Chapter 30
You did what?” Elegy demands, and across from her, Hela sighs into her whiskey.
Elegy has been in the trailer in Twentynine since last night, when she came home from Losan Stronghold too agitated to sleep.
Hela was already passed out, so Elegy went outside to pace, rubbing at her face to get the sensation of Theren touching his forehead to hers out of her mind, out of her skin.
It didn’t work.
Hela gave her a distraction this afternoon.
She turned up with Parin in a Hummingbird with a shattered windshield, the plant she was supposed to be returning buckled into the passenger seat like an infant.
She just confessed to the whole caper, including the part where she threw one of Elegy’s spears at a man’s foot and ran away without retrieving it.
“You,” Hela says, and it sounds like she’s struggling to stay calm, “do not get to lecture me about taking risks without informing you first.”
Elegy bites down on her lip, and drinks the rest of her whiskey in one gulp.
She can’t stop fidgeting. It’s gotten worse since yesterday—-word of her dropping out of the army to become a Scout has hit the news pavilions, and even though the general public doesn’t have the same distaste for Scouts that the military does, it’s a move that doesn’t exactly scream “emotional stability.” The worst of the rumors speculates that the Getty attack sent Elegy into full mental collapse, whatever that means.
So it’s almost a relief to find out Hela believes in an alien landing now.
“Fair enough,” Elegy says, finally. “But . . . do you really think it was an alien ship?”
Hela runs her finger around the rim of her glass.
“If I tell you . . . are you going to accuse me of turning into Keen?” There’s something vulnerable in her voice that startles Elegy into stillness.
“No,” Elegy says, like it’s an oath.
Hela leans back in her chair, still running her finger around the rim of the glass, until it sings a low, mournful note.
“The idea of an alien ship sort of . . . pieces things together for me,” she says, after a long pause.
“The way I saw that woman by touching a damn leaf, the way all those scraps Keen collected were made of nothing I can identify, the way that ship in the video launched . . .” She shrugs.
“If there was an otherworldly person here, on Earth, that would make sense of all of it. Someone who planted the plant. Who launched the ship. Who knew Akara.”
Elegy can’t pretend she doesn’t see the logic in it. And it’s not like they don’t already know there are people out there, people capable of communicating with them.
“What confuses me is Kesia Forint being at the launch,” she says. “She was a soldier before she came to Cedre. So her being there says ‘Talusar military’ to me.”
Kesia was a soldier before Cedre—-and now after Cedre, according to Theren.
What if she was a soldier during Cedre, too?
Some kind of sleeper agent, placed in Cedre to activate at an advantageous moment—-or a spy, sent to look into Cedrae technology?
What if the ship was just a secret project they’d been developing all this time?
“I don’t know,” Hela admits. “Both theories seem plausible to me. But either way, I’d like to talk to Kesia Forint.”
“Yeah.” Elegy’s voice comes out sounding hollow. “So would I.”
Hela finishes her whiskey, and taps the empty glass against the edge of the table. “Well . . . what if we can?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said she sent a message to Isre,” Hela says. “If we can trace that message back to its origins, we could send a response. Arrange a meeting.”
“If this is some kind of long--term Talusar plan that’s brewing,” Elegy says slowly, “then we need to know what Kesia knows. But we have to be careful. She reached out to Isre after four years of silence for a reason, and we don’t know what it is, or what she wants.”
“So we find out . . . and then arrest her and try her for crimes against Cedre.”
Elegy shakes her head.
“I want to say yes,” she says. “But that’s what a Peacekeeper would do, or what the Sword would do. Not what a Scout would do.”
Hela sighs. “ ‘Never burn a bridge—-’ ” she begins, quoting their father.
“ ‘That’s still getting you somewhere,’ ” Elegy finishes.
“Kesia’s a link to Rava Vidar. She’s not a predictable link, but she told Isre Theren was alive, so she seems to be willing to at least pretend to be a go--between.
It would be bad strategy to take her out of play. Better to make use of her, if we can.”
“I’d rather throw her directly into the sun. But okay. So?”
Elegy rubs a circle between her eyebrows. “So . . . find a way to contact her and set a meeting. Please.”
Hela nods, and with a quirk of a smile that she almost means, says, “Is that my sister giving me an order, or the Hope of Cedre?”
Elegy glares at her. Hela winks.
“Just kidding. You’re always both.”
Hela gets up and takes Elegy’s empty glass to the sink, along with her own. She’s rinsing them both when she asks, over her shoulder, “Did you hurt yourself, or something?”
“What?”
“You keep touching that spot.”
Elegy takes her hand away from her forehead, from the place between her eyebrows where Theren’s skin burned into hers. My life is yours.
How dare you? she wants to demand. How dare you say that, how dare you lay a hand on me, how dare you spit my emotions back at me, how dare—-
“The memory sharing, during the erczet,” she says. “Is it supposed to . . . stay with you?”
Hela seemed surprised when Elegy told her she was going to do the erczet ritual. When Elegy asked her why, she only said that she wouldn’t want to see four Knights die. But now Elegy is wondering if there’s more to it than that.
Hela picks up one of the cat figurines on the shelf next to the sink. It’s one of the realistic ones, painted to look like a tabby. She’s turning it in her hands when she faces Elegy.
“It’s intimate,” she says. “Like you didn’t just share a memory, you shared .
. . a body.” She runs a finger over the cat’s ears.
One of them is broken from the time Elegy knocked it off the shelf.
Hela doesn’t like to revisit the past, so Elegy doesn’t move—-if she moves, Hela might remember she doesn’t talk about this sort of thing.
What she learned among the Talusar. What her life was like there.
“They usually do erczet after battle, when one soldier survives and another doesn’t. They say it heals what’s broken between people,” Hela says. “Some people praise the Fever for that, like it’s an act of God. But my mother told me it was just what happened when you’d lived under someone’s skin.”
She turns, and sets the cat back down.
“That’s not an easy phrase to translate into English,” she says, “but you know what I mean.”
“Yeah.” Elegy is rubbing her forehead again. “Yeah, I do.”