Chapter Thirty-Eight
Yun
I really hated this asshole. The crook of my arm hurt from another vial of blood, and despite the fact they’d given me supplements, I’d grown more fatigued over these damned sessions.
Each time, they took more blood. Never enough for Kenyon to notice, of course, but just enough for me to gradually turn anemic.
The blood tests weren’t fun, but they were hardly the worst of it. Instead, it was the way he screwed with my head, it was the corruption he tested on me that got to me.
He had me guide test cubes, even past the point that my powers easily handled them, as though trying to find my threshold.
“Interesting,” he said as I staggered backward, barely catching on the exam table to keep me from ending up on the ground.
I knew for a fact Mr. Yorn wasn’t about to help me—not that I wanted him to. The idea of his hands on me in any way turned my stomach.
Funny that people thought of Shear as being empty, when the man before me epitomized that. He might look more normal, have the ability to hide his brokenness, but seeing him as I had, I knew he lacked anything real or human inside of him.
Had it ever been there? It was hard to think that someone could reach this state if they ever had something warm or kind inside them. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe that, because that made me think anyone could turn into that, given the right circumstances.
I preferred thinking that he’d been born damaged, that he’d never had a shot, that a monster like this was an anomaly and nothing more. Even Corsa had been broken by corruption, doing what he’d done because he’d changed at a fundamental level.
Mr. Yorn?
I had no idea, and I was pretty sure no answer would truly make me feel better.
“You appear to take in corruption at an exceptional speed. At first I thought it made you stronger, as though perhaps you were a higher rank than S.”
“There aren’t higher ranks.”
“Of course there are, but they are rare, and so far we’ve only observed them in espers, not guides. You’re not stronger, though, simply different.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He turned toward me, holding another blasted testing cube in his hand.
He didn’t give it to me, though. Instead, he shifted it in his hand, rotating it using his fingers like some fidget toy.
“Think of it like a lake. You can measure the depth of a lake, correct? And if there was a lake where you dropped a measure and it went down, much farther down than you thought, you might at first assume that lake was simply far deeper than other lakes, far deeper than you expected. That would be like thinking you are a higher rank than S.”
“But I’m not just a deep lake?” I didn’t think I was keeping up, but I tried.
“Exactly. Instead, picture that lake has a cave system beneath it. It has a basin, that contains a normal depth, but there is a crack inside of it, and that crack leads deeper in a twisting, turning space. That doesn’t make the lake deeper overall.
You have a cave system inside of you, a broken space placed there by the corrupted you guided.
His energy caused it, and because of that, corruption doesn’t pool normally in your ‘lake.’ It sinks beneath there, into that fractured space inside of you.
That is why it rushes so quickly and why you can take so much more. ”
I frowned, trying to work out what that meant.
I thought I understood it, and in some—absolutely horrible—ways it made sense.
I recalled the pain from guiding Corsa, the way it had burned, like he’d seared me, like a flame had licked along every nerve ending inside of me. Was that when it had happened?
When he’d fundamentally changed me at such a basic level?
We’re bound.
His words haunted me, how true it seemed, how every piece I discovered led me to think we were far more entwined than I had ever wanted.
He’d created a link between us and his actions had altered the way my body and powers worked. It went so much deeper than a single wound he’d left, like he’d ruined me, made it so I could never truly escape.
“Here.” He threw the practice cube toward me, and I caught it out of habit.
When I touched it, it seared my fingers, a familiar pain, one far too familiar. It wasn’t Corsa’s energy, but fuck, it was close. Worse, I couldn’t remove my hand from it, my body clasping it tighter as though it couldn’t bear to let it go.
The corruption burned. The sickening heat said it came not from an esper but from a corrupted. It was foul, stagnant, and it filled me in a rush that made me sick.
My knees buckled and this time I couldn’t hold myself up. I couldn’t stop myself from collapsing to the ground, from hitting the tile hard. Fuck, I couldn’t even brace myself, my face smacking right into the hard floor.
The sting of my lip, the blood from where my tooth ripped into it, I noticed those things as only background noise, as details that didn’t matter.
Instead, I only felt that corruption, the way it was both painful yet familiar, hated yet welcome, horrible yet home.
It pressed the point that Corsa had changed me, that I was forever broken, that I was fundamentally altered.
My eyes closed, and I went with it.
It took me to a nightmare. A memory? I didn’t know for sure.
Corsa stood there, not a shadow, but fully illuminated as though I’d finally remembered everything.
I felt him, but it was a weaker link than before.
“You surprised me,” he said. “I never thought you had it in you to break the link.”
