Chapter 28
When I wake, Serafina hovers above me, the starry night sky lightening behind her.
“Axira, wake up,” she whispers.
I am dreaming. She is not here. This is not real.
“We have to go!” Her brows arch high, trembling slightly.
“They came for me and brought me here. I’m scared.
” Her face is a haze. I grind my knuckles into my eyes.
She is still there. Her small, dirt-covered hands are white-knuckling on the ties to my tent.
Her expression is twisted with desperation, eyes glistening with unshed tears.
I sit up, leaning against my tent where I fell asleep outside of it. I blink again. “Serafina?”
She looks over her shoulder. “Hurry, before they come back.”
The fire has all burned out. The locked transport is still sitting there. My heart thuds, finally catching up with my mind. I stumble up, my limbs heavy with sleep. I slide my shoes on.
“Hurry,” she says.
Once my shoes are on, she runs ahead of me.
The grassy field strewn with piles of ashen vegetables may as well be a graveyard.
The sun isn’t up and won’t be for a little while longer.
Kade must still be sleeping. My footsteps are lead.
I stagger behind Serafina. She’s covered in sticks and twigs, her hair mangled.
“Are you okay?” I ask. “Where is Miss Omon?”
“I’m okay. They came in the night. They locked me away somewhere in the palace.
Then they brought me here this morning, but something went wrong, I don’t know.
They turned around to go back to the palace.
” She holds up a piece of sharp metal. “But I broke the latch on the transport and slipped out. I ran until I found you asleep beside your tent.”
The hum of a vehicle roars in the distance.
I motion for Serafina to follow me deeper into the corn stalks.
She sticks to my heels. We duck behind a pallet of produce, then dart toward waist-high grain.
My steps are clunky, like I’m moving underwater.
Time and motion feel out of balance, the exhaustion of the last day weighing me down.
Serafina presses a finger to her lips, pointing to the wagon as it rolls by. We crouch down, and my heart skips a beat. Did they hurt her? I scan every inch of her exposed skin, but there are no bruises or cuts that I can see. She’s here. I can’t believe she’s here.
This changes everything. I scan for other tents, for Caelus, wondering if I should wake him. I promised to steal for him, and this ruins all that. Even if I could get him, there’s no time. I have to run. I have to run now.
And it makes me ache in a way that’s confusing.
“Axira, come on.” Serafina crouches, urging me to follow her. Then my gaze drops to her chest, which is not glowing with a Heartfiller. She hasn’t coughed. She doesn’t look pale with fever.
“You’re all better?” Caelus just sent the medicine.
She slips out from the cover of the stalks and ducks behind a toppled bin meant for sorting. “Come on, Axira.” She blinks for a beat too long.
“Fina, you did use the medicine, right?” I ask again. How else would she be well? The world is still a haze.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m scared. Please.”
My fingers find my chest, two steps ahead of my mind. I pull my collar aside, exposing my skin. It glows. A tiny coral-colored shard of a memory Heartfiller sticks out, its hue dark red, as if singed by a flame.
No.
I back away.
This is not real. Serafina is not really here.
Serafina’s brows slash angrily. “Come with me now! We have to get away!” She grabs a blade from somewhere that I miss. “Traitor! You said you’d protect me. You said you’d teach me how to fish!”
“It’s not you. You’re not real.” The Trial of Loyalty is still underway. I plug my ears. The more I say it aloud, the more I realize it’s true.
“You have to save me. And Miss Omon! You promised.” When I don’t follow her, she paces. “This is why your mother died. This is why your father died! Because you couldn’t save them. You didn’t even try.” She keeps shouting more accusations. My heart feels like it’s going to burst through my ears.
“Stop,” I plead. “Please stop talking!”
“You couldn’t love your parents even if you were allowed to. You can’t save me because you don’t even know how to save yourself.”
I flinch at her words. My gaze drops to the dirt, to something glinting beneath a wilted leaf. A broken handle jutting from the soil. Metal curves from one end, dull edged and rusted. It’s solid, heavy, and sharp. I grab it.
And plunge it into Serafina’s throat.
She vanishes like a vision, fracturing into drifting flecks.
And the piece of crystal attached to my chest like a barnacle falls to the ground.
