Chapter 4 Heart #3
"I’m happy for them. Truly, I am. But…" Rin blew out a sharp breath.
"When will it be my turn? Am I destined to be alone forever, for this life?
How many lives will I be forced to live alone?
What life will I be on when I meet the Soul—or Souls—meant for me?
What will they be like? What will he be like?
Will he be kind, quiet? Strong? Will it be a thousand years from now?
How many lives will he have lived without me?
How many lives will I live without him?"
Her words grew quieter and quieter with every question, uttered into the still night air. The Stars winked above her, unanswering.
"I just wish I knew," Rin breathed. "Please—just this once. Let me have something… extraordinary."
Her head hung low, white hair falling into her face and obscuring her vision. She bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. She would not cry. She wouldn’t.
After some time of sitting there, when her thighs grew numb from her still position and her fingertips were white with cold, she heard the faintest buzzing sound in the air.
Rin picked her head up, wiping the back of her hand over her traitorously wet eyes. Just as she pulled her arm away, she gasped.
"What is that?"
She stared at the thing in front of her, hovering in midair.
A shadowy impression of a human body floated right in front of her, made of pure darkness.
Her lips parted, and she scrubbed at her eyes.
Blinked.
But the shadow was still there.
Rin stumbled to her feet, swaying near the edge, and the shadowy shape raised a hand toward her. She saw the visible imprint of a hand, palm raised, as if to ward her back, away from the ledge.
Her brows furrowed.
"Oh god." Rin laughed lowly. "I’m going crazy."
She hadn’t had anything to drink, not even water, for if she did, she would have suspected someone of slipping something in it. But she had had nothing. There was no explanation for this.
Except…
"Is this my heart?" Rin asked the shadow. "Is my time running out now?"
She shook her head and looked away with a self-deprecating huff. The shadow did not feel malevolent, but radiated peace. Comfort. The longer it wavered before her in the sky, the more at ease Rin felt. Until she found her erratic heart slowing.
She pressed a hand over her chest, feeling the steadiness of her pulse. She had never felt it so… normal before.
Rin stared at the shadow. "Thank you," she murmured.
And right before her eyes, it dissipated. Like smoke, fizzling away into nothingness, leaving Rin with a calm heart and peaceful mind.
Rin’s grip on the Echogun in her hand was unfaltering as she ventured deeper into Nova Zone 21.
She had been sent back here again for her second assignment, and this time, she was prepared for what she would be forced to face. She wouldn’t falter this time, or become prey to her weak memories.
She had a mission, and she was going to get a good grade on this assignment. After receiving a seventy-one on her very first, she had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
Tasked with killing two lowlevel Rogues, once more, except her weapon was an assigned pistol, designed for newer trainees with a lighter recoil and smaller grip.
The forest was still this evening, a time of day when dusk played tricks on your mind, making shapes out of shifting shadows. Her boots crunched expertly over the leaves, and her heart was steady—too steady.
She hadn’t been able to explain it when she had met with Lucien this morning for her weekly check-up. The stoic doctor had asked her how she had been, a large, warm palm on her knee as he sat far too close to her on his rolling stool.
The shadows under her eyes were for many reasons.
A night of crying herself to sleep, staying up far too late, mind spinning as she stared up at the ceiling and prayed to whoever was listening:
Let it once be me.
And just as Rin had dozed off, eyes sore from crying and cheeks wet and crusted from dried tears, her phone had buzzed with a video call from Kit.
Even thinking of it now brought a smile to Rin’s face. He always knew when she needed him most.
He had heard the thickness in her voice and immediately questioned what was wrong. She hadn’t said anything, just a simple, Tired from training.
Kit had seen right through her lies, but he didn’t push. He never did.
They had spent hours talking, and now she was paying the price. It was an effort to keep her eyes open as she trekked deeper into Nova Zone 21, steps lithe, but the heaviness to her limbs made her drag as she remembered Lucien’s words from this morning:
Your heart is growing worse. The Nova inside you is expanding, leaching out to your other organs. You may feel fine now, Vesperin, but make no mistake, you are not healed—you are not getting better.
It was the calm before a storm. And not just any storm, an electric storm, with bolts of lightning and charged air.
