Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
NORA
Airik led them to a black metal wall that blocked their path and clearly marked a danger zone, with red blinking lights and a low, droning alarm. The wall extended in both directions as far as the eye could see and was at least thirty feet high.
“Step back,” he told Nora.
Lucky tugged on her shirt, pulling her about a dozen feet away.
Airik drew his sword, tapping its glowing symbols as he sized up the wall.
He pressed its tip into its reflective surface.
The blade sank in easily, like red-hot metal gliding through ice.
He cut out a door-shaped portal, then stepped back to examine his work.
Satisfied, he laid the blade flat in the center of the cutout and placed his left hand on top, as if he were about to push.
He issued a short command to the jewel set in the hilt. He shoved his sword forward. The carved block shattered into small rocks, pushed out of the portal by an invisible force, clearing a path. At the same time, the sword recoiled, cutting into him. He grunted, pressing his hand to his chest.
Nora cried out, rushing to him, barely registering the pain in her ankle or the miracle of his sword. “Are you hurt?”
Airik reluctantly held out his palm. A cut welled with blood, right across the center of his hand.
She glared at him. “You knew that would happen.”
“I will survive, demon eyes. But neither of us will if we don’t keep moving.”
Frantically tossing items out of her bag, Nora found antiseptic cream and gauze.
She pressed a square to his palm to stop the bleeding. It took only a few seconds. Then she dabbed antiseptic cream into the cut, working carefully, feeling that at any second Airik would snap out of whatever pity he had for her that allowed her to do this.
Lucky huffed from the rubble at the center of the portal cutout. Airik turned, maybe to leave.
She placed a hand on his stomach. “Wait.” He stopped, dropping his arms to his sides. “I’m not done with you yet.”
She reached up, pressing another square of gauze to his chest, wiping it of blood.
Airik instantly stilled—even the rise and fall of his chest. But she dared to look up.
His eyes were on her, as bright as the suns.
“I’ll finish quickly,” she said, trying not to notice the small contractions of his abdomen with every dab against his skin.
Needing to distract herself from her heart beating wildly out of control, Nora asked, “Are all your scars from your sword?”
“No. They are from all the times I let someone touch me.”
“Oh,” she said, her fingers grazing his skin. “Is that how I can tell who is a morazir? The soldiers with all the scars?”
“No other morazir has scars like this. Only me. The others use machines that can heal them better.”
“Why can’t you use the healing machines?”
He looked through the cutout to the other side, stroking the thin, gray line on his cheek. “Because I’m…wild.”
She blinked. “What does that mean? As in, you were raised by wolves or something? Or…a seta?”
He smiled, the tips of his fangs peeking over his lips. “What if I was? The truth is not much different.”
Nora’s breath hitched. Shocked that the heat of his gaze didn’t immolate her on the spot.
“It would honestly make a lot of sense.” It didn’t make sense, and it was the stupidest thing for her to say—he’d had loving parents.
When they’d passed, had he been thrown into a horrible system churning out gladiators?
Of course not—a world that had healing technology and gravity weapons prioritized science and reason. They wouldn’t have…child soldiers.
His chest had been free of blood for long minutes as they’d talked, and she could no longer pretend she was helping. “I’m all done,” she said, stepping away from him.
Airik and Lucky helped her to gather her things back into her bag. Letting her hold on to his harness, Airik guided her through the cutout, where they were met with more of the same fields and the river to their left.
When they’d been walking for some time, Airik, to Nora’s excitement, started to talk unprompted.
“Wild means I’m unchanged.” He loosened his harness to give her hand more room to hold on as they walked over the gravelly path. “When my parents matched, I stayed inside my mother until birth.”
“That’s…not usual?”
“No. Usually after a child is made, right after the parents’ cells have joined into one, it’s taken out and made better, with the language in its body rewritten.
Removing…useless things and harmful sickness.
A…code is added, called a tagion, which Veynari machines need to read for the technology to respond.
” He glanced at her, making sure she understood.
“After everything, the child, still so small it can’t be seen, is put back into the mother until birth.
Then, when born, the children are raised in groups with others. ”
Nora tensed, recognizing his strange but accurate description of genetic engineering. “Is everyone on Vorakon made…better?”
“Most are,” he said. “But not everyone.” He ducked to be level with her, watching her with a tentative gaze. “Do you understand what I am, Nora? I’m not…better.”
She understood him completely. That he lived in a world that demanded he be both exceptional and lonely—an elite warrior forced to wear each of his mistakes on his body, unable to use the technologies everyone else benefited from.
“I know exactly what you are,” she said, smiling or else she’d cry. “You’re a wildborn.”
The corner of his lip pulled up. “A better word than asshole.”
She laughed, but it faded as soon as the rest of his words registered. “Your parents were matched using the ‘engine’ that decides everything?”
Dropping his gaze, he traced the length of his wound, neatening the messy edges of cream. “Yes.”
“What if you don’t like your match?”
“There’s no choice for liking. And it would not matter—a match is together only until a child has been planted in the mother.
Another duty to fulfill.” He clenched and unclenched his fist. The gash across his palm was already graying with scar tissue.
She had the sudden realization that he used duty to mean order.
Another way the system he protected used him and could not serve him in return.
“Is everyone on your world matched?” Nora asked.
“Most.”
“Have you been matched?”
“No.”
“Oh,” she said, feeling a strange sense of relief.