Chapter 29
Isit beside Caelus in his tent after everyone is asleep, letting our thighs touch.
His hands rest in his lap, knuckles pale, but his shoulders are drawn up slightly, as if he’s bracing for an impact.
He is shaken, staring at nothingness. “Was it the hallucination?” I ask in a whisper. It still sounds too loud.
His jaw flexes once, the muscle twitching like a tremor.
“What did you see?”
“No.” His voice is rough. Not cold, but heavy. “We don’t need to discuss that.”
I inhale slowly and shift to face him. The movement disturbs the fragile peace we’ve found, his leg shimmying away from mine. If he isn’t upset about the hallucination the strange memory filler gave him, then what?
He blinks slowly, then speaks. “The tournament is not a competition, Axira. It’s a harvest.”
My skin tingles like I’m being pricked with a thousand tiny needles.
“A kiss between the winning truest-love match makes a powerful magic,” he says, quieter now. “The magic we are going to steal.”
I straighten.
“The Benevolent claims the kiss is just a symbol—an ending to the tournament,” he continues.
“But it’s more than that. My father drains magic from the contestants when they kiss.
It unleashes something. I’ve seen it, once.
At an Ascension Ceremony when I was ten years old.
The magic appears like Heartfillers, small ones, thousands of them.
My father duplicates them in his lab, and the more he duplicates them, the less potent they become.
Eventually, he has to harvest a new set. About every ten years.”
I go cold all over, my thoughts scattering, racing to knit themselves into something that makes sense. I touch my lips, remembering Kade’s…“Is it all kisses?”
“Just the one at the Ascension Ceremony. He gives something to the contestants so that the connection produces magic.” He leans in.
“And I figure if we harvest the magic, it will stop him from being able to keep the lowborn addicted to feeling good, their minds duller than an old blade, fixated on the pleasures, distracted, numb.”
I think of Miss Omon and Nichol, but also the others—Dorian, Ferdy, the Saltblood. Their slack eyes. Their manufactured happy. We could free them. We could free all of them. I blink quickly to dry the moisture forming in my eyes. “Then we would, what, rally them to fight?” I ask.
“No. No, we don’t want war,” Caelus says. “But if we take the weapon out of my father’s hands, we will have control. He will have no power without the lowborn oppressed.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “He has all the power in his position.”
“That’s what he wants you to think. He only has power because it’s given to him.
” He says it like we have some kind of power.
Like lowborn could choose to not give it.
Like we weren’t born beneath the boot of it.
I almost laugh, but don’t because of how he looks at me, like it’s true. I scoot closer to him.
He continues, “The magnitude of the power from the kiss depends on how much the kiss means to the people who share it. The more desperate for love, the more—”
“Power it has,” I finish, the words tasting bitter.
“Exactly. So he has made the districts as miserable as possible, stringing them along on false promises and temporary pleasures. He wants as many people as possible, the most desperate possible, to enter the tournament. And once you’re in here, watching people drop left and right, turning your attention away from—”
“Horrible things,” I whisper. Like Finn’s murder, and Orrick being manipulated into doing it.
Like burning food while our families and friends starve.
“They can’t live with the horrible things they’ve done.
So they only become more desperate to win.
” It feels like the floor vanishes beneath my feet.
The Benevolent has built his kingdom from the desperation of his people.
“He’s manipulating lowborn to fuel our own oppression.
Making us believe we are powerless. That we need his Heartfillers. ”
“Yes.” Caelus’s chin dips in shame. He’s carried this secret for too long.
I see Dorian cowering bloody on the ground, a contestant’s swollen purple lips, Kade’s stare, glinting with dark ambition. And Rhythe, pulling all the strings he can, just to reclaim a shred of power and control. I recoil—not with my body, but somewhere deeper. My arms cross my chest.
The lowest in society aren’t desperate by accident. People are hungry and sick on purpose.
We are desperate by design.
Engineered to be harvested.
I want to scream. I want to run. But I just hold my arms around myself like a shield. “Why are you just now telling me this?” I ask.
Caelus exhales through his nose, a quiet surrender in his shoulders. “I’ve spent years preparing for this moment, Axira. I worried that if I told you the truth, you’d walk away.”
