Chapter 24
Nyx knew her eyes had to be bloodshot when she went to get Tristen, but he tactfully didn’t mention it. Now that they stood in the Arrival Room, at the edge of the portal bay, staring down into the abyss of the Station’s Heart, he looked a little green.
He pointed into the impenetrable darkness. “You want me to go down there?”
“I do it all the time,” Nyx offered.
“It has a vested interest in keeping you alive.”
“They have a vested interest, and they have it in you, too.”
Tristen did not look convinced. “I can do a lot of things, but I can’t make my body survive without oxygen.”
“There’s oxygen,” she reassured him. In truth, she wasn’t sure exactly what she ended up breathing in the Stations’ Hearts, but she’d never died or suffered brain damage, so… “Do you need me to hold your hand?”
He glared at her. “No, I do not need—” Whatever else he might have said was cut short when two enormous vines slithered out of the opening. One wrapped around Nyx, the other around Tristen, and unceremoniously dragged them down.
On the Heart’s floor, Kaliaris released them so gently that neither so much as stumbled. Even so, Tristen shot Nyx a look of pure venom.
She lifted her hands. “I had nothing to do with it. They got tired of waiting.”
Kaliaris agreed.
When Tristen took a startled step back, tripping over some of the vines running across the floor and crashing down, she knew Kaliaris had spoken into his mind as well as hers.
Kaliaris said, clearing the ground around Tristen as he righted himself.
“No problem,” Tristen muttered.
Kaliaris’s attention turned to Nyx.
“No. I figured you might want to talk to Tristen first, since he’s the one who will be physically altering you.” Kaliaris would have heard their conversation in the cafe, so they would know roughly how things were going to go, but it stood to reason they might have questions.
“And I wanted to tell you that I’m going to need a few days before Tristen cuts the councilors’ tethers.
I think Calista will let us stay with them once you’re gone”—she forced her voice to remain steady—“but we’ll need time to move our belongings.
” She said it all matter-of-factly, but there was a small part of her that intentionally threw Calista’s name into the explanation, hoping to make Kaliaris jealous.
As if the soul of a planet would get jealous of its unchosen Guardian packing up to live in the space created by another soul of a planet.
The vines rustled throughout the room.
Tristen cast a hesitant glance Nyx’s way. “Sure?”
A moment later, Tristen was lost in an enclosure of vines.
Nyx waited. And waited. And waited. What the hell were they talking about for this long?
Did Kaliaris trust her so little they were trying to strike a separate deal with Tristen to ensure he did what they wanted?
Another stab of hurt lanced through her.
It was fine, she lied to herself. It was fucking fine.
The vines fell away, revealing Tristen once more. Neither he nor Kaliaris said anything.
“Should I send for Griff and Jevryn?” she finally asked.
Kaliaris said.
She nodded, and soon she was inside her own enclosure of vines. “Look, if this is about the couple of days I asked for, I’m sorry, but I need them.”
“I know you don’t want me to need them, but that doesn’t change the fact that—”
Relief wanted to cascade through her, but she wasn’t quite buying it. “You’re going to stay,” she repeated.
The relief hit this time, but it was tinged with anger. “Really? Because when I asked you to stay, you basically told me I was a backstabbing liar for even suggesting it.”
The vines rustled around her.
“Thank you so much for bringing up my private emotional trauma,” she gritted out, “but no. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that you hurt my feelings, because I care about you and the thought of you being gone makes me sad. Because I will miss you.”
The rustling of the vines around her grew more energetic.
“That’s it?” Nyx didn’t think that was it. That had better not be it after how shitty she’d felt at the thought of losing them.
“Yes. That, and ‘We’re sorry’.”
The vines whispered together like a sigh.
She finally smiled a little, the tangles around her heart loosening. “Okay then. What did you confirm with Tristen?”
The vines around her slithered away, once again letting her see Tristen. Kaliaris demanded.
Tristen wiped his palms on his jeans. “So I can alter your connections like you wanted—cut all of your bonds without killing any of you. But I could also change them, instead. Separate you and Griff from each other entirely, but leave the two of you independently connected to Kaliaris. It would allow each of you to survive the deaths of the others, but you’d still be connected—the Station would still have a Guardian and an Avatar, so as far as the Council will be aware, nothing will have changed. But you won’t be vulnerable anymore.”
“What about the Council? Would they still have control over Kaliaris?”
Tristen hesitated. “Yes and no. I can’t alter or break their ties without them noticing.
But I can make a kill switch for them, essentially.
I can isolate the area of their connections and give Kaliaris the ability to excise it at will, in an emergency.
But once it’s excised, it’s done. They’ll know and there will be no going back. ”
The selfish part of her wanted to say yes and not ask any more questions. To ignore that “kill switch” basically meant only that Kaliaris had the ability to cut off a limb if they needed to do so in order to survive.
“Will you have autonomy?” Nyx asked Kaliaris. “Will you have full control of yourself without me or Griff here?”
“I can’t give them that without severing all of the controls,” Tristen explained. “Yours, Griff’s, and the councilors’. The best I can do is that they’ll still have the minimal autonomy they explained they’ve managed so far through you and Griff.”
“And you're okay with that?” Nyx asked Kaliaris. “With not being free?” Having felt the weight of Kaliaris’s dislike in the past, it wasn’t something she was eager to experience again, should they come to resent her for this choice.
After how they’d reacted when she’d initially asked them to wait, she wanted them to be abundantly certain of this choice.
“Okay.” Nyx blew out a breath. “Then…are we ready to do this?” Upstairs, she could feel Jevryn practically wearing a groove in the floor with his pacing.
Tristen nodded. “Can you bring them both here?”
“I can. Are you going to need to be in every Station’s Heart to separate their Avatar and Guardian bonds?
” Seeing the look on his face, she preempted his response.
“If you agree to do so, will you need access to each of the Station’s Hearts?
” That was a possibility she hadn’t counted on, and a difficulty she wasn’t sure could be solved.
He shook his head. “Just you, because of those.” He pointed at the chaos thorns.
“Untangling those from your life force is going to be difficult enough, and then there’s the one you’ve shoved in there”—he pointed at the pedestal in the center of the Heart—“and the one in Griff’s paw.
They have to get removed and put back into the Station and then I can untangle the three of you from each other. ”
That made sense. Nyx moved through Kaliaris’s senses and nudged Griff. A few minutes later, he and a tightly strung Jevryn arrived in the Station’s Heart. The four of them stood in a circle, Griff at Nyx’s left, Jevryn at his left, and Tristen on her right, between her and Jevryn.
Tristen flexed his fingers and suddenly the magic rolling off him was like an atmospheric punch. “I’ll start with Nyx.”
“If you harm her,” Jevryn warned, “I—”
“—will make me suffer until the end of my few remaining days, etcetera, etcetera,” Tristen finished for him. “I got that warning the last time you told me to fix her, remember?”
Jevryn’s eyes narrowed.
“Ignore him,” Nyx told Tristen. “He’s stressed.”
Tristen rolled his eyes, stepped in front of her, and took her face in his hands.
His magic flowed into her again, the same as it had back in his room in New York, only twice as potent.
This time, when it streamed in between the chaos thorns, it wasn’t only exploring, but rearranging.
She could feel, as he dug underneath where the thorns embedded into her skin, the string that connected them to her.
Felt how that string originated deep inside her, and how pulling out any one thorn would pull out a chunk of her with it.