Chapter 39 #2
“Oh.” Larke laughs a little. “Oh.” She laughs again, full--bellied this time. “You think it’s him, don’t you.”
Elegy feels like she’s about to choke. “That’s not what this is about.”
“ ‘I saw a man,’ ” Larke says, quoting the augurs. “ ‘He will bring you death. You will fall—-’ ”
Her eyes are burning. “Stop it.”
“ ‘—-in love with him.’ ”
Larke is still smirking. In that moment, Elegy would do anything to wipe that look off her face.
“You think I’m playing a game, Larke? Fine. Then here are the new rules.”
She steps closer. The veil pulls against her skin.
“You’ll leave Theren Forint alone. You’ll stop monitoring me. You’ll stop tracking my sister. You’ll stay out of my way as I do my best to stop Rava Vidar.”
She watches the multicolored spots of light cast by the veil dance behind her sister’s projection.
“I said I didn’t want to take anything from you, and I meant it,” she says. “But if you interfere with my work again . . . I really will come for your goddamn throne.”
She waits for a moment to see if Larke will say anything back to her, but Larke is still just standing there, staring at her, spots of light on the wall behind her and her hands limp at her sides.
For the first time since Elegy has known her, Larke looks afraid.
Elegy steps backward through the archway.
The building where Theren Forint lives is made of cement, like all the neo--Brutalist structures of Losan Stronghold. Orange light streams through the slanted windows in the ceiling, making it look like the hallway is on fire.
It’s lonely here, and quiet. A good place for her to calm down after her meeting with Larke, only she doesn’t think she’ll be able to.
She’s never made things easy for Larke, but she’s always preferred to sidestep her or manipulate her rather than stand up to her. She has no idea what she was thinking.
Actually, she does. But she doesn’t want to look at it just yet.
She taps on Theren’s door and hears, “Come in.”
When she steps into his room, he’s facing the cabinet where his clothes are stacked, tugging a shirt over his head. She sees just a flash of his scarred abdomen and the jut of his hips and her mouth goes dry.
He catches her eye in the mirror, and she realizes: he can feel that. He can feel whatever she feels when she looks at him.
No one surprises him.
She’s been trying not to think about how he felt under her hands in that supply closet.
Warm and strong and urgent. His arm across her back.
The smell of him, like citrus. It’s hard not to think about it now, with his hair wet from a shower, and the way he looks at her, so focused, like the rest of the world is irrelevant.
Thoughts of Larke, of how Elegy threatened her, of what happened with him and Julia Martin—-they suddenly feel small by comparison to this, this desperate longing, this devouring guilt.
“This doesn’t have to be anything other than what it is,” he says.
Sometimes she wonders if he can read her thoughts as well as her feelings.
“And . . . what is it?” she asks.
“You want me.” The boldness of it is almost embarrassing. But it’s pointless to deny it. She knows how acute his sense of other people is.
She meets his eyes in the mirror and tries for the same boldness. “Yeah. I do.”
“Well,” he says. “You can have me.”
The last knot of her control unravels. She moves closer, drawn like a moth to the fire of him, her footsteps soft on the concrete.
He doesn’t move, just watches her in the mirror until she’s right behind him.
She sets her hands on his hips, and hears Parekh telling her not to beat herself up about it, that it’s biology, that it’s all right.
Then she slides her hands under his shirt.
He draws a sharp breath, almost like a gasp, as she slides her hands up, over the fresh scar on his side, over the ripple of muscle that covers his rib cage, over his chest. She leans in, and kisses the top of his spine, right above the collar of his shirt.
Lemongrass—-he smells like the lemongrass balm the army doctors give out for sore muscles.
It’s hard to remember to feel guilty when she’s touching him.
He turns toward her, and for a moment he just stands there, the barest sliver of space between them.
Then he bends his head to kiss her throat.
Her hands are still under his shirt, but she’s less gentle after that first touch of his lips, holding on to him for stability as his mouth traces a line up to her ear—-not quite kissing, more like he’s deciding where to start.
She can’t bear it any longer; she turns her face into his and kisses him, hard, her lips parting.
Her body is hot, scorched by the contact. He puts his hands on her, her hips, her waist, her chest, and she can’t help the desperate sound she makes, can’t help the way she grabs at him in response.
He backs up, still kissing her, and sits on the edge of the bed, so she has to trip after him.
