Chapter 54 Gedeon #2
A flame shot up high in the sky and heat blasted my face from the sudden burst. It brought me back to where we sat around the bonfire, where tiny rocks prodded our legs folded underneath us, where wind howled and attacked us in brutal gusts of freezing air.
Kali picked up the pencil, and a drop soaked the top corner of her sheet. Shortly, the brothers and sisters of her first tear joined it, and she shivered.
A claw slashed at my chest. It had been years since I experienced true pain, but the last months ticking by had crumbled the walls of the hollowness inside me.
“Pretty birdie,” Zion murmured, rubbing her back.
She sniffled. “I’m okay. It’s just…” She watched the bouncing flames, their reflections morphing into warring forms on everyone’s clothing. “I don’t know what to write.”
I squeezed her thigh. “What do you need?”
“Forgiveness,” she whispered.
Heaviness enshrouded me like a cloak. I knew the cost of your actions too well. It had been dragging me into the depths of a bottomless pit for years.
“Only you can give it to yourself,” Zion said quietly, his gaze set on me, his ocean-blue eyes glowing in the firelight. “She forgave you years ago. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have stood by your side all this time.”
Yellow and orange hues danced on the burn scars on his inner forearm, and I mouthed what I had not believed I was capable of, “I’m sorry.”
Kali had once said I was a fucking idiot. I truly was. My mistakes had wrecked Zion when he was already in ruin, and yet I had refused to take responsibility for my actions, instead pushing him away and taking too long to admit it.
An idiot. I was a fucking idiot.
Zion nodded in response, a small smile softening his high cheekbones.
Gradually, that stone-heavy cloak choking me dissolved, incinerated by the fire before us. I welcomed the scorching heat. Better than the cold.
“May your soul sail the stars,” Ava said, observing the flames devouring the letter she had scribbled.
Others soon fed the blaze with their own written words, Ezra one of the last as he balled up his piece of paper and sent it flying into the bonfire, the first scorch marks appearing moments before it landed between two pieces of firewood. “May your soul sail the stars.”
Zion extended his folded letter and a tiny flame caught its corner, eating it away, inch by inch, almost singing his fingers before he carefully dropped it into the fire. “May your soul sail the stars, Ayla.”
Reaching over Kali’s back, I squeezed his shoulder. Goodbyes never became easier, no matter how much time had passed since your sibling’s suicide.
“You’re not writing?” she asked me, quickly flipping her letter to hide the text from my perusal.
“I will not read it. Not unless you want me to,” I assured, keeping an eye on Zion, who stared at the spot where his goodbye had gone up in smoke. “I said what I had to. I don’t need to write it.”
Kali folded her scribbled sheet of paper twice over. “What now?”
“Burn it. If you wish, you can also say the accompanying words most of us speak. But it’s up to you.”
Leaning forward, she carefully dropped whatever she had written into the blaze. “May your soul sail the stars, Alora. I’ll pay you with my life in the next one. I promise you.”
A brutal gust of wind lashed at the fire, and the flames retreated to the embers for support.
Soon they recovered and rose once more, welcoming the current of air and allowing it to pick up the glowing ashes.
It carried the flurry of gray and black cinders, their edges painted red, orange, and yellow, into the night sky now peppered in white, where Kali’s letter’s remains disintegrated into invisible particles that were supposed to reach the final resting place of Alora.
She lowered her head from observing her goodbye’s journey, and swiped under her eyes. “Thank you.” Kali cleared her throat. “For everything.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Ryder inclined his head, and everyone rose, dusting their clothes. “We’re going to go. We’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
As they left the training rings, the gravel being crushed by their boots emitted different sounds, not similar to the rattle of bullets, but to the rustle of foliage in summer, hypnotizing and soothing.
Like the ground could identify who was walking and would switch its melody to match the person, bringing out what resided in the deepest and darkest crevices of their being into the light.
Kali tucked her hair behind her ears. “Can we stay here a little longer?”
“As long as you wish.” Zion pulled her hand into his lap. “We’ll go home when you feel ready to.”
“Home.” She looked up at him and then at me. “I never thought it would hold meaning to me.”
“Neither did I.” Because I had not had a home for twelve years. You could call a room, an apartment, a house, a street, a neighborhood, or any of the other endless locations a home. Nobody would object you.
Except none of the places were mine.
Mine consisted of two living halves, both of whom were currently kneeling beside me.
I had destroyed one with my foolish request to inflict scars on himself, and the other a few weeks ago by giving her the freedom she had asked for instead of protection.
And now both of them demanded war in which they were most likely to die. War which we were unprepared for. The war which, if not given to them, they were going to launch themselves. Or die inside trying and not succeeding.
On silent feet, I stalked to the window, the glass thin as a hair a barrier between the warmth inside and the winter outside, and leaned on the windowsill.
They lay tangled in her bed, the duvet scrunched up around their waists, Kali’s covered in Zion’s t-shirt and his toned torso bare.
The bruises on her neck and upper arm had healed, but invisible wounds had embedded themselves deep inside her.
She had spent the last two weeks since the funeral in our training rings, repeating the exercises Zion had instructed her with until she would collapse.
Whenever we tried to get her to stop, she would force herself back up and into another position.
