Chapter 15 Kali
KALI
Alive.
Standing.
Fighting.
Watching.
Alive.
He was alive.
“Wait!”
Ignoring Zion’s shout, I leaped out of our car parked in front of the central building and sprinted down the street.
The silhouettes moving in the windows and the rare night roamers blurred in my peripherals as I navigated through our compound, across the grassy field, and then flew into the surrounding forest.
I slipped on the damp moss, the vegetation awakened from its winter slumber—
My shoulder collided with a maple tree. Pain tested my joint as the splintered tree bark snagged on my leather jacket, abrading the supple material.
But I paid no attention to the scratches ruining the clothing I’d purchased after Gedeon’s had ceased smelling like him. I couldn’t convince myself to wear his things anymore.
And now I wouldn’t have to.
He was here.
He’d been here all this time.
Oblivious to the ache spreading in my scalp from the twigs catching my hair and the late-night humidity leaching warmth from my fingertips, I circled the clearing I’d grown fond of.
One circle.
Two circles.
Three circles.
Four circles.
I ducked under boughs, jumped over gnarled roots, brushed away the spider webs, and repeated it all anew, the smarting cut on my cheek forgotten.
Seven circles.
Realization that I’d been lied to kindled my fury.
I’d been deceived. Kept in the dark, throttled by the night.
Eleven circles.
On that roof in Ilasall, Gedeon had to have been just a mirage, a hallucination. Otherwise…
Fourteen circles.
Round and around I went, the laces of my black boots loosening, the rubber soles squelching in the mud.
Thick clouds occupied the sky, harboring the moon and the stars—the gods residing high above. They had erected the fluffy wall of the darkest gray as a shield to protect themselves from the explosion about to burst out of me.
Gedeon had survived.
A withered branch crunched behind me, the sound so jarring in the hush my feet halted their restless pacing.
Goosebumps pricked my flesh, and I succumbed to the far too familiar situation: Gedeon stalking the oblivious me, and me yielding to him once he’d appeared from the shadows veiling the woods.
I could swear his eyes, their shade the deepest brown marred with black specks, traced the line of my rigid shoulders, flicked to the back of my head, and seared the path all the way to my toes.
“You’re alive.” My statement came out hoarse, cracked, forced.
Decisive footsteps grew louder, their tempo as steady as the air was crisp.
But I didn’t move. Not even when he halted at my back, close enough for his body heat to bathe me.
My fists balled at my sides, anchoring me to the forest floor. Ants crawled underneath my skin, nagging me to turn around and determine if this was another nightmare or an actual, true-to-my-bones reality.
Whether Gedeon was an image conjured by my desires or an actually solid, palpable presence, and not a wraith floating between the oaks.
“Little death.”
The voice from my dreams furled around my knees, seizing control of my joints and counteracting their need to wobble.
“I have missed you,” he murmured, his breath ghosting along the shell of my ear, infusing me with ire.
He’d missed me?
Missed me.
I’d said goodbye to him. I’d wished him a smooth sailing among the stars at his funeral.
I’d spent my days training, my nights at Vice or deep in our underground, observing Zion unleash himself on his dolls, my mornings in war strategy meetings, and my lunches by strolling through the streets and chatting with our people, pretending I was fine, that everything was fine, fine, fine and fine.
That my world hadn’t collapsed.
“You missed me,” I sneered. Not a question, no.
A statement of nothing but the truth.
First, he’d stalked me for months, then he and Zion had kidnapped me, then he’d declared I was his during dinner my first night at our compound, yet I’d grown to care for them.
For him.
But for three months now, I’d had to learn how to exist without him, and all he could say was he missed me.
His fingers threaded through my hair, and my strands wrapped themselves around his hand, melding us into one. “Yes.” He tightened his grip on my scalp. “I do not enjoy straying far from my belongings.”
“I’m not—” I choked on the denial about to spill out of me.
“You are.” Releasing me, he snatched my waist, plastering his front to my back. One of his palms came to rest low on my throat, and the contact seared my flesh.
“You tried to run from me. First, on the roof in the city. Then, you jumped out of Zion’s car and bolted into this forest to hide.” His nose skimmed my temple, and a hum fluttered from my chest. “Except there is not a place on this planet I would not upturn to find you.”
Instinctively, I gripped his wrist. “I didn’t do it to escape you.”
His low chuckle curled my toes. “This reminds me of the first time you approached me. Remember? At the end of last summer, when you spotted me in the forest? Your punches were weak, but the strength shining in your eyes was unparalleled. But all it took for me to break your shield was leaving a mark on your neck with my teeth. Coloring it in blues and purples, reds and yellows. Sending you back to the city with a message spelled in bruises—mine.”
