Chapter 32 #2
The word hung in the air between them, or maybe it hadn’t been directed at her at all.
Was he talking to the light? It was the kind of absurd thing he would do, address the sun directly, as if it owed him a greeting in return.
But the word had landed on her skin before her mind caught up to dissect it, warm and familiar and gone in the same breath.
Sunshine.
He hadn’t said it since Grayhollow. Not once. In the weeks since, he’d used her name, Elora, clean and without decoration—and she’d told herself it was better that way. Names were just names. Labels. She’d answered to worse.
She didn’t miss it.
She stared at the bruised apple in her hand and tried to believe that.
The problem was that the nickname had gotten in before her defenses were up.
Before she’d had time to brace. It had touched something she’d been carefully not touching for months, some small, stupid part of her that had liked being called that, that had felt like something worth naming softly. Like something warm.
She wasn’t that anymore.
She wasn’t sure she ever had been. Sunshine implied openness, light let in, something bright at the center.
What she had at her center now was a beast and a list of grievances she planned to settle in blood.
She moved through corridors counting exits.
She slept as a creature because her human body remembered too much.
She didn’t ask him why he’d stopped using it. Didn’t ask if he’d noticed the shift in her, or if he’d simply decided on his own that the name no longer fit what stood before him. Both possibilities felt equally unbearable in different ways, so she left the question where it was.
“What’s the plan for today?” he asked, as his arm slid away and he bit into the apple with a crisp snap.
“Florence asked me to go to the gathering later.”
He paused mid-bite, his jaw tightening just enough that she noticed.
“The rally, you mean?” His voice flattened the word, curling around its edges with distaste, like someone describing a rash they couldn’t quite get rid of.
The slight downward pull at the corner of his mouth suggested he’d sooner swallow broken pottery than sit through another one of those gatherings.
She studied his profile, the way he avoided her eyes for a second too long. “Why do you call it that? And why the face? You don’t like them?”
He forced a grin and waved his half-eaten apple like it was a prop.
“Oh, you know, nothing like watching apprentices compete for the title of Most Tragic Backstory, while parents clutch their pearls and pretend they thought the Empire wouldn’t mistreat their children like they mistreat their villages. ”
Her eyes narrowed, one eyebrow arching high enough to make him shift on the bench. The humor slid off his face like water on waxed leather. He looked down at the apple in his hand, turning it slowly as if suddenly fascinated by its bruises.
“Fine, the truth. Everyone in that room acts like the Empire stole their children in the night.”
He turned the apple slowly in his hands.
“Most of them walked those kids straight to the recruiters themselves. Signed the papers. Told them it was an honor. And the ones who didn’t?
” He let out a quiet breath through his nose.
“Half of them sold their kids to the Snatchers instead. Figured if the Empire might take them anyway, they might as well get a few coins out of it.”
“Hard to listen to people cry about injustice when they helped feed the machine.” Rell’s voice dropped, roughening like gravel underfoot, his jaw clenching so tight she could see the muscle jump along his cheek.
He looked away, staring at the half-eaten apple like it had offended him, his fingers digging into the fruit until juice seeped out.
The words hit her like a gust through an open window, cold and sharp, stirring that old ache in her chest—the one tied to Grayhollow, to the meat vendor who’d looked at her without a flicker of recognition.
Rell’s gaze drifted somewhere beyond the mess hall walls, a flush creeping up his neck like rising floodwater.
Whatever memory had seized him burned hot enough that she could feel its heat across the inches between them, something wilder than mere anger pulsing beneath his skin.
Part of her wanted to lay her hand over his, to pry those fingers loose and tell him she understood, that her own so-called father in Grayhollow had stared right through her like she was a stranger, like the years stolen from her meant nothing.
But something in her chest tightened, a small voice rising to argue that not every parent had choices.
She’d heard the whispers at The Institute.
Children trading stories of parents who’d sent them away rather than watch them starve. Some sins weren’t so easily sorted.
She knew this went deeper for him, rawer than just the old guilt over not pulling her from the Snatchers’ grip back when they were kids.
No, this rage tied straight to his sister—the one he never mentioned, the ghost that hung in every bitter word about abandonment.
What had happened to her? The question burned on her tongue, sharp and insistent, begging to slip out right here amid the clatter of trays and the low murmur of voices.
But she swallowed it down. Better to let him have this anger, unprodded, unchallenged.
It wasn’t hers to pick apart, not when it fueled him like this.
“I get it,” she said instead. “It’s not something you just forgive. And maybe you shouldn’t.”
He held her eyes for a beat, then that familiar grin cracked back into place, lopsided and easy, like he’d flipped a switch.
The tension in his shoulders eased, his fingers loosening around the mangled apple, juice dripping onto the table.
“So, when are we attending this prestigious gathering of the tragically betrayed? I should polish my best ‘sympathetic head tilt’ before dusk, right?”
Elora forced a half-smile at his quip, the apple’s sharp tang still biting her tongue, but it didn’t ease the knot in her chest. He didn’t have to tag along, not if these gatherings churned up that much bile in him.
“You don’t have to come,” she said, the words slipping out quieter than she’d meant. “I can handle it on my own.”
Rell’s grin didn’t fade, but his eyes sharpened, that familiar spark flickering like he’d already made up his mind. “And miss the show? Nah.” He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Besides, I heard Symond might speak. I don’t wanna miss that.”