Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
My skull’s buzzing with a thousand stares. Every eye is on me, but Malakai’s is the one that pins me like a cockroach with a needle through its middle. I stand on shaking legs anyway.
The girl kneeling before the dais is small, so pale she looks dipped in moonlight. Her neck is a mess of bruises and bite marks. I don’t want to know what they did to her.
“Go on, Skid Mark,” Davrin whispers. “Don’t choke.”
Malakai makes an impatient sound, and I move forward, though I can’t feel my feet or the floor.
The girl sees me coming and cowers, but the adepts flanking her yank her head up so she’s forced to see me coming.
Her eyes remind me of Callie’s. Only hers are ringed with the swollen red of last night’s torture, and the white around the irises is spiderwebbed with blood vessels.
My hands shake.
Malakai folds his arms across his chest. “Show us what over a decade of dormancy creates, Initiate. Harvest the soul.”
My mouth is so dry my tongue nearly glues itself to my teeth. I don’t know the theory or how to call upon my magick, just the hunger at my core and the memory of Edon’s death, and even then, I wasn’t in control. I can’t—
The kneeling girl holds my gaze with such open terror that nearly turn around and run.
“Holbrook,” Malakai scolds.
Falcen’s warning echoes in my mind. Insubordination is punished.
I stare at the girl, Callie’s doppelg?nger, and want to vomit, want to collapse, want to disembowel Malakai with the broken leg of his own desk.
I can’t. I can’t do it. But if I don’t, Malakai will pick someone else, and I’ll be next in line for whatever passes as discipline around here.
“You’ve already done it once. The magick will know what to do. Just reach.”
Malakai’s voice is low and hardly encouraging.
Behind me, Davrin jeers, “Fifty tokens says she pisses herself before she draws a single strand.”
The adepts pull on the girl’s hair harder, exposing her neck, and in that instant, I realize the truth.
If I refuse, they’ll kill her, anyway. If I botch it, she’ll suffer longer.
I look her in the eye.
“What’s your name?” I whisper.
She stares at me, lips trembling.
“Lira,” she says, voice so faint it’s nearly gone.
She’s so small. So scared. She doesn’t even look at Keeper Malakai or the adepts or the initiates, just me.
I want to be the kind of Soulren that refuses. The one who overturns the whole system by saying, “No, I won’t.”
I want to tell her to run, to fight, to bite and scratch and scream her way out. I want her to hate me so much that her soul leaves permanent scars on my skin. But I am not that brave.
I kneel in front of her because my legs give out. My hand, shaking, lifts to her cheek. Her skin is as cold as my own.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and mean it.
The hunger wakes.
It unspools from somewhere behind my ribs. Not an organ, not a thought, but the space between them. It’s the same gnawing absence that opened its mouth when Edon died. When it wanted his warmth before it knew what warmth was.
Lira’s chest rises and falls too quickly with shallow exhales. Panicked breaths.
I can feel her. The heat of her. Not her skin or the blood moving underneath it, but another, invisible piece of her. An energy that hums just out of reach, dense and layered and alive in a way flesh isn’t.
The hunger leans toward it.
My hand is still on her cheek, but that’s not where the touch happens. It happens in the space I didn’t know existed until now, the place where her edges meet mine. Where the boundary between us stretches thin enough to pierce.
A bright blue filament forms.
I don’t create it. It simply is, strung taut between her sternum and mine. I feel it the way you feel someone’s gaze on the back of your neck.
Lira’s pupils blow wide.
The hunger slides down the filament, and I go with it.
Not into her thoughts. Not into flesh or bone or the mechanical pump of her heart.
I move into the place where she keeps everything that makes her her.
The deep, hidden section that holds her name before she learned to say it.
The shape of her sister’s face. The particular quality of light through her bedroom window on spring mornings.
Wheat under her bare feet. The scratch of it. Lux’s heat on the top of her head.
It’s not memory. It’s too immediate for that. Too present. I’m not watching Lira remember running through stalks of wheat. I’m there, feet striking earth, lungs pulling air that tastes like grain dust and oncoming rain.
Then the hunger pulls.
The filament goes taut. Lira’s soul begins to fray at the point where we’re connected. Threads of her peeling away, traveling up toward me.
Lira’s hand finds my wrist. Her fingers don’t grip. They rest there, light as bird bones.
“Quick.” Her plea barely has sound behind it. “Please. It hurts. Make it quick.”
“Stop.”
My focus shatters at the male command. The filament jerks, and Lira’s scream is the sound of vocal cords tearing. Her back arches. The threads of her soul, half-severed, hang suspended between us.
“What the fuck is this?”
Falcen’s voice cuts through the lecture hall, and I’ve never heard that particular blade in it before. He’s at the threshold, backlit, two other Elites flanking him in formation.
Malakai hasn’t moved. “Elite Reaves. You’re interrupting an evaluation.”
“She’s untrained.” Falcen storms toward the dais. “Initiate Holbrook manifested her powers a little over a month ago and you have her performing in front of fifty initiates?”
“The initiate requires immediate assessment if she is to take my class.”
“In a warded room. With suppressors standing by,” Falcen snaps. “Not in a lecture hall where she can lose control and take half the class with her.”
The smoky twines of blue between Lira and me are screaming. Not literally, or outside our heads. But I hear it the way you sense a muscle about to tear under your skin.
