Chapter 16
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
The sky won’t hold.
It’s the first thought that resonates cleanly through the chaos in my head as the tear above us shudders and widens and then, with terrifying abruptness, begins to fray at the edges.
Light spills through it in erratic pulses now, no longer a steady wound cut into the green expanse overhead but something unstable, something fighting itself as though two worlds are trying to agree on where the seam should sit and failing.
Wind tears through the trees hard enough to bend branches. The forest floor shivers beneath our boots. Somewhere above us, lightning cracks again, this time so close, the afterimage scorches across my vision.
“It’s changing,” Sonny says unnecessarily.
No one answers him.
No one needs to.
Every one of us can see it.
The rift is not opening wider anymore. It is buckling, the edges beginning to collapse inward in uneven jerks, shrinking and stretching at once in a way that makes my stomach lurch.
Jack moves first.
He turns to Jamie with a look on his face I have never seen before, not even in the worst moments since I met him.
Fear is in there, yes, and desperation, and the kind of fierce, protective love that turns a person into something immovable, but underneath all of it is grief.
Not the aftermath kind. The anticipatory kind that arrives when someone knows they’re about to lose something and has to make themselves do it anyway.
“Mate,” he says, and his voice is rough enough that Jamie’s head jerks towards him immediately. “You have to go.”
Jamie still has the medallion clenched in one hand.
It throws strange light across his knuckles, across the tendons in his wrist, across the frightened set of his mouth.
He looks from Jack to the tear in the sky and then back again, and whatever fragile control he has been holding onto cracks. “No.”
The word comes out sharp and immediate. Childish only in the sense that he is, in fact, a child. There is nothing immature in the raw force behind it.
“Jamie,” Jack says, stepping closer.
“No.” Jamie backs up a step. “No, I’m not going. I’m not.”
The wind catches his voice and flings it around us. Behind him, the rift shudders again, and the blue on the other side—real blue, impossible blue, the colour of home, of Earth, of every stupid ordinary sky I’ve spent ten years aching for—sputters in and out behind the distortion.
Jack reaches for him. Jamie bolts sideways and crashes straight into Caly instead.
Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to cling.
The movement is instinctive. So is the way Caly catches him. One pale, almost translucent arm wraps around Jamie’s shoulders, steadying him without caging him, and for one painful second, the whole world narrows down to the shape they make together beneath the darkening sky.
“Don’t make me go,” Jamie says, his voice breaking wide open now as he presses into Caly like if he holds on tightly enough, the rest of reality can’t pry him loose. “Please. Please, I don’t want to go.”
Jack stops dead. Something on his face twists so hard, I have to look away for half a beat.
Solan, standing at his shoulder, goes very still.
More still than any creature that big and that built for violence has a right to go.
The fight is over for the moment. The guards are down around us in ugly, crumpled shapes, blood sinking into root and soil.
We should be moving. We should be deciding. The sky shouldn’t be waiting.
But it is waiting, and so we’re trapped here inside this impossible, brutal pause where a boy has to be sent home and doesn’t understand why everyone else thinks that is salvation.
Caly lowers his head and says something into Jamie’s hair that I cannot hear.
I watch Jamie’s shoulders jerk.
Whatever the words are, they land.
Slowly, painfully, Caly disentangles himself.
He does it with more care than I would have thought him capable of if I didn’t know better now, if I had only the first impression of him—beautiful, clever, detached.
Nothing about him is detached in this moment.
His hands linger for one extra beat on Jamie’s upper arms as he eases him back, and when he lifts his head, there’s no na?veté left in his face.
Only intelligence. Only sorrow. Only a discipline that looks ancient and far too practised for a body that reads so young.
“You must go,” he says quietly.
Jamie’s eyes go wide and wet. “No.”
Caly’s throat works once. “Yes.”
“No!”
The word tears out of him. It slams into my ribs because there’s no artifice in it, no posturing, no attempt to be brave. Just grief in its first, rawest form.
Jack steps in then, because he has to. Because he’s both the adult and the one who loves this boy enough to break him now in order to save him later.
