Starside

Chapter 41

Rise, phoenix, rise.

Stellan’s voice is in my head again, the words familiar and from another time entirely.

A shaking girl in a pile of ashes.

A white-bearded man reaching out a hand.

Rise, phoenix, rise.

The world is boiling around me. My senses have been shredded. Slowly, they return. I hear the muffled crackling of the flames that have swallowed me whole. Even with my eyes closed, I see the relentless red and orange, like I’m trapped within a final sunset.

My body—I can barely feel it. My bones must be shattered.

Kira is dead. Dead. She died alone, begging for anyone to save her. I let her down. I let them all down. Every single person who has ever loved me has ended up dead.

This City on Fire should let me burn. My shame and guilt and fury are like these endless flames, forever roaring all around me.

Still, his voice is in my head again, insistent. No one can heal you in here. You have to step out of the fire.

Rise, phoenix, rise.

I can’t, I think. Not this time.

Stellan’s voice is angry now. His words are new. “Every time,” he says, “You rise every time.”

My eyes sting, remembering that hand that reached out from nowhere, toward a trembling girl covered in the ruin of everything she once loved, whose voice had given out from all the screaming.

He didn’t leave. He didn’t turn around. He reached his hand out for what seemed like hours, until finally, mine reached back. He gripped it with a strength I couldn’t imagine ever having. With a firmness that I can still feel in my soul. But he didn’t help me up. He said I had to do that myself.

No matter what, Stellan got up day after day. He was always there for me. Just like they were.

You rise every time.

For all of them, I will try.

The world is burning around me, my body is broken, but I grit my teeth against the pain and splintered bones and reach a hand forward. Another. I lift my head. Every aching muscle is pleading with me to stay down, to stay still, but I do not.

I rise until I’m on my feet.

My clothes are gone. My skin is coated in their ashes and the blood from my fall.

A single step. The first is always the hardest. My shattered knee nearly buckles. My arm is hanging at an unnatural angle. My skull is fractured. My ribs are snapped. It hurts to breathe. But even when I think I’ve reached my limit, my own strength surprises me.

Again. I step again. Once I’ve proven I can take one, the next comes, and then the next, until I’m walking through the raging flames, parting them like a blade that refuses to be melted down.

My flesh is hanging off my bones, I am gaping and bloody and broken, but I keep going, dragging my bare feet through this city, the one that burns with a thousand years of fury, the one that has burned for centuries before I was born and will for centuries after I am just dust in the wind.

I keep dragging myself forward until I reach the edge of the flames—

And then, I step through them.

Harlan Raker is rushing toward the City on Fire without signs of slowing down, as if he was going to run through the flames for me. That bellow. It was him.

When he sees me, he stills.

Our eyes meet. His eyes. His hood is down. It’s down like it fell while he was running and he didn’t care about putting it back up.

Those gray eyes are gleaming, they are wide, they are filled with a relief that I can almost taste. And something else … something like wonder.

A shriek peels through the sky, and slowly, I look up to where Cadoc is circling on his wicked dragon, close to the ground, as if he wanted to watch me burn. He’s close enough that I see his shock.

He thought he killed me.

He is going to wish he killed me.

Gaze locked on his, I hurl my arm to the side, broken bones screaming, my shredded palm open wide.

“Stellaris,” I bellow with every smelted piece of myself, the word a fractured roar.

And I feel it. My metal, singing a song only I can hear as it arcs through the sky like a shooting star, back into my hand, with a force that rattles my blood. Rattles the world.

Cadoc’s eyes burn with wrath. My stare promises revenge as he takes off into the sky, until his dragon is nothing more than a mottled smudge in the burning horizon.

Then my bones finally give out.

Arms catch me just before I hit the ground.

I gasp.

“Shhhh,” a voice says, so gently it can’t possibly be from the source I think it is. “Just a little longer.”

But I can’t be quiet. Not when it feels like I’m swimming through a sea of blades.

I keep screaming, pain a blinding light. My body convulses, hurt lancing through me again and again.

“Make it stop,” he says, his voice as threatening as I’ve ever heard it.

It is completely at odds with the gentle voice that responds. “The pool needs time. It will be over soon.” I recognize that voice.

Este. She’s here. How?