My tears sprang out, both from the sensation of him pressed against me and the reminder of the night we’d met. How everything had changed since then.
How callouses had formed in my soul, and how feeling Gedeon now was like a razor shaving the hardened skin off of me, one slice at a time.
It hurt.
It hurt so much.
I shoved my elbow into his solar plexus, right where Zion had taught me. Gedeon bent over, clutching his stomach, but when his gaze met mine, amusement danced in it.
“Yours or not, Gedeon, but it was my knife that bled you. I thought I’d killed you.” I stumbled backward, away from him, away from the realization he’d pulled through, yet had left Zion and I alone to deal with his supposed death. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
I scrubbed the wet paths streaking my face, disregarding how the metal buckle on my jacket’s sleeve pinched my skin.
The sting was nothing compared to the suffocating heat of the bonfire I’d sat at twelve weeks ago.
“I mourned you. I burned my words for you in your funeral fire. We had all assumed you were dead.”
I threw my head back. Tears singed a path across my temples, soaking into the mess of my sweaty hair and shooting straight to my chipped heart. The stone cage encasing the organ couldn’t contain the fluctuating beats seeking to disintegrate it.
“Zion told me you were gone. And I don’t mean the lie about the city’s prison we both spread around. He said you were”—I swallowed—“not with us anymore.”
Gedeon’s heavy sigh cleaved me in two. His black clothing blended him with the night, as if they were one and the same.
My lips rolled into a tight line to keep a sob from escaping.
“He knew? You told him and not me?” I sniffled and quickly wiped under my nose.
All this time, Zion had glued me back together whenever I broke or lashed out, but he’d known the secret all along.
“Am I such a worthless object in your eyes that you couldn’t share the fact that you were alive with me? ”
“Do not dare repeat those words. Ever.” Gedeon prowled toward me.
“Your worth had nothing to do with it. I had coerced him into swearing silence, but I couldn’t bring myself to do the same to you.
I know how much a promise means to you. I could not bear loading a burden of a false one onto your shoulders. ”
My lungs failed to work properly. “But it wasn’t your decision to make.”
He seized my throat. I jolted at the unexpected hold, clutching his arm pushing me backward until my back hit a tree. The rough bark caught my jacket, the friction locking me against the trunk.
He leaned in, close to my face. “Did you see my body? Did you incinerate it? Did you bury it in a grave, like our ancestors used to do?”
“No,” I croaked out, but not due to him immobilizing me. My body welcomed Gedeon’s hand, as though it needed it like water. To survive. “There was nothing left of you.” After I’d run away, Zion had told me he took care of Gedeon’s remains. I hadn’t had the courage to question him.
“Exactly.” Gedeon’s nostrils flared. “It was a trick, Kali. A ploy to unite our people under your rule, yours and Zion’s, with me serving as bait.
A tactic to coax everyone into marching to war.
” A bitter laugh vibrated in his chest. The sound of it was neither demeaning nor leaking disdain—it carried notes of defeat.
“They are all a herd. Or an army, as you like to call it. And what happens when the enemy captures their leader? They run after him in hopes of getting him back. Because as people, as a nation, we are nothing without control. Freedom cannot exist without it. You cannot be free if there are no limitations. The concept of liberty would cease to exist. And was that not what you sought? To annihilate the cities, starting with Ilasall? To reduce their population control methods to ashes?”
The clouds parted, revealing a crescent moon. Its silvery light caressed Gedeon’s forehead, his swelling jaw from my punch back on the roof in Ilasall, the glistening bottom lip as fluffy as the brewing clouds, sculpted just for my—
No.
His free hand came to grip my hip, and his thumb dug into my flesh. “I did this for you, Kali. So you would have better chances of winning. I increased the probability of your preferred outcome. Instead of our people splitting into factions, they all bend at your will now.”
“Then why did you return?” I leaned into his hold on my throat, obstructing my breathing in the process. “Why not stay away from us? If you were so intent on tormenting us, Gedeon, why did you come back?” I screamed into his face, inches from mine.
His smile turned icy, as did his reply. “Because I could not stay away from you.” An assertion. A claim. “You and Zion.”
“Unbelievable,” I muttered, shaking my head as much as I could in his hold. “You followed us back because I recognized you. Not because you needed us.”
“If that were true, I would have returned weeks ago. You both have spotted me countless times.” He pushed his knee between my legs, trapping me against the tree.
“I feared your neck was going to snap from how fast you twisted toward me in the valley of that mountain.” His satisfied chuckle coiled in my pelvis, right where it belonged.
“And I’m certain Zion had noticed me hovering behind the kitchen window when I watched you push around your pancakes this morning. ”