Chapter 33 Kali #2
I exhaled the need to vomit, fixating on Zion’s torso marred with endless scars.
The tiny one curled around itself like a shackle below his collarbone, the blotchy one under the left side of his rib cage mimicked a pool of bleach, the crisscrossing lines right underneath his right peck were shaped like gnarled fingers fracturing apart, and the fresh bloody slash across his stomach was reminiscent of a whip strike.
A distorted painting of what their parents had gone through etched into him.
“I’m sor—”
“Please.” Gedeon’s tense voice cut me off. “Let me.”
His pleading furled around me, and my mouth bent to its will, refusing to make a sound.
He continued. “Later that day, luck switched to our side. We managed to push the city back. But during their retreat, the city employed one last tactic to break us. On their way back, they took the women they could catch with them. From what we found out later, to test for fertility and determine their future use.”
Zion’s grip on my hand turned crushing. I smothered a cry and hoped Eislyn wouldn’t have to tend to my broken bones.
Zion closed his eyes as Gedeon revealed, “One of those women was his sister.”
“No.” My voice came out as cracked as the bark from the spindly branches Ilasall had used to torture their parents.
“With my parents…gone, I was handed their place at the top.” Gedeon dragged a hand over his face.
So much darkness crawled over his shoulders; I feared the lights in the infirmary would explode from the effort to keep it at bay.
“We needed to bide our time and recoup. But during the first night of Ilasall’s retreat, Zion talked thirty-seven people into joining him and racing to the city in hopes of saving his sister.
” The stool’s wheels squeaked as he stood up and began pacing the room.
Zion tracked his movements, a tic in his jaw.
As Gedeon hit the wall, his head dropped between his shoulders, their line so agitated it rippled.
Shivers skittered up my spine. As if sensing my need to move, Zion unlaced our fingers and gestured at Gedeon—a silent encouragement for me to traipse over to him.
I placed a hand on his upper back. “Should I not have asked?” Zion had already gotten injured because of me today, and now me making them live out the past again…
Gedeon’s head slowly rose. My tongue dried out at his haunted look as his eyes connected with mine.
“It’s me.” I pressed his palms to my cheeks. He’d caress them any chance he got. Couldn’t keep to himself. “You’re not back there anymore. It’s me and Zion. Here. Now.” I turned his head to Zion, to the evenly placed lines of blue thread on his stomach.
With heavy footfalls, as if each step seeped his strength, he followed me back to the table and slumped on the stool. Long seconds ticked by, one after another, and another, each dragging out the time they spent surveying each other. A silent conversation passed between them.
Zion rubbed at his chest. “I found my sister in one of the military trucks they’d brought them in.
Its back was open, and she stood with…” he trailed off, his breathing slow and heavy, every breath deliberate.
“Right when I called out her name, she plunged a knife under her ribs. She said she didn’t want to try her chances and would rather die than serve the city.
” He paused to collect himself. “I kept telling her that she was safe, that I was there, that I was bringing her home.” His voice broke.
“There was so much blood.” Zion covered his eyes. “She died in my arms.”
“I—” Lack of choice was a constant companion in our lives, but to witness someone be consumed by it enough to raise a hand against themselves…
It felt familiar. Except I’d raised it not against myself, but against Alora.
And it’d shattered me into pieces, each shard lodged deep in my heart, forming the bars of the stone cage encasing it, and if that was how Zion had felt, no wonder he’d developed an obsession for blood and sought a release in torture, finding the screams and begging of others cleansing, calming, steadying him as his sister’s last words echoed in his head.
“I’m sorry.” I forced my tongue to form the sounds.
“It was a long time ago,” Zion said quietly.
“It doesn’t mean you forget such things.”
I did, Gedeon had admitted when I’d asked about the scars.
My head whipped to him. “What did you do to him?”
