Chapter 45
CHAPTER
FORTY-FIVE
The rays of early dawn rippled overhead.
My legs swung off the edge of my family’s platform as I rested back on my hands, watching the dappled light spill through the trees.
The calling of the ripa birds roosting in their nests tangled with the sounds of my village waking.
Inside, my mother murmured to my father and above water rushed through one of the reserve basins to fill the pots in Kal’s home.
Warmth curled around my shoulders, heavy but nothing like the weight I’d been carrying in my chest for so many cycles. A shoulder pressed against mine and I sighed, leaning into him.
“How old would she have been now, your sister?” Asher murmured.
We had been talking for so long, I knew we had, but I couldn’t remember our conversation.
All I knew was he’d been here with me in this place, his heart beating beside mine.
There had been pain…but the pain was only a distant idea.
Here I could see their faces so clearly: the gentle curve of my mother’s nose, the wide set of my father’s eyes, the haphazard dark brown curls of my sister.
Brynne. That had been her name.
“Fifteen.” I sighed, gazing up into the wide canopy above where I could just make out the handprints of our people. “This year when the leaves begin to turn, she would have made the climb.”
“I’m sorry.”
When I turned, I couldn’t quite see his face, backlit as it was by the dawn. There were things I needed to ask him and words we had to say, but I couldn’t find them. All I could do was place my hand over his, running my thumb across the raised ridges of his scars. “Thank you.”
His hand flipped up to take mine and he tugged me forward until I was wrapped in his embrace, head tucked beneath his chin. “It’s time to wake up.”
I frowned, twisting so I could still see the branches of my home tree spread around us. Lips pressed against my hair, his arms tightening around me. Here, nothing hurt. Here there was something I’d been dreaming for—longing for even. Something I could never put into words.
“It’s time to go.”
White-hot pain sliced through my bones and I pitched forward, eyes squeezing shut. A beeping pierced through the peaceful silence, a muttered curse, and the tang of blood washed across my tongue.
“I know, sweetheart,” Asher continued. “I know it hurts, but you need to take a breath.”
My chest ached and I fell back, squinting in the bright light overhead before a hand cupped around my eyes.
He loomed above me, backlit by the light the way he had been before, but now he was splattered with dark green blood, face pale and drawn.
With each stroke of his fingers relief and worry and warmth tangled with each other, sinking into my bones.
Liquid sloshed against my skin, splashing over my face and running down my scratched windpipe.
“Take a breath, Juniper,” Rhiaon instructed on my other side. “I need to make sure your lungs were repaired correctly.”
Black spots bloomed in the corner of my vision and I shook my head, wincing even from the tiny sip of air that whistled through my lips.
Asher’s thumb stroked my wet hair and he nodded encouragingly.
I took a deeper breath, even when nausea churned in my stomach from the scent of the hyaxia healing liquid.
“Good, June,” he praised, brushing his lips against my brow.
Rhiaon muttered something about grafting and correct calculations, but all I could see was Asher as he pulled away, hair spilling across the side of his face.
Were we on Charlis’ ship? The last thing I remembered was slipping through the hole in the laundry chute and tugging the communicator from my ear. Everything else was a blur.
Warmth slipped through my veins, eating away the pain until there was only a fuzzy numbness in its place. My hands fell from where I’d gripped his bloodstained shirt. I flopped back onto the sheets with a sigh.
“Sleep, j’ska mahsi. I’ll be here when you wake.”
Sleep, little mate, he was telling me. I wished I knew what that meant.
…
Next time I woke the pain was gone.
I stared up at the dim halo orbs, rubbing a hand over my chest. All the tubes and wires were absent, save one strapped to the crook of my arm that hooked to the monitor affixed to the wall, beeping in time with my heart.
Time had passed since I’d last been conscious, though I didn’t know how long.
My skin itched from the hyaxia chamber. I licked my dry lips before slowly pushing up to a seat.
Though there was none of the agony of before, there was a tightness in the muscles around my sternum and belly—similar to the soreness I’d had when I first learned the silks.
The clock on the opposite wall told me it was early in the morning but I had no idea what day it was.