Zion rolled onto his side, reaching to where I had been sleeping but not finding anything. Grumbling sleepily, he shuffled closer to her as she slept on her back, her arms resting on the pillow above her head.
I clutched the windowsill harder. If we intensified our training regimes, if we maxed out our supply chains in getting what we lacked from the city, if our contacts rallied enough city dwellers in Ilasall to rebel, if we infiltrated their systems and exposed their weaknesses, if we gained support from the other two compounds while allowing them to remain independent in their own stands against Ardaton and Coriattus, if we timed our first wave of attacks just right, if we had enough fighters willing to see their families, loved or close ones die while remaining sober enough to push through the battles, we could launch the war.
So many ifs that had to go right.
So many ifs that, gone wrong, would cause a multitude of useless deaths and the destruction of our compound.
The truth was, rising to the top had been easy. But holding on to that power, wielding it, was incomparably harder. Day by day, it ate away your morals as you controlled your people’s lives like a puppeteer, with the ability to cut their threads at your wish.
But the willingness of the puppets to execute your commands and bend to your laws never remained steady. They were like snakes eating their tails, hurting themselves if you did not direct them toward what should have been their prey in the first place.
And the simplest thought of marching the people you had led for more than a decade, including the two who craved it with their mad minds and broken hearts, to war without being able to ensure a remotely positive outcome was crushing.
I loaded the magazine into Ilasall’s standard-issue rifle that could function both in a semi- and fully automatic manner. Disengaging the safety, I aimed at the dummies positioned at the far side of our shooting range. The bullets flew to ten different targets, striking each one in their heads.
“It’s all about your reaction speed. Not so much how fast you can reload and get the safety off, but how to instantly differentiate between friendly and enemy forces that forced you to pick up the gun in the first place.
If you are not careful enough, you could shoot someone you’d wish you had not. ” I handed her the gun.
“Have you?” she asked, repeating the steps I had just demonstrated.
“Killed? No. Hurt? Yes. We both have.” I fixed her stance and pointed out a dummy about thirty yards away. “Try to hit it.”
“Both?” She stuck her tongue out in concentration and pulled the trigger five times, not a single bullet reaching its goal. “Damn it.”
“Oh, come on. We were teenagers. And they barely got grazed,” Zion muttered, his hands hooked behind his head and his legs propped up on a stool as he sat in the corner of our booth. “Don’t scare her away from shooting your head off.”
I rummaged in the crate underneath the table for another crate of bullets. Making the deal with her to teach her how to use another firearm in exchange for taking a day off from training had been the only convincing enough option for her.
“What did you do?” Kali reloaded the handgun with the new magazine.
“One night, we stupidly decided to practice in the street instead of the dedicated areas,” I confessed. “People heard the shots and ran out to see what was going on. Three of them leaped out of the street corner right as we pulled the triggers. Thankfully, their reactions were quicker than ours.”
After another failed attempt to hit the target, she clicked the safety back on and slammed the gun on the table. Her shoulders rose as she took a deep breath. “When are we taking over Ilasall?”
“Not right now. You know we are not ready.” And she herself was far away from it.
She turned away from the table, our lesson forgotten. “I can’t just sit and wait.”
I stepped into her space and gripped her nape. Firm, but not quite compressing. My thumb brushed where the bruises had been on her neck, and she flinched.
“How do you plan to fight if you don’t know how to deal with your own experiences, your memories?” My words and tone were harsh, but so were battles. There was no beauty in seeing your friends die, your loved ones tortured in front of you. Held hostage. Stolen. Murdered.
“The same way you do.” She brought my palm to fully encompass her throat. “By pushing through it.”
“Do you really want to end up like me?” I tightened my hold. “Because I’m not a good person, Kali. Or is that something you find admirable?”
“I’ve never been good. You know what I’ve done. I’ve survived much worse than this.” She tipped her head back—an offering—but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. “You can’t break what’s already broken.”
“You’re not broken. Not yet.” I moved her dark hair to frame her face, leaving part of it flowing down her back, and retreated. “But war will do it for you.” The sunset behind her back painted the sky and feather clouds in streaks of blue and purple. The colors of bruises. “Destroy what is left.”
“But it’s my choice. You can’t take it away from me.
” She leveled her gaze on me, clutching the edges of the battered table littered with firearms. “Time won’t change my mind, Gedeon.
I’m going to war one way or another. With or without you.
” Pushing off, she paused at the edge of the booth, her sigh full of resignation.
“I just wish I wouldn’t have to do it alone.
” She stormed off to the alley leading to the center of our compound and vanished behind a brick building.
Alone. Those five letters crushed my ribs and ground the bones into dust, precisely how a corpse disintegrated into nothing over time.
For twelve years, I’d done things by myself. I knew how it felt to be by yourself. To work, to smile, to laugh, to live with no one at your side. It was like playing a game of pretend happiness.
Hearing her say she would enter a match in such a game because we couldn’t agree on the timeline of war, it made my fingers tingle with the need to empty a magazine after a magazine into the targets, imagining they were Ilasall’s government and military and not dummies sculpted out of wood.
I wanted her to feel free, not unseen and unheard.
Zion gracefully leaped off from his seat in the corner. “You know my stance on this,” he said, and strode after her, leaving me…alone.