Chapter 7
Nova
“Nova.”
Warm. That’s the first thing. Warm and heavy and something smells like food and I’m not on the ground, I’m not cold, I’m not—
“Nova.”
I know that voice. I don’t want to open my eyes yet because opening my eyes means figuring out where I am and my body is doing this thing where it feels like it’s been filled with wet sand and I just want to stay here for another second where nothing has to make sense.
“Hey. Can you hear me?”
I open my eyes.
Wrong ceiling. Stone, not plaster. It’s low, with a beam across the middle. There’s warm light coming from somewhere, flickering. This is not the house. Not my room. Not anywhere I recognize.
Locke is right there. He looks like absolute shit — dark circles, hands shaking, like he hasn’t slept in days.
“Hey,” I say. My voice sounds like someone ran it over gravel.
And just for a second, he lets it slip and I see it. How he was holding everything together and the sound of my voice was enough to let it all crumble.
“Hey.” He clears his throat. “How do you feel?”
“Like I got hit by something big.” I try to push myself up and my arms don’t cooperate. I make it to my elbows and that’s it, which is embarrassing because I used to walk ten miles on an empty stomach and now I can’t sit up in a bed.
“Easy.” His hand is on my shoulder and it’s warm and steady and I let it push me back because I don’t have the energy to argue.
“Where are we?”
“A friend’s place. Outside the Academy. You’re safe.”
Outside the Academy. That doesn’t make any sense. The last thing I remember is the lake, and the water, and something inside me building and building until—
It gets hot right there. The memory. Sharp and bright and my body flinches away from it before I can push through.
“What happened?”
“What do you remember?”
“The lake. It hurt.” I stop because that’s where the memory turns into heat and noise and nothing. “And then I don’t remember anything.”
He nods slowly, like he was hoping I’d say more and also relieved I didn’t.
“You’re okay,” he says. “That’s what matters.”
“That’s not an answer, Locke.”
“I know.”
Footsteps in a hallway somewhere. Then Vaelor is in the doorway.
“Hey, sweetheart.” His voice is steady but his eyes aren’t matching. “How are you feeling?”
“Terrible. Where are we? And don’t say a friend’s place, Locke already tried that.”
Vaelor almost smiles. “A woman named Ameena. Zoe’s aunt. She’s letting us stay.”
“Why aren’t we at the house?”
They do the look. Over my head, the kind where they’re having a conversation I’m not invited to.
“We had to leave,” Locke says. “It wasn’t safe.”
I want to push. I want to ask what that means, what happened while I was unconscious, who decided what and when. But something is pulling my attention and I can’t figure out what it is until I feel it.
There’s heat at my wrist. Warmth sitting right under the skin that was never there before.
I look down.
There’s something on my wrist.
Gold and red, shifting, the colors moving into each other like ink in water. It’s not a tattoo. It’s not a scar. It looks alive.
I’ve never had a mark. Twenty-six years of nothing. My whole life has been the blank wrist, the absence, the thing that made me nobody from nowhere.
I stare at it. The colors pulse with my heartbeat and the warmth spreads up my forearm and I don’t understand what I’m looking at.
“What is this?”
Neither of them says anything. The silence goes on long enough that I hear a clock ticking somewhere in the house.
“We’ll talk about it,” Vaelor says. “Not right now. You need to eat. You need—”
“I need to know what’s on my wrist, Vaelor.”
“You do,” Locke says. “And you will. But not this second.”
The anger rises fast. I’m too tired to push and too wired to let it drop, and something shifts in the room that I can’t place. The air gets warmer. Locke and Vaelor exchange a look that’s different from the others they’ve shared — sharper, more urgent.
“Nova,” Locke says, and his voice has changed. Careful in a way it wasn’t a second ago. “Your eyes.”
“What about my eyes?”
Neither of them answers that. Vaelor takes a breath.
“Okay, look. Just — let’s wait until everyone is here and everyone has had a chance to see you awake. Then we’ll talk. All of it. I promise.”
I look at him. He’s not brushing me off. He wants the others here too, wants them to see me awake before the world gets heavy again. I can give him that.
“Okay,” I say. “But I’m holding you to it.”
Rane shows up in the doorway with a bowl of something that smells like stew and the expression on his face does the same thing Vaelor’s did. This visible flood of relief that tells me whatever happened was worse than anyone’s saying.
“She lives,” he says, and his voice is light but his eyes are too bright.
“Apparently.”
He hands me the bowl and a spoon and I take it because my stomach is demanding it in a way that overrides everything else. The stew is hot and simple and good and I eat too fast and nobody tells me to slow down. I wasn’t planning on slowing down anyway.
I eat and I watch them arrange themselves around the room.
They all came. Wherever this is, they’re all here.
I finish the stew and put the bowl down and without thinking about it I press my thumb against the mark.
It pulses back, warm, just once.
I pull my hand away. Locke’s eyes drop to my wrist and come back to my face and there’s something there I can’t read, something heavier than fear.
I don’t ask again. Not because I don’t want to know but because my body is pulling me back under and I can’t fight it. The food and the warmth and whatever this is — it’s dragging me down.
“I’m going to close my eyes,” I say. “When I wake up, someone’s telling me everything.”
“Deal,” Rane says.
I close my eyes. The mark hums against my skin.
The room is full of people who won’t leave and I should feel safe but I don’t, not entirely, because something happened at that lake that I can’t remember and there’s a mark on my wrist that has never been there before and my body feels like it belongs to someone I haven’t met yet.
I let sleep take me knowing when I wake up, they’ll be here.