At some point I’d been changed into a soft pair of medical pants and a shirt.
All the blood had washed from my face in the hyaxia, but the scent of dust and desert still clung to the ends of my hair and lodged beneath the half-moon of my nails.
A snore slid through the room. Asher sat in the chair beside the bed, head resting on one edge, face pointed toward my pillow as if he’d fallen asleep watching me.
That hollow pang in my chest flared at the sight of him, one of his hands inches from my own.
He was covered in my blood and dressed in the same clothes he’d been in when we infiltrated Charlis’ ship.
In small flashes the events of however long ago came back to me.
Asher screaming my name as I grabbed the stone.
The power flooding my veins. The guards I’d killed.
The forest. The panic as I’d run from those soldiers.
The pain as the energy I’d clung to turned against me, ripping apart my insides.
And then there was the relief on Asher’s face at the outpost, mixed with my fear of what he might do.
I’d run from him and taken the thing he’d spent endless cycles looking for.
It had seemed logical he would want retribution.
There had been that moment right before everything went black, where the world had made sense. It had been brief, but I reached for it now, trying to remember what it was.
Without thinking, I brushed the hair back from his face. He started, wrapped a hand around my wrist and jerked upright, scrambling over the bed to me. “Are you all right? Are you in pain? What do you need?” The words tripped over themselves, eyes wild as they searched my face.
I could almost feel his panic, taste it on my tongue even—sharp, like metal or blood. He pressed his hand to my face, a sigh slipping through his lips that sounded like relief before his shoulders slumped.
I cleared my throat. “How long have I been asleep?”
He rose, turned to one of the modules in the corner of the room and grabbed a cup. “Three days.”
I was relieved it wasn’t longer. But his words sounded hollow, as if they’d been the longest three days of his life.
From the set of his mouth when he turned around, I thought it might have been a fair assumption.
He handed me the cup, holding it for a moment longer as our fingertips brushed before he settled again in the chair.
“When did you wake me up…before?”
He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Yesterday morning. We had to make sure your lungs worked properly off life support.”
I played with the edge of the pale orange blanket covering my legs.
There was an intensity in his stare and a feeling churning through my stomach I didn’t know what to do with.
It felt the way it did to stand at the top of the hatch right after I’d wrapped myself in the silks: an anticipation mixed with something more.
So, I stared at my hands as I worried a frayed corner. “You’re not wearing your helmet.”
“No, I’m not.” His tone was intimate, like it had been that night in my room. It made warmth flare in my cheeks and I looked toward the window into space rather than at him.
“Why not?”
His sigh was quiet as I tracked the nebula system sliding across the glass, a mix of purples, pinks, and blues like a splash across a black page. “I don’t wear my helmet when I’m at home.”
Frowning, I dropped my attention back to the blanket. “But you’re not at home. You’ve always worn your helmet on the ship for as long as I’ve been here.”
“That’s true, but Juniper”—two fingertips touched my chin, dragging my face toward his—“you are my home, now.”
I shook my head, even as his hand slid up to trace the curve of my cheek, fingers tangling in my hair. “I don’t understand.”
Asher’s expression was so soft it rendered him almost unrecognizable. Why did my body warm as if I was lying in the heat of the suns—why did my heart suddenly feel three sizes too large? The longing, there was such longing it made my eyes prick.
Maker, was that… “Is that you?”
A sad smile slashed across his face, pulling at the silver markings on his cheeks, and he nodded. “I’m sorry. I know it’s overwhelming at first. But it’ll get easier. You can learn to turn it down or even push it back altogether. I promise I—”
“I don’t understand,” I repeated, shaking my head again.
After a pause, he let go, sitting back in the chair with his hands clasped tightly in his lap like he was trying to restrain himself.
His hair was messy around his face, waves trailing down his shoulders and streaming over his chest, and it hit me then he hadn’t changed in three days. He’d stayed by my side the entire time.
“I guess I should start at the beginning,” he said, leaning forward until his elbows rested on his thighs. “My name is Asher Kalisya and I am the last remaining Ra’jakan, or prince, of Akahzyr.”