He goes to his knees in the dirt in front of Jamie, not caring about blood or mud or the absurdity of kneeling in the middle of a battlefield under a ripping sky. He puts both hands on Jamie’s face and holds him there, forcing eye contact, forcing the moment into something real and inescapable.
“Listen to me,” Jack says.
Jamie shakes his head so hard, the medallion flashes wild light over both their faces. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I know.” Jack’s voice cracks, and he doesn’t hide it. “I know, Jamie.”
“I’m meant to be here.”
The words hit me low and strange because I remember him saying them before, half defiant and half wondering, and hearing them now in this voice, in this broken little plea, turns them into something else.
Not certainty. Fear. A child trying to cling to meaning because the alternative is too awful to hold.
Jack swallows hard. “Maybe you are. Maybe one day, maybe later, maybe for reasons none of us understand yet. But not like this. Not now.”
Jamie tries to turn his face away. Jack doesn’t let him.
“Your mum and dad,” he says, and the words land with quiet force, “have been without you all this time.”
Jamie squeezes his eyes shut.
“Do you understand how terrified they will have been?” Jack goes on, softer now but somehow even more relentless. “How many nights they’ve gone to sleep not knowing if you were hurt or cold or alone? How many mornings they’ve woken up and had to remember all over again that you weren’t there?”
My chest caves in around the image before I can stop it.
Somewhere back in Coventry, there is a father I haven’t seen in more than twenty-five years.
Somewhere in a grave on Earth lies my mum.
Somewhere, once upon a time, there was a version of me who would have killed for the chance to get home before everything in him hardened into survival.
The rift pulses above us like a heartbeat gone wrong, and I can’t stop seeing all of it at once.
Jack keeps going because he has to.
“They love you,” he says. “Whatever this world has made you feel, whatever you think you owe this place, it doesn’t change that. They love you, and they’ve been missing you every second you’ve been gone.”
Jamie makes a sound then. Small. Destroyed. He folds in on himself, and Jack hauls him close, wrapping both arms around him, holding on with the desperate tenderness of a man who is about to give up part of his own heart with his own hands.
For a second, Solan looks away.
I see it happen, and that somehow undoes me more than if he had made a show of anything.
The great terrifying warrior with his impossible red skin and his habit of dropping old Earth action lines like he’s personally keeping half of Schwarzenegger’s filmography alive in another dimension can’t watch this part straight on.
He turns his head towards the trees and breathes once through his nose, hard.
Above us, the tear contracts.
Not much, but enough that my whole body flinches towards it.
No one notices. Or maybe they do, and they’re all too wrapped in their own grief to call it out.
Because that’s the other thing happening here.
Under Jack’s breaking voice and Jamie’s desperate shaking head, under Caly’s terrible stillness and Solan’s rigid silence, under Sonny scanning the tree line on pure reflex and still somehow clocking everything anyway, my own life is splitting open.
Home.
The word will not stop burning.
The blue shining through the rift looks clearer for a second, and I can’t help it—I stare.
Some stupid, greedy part of me keeps trying to will the image into certainty.
I imagine heat rising off bitumen. I imagine the smell of petrol and dry earth.
I imagine fluorescent supermarket lights and ugly servo coffee and the weight of human air that doesn’t taste like storm-metal and old magic.
I imagine leaving.
The bond recoils so hard, it almost feels like pain.
No, not recoils. Not exactly. It constricts.
Pulls. A live wire stretched between me and a male who is nowhere near enough to touch and still somehow everywhere inside me.
Varek is distant, too distant, but there.
Alive. Burning. Focused on battle while some piece of him must know what this is because how could he not feel what’s exploding through me?
I close my eyes for one beat and hate the emptiness.
This is the moment I should have him here.
Not because he would tell me what to do. He wouldn’t. Not really. Even if it killed him, he wouldn’t take the choice from me.
That thought flashes through me so fast, I barely catch it.
Even if it killed him.
There is something under all of this. Something he hasn’t said. Something I’ve felt skirting the edges of his honesty, a shadow cast by a truth too ugly to turn and look at directly. Now is not the time. Now is exactly the time. I hate that both feel true.