“That’s preposterous!” I release my balled fists. I want to be angry and say he should have told me from the start, but if he had told me at the beginning—when all I cared about was Serafina and my orphanage—would I have stayed? I can’t honestly say I would have.
“So we have to steal the kiss magic,” I say, smoothing my clothes.
“Right,” he says, the corners of his mouth tugging to not quite a smile, but something resolved. He shifts closer to me, and I savor the warmth of him.
“How, exactly?”
“When Dorian and Mae share their first kiss as citizens at the Ascension Ceremony, shards will appear. They’ll form near the heart first—tiny, glowing crystals.
But the more real the love, the more the shards multiply.
” He goes on to explain how the Benevolent’s Mercyenforcers will use special gloves with a siphoning vial to collect them as they grow and fall like a flower speeding through its life cycle.
“The shards are more delicate than petals. The gentlest graze of a hand will cause them to fall to the ground. I’m planning a distraction. We’ll need to gather them quickly and run.”
“Alright, then.” I settle in deeper beside him, feeling more nervous. We still have to survive the trials to even get to the Ascension Ceremony. “And after that, if we succeed, then what?”
“You leave on a ship.” He swallows.
“Right.” A beat passes between us. “I’m scared, Caelus.”
Something inside me cracks open, hot and vulnerable.
I tell him about the hallucinations from my trial, about Serafina, about the heart-rending fear of seeing her here, of not knowing how sick she is, whether she has enough medicine, if she’s even alive.
And then, how she snorts when she laughs, how excited she was the first time she lost a tooth, thinking it was some kind of magic that made it regrow.
I tell him how Miss Omon would let us make bread sometimes when we saved up the ingredients and how Serafina’s favorite thing is kneading it.
When I mention the first time she tasted the flour, thinking it would taste like a roll, I chuckle.
He listens without saying much, elbows resting on his knees, head tilted slightly. By the time I’m done talking, I’m smiling and breathless, reminiscing. The doom and gloom of the last trial fades into something lighter for a moment in the tent and I steal it, grabbing it tight.
When I’m done, Caelus studies me. “The way you talk about Dockers Row, the Saltblood, Miss Omon…it sounds like the best place.”
“It is.”
He looks past me with longing, and I would trade gold to mine his thoughts.
“The first time I saw you in that hallway, I knew who you were,” he says. “I was embarrassed to be scrubbing floors in front of a notorious thief. I’d figured Lucent brought you inside for some reason to find me, but then you didn’t know who I was.”
“Why were you scrubbing the floors? And why is your bedroom so empty? Why do you live like you do?” I asked him once before, but it feels like we’ve crossed some invisible bridge between us, so maybe I’ll get an answer this time.
“My father is grooming me to take over after he dies,” he says, “but he is constantly finding that I am ‘not fit to lead.’ So he has taken away the privileges of being Skyborn, one by one, to, as he says, teach me an appreciation for my position. He says I could benefit from living as a lowborn for some time. Turns out I’m very bad at learning some lessons. ”
Silence stretches between us. There is comfort in sitting with the truth and not saying anything and letting it fill the air.
Like we are holding the space for it together.
My thoughts move to Rhythe, to Dorian, who is still a target, I bet, to the unending problems that await us outside the fold of this tent.
Caelus flexes his hand between us, palm up, asking for mine.
I set my fingers on top of his, unsure what to expect, now that he’s not holding it to lead me anywhere.
But when our skin meets, a breath catches somewhere in my chest. His warmth sweeps behind me like a tide I am not ready for.
He locks his fingers in mine, trapping them between his, and it scrambles my thoughts.
Then his arms open wide, reaching for me.
I scoot closer to him and lay my head on his chest. His arms close around me, and the world goes quiet. I can feel the steady thrum of his heart, hear the slow inhale he takes against my hair. His scent is cold and clean, like wind after a snow.
My hands hover uselessly, unsure of where to settle.
After a determined breath, I let them lie naturally, curved around his back.
His chin rests on my head and a warmth blooms in my chest. I don’t think of the danger ahead, the many complications of making Rhythe an enemy, or what happens after Caelus and I succeed.
I only focus on the steadiness of my breath, in and out, its calm, slow cadence.
He doesn’t let go, holding on to me like I am something he wants to keep.