“If I did, how are you still here?”
He smiled and tapped his finger against my temple, the nail sharp. “I’m still here, Yun. The only difference is that you temporarily evicted me. You threw me out for a short time, but you can’t fully break the link.”
“How do I break it for good?”
“Even if I knew, why would I tell you?” He smiled, walking around me in a circle. “However, I don’t think there is a way. Do you know why I could do what I did to you?”
“Because I’m different?”
His laugh hurt, vicious and mocking. “No, Yun, you aren’t different.
You were new, that’s all. A new, fresh little guide who hadn’t truly understood her powers.
Think of it like you being fresh clay—malleable.
If I had done that to a more seasoned guide, their mind would have shattered under the pressure.
You, however, bent so wonderfully. You were crafted at a stage when you could still be molded into a more useful form.
What were the odds that I could have stumbled upon you then, of all times? ”
I closed my hands into fists, hating everything about him, about this, about the way I felt that truth.
I wasn’t unique in any way, so nothing I had was truly mine. I was just broken, a damaged toy too young to have realized what had happened.
“Don’t look like that, love.” The way he used the nickname made my stomach roll, but I tried to ignore it. “I feel the veil nearly gone. The Pitt will open soon and I will have you back.”
“You won’t. You can’t leave the dungeon, so you can’t do anything to me.”
“Who says I can’t leave?”
I opened my mouth but no response left me. I’d just…assumed? Why, though? He wasn’t a monster—not in the creature way—so he could leave it. Nothing was trapping him there except a closed portal.
Sweat broke out over my skin, my head fuzzy, my thoughts broken.
“See, this is another reason I adore you—you’re so stupid as to be charming. I still remember finding you.”
The space around me shifted, and suddenly we were back there. The darkness of The Pitt, and I knew what he would show me.
Before us, the scene played out like a movie, and I saw myself there, so young it nearly made me cry. I’d been a child, really, just a kid who had lost everything, alone and afraid in a world I had somehow survived.
I sat against a tree, my knees pulled to my chest, sobbing.
I’d just lost the last of the survivors I knew of, watching them grow sick and die.
It had been a man of forty, a detestable asshole who had spouted racist slurs like he considered it a second language, but I’d still cried when he’d taken his last breath because it had signaled me truly being alone.
The old Corsa approached, but the old me didn’t see him at first. When I finally lifted my gaze to see him, the relief on my young face had me wanting to cry all over again.
“You look so happy,” the real Corsa whispered to me.
“I wasn’t alone,” I answered.
Except that pleasure hadn’t lasted more than a moment before the old me saw the way his eyes had glowed, the purple that said exactly what he was.
A monster was terrifying, sure, but a corrupted? It was like having a barking dog scaring me, then spotting a snarling tiger. I knew which was the larger threat.
He walked up to the old me, holding his hand out as though he were some prince. The idiot I’d been reached out and took it.
“Why did you do that? I’ve always wondered. You knew what I was, so why did you reach for me?”
“The monsters had calmed after the portal closed. I thought maybe it was the same for you.” I paused, then sighed. “Or maybe I was just an idiot who was so afraid of being alone I’d have reached out for anything, even you.”
“Honestly? I think you sealed your fate there. By reaching out like that, you made me sure that I’d never let you go.”
“You’ve survived ten years. You don’t need me, so why do this?”
“You really have no idea, do you? You still think the dungeon is just a dungeon, that they’re just pockets of space, disconnected from everything else?
” He shook his head. “It is so much bigger than you know. It took me time to figure it out, but I know it, now. I’ll leave only long enough to get you, then we’ll go back to where we belong, because that world you’re in, it doesn’t have a place for me, and it doesn’t have one for you either, not anymore. ”
“They won’t let you.”
He barked out a hard laugh. “Oh, love, you think I can’t handle them?
I feel like this is all a gift to me, that I can take you back and hurt them at the same time.
They left me here, started this all. In fact, if they’d simply followed orders, none of this would have happened.
I would have never been corrupted, wouldn’t have been left here, wouldn’t have found you.
None of that would have happened. You should probably be angrier at them—they’re at fault for it all. ”
I shook my head, because I didn’t believe it. No matter what happened in The Pitt before, I refused to blame them. Months ago, maybe I would have fallen for it. I had looked for any reason to hate them, anyone to blame, but now?
I refused to do that. “I’m not going back to you.”
“You think they’ll stop me?”
I met his gaze and said something I should have said long ago, something I finally felt ready to say. “If they don’t—I’ll stop you.”
He laughed, and that sickening sound followed me as I woke, as the dream shattered around me, leaving him behind.