Breathless, heart racing, she lets him pull her to stand between his knees.
She braces herself on his shoulders as he kisses her stomach, over her shirt—-and then he lifts the hem just enough to kiss beneath it, right under her belly button.
She reaches down to undo the top button of her pants, and he kisses the skin she bares, right above the band of her underwear—-
Then she puts her hands in his hair, and everything stops.
He freezes, breathing against her stomach, and his hands come up to her wrists. They’re so gentle it startles her. He guides her hands away from his head, and looks up at her, apprehension in his eyes.
She doesn’t need to ask about it. She already knows: grabbing his hair like that, it must be something Rava used to do.
She nods, and tries to steady herself. She should step back, button that button, sit in an actual chair for this adult conversation that she is definitely going to force herself to have, but she can’t bring herself to move.
“You could ask me what I’m doing here,” she says. “If you want.”
He leans in, touching his mouth to her stomach again, and speaks against her. “I’d rather just take what’s on offer.”
His teeth graze her skin. She considers peeling her clothes away from her body, piece by piece, so he can do that to every inch of her.
She doesn’t.
“What’s on offer?” she asks quietly.
“You want me, and you trust me, I think,” he says, raising his eyes to hers again. “Seems like plenty.” At her dubious expression, he adds, “I so rarely get anything I want.”
He makes it sound so simple. Like there really doesn’t have to be more. He slips his hands under her shirt, just a little, just enough to brush his fingers over her sides—-and she almost believes it. She believes it for now.
He says, “My hair’s growing out. I’ll cut it again.”
She gets the feeling that’s the most he’ll say about his reaction to her hands in his hair, and she doesn’t want to press him. The mood between them has shifted as a result, the desperation gone, so she doesn’t mind, so much, when he slides his hands out from under her shirt and leans back.
“I liked it short,” she says. “Your hair.”
He smiles a little.
“You did come here for a reason,” he says. “What happened? You feel—-” He pauses. “Sorry. I know you don’t like that.”
“No, tell me.”
“You feel . . . like you did something important.”
It’s hard, sometimes, not to marvel at him. The Fever reshapes everyone who survives it—-she knows that. But the Fever in his blood only gives him more data than other people; it doesn’t teach him what it means. That’s all Theren.
“I might have. I’m not sure yet.” She clears her throat, and puts a few steps between them, enough for her to regain her senses. “I’d like to know about Julia.”
Elegy sits on his desk chair, just the edge of it.
She watches his bare toes curling into the cement floor, then looks around the room—-dim now, the sun almost set.
There’s a line of books on his desk that wasn’t there before.
The spines are creased and peeling. She recognizes some of the names, written in Talusar.
He looks out the window. “Fenn Kovek is alive.”
Of all the things she expected him to say, that wasn’t one of them. “You saw him?”
“Him, and an augur. They . . .” He sucks in a breath.
“The augur said something about . . . past, present, and future. That the three of us would be sufficient. Actually, she said that to Rava, but—-” He shakes his head.
“Fenn touched me, and the augur asked him what he saw. He said he saw my father. He said he came from . . . a doorway. In the stars.” He laughs a little. “Does that sound insane?”
Elegy thinks of the box of artifacts in the trailer in Twentynine, her -father’s conviction that there were otherworldly visitors on Earth. She thinks of the glowing plant that Hela almost died to protect, and the maybe--hallucination, maybe--visitation she experienced when she touched it.
She swallows hard. She promised herself she would never start to believe in wild things like secret aliens and . . . and world--saving prophecies, would keep her feet on firm ground. But what is she supposed to do when “firm ground” starts to feel like denial?
She who moves the fulcrum controls the outcome.
“I’ve heard quite a few ridiculous revelations in my time,” Elegy says, trying to keep her voice level. “So, not really.”
Softly, he replies, “Yes, you have, haven’t you.”
She clears her throat. “What happened next?”
“I don’t know why, but I think hearing about my father triggered the augur to see something,” he says. “Me, on the Sundial, going through that doorway.”
Elegy grew up hearing about the voice beyond their solar system, beckoning them out to a much greater existence.
Faith in it, in the Sundial, feels like faith in the Fever, in a god.
The audacity of believing there could be something out there that was better than what they have.
The absurdity of thinking there’s meaning somewhere in the chaos of the endless universe.