My body is on fire, burning from the inside out, the water so cold it cuts me down to the bone. I don’t want to scream. I don’t mean to scream. But my body has abandoned my mind, it moves of its own volition, and I hear my bellow and begging as if I’m listening to someone else.

I hear the slicing of a sword leaving its scabbard. “Make it stop.”

I don’t know what happens next. The pain is so great, it pulls me under.

When I awake, the pain is gone. All that’s left is a distant numbness, the ghost of its memory.

My eyes open to find Raker sitting across a glimmering pool, staring. He looks lost in thought, brow furrowed.

He’s by my side in an instant. His eyes are furious.

The necklace. Somehow, Raker used it to summon Este for help. The water in front of us is swirling with silver flecks, like the starlight was broken into it.

“You wasted the necklace on me,” I say, my voice a croak.

If I thought that might tamper his fury, I’m wrong. The anger only grows. He makes an aggravated sound. “Your injuries were significant,” he says tightly, as if that is a light way of putting it. His entire body is coiled tight.

I nod. I could feel them, of course. My body broken and shredded from the fall. I shouldn’t be alive.

A heavy silence falls between us, and I remember those eyes. How those eyes gleamed across the desert. How they did not at all belong to the merciless warrior, to the fearless and fearsome head of the king’s guard.

“None of them were burns, Aris.”

There it is. An answer he deserves, but I’m not willing to give him. I don’t meet his eyes. I stare very intently at the glowing pool in front of me, full of that starlight; then I feel long fingers curling around my jaw, forcing me to look at him.

My chin quivers with defiance. “What do you want me to say?” is what comes out.

“How you walked through fucking flames would be a start,” he says through his teeth, voice shaking with barely leashed fury like he’s working very hard to remain calm.

I try to move, but his grip is like iron.

“Now isn’t the time for secrets. Have we not been through enough?” His voice. It’s changed. He sounds … almost hurt.

My gaze locks on his. I look at him. Really look at him. He has saved me. I have saved him.

I’ve seen his face. He’s seen my markings. My scars. He’s seen me retch, and sob, and scream.

If moments can leave marks, claws on our minds and souls, then we have matching battle scars.

No matter what happens after this journey, after these weeks together, if somehow I survive this, if one day, we are strangers, walking through a sea of people, we could share a look and know, know truths of this world that no one else could ever understand.

We have been through endless trials together. If ever I was to tell this secret to anyone, to speak the unspeakable … I would want it to be to someone who has seen me fight harder than I ever have in my life. Someone who has seen me broken and battered and still standing.

Someone who has seen me walk through flames.

“Ever since the day the sky touched me, I have been immune to heat. I could touch warm things. I was drawn to the hearth. I didn’t test it.

The markings worried my parents, so I hid them.

I didn’t tell anyone about the ability I discovered.

I thought … I thought if I ignored it, it would go away, and I could be normal again, and maybe my parents would stop worrying.

Then one night, my sister woke me up.” I swallow.

My eyes close. My nightmare. The one I’ve had for years. I’ve never told anyone. Even Stellan. Not this part.

The worst moment of my life. A moment that has swallowed my entire existence. In a way, my soul remained there, in that night. In those flames. My body might be here, but my heart and mind and soul are still there in that pile of ashes.

Warmth against the endless chill. I open my eyes to see Raker’s hand curled around mine. I look up to see his eyes fierce and steady. I’m here, his gaze seems to say. You can tell me unspeakable things. You can tell me things that no one else will understand.

He squeezes, firmly, almost painfully so, and that one movement has a thousand memories trapped within it, of all my toughest moments, as if to remind me of my strength.

My words are not steady, but they are out.

“She said there was a fire. She could smell it. We tried to leave our room, but our doors were locked. Our parents were on the other side, trying to get in.” I take a shaking breath and keep going.

“They tried everything. We heard … we heard their screams, as the fire swallowed them.

They could have lived, if they had left us.

But … but they never left. They never stopped trying. It was the last thing they ever did.

“Then—” I choke on a sob. Raker is there, holding my hand, his other steady against my back.