Lira’s soul, half unraveled, is still coming apart in my hands.
“The girl needs preparation.” Falcen gestures at me, at Lira, at the horror suspended between us. “Look at her. She doesn’t even know what she’s doing.”
I don’t. The hunger inside me keeps tugging, and I can’t make it stop.
Lira’s memories flood into my mind in broken waves.
Her mother’s voice, the smell of hay, cold stone under her cheek, her sister’s face, her sister’s name, Taye—and it’s too much, too fast, and I’m drowning in someone else’s life while her body convulses in front of me.
Malakai steps down from the dais. His touch is ice cold when it settles on the back of my neck. “Once the connection forms, it has to complete. You’re well aware of that, Resonant.”
Falcen’s nostrils flare. “Then help her control it.”
“Why? So she can pretend she’s something she’s not?” Malakai’s fingers burrow into the muscles in my neck. “She’s a remnant. Late, with a too weak foundation. This is exactly what happens when inferior stock tries to wield power they weren’t born to.”
“You set her up.”
“I gave her an opportunity to prove otherwise.” Malakai looks down at me. “She’s failing.”
Lira’s cobalt soul continues unspooling between us. The wisps dissolve on my lips, one after another, and each one brings a fragment of her. Bread baking, rope burns, Taye’s birthday, the promise she made to come home.
Falcen kneels beside me. “If you try to sever this now, both souls will suffer.”
The cobalt smoke keeps flowing. I watch it disappear into me.
“Do you understand?” His voice is quieter now. “You’ll die with her.”
My throat is too tight to answer. The hunger is already halfway through Lira. Her memories stack up inside me like cards shuffling into a deck.
“I can’t kill someone!” I cry.
“You have to.” So low I almost don’t catch it, he says, “I’m sorry.”
Lira’s fingers tighten around my wrist. She has no strength left, but she holds on, anyway.
“Taye.” Her lips barely move. “Tell my sister—”
A torrent of blue-white light floods the hollow space in my chest.
The gnawing pit inside me swallows it all.
And then—
Silence.
Not the silence of an empty room. It’s the sweet quiet of a body that’s been starving for twenty-three summers and suddenly isn’t.
My lungs expand. My muscles unclench. The constant ache that’s lived in my marrow since the last of Edon’s soul left me just … stops.
Lira goes slack in my arms.
Her eyes haven’t closed. They’re still that shade of amber, the one that looks like Callie’s, but the light behind them has guttered out. There’s no fear in them now. No life. Just glass.
My arms won’t release her.
She’s so light even before she starts dissolving. I didn’t think a person could weigh this little. Like all the substance of her left with her soul, and what remains is just architecture. Skin and bone and ash.
“Let go,” Falcen says, gently prying my fingers from Lira’s cheek as it disintegrates under my touch.
Her skin is mostly ash. I want to be sick, but instead I just kneel there, hands sticky with the sweat and tears of a girl whose life I stole in front of an audience.
Falcen helps me up as the last of Lira’s skeleton crumbles.
The rest of the class watches me with vulture-like intensity. Some are envious, others cautious, but Davrin just grins.
I want to erase that smile with a shovel.
“She did it,” he says. “The Skid Mark actually—”
“Shut up.” Falcen levels a deathly glare at Davrin.
Davrin closes his mouth, but his eyes shrink into slits.
I sense the two Elites that accompanied Falcen coming forward before I see them. Their flat expressions are unreadable, but their stares contain a kind of wary respect. Like I might snap and start draining everyone in the room. Maybe I will.
Maybe I want to.
Maybe the only thing stopping me is the growling, exhausted thing inside that just spent itself on its second real meal and is now looking for dessert.
Yum, the ember says.
“Efficient, at least,” Malakai drawls. To the adepts, he directs, “Remove the soot stains before I step in it.”
They clean what’s left of Lira off the floor. My hands stay curled even after she’s gone. I’m empty now, and full, and ill.
“Class dismissed,” Malakai says.
“Can you walk?” Falcen asks near my shoulder.
I push to my feet, but a wave of dizziness crashes over me.
I sway, my boots slipping on the floor. Strong hands catch me before I can crumple completely.
I want to snap that I’m fine, that I don’t need his help, but my tongue feels thick and clumsy.
I lean against him instead, basking in the warmth of Falcen’s solid chest as he lifts me into his arms.
“Reaves,” Malakai shouts. “Your interference is unacceptable.”
“I was merely doing the Elite rounds, and you left your door open,” Falcen replies.
“You have tampered with my lesson, shown massive disrespect, and have proven my opinion that you should never have returned to the academy. Take your initiate and report to the Master Keeper immediately.”
“Yes, Keeper,” Falcen capitulates, but with the way his hold tightens on my body enough to break my bones, I can tell it costs him.
But I don’t concern myself too much with Falcen’s face-off with a Veil Keeper.
I’m too busy trying to ignore Lira’s body decaying in my arms. Because if I look that way, I’ll have to see her eyes still open.
I’ll have to acknowledge the warmth spreading through my chest. Lira’s warmth, a stolen life that this time was deliberate.
Worse, I’ll have to face the fact that for one terrible moment, right before the revulsion crashed in, I experienced something that wasn’t revulsion.
I felt whole.