33. THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-THREE
CALVEROUS
Location: Jiradesh Desert
Calver startled awake with a coughing, hacking gasp.
He controlled his lungs again.
He controlled his mind again.
A fleeting scan of the memories he shared with the Survivor confirmed he hadn’t killed anyone.
Knees curling into his chest, he nearly sobbed with relief.
A cool breeze billowed against the flap of whatever dark tent he was in, caressing the overgrown hair on his face.
Across from him, moonlight flashed over a stand stashed with medical supplies.
Someone had tended to him. As if he didn’t have enough problems.
Chaos knew what they’d seen that would make an even bigger mess of things. Not only was it clear he’d spent time in the Terath’ian state, but the Survivor could surface at any point. If he hadn’t needed to get out of this encampment before, now it was paramount.
Calver shuddered and washed his mind with a void mantra. He slowed his breathing. Only then did he realize his pain was gone. In fact, his back felt better than it ever had. Better, even, than before Cul’Mon had…
Calver’s heart plummeted.
See me? Before the sun rises. The infirmary tents behind the command row.
Kretch.
He rolled over.
A body cloaked in sleek, white fabric occupied the only other cot in the infirmary tent. Unmistakable curls mirrored the moonlight. Silver eyes locked onto his. Raimee lobbed him a weak smile.
“You got my message, then?” As if it was her best witticism yet: seeing possible futures and writing preemptive notes which made them look like passing coincidence.
He could have signaled anything. Anything at all.
“You’re welcome.”
What had she done to him?
What had it done to her?
“With my best interests in mind. And I decided it was in my best interest not to listen. How do you feel?”
How did he feel? He’d just learned the depth of their connection: shared Ruxian blood. Compromisingly dimwitted and morbidly anxious, for one. And she—she already knew they had something in common. She—
His tilt toward derangement leveled in a glance. She looked cold and frail, and a whisper of the queen he’d seen on the Repository’s rooftop almost three moons ago.
Calver rolled from the cot and dropped to his knees beside her. For years, the thought of anyone laying a hand on him had been repulsive. Now he wanted nothing more than to pull her close, and he couldn’t do it.
She scrunched her speckled nose. “Careful. I might start to think you don’t resent me.”
“Death is irony at its core, and it is a little bit funny, Cal.”
Her eyes widened in the silent way that said ‘You are, in fact, the brunt of my joke.’ “I hear it’s hereditary.”
Hereditary.
He held in both a laugh and a cry. Death as a result of saving her certainly was.
“No. Decent folk are asleep at this hour.”
“You don’t see what I see, Calver. I don’t live without you. And I know you don’t want to live without me.”
He didn’t want to… the words couldn’t find purchase in his mind.
They just kept slipping away into blackness.
Maybe Ruxians couldn’t see as far as the Tera’thian coronation.
He shook his head.
“It’s not so much Fate as listening to the space between stars.”
A chill of remembrance ran through him. Why did that sound so familiar?
“Toronoff’s theory of void space?” She looked at him like he should have it written down and folded in his pocket, obviously.
They had conversed at length on Toronoff in the cave outside Chira’na.
Fankalo had owned dozens of Toronoff’s volumes, and the void mantra Calisto had taught all his students had originated from his works.
Calver started.
“For only in nothing can you find everything. When you seek answers, seek the space between stars, and the space between stars will fill you,” she finished.
He had forgotten the rest of it. “Toronoff said Ruxians who mastered the space between stars were the most powerful. I’ve been practicing the meditations he documented, but… they’re difficult.”
The void space theory. That couldn’t be the same void space—his void space.
Calver shifted. Swallowed—an impossible task, given the dryness of his stump.
Knowing what he now knew, why had he become so attached to the void mantra?
Calisto had read them hundreds of philosophies.
Why had he pushed Calver to fixate on that single phrase?
Raimee watched him like she was picking him apart. “What is it?”
he lied. When he paused, Raimee scooted closer to him and cocked her head.