I pick it up, examining it. The memory Heartfiller is standard issue at checkpoints throughout the districts.
They are the worst ones, making you relive past memories over and over.
But this one…
I turn the piece, pulsing a burned shade of orange, a much redder hue of coral than any memory Heartfiller I’ve ever seen.
It hums with a darkness inside it that reminds me of death.
This one was making me hallucinate in the present, like fake-future memories somehow.
I throw it down and smash it with my boot.
Without the Heartfiller, the haze begins to lift from my vision like morning sea mist in the midday sun.
Shapes sharpen. Color returns. Sound rushes in—wind rustling through the stalks, the groan of wagon wheels.
I’ve wandered to the same spot where the Mercyenforcers gathered us yesterday to read out the rules and sort us like livestock.
That’s when I see them.
The field before me is chaos.
Contestants are unraveling in their own minds, screaming, fighting, running from hallucinations, soft coral glowing at their chests.
There is a litter of tools on the ground—rusted shears, splintered shovel handles—and several in hands.
A pitchfork lies on its side like it was dropped mid-strike.
Even a long wooden tool snapped in half is deadly in the right hands.
Mercyenforcers lurk in the shadows of the perimeter of trees, feasting their eyes on the mess.
Someone backs into me. Jace. He darts around me, clutching a bloodied sack of food like a weapon, running from something only he can see. I spin, trying to find Caelus, but stumble on Talia on her knees on the ground, rocking back and forth sobbing, arguing with a hallucination.
Paces away, Lira is tearing through the field, trampling vines and scattering roots in her wake.
She turns over a planting bed, digging through loose soil with her bare hands, looking for something.
Her eyes dart, unfocused, and for a second she looks toward the tree line as if something’s chasing her.
She stashes a tangle of branches under her arm and glances toward the edge of the field—where two Mercyenforcers watch just beyond the rows, one with sharpened spears, the other scribbling on a paper as if taking notes.
This is madness.
Nearby, metal scrapes against metal. Sparks fly, steel clashing with steel. Contestants stagger between trampled crops. Some cry out. Rusted tools-turned-weapons are being swung at nothing. I dodge past Orrick, who is bleeding from the temple and shouting a name I don’t recognize.
Beyond the haze of smoke, across the field, I spot Caelus.
He moves like a man torn in half, holding an axe, swaying it one way and then the next.
He steps back and falters as if the air is pushing against him.
His weapon wavers, then lowers. His mouth moves, saying something I can’t hear.
Then he falls to his knees. His shoulders rise and fall like he’s drowning. My heart twists.
“Caelus?” I rush his way, darting around several others, when I smack into Rhythe and stumble sideways.
Rhythe, who tried to frame Dorian as a rebel.
Rhythe, who probably now wants me dead. His hair is plastered to his forehead by a sheen of sweat.
His widened irises dart back and forth as if hunting for threats in every shadow. The tiny crystal at his chest glows.
The fear on his face stops me dead in my tracks.
His nose flares with each ragged breath. His lips are parted, quivering; the usual intimidating smirk is gone. “Keep your voice down,” he says to some unseen hallucination. “They’ll hear you.”
I can’t move, transfixed.
“What do you mean we can’t win this? We can. Don’t talk like that.” He reaches for nothing. “Ivy, listen—”
My pulse skips. Ivy…
“No one even suspects us.” He claws at the sides of his face, and I can feel control buckling in him.
“Put that down. Put that blade down, now.” Then he picks up a sharpened pruning blade as if he is the Ivy he’s imagining.
“We can’t give up now that we’ve come this close. We have to fight. We have to live.”
He cares about Ivy.
And she cares about him. How did I not see it before?
They knew each other before coming here!
They must’ve. And he’s hiding it from his alliance for a reason.
He mutters something I can’t hear, resolve cementing in his eyes.
“If there’s no other way. If they’ve really found us out.
Are you sure? You’re sure?” He crouches low.
He gasps. “They know? They know. They’ll kill us, Ivy.
They’ll kill us both, unless we…” He double fists the weapon, pressing the sharp tip to himself.
I suck in a breath. He’s going to do it. He’s going to shove that blade into his stomach.