He cleared his throat. “Damia and Conall woke me up when they learned about Zion and the others missing. I waited for an hour before setting off to pace the surrounding forests. Dawn broke, but not a single person had returned. At that point, I was certain of one thing. Nobody would die anymore. I rounded up a group of fifteen to go after them. But when we arrived at the city, we found only four alive, including him.” Gedeon pushed away from the table and rested his elbows on his knees; the squeal of the stool’s wheels grating on my ears.
“We managed to get him and the other three back to the compound, but we lost eight more on the way. Forty-two people died in total because he had decided his sister’s life was more valuable than those of the rest of us.
Forty-two people died because he could not control his rage, because he let vengeance cloud his logic, because of his inability to restrain himself. ”
“What did you do?” I repeated, hissing.
“We couldn’t have anyone acting this recklessly.
I had just been handed a leadership role and could not appear weak in the aftermath of war.
” He ripped at the ends of his hair so harshly it had to ache.
“I had to make an example out of him. Stupidity was to be punished.” A muscle in his jaw feathered.
“The next day, we were burning our dead. In front of everyone gathered around the funeral fire, I told him to outstretch his arm above the blaze and hold it there until the burns became sufficient enough to scar. I had to leave a permanent reminder of the consequences. The forty-two deaths he had caused.”
I stumbled away from the table. He had punished Zion by forcing him to burn his own arm. No wonder Zion had become Zion after that.
I released my hair out of the bun and puffed it out. I always kept it short, a few inches below my shoulders, but having it loose made me feel like I had a protective wall around me. And the chill currently creeping up my nape called for it.
Their parents had been tortured in front of them. The same couples who had raised their children with survival at the forefront of their minds and ingrained the same into their kids, so they had no choice but to do what they’d been taught.
And then they had to take over their parents’ work immediately, all while dealing with the loss of their families. I had no clue what it meant to lose those who cared about you, but my shudders didn’t originate from the cold swirling in the infirmary.
They arose from their story. A memory. A nightmare.
Zion’s sister had killed herself while he raced to save her. People died because of it. Gedeon went after him. More people died. So Gedeon punished him. And Zion went through it, choosing to follow his leader’s order.
My head hurt just thinking about it.
And they had lived with it.
For years.
“No one will die because of me again,” Zion said, his voice so resigned and at peace with what had befallen him that a scream at how wrong it was threatened to tear me apart.
“This”—I searched for words—“is a mess. So fucked up that I don’t know what to say.
” The tattoo curling around Zion’s right forearm stole my attention.
On the inner side, flames licked up the trunks and foliage of a forest. Three silhouettes of birds sat atop the branches, drowning in ruthless flames while the fourth beat its wings high in the air.
“Your tattoo. That’s your family and you, isn’t it? ”
Three birds for two parents and the sibling. The fourth for the sole survivor.
He nodded.
So he carried two permanent reminders. The first decided by Gedeon and yet his choice for agreeing to go through with it, and the second picked out by himself and masked as a sign of trust and closeness to Gedeon.
I paced the room, focusing on the rhythm of my footfalls to calm the storm bellowing inside me. They’d both done what they’d deemed right in the moment. They both had paid for it. And they both had broken something in each other with it. Something they hadn’t been able to repair since.
What happened between you? I’d asked Gedeon that night at Vice.
Something I cannot undo, he’d responded.
If you could, would you go back and change it? I’d pressed.
In a heartbeat, he’d revealed.
Laughter bubbled up in my chest, and I covered my mouth. Was this how it’d go from now on? Gedeon and I hurting Zion any chance we got?
“How do you feel?”
“What?” I snapped at Gedeon. He was sitting on the stool that my feet itched to kick from underneath him.
I quickened my pacing.
“How do you feel?” he repeated.
“I don’t know. You burned his arm, Gedeon. For trying to save his sister.”
“I did. There is no denying it.” Quiet to not awaken Zion serenely sleeping away his nightmare of a memory, he rummaged in the closet and emerged carrying two cloths. He ran them under the faucet and handed me one, the fabric warm from the hot water.
Gedeon cleaned the sweat, caked-up blood, and dirt from Zion’s upper body while I took care of his face. After we cleansed him as best as we could, Gedeon threw both small towels in the sink and dampened a fresh one. “Can I?” he asked, his hand hovering an inch from my face.