It had nothing to do with Toronoff’s theory of the void space, but it might be believable.
“What was she like?”
Calver knew she didn’t mean his mother, this time.
“How so?”
He hummed in mock irritation.
Raimee’s grin only widened. “I like the sound of her—or, ah—the signal.”
He snorted.
“Sounds like a dream.”
Raimee’s fingers reached for his. He stared at them for long seconds before letting them lace between his. He had to know for sure. He focused on not letting that electric tingle of power flow into him. He thought about the opposite: about pushing it back into her.
Futile.
The soft drain of everything that kept Raimee living trickled into him. Calver pulled his hand free. He’d tried. The Fates could never look at him and say he hadn’t tried.
“Do you miss her?” Raimee asked.
Fankalo? Always.
Something twitched in the side of Raimee’s face. He could tell she was working up the courage to suggest something impossible. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to hear it.
“I’m supposed to be with you.”
Calver gritted his teeth.
“If it means that we’re together, I’m more than willing to give. I just need to find a more efficient means of self-replenishment than time alone. I couldn’t distort anything until I met you. I haven’t figured it all out, but I’m sure that—”
She shook her head, a motion so weak it pained him. “That’s ridiculous. What do you call me taking those out of you?” She lifted her chin beyond his shoulder.
On the canvas floor behind him black blood, slippery as the night itself, glistened off a half-dozen pieces of metal in the low light.
They were like tanka bits, but hooked in every direction.
He hadn’t laid eyes on them in nearly a decade, and the sight made his eyes burn. Those were what had made him give up.
The Survivor unfurled. He hated that it had come back. Hated it.
Void.
Raimee’s voice brought him to the surface. “And let’s not forget the birds in Chira’na. And the tree.”
It would keep coming back. It could control him any time it wanted. He was a liability.
“I’ve been practicing distortion for nearly two moons now.
I’ve had to resist every moment of my second sight pushing me towards you—not easy, thank you very much.
But it’s telling me to talk to you now or die painfully.
I distorted the fabric of the desert to get to you.
And I incapacitated the guard that was outside of this tent. ”
The Survivor’s presence disappeared. Calver blinked twice.
“Well, how else was I going to get in here?” She shook her head at him like he was a simpleton.
“Look, I just need someone to teach me how to not use my energy to distort with. That’s why we need to go to Methu’su.
” Raimee paused before whispering, “Back in Chira’na, when you said you were coming with me I—” Her voice quavered.
“I’ve never felt like that.” Neither had he.
“You’re the only person I’ve ever met who’s just treated me like I’m normal. ”
Wrong. She was wrong.
He could tell her.
He could tell her that, from the moment they’d first touched, he hadn’t been able to think properly.
For months, he hadn’t had a single alchemy of the mind that wasn’t chased by her: the way her nose crinkled.
The way she laughed. The way her lisp never left his ear.
The small warmth of knowing her heart beat close by him where, for years, there had been nothing.
He could tell her how horribly and infinitely she’d mangled him, and that he didn’t want to be fixed. But he didn’t.
Raimee frowned. “I think preventing you from contracting sepsis is reasonable.”
Calver rose to his feet.
“Where?”
To Steila, where Cul’Mon would probably capture him before he could disable the Tera’thians’s remote activator. Because, as much as his duty to Fankalo meant, he wasn’t going to let Raimee get blown into pieces, either.
“Calver?”
He looked at her. Goodbye, Raimee. Two words, ten steps, and it would be done.
“What do they have on you?”
Thyatira’s last words to him back in Chira’na had never stopped echoing in his mind. “I will find a way to slit her throat while you watch and have you blamed for it.”
Walk away. Walk away. He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Thyatira. Mastico. The Red Wing. The Hand of the Shadewalker.” Said as though he’d insulted her intelligence. “You’re avoiding me because you think it puts me at risk to any number of them.”
He froze.