Adria says, “she deemed it better for you to dissolve in a sun serpent’s stomach than for you to discover what you really are.”
My voice is wire thin. “And what is that?”
Grating metal. A squeaking, stubbornly straight leg pressing up against stone.
Amidst my racing thoughts, I almost forgot Aspect is here, having apparently rebooted during our intimate moment.
As they stand, they insist, “Kori is—Aspect’s friend.
Kori is—Adria’s friend. Kori is brave—and smart, and—still alive, despite—everything trying to—destroy Kori. ”
I swallow hard. I square my shoulders, find my center.
Aspect is right. By all accounts, I should be dead a thousand times over, but instead, I’m living proof of the impossible: a dayfolk reborn amidst the radiation, rather than swiftly silenced by it.
My mother was willing to risk my mutilation or death by the sun serpents to prevent my ever happening upon the truth beyond her jurisdiction.
I suck in a deep breath, then blow it out through my nose.
“There could be more of us. Dayfolk who don’t die from radiation exposure.
There’s no way to know how deep this goes, how long my mother’s been lying to me.
If I stay here …” A chill racks my frame, but I fight it back.
“My mother could send something even worse to silence me. Ensure nobody ever finds out about this. But how far does the lie reach? Are there others? Why lie to me—to the dayfolk entirely? If I don’t find out—”
“Then the truth dies with you,” Adria finishes for me. The weight of that statement bears down on both of us like a thing with teeth, as terrifying as any sun serpent.
A robotic whirr, rising in volume. “Too much—for Aspect.”
“What?” Adria and I say in near unison, barely turning in time to see Aspect’s optical processors blink out and their body collapse in a haphazard heap to the floor all over again.
“S-stars above,” I stammer, sprinting to check Aspect for further injuries. But they have no exposed wires, no obviously visibly misplaced gears, nothing.
It seems that finally, even more so than their countless installed memories or even their fall into this pit, it’s a firsthand experience that overloaded their system into a temporary shutdown.
An absurdly human thing for a robot that’s shown no signs of independent, sentient thought, but there’s far too much happening for me to dwell on that right now.
It’s far from the weirdest thing Aspect has done thus far; I’m just unspeakably grateful that they’re with me and that they’re alive.
As long as they’re alive, I may still find a way to help their consciousness wake.
With a clatter of loose limbs, I pull Aspect’s powered-down body close my chest. “I’ll have to do a manual reboot. Shutdown has only been known to happen to mechs from, like, core-system heat overload. Not …” I sigh. “Any of this.”
Adria rises to her feet. Even with her wounded left wing causing her to hunch, wincing with every motion, her bulk as compared to me makes my heart stumble against my ribs. Yet her voice is small, half strangled. “Will it help them?” she asks. “To be back in the sun?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your starship crashed at the Second Spire. Its core components are likely intact. With some repairs, it can still get you home. Fixing your armor should be no trouble either.”
I open my mouth to launch a comeback. No sound comes out.
“You said it yourself, Kori. Right now, you’re the only one with any idea of what your mother is plotting. If you stay here, you’ll never find your answers. She could send any manner of further monsters to ensure you never do.”
Adria moves to cross the space between us again, despite visibly tensing every time her injured wing shifts.
The serpent slash across my own arm stings fiercely, too, but I’ve hardly been able to register it over the tumult of other thoughts—over the overwhelming reality of Adria’s lips having finally collided with mine.
“I thought I’d sacrificed everything for a chance at peace,” Adria muses. “A body that felt familiar to me. The lives of my parents. My perilous standing with the Shadow Court.” Both her hands settle lightly but firmly on my shoulders. “But not everything. Not yet.”
Again she kneels, eyes half shut, breaths pluming in the relentless cold, and leans her forehead against mine, level. Steady. “I have to let you go, Kori. You need to protect your people, as surely as I’ve fought to protect mine.”
My throat feels raw as if from screaming. I know she’s right, as hideous as the realization is. My mother tried to kill me, but the planet that should’ve finished the job brought rebirth instead. I need answers—not just for myself, but for every other subject of my mother’s unquestioned rule.
“And you can’t protect your people if I stay here,” I realize.
“You’re already in the throes of civil war.
And now I’ve brought monsters to your doorstep.
Invoked the ire of my mother—maybe soon a full-blown dayfolk army.
” Gently lowering Aspect’s body to the ground, I rise to my own feet.