I see you too, he said. He sees me now. “The fire overtook the room. We knew it was done. So we held each other. She began to scream. Her hair caught fire first. Then her clothes. Her skin. Her eyes, they got so big. She was burning, burning away right in my arms, but I—”

Tears fall, endless tears, choking tears, forever tears, a bleeding vein that will never stop. An infernal agony.

His voice is rough with understanding. “You did not burn.”

I did not burn. I wish I had. I wish it had been me instead of her, instead of anyone who had become ash.

I shake my head.

The world was fire around me, but I saw her. Through the flames, I saw her. A goddess, with silver-red, sparkling eyes, who then turned her back to us. She set the fire—I knew it like a truth buried in my soul.

Then she was gone.

I held my sister until she was just ash and bone, until there was nothing left to hold, and then I screamed until my voice gave out.

The next day, Stellan found me in the ashes of everything I once loved.

“I died that day, with my family. The only thing that has kept me going is the belief that I will see that goddess again.” My eyes lock into his, and my sobbing calms. My voice does not waver now.

“I’m going to kill her. I’m going to kill them all.

I’m going to paint the sky with their blood.

I’m going to unleash a wrath so great, even the stars will flinch. ”

I say it like a promise.

A muscle in Raker’s jaw works. “You’re going to die.”

“I know. This will kill me.”

He glares at me.

I shake my head. “Don’t you see?” My voice is raw from the screaming. I form something like a smile. “I’m not afraid. She is waiting for me at the end of this, and then I won’t be alone.”

He studies me for a moment. Then he says something I would never guess. “Aris, you are not alone.”

You are not alone.

We look at each other. More moments spill between us, yet the silence doesn’t feel cold anymore.

“You don’t understand. You never could.”

“I understand,” he says.

I swallow. “You don’t have a heart. How could you?”

He scowls at my attempt at a joke. “I know you, Aris. You claim you don’t care about anything but revenge, but I have watched you unfailingly, stupidly care about everyone else’s life over your own. You are not the monster you think you are.”

His words make all my hatred rise to the surface, because I don’t hate him, I don’t hate anyone more than I hate myself. “I am worse!” I say. “I am the reason they are all dead!”

He opens his mouth as if to say something else, but at that moment, someone steps behind us.

Este.

She’s followed by a half dozen women that look almost like the faelings, draped in thin, white fabrics, flowers woven through their long hair, vines wrapped around their arms.

Relief melts through her expression. “You’re awake.”

“Because of you,” I say, my voice heavy with emotion. “How—”

“You needed help,” Este says simply. She looks over at Raker.

“He reached for it.” I remember now the final words she told me, before we left the Traveling City.

Her gaze drops to my back. “Nothing we could do about older marks, unfortunately. It would have required more time in the pool of starlight. And pain.”

I shake my head. “It’s fine.” I want them. They are a reminder, just like the mark I can still feel the ghost of against my throat.

I drop Raker’s hand and don’t miss how his fingers reach for mine again on reflex—before pausing.

“I hope you don’t mind the clothes,” Este continues, motioning to the dress I woke up in.

It’s thin, silky fabric, barely enough to cover me, just like the women behind her, staring at us curiously.

I walked out of that City on Fire naked, broken, ash-covered but unburnt.

I walked out the phoenix Stellan always told me to be.

The clothes—they don’t matter. Not when Este has given me a chance to finish this journey.

I lift to my feet and reach my hand to hers. “Thank you,” I say, gripping her fingers, trying to convey in any way possible my endless gratitude.

She smiles, but I see a trace of sadness in her eyes.

Something is wrong.

I think about the Traveling City, and all its rules. The way the Eldress looked at her, when she reached out to give me her final parting words.

A pinch forms between my brows.

“You can’t go back, can you?” I ask, hoping I’m wrong.

But she just lifts her head. “No. Once one of us chooses to leave through the gates … we’re not welcomed in again.”

My eyes widen. She sacrificed everything she loved … including her sister … for me.

Why?

“I—”

She silences me with a hand on my arm. “I made my choice, and I don’t regret it.” She looks up at the sky. “You are the ember that lights the torch, Aris. I know it. The world is about to change … and it’s time we stopped hiding. It’s time we actually do something.”

Conviction rings through her words. She dips her chin.

“Now, come,” she says, leading me toward the rest of the women. “Tomorrow, you finish your quest. You deserve at least one night of peace.”