But that still didn’t make sense of what she had seen last night on the roof of the warehouse. The shadow. The memory of the comforting impression of it haunted her, even now. She swore she saw flashes of preternatural darkness between the trees, taunting her.
Rin still didn’t know how to explain it.
When she had fallen into bed last night, she had chalked it up to a product of her imagination, desperate for comfort, but that didn’t explain how well she had rested.
Nor did it explain how even Lucien had been surprised when he had listened to her heartbeat, the cool diaphragm pressed against her skin as he leaned toward her, brows pinched in concentration as he listened intently.
It didn’t matter.
Rin gritted her teeth, shaking the thoughts away. She would die. She had five years to come to terms with it.
Her watch beeped with a warning, and she raised her arm, reading the small red words on the face of it. Nova warning.
Rin wouldn’t slip up this time or let her past get the best of her.
She could do this. She had trained for this.
Carefully, she placed her feet on the deadened grass, dodging broken tree limbs and brittle pine needles. She stepped a few paces to the right, and the Nova warning went away.
"Dammit," she breathed out, retracing her steps back to where she had first received the warning.
Her watch beeped again, and she went the other way, deeper into the shadows of the forest. Low branches snagged in her hair, and her eyes were wide, scanning her surroundings.
The air seemed to grow still, expectant, as the trees grew more sick and dead, spindly limbs glowing faintly with veins of blue Nova.
Her guard was up, especially after running into a midlevel Rogue her first time in this Zone. She had come to realize, in this line of work, you should expect the unexpected. Or face the consequences—usually death.
And her tense posture and finger hovering over the trigger guard of her pistol were the very reasons why she was able to react so quickly when a branch snapped toward her left side.
Her watch let out a soft beep in warning as blue veins lit up the evening air.
There was a soft huffing noise, like some inhuman thing blowing out a great, big breath, and then, from the shadows between two tall, thick tree trunks, a Rogue lunged.
Rin didn’t waste a moment. Her arm was already raised, pistol ready to fire, and as she swung the muzzle straight toward the Rogue, she saw its eyes, black as pitch, and serrated teeth dripping thick, red blood as it opened its maw.
She fired straight into its mouth, ichor splashing her skin and coating the dead grass as three bullets tore through its throat and came out on the other side of its pointed head.
The Rogue fell on the ground in a heap, twitching as if it didn’t want to come to terms with its death. And then, it stilled, and Rin gave a triumphant smile.
"Not bad," she murmured, walking closer to hover her watch over the Rogue, capturing its death in the database so she could complete her assignment.
"Your reaction time could have been a bit quicker," a masculine voice, smooth as silk, spoke from above, whispering down on her.
Rin gasped and raised her pistol, training it above.
She knew, even before she truly studied the shadowed treetops, what she would see—whom she would see.
The gleaming blade of a scythe and a white cloak.
Her Soul Searcher was back.
Perched atop a tall branch, one leg was pulled close to his chest, a gloved hand clutching the impeccable handle of his scythe as it rested over his knee. His other leg dangled off the branch, the edges of his white cloak caught under him, fluttering in the evening light like a stark beacon.
"But not bad at all, Vesperin Vox," said the Soul Searcher.
Rin did not lower her gun. "How do you know my name?" she demanded.
The Soul Searcher’s hood fell back as he stared up at the winking Stars, peeking through the canopy of trees above them both. It revealed his gorgeous, untouched, pale skin—and the small five-pointed mark under his left eye. Breathtaking.
"I have my ways, Hunter. It was easy to find the name of the girl with Stars in her eyes.
" He canted his head down, toward her, and then, before she could blink, he hopped down from the branch, the end of his white cloak billowing out as he landed lithely on his feet.
Not a wince on his face, nor even a breath of sound as his boots landed on the dead, brittle grass.
His blue eyes pinned her to the spot. Something about them…
the way they took in every bit of her, it made her feel seen—like she couldn’t hide, even if she wanted to.
Consuming and knowing, he stared at her, taking her in from the tips of her black laced-up boots to the top of her white hair, tucked behind her ears, revealing the many silver earrings lining her lobes.
The Soul Searcher hummed.