“You’re right, Adria. I have to go home. ”
Home. The word tastes sour, its shape stinging on my tongue. When did this lightless, frozen wasteland start to feel more like home than the sunny dunes surrounding my settlement? I don’t know anymore.
“And I will get you there,” Adria says, resolute.
“So help me, I won’t be the one to stand in the way of your answers.
You’ve come too far, seen too much, to risk being silenced in the shadows.
And I …” She stands, too, rising several feet above me once again, and stares off as if she can see something distinct in the distance.
“In the wake of this assault, I’ll rally my people.
I’ll repair my fortress. I’ll ensure Azarii does not have his victory—will never have a world where nightfolk identity is rooted in shame. ”
Despite its crushing weight, despite everything bearing down upon us, Adria carries the responsibility with a regal air. More than ever, she sounds like a queen.
“I know you’re right,” I sigh. “I know you have to stay, to stop this war. I have to go, if I’m ever to find my own place in the world.
But … this can’t be it, can it?” My heartbeat echoes in my eardrums. I swallow hard on a sudden sob.
“I can’t have come all this way—found you, fought you, finally kissed you—just to disappear back into the sun. ”
“I can’t send you back with a nightfolk comms tablet unless I want your entire nation to doubt your loyalties.
Which means we’ll have no way to communicate across the Passage.
” Wavering, Adria’s voice drops an octave.
“Promise you’ll come back to me,” she breathes, more a plea than an order, all posturing between us incinerated the moment our lips finally met.
Her hand finds the side of my face again, holds it like I’m fragile as a butterfly’s wing.
“Even if you can never stay, even if the daylight will always mark your home … come back to me, Kori, and remind me why we’re fighting. ”
My whole body trembles again at her touch, not from the force but from the gentleness of it, her finger cold and sure as any promise when it traces my cheekbone, trying to memorize it. “If I gave you my word, would that be enough?”
“Not nearly.”
“Would it help if I kissed you again?”
“No,” Adria says, but she leans in anyway, her lips tentatively brushing mine as if expecting a second embrace to make me disappear altogether.
We stay like that for a while, kissing soft and slow, hands settling on each other’s hips instead of wandering, learning each other’s corners and edges.
She holds one hip with the other hand braced against my back, since she has to bend so far to kiss me, dipping me low.
And I grip her hip right back with one hand, and the underside of her good wing with the other, just barely keeping myself upright through the brain fog of she’s kissing me, I’m kissing her, we’re kissing and I don’t ever want to stop …
I’m the one to draw back this time, needing to catch my breath despite the softness of the kiss. It takes Adria half a moment to register my absence, her eyes fluttering back open, violet orbs pinning me where I stand, ordering me not to withdraw any farther.
“Nothing ties you here,” she says.
I shake my head, defiant. “I’ll come back for you.”
“And I want to believe you, Kori, I do.” She sighs. “But without something to draw you back, to demand your return …” At once her gaze goes wide. “After I’ve tended to my wounds, and to yours, would you accept a parting token from me? Something of the nightfolk?”
“Of course I would,” I agree without thinking.
Before I forget, I gather the collapsed pieces of my armor, reattaching them to my various joints. I don’t extend them to cover my full body, though; I’ve spent quite long enough in that sun-forsaken security suit. Instead I let the shrunken pieces of metal stay at my wrists,
my ankles, my waist, and my collarbone, ready to extend as needed, but notably less constricting.
“My wing is too wounded to carry you on my back,” Adria says, glancing up to where we both tumbled from a floor and a half above.
“But I can’t very well expect you to climb with that arm.
And there’s Aspect to contend with.” Her eyebrows furrow as she determines a solution.
“You carry Aspect; I carry you. All right?”
With a grunt, I heave Aspect into my arms, unsure of what to do next. “I’m not sure I—” But before I can protest, Adria sweeps me up into her arms—one of them beneath my back, the other settled beneath my knees, holding me securely against her body.
The sun serpent’s slash on my arm stings more every moment, but complaining about it given the state of Adria’s wing feels like every time Aspect has tried to convince me that their life is very hard.
I expect Adria to put me down once we alight on the upper floor.
Instead she holds me close, her heartbeat pattering against my cheek, as she walks us both back toward what’s left of her quarters.
Fur ragged, triple tongues panting, Russ patters after both of us, all three heads observing Aspect’s supine body in my arms with ever-increasing canine concern.