I nodded. My stomach churned, digesting their story, as he gently cleansed my cheeks. “Your gunshot scar. You said you got it during the war, hours after you became the leader. How?”
“Lift your chin.” He wiped at my neck, so softly, so carefully, so… My throat bobbed at the tenderness. “A soldier shot me when I was hauling Zion out of that military truck.”
I took the cloth from him and rubbed at the splotch of crimson right in the middle of his forehead. “How old were you?”
“Twenty. He was nineteen.” He glimpsed at a passed-out Zion. “We were young and reckless. I acted foolishly. Made a mistake I have regretted ever since. It was not his fault others died while he sought to rescue her. I would have done the same.”
“For him or for your parents?
“Yes.”
I paused erasing the red specks along his jaw. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is. When I woke up here, I asked what you wanted. You said me. I’m asking again now.”
Silence enshrouded him like a shadow.
“You pushed him away, didn’t you? After everything, after stupidly punishing him, you pushed him away.”
What did you do? I’d questioned him at their bar.
Something I should not have, he’d admitted.
“You’re an idiot, Gedeon, a fucking idiot.”
The click of the adjoining room’s door cracking open interrupted us. A yawning Ava emerged with Eislyn. “I’m off to bed. See you guys tomorrow. Don’t bite each other’s heads off while I’m gone. I want to see it.”
A collision of emotions had made my head spin, and yet Ava pulled a resemblance of a smile out of me.
Eislyn inspected Gedeon’s stitch work on Zion’s abdomen, murmuring her approval, and dug into the shelves of the med supplies closet.
Disposing of the cloth Gedeon and I’d used to clean each other in the sink, I asked Eislyn, “How is Malaya?”
“She’ll be okay. She’s seventeen, and that’s not the best age to have a child.
Not including the fact that she weighs barely enough to carry out the pregnancy.
She broke down and told me about the fight at the gates.
I think talking it out helped.” Eislyn placed a cotton bandage over Zion’s wound.
“He can remain here tonight, seeing as he’s out.
I don’t want to move him while he’s sleeping.
” She whipped up a pillow—more like a bunch of cotton balls stuffed in a plastic package—and a blue-and-yellow checkered wool blanket out of nowhere and covered him up.
“Do you need anything else from me? I’d rather go back and stay with Malaya overnight to make sure that she rests. ”
“We’re fine,” Gedeon said, looking right at me.
“Call me if things change.” Eislyn disappeared through the door, leaving me and him staring at each other in dead silence, apart from Zion’s faint snoring.
I pressed my lips to prevent my laughter from bursting. The man obsessed with blood and knives was snoring.
My emotions were spiking all over the place.
“You know you sometimes snore yourself, right?” Gedeon remarked.
“I do not,” I huffed with indignation.
“I have told you I do not like liars, little death.”
I sighed through my nose. “Why do you keep calling me that?”
He prowled toward me. “Because you fight everyone and everything to the end. You do not give up. You are a walking incarnation of death to whoever wrongs you.”
“Fine, I get the death part, but I am anything but little.”
“You are to me. Not in a derogatory sense—an endearing one. A flame ready to incinerate your prey. I adore it.” His knuckles brushed a path along my jaw.
“But I’m not the only one haunted by my past actions, Kali.
Something is after you. I see it. Zion does too.
One night at a time, you are losing your battles and burning scars onto yourself.
As invisible as they are from the outside, they will consume you alive.
And I want you whole, not just crumbs from the leftovers. ”
I swallowed roughly. I’d told them her name and nothing more, but had they figured it out? Even if the answer was yes, Gedeon’s messed-up actions were nothing compared to me stabbing Alora’s back.
“You do not have to speak now. But you will.” Gedeon’s thumb grazed below my ear. “For now, look after him. I have to go and sort out the chaos in the training rings.” He kissed my forehead, and I traced the spot as he walked away, rolling his shoulders.