“Same time,” he says.
Everything in me wants to scream.
“One.”
But I’m cemented in place.
“Two.”
“Ah!” Lira charges past me, knocking the blade out of his hands. He shoves her off of him and throws her to the ground hard, about to bring his fist down to her face when she rips the glowing shard from his chest.
He blinks, his eyes widening. Then he stumbles up, ghostly pale, worried, I bet, about what Lira might have heard.
He glances around, paranoid. He cares about Ivy, which could mean he is lying about his motive for wanting to win.
All his talk about fighting for Saltblood, when Dorian is one of us and he tried to have him killed.
Maybe Rhythe has been lying to all of us the entire time.
Maybe he was lying to me just to get me on his side. He knows I’m a good smuggler.
In the distance, Caelus still stares, unfocused, like he’s just outrun something, standing there as if he isn’t sure if the nightmare is over.
“Rhythe.” Lira grips him by the shoulders. “You’re alright. It was a memory Heartfiller. A strange kind I’ve never seen.” Her brows furrow, showing him the dark-coral shard.
He flinches in fear before regaining his composure. “What happened?”
“You were about to shove this into your chest!” She kicks the blade before turning to glare at me. “She was standing there watching.”
Rhythe’s cold eyes widen first, then narrow, a divot appearing between his brows.
“No, I—” I start.
“What’s going on here?” Talia is behind us with a pitchfork in her hand. “What did Axira do?”
“She was about to let Rhythe die,” Lira says.
“I—” I was. I really was. The thought chills me. Rhythe picks up the pruning blade, spinning it in his hand as he strolls toward me, as cavalier and nonchalant as he normally is. As if he wasn’t just scared to death of losing Ivy.
“Brave of you to choose to be my enemy, Axira.” He continues past me. Lira and Talia trail behind him, but I stand in their way.
“He’s lying to both of you,” I say. “He’s using this alliance to position himself at the end, not to rob the Benevolent but to win. With Ivy.”
Lira guffaws. Talia studies me a beat too long, but she scoops up a few more weapons and tosses one at Lira before catching up to Rhythe. They are a lost cause. He can have them both.
Just then, Mercyenforcers drag bodies with bruised purple throats and swollen lips across the scorched ground, the stench of bile thick in the air. One by one, they pile them up—the first tossed on the ground is a girl with half-eaten food still clutched in her hand. Their discolored lips…throats…
“Poisoned.” The word slips from some desperate place inside me.
“Steep price for disloyalty, like I said.” Dreth raps his knuckles against the metal plates across his chest.
They poisoned them. They poisoned the crops.
More bodies are tossed on top of the first one. Titus and Tamara, I think are their names. I didn’t know them. Never held a conversation with them and yet I can’t look away.
A crowd forms, watching in fretful silence.
Talia holds on to Jace, gaping in horror, her palm on her chest. Mae is stifling a sob into Dorian’s shoulder; his bandaged face is still bloodstained.
Ivy is in the shadows, looking from the bodies, then to me, then back to the bodies.
Orrick and Lira look like they might lose their midday meal.
More bodies. More dead.
Dead for eating the food we were supposed to burn.
Bile rises in my throat and out my mouth.
Titus lies on top, his arm bent back in an unnatural way.
Something’s different about him. I step closer.
His skin is covered in dirt as if he worked hard, did what he was asked, and then took a bite of a piece of food at the end.
His throat isn’t purple and his lips are not swollen like the others’.
But his face is covered in blood like he was beaten for that bite the minute he finished it.
Kade calls my name, but I skim the chaos for a ribbon of white hair and race to Caelus.
“You’re okay,” I say, catching up with him. He’s gone deathly pale. His arms are rigid at his sides. A low sound escapes him—half a gasp, half a strangled word. I touch his arm gently, imagining my warmth could calm his storm.
“Back to the arena,” Dreth announces, directing us to the transport.
Caelus opens his palm, showing me the glowing darkened coral shard.
“I know,” I say. “I’ve never seen it work like that before. You’re okay, though, right?”
“No,” he says. “No, I’m not. When we get back, meet me in my tent once everyone’s asleep. Axira, I have something to tell you.”