Chapter 61 #2
Time moved slowly. Her only indication that time had passed at all was a progress bar over Lucky’s chamber.
At least she could be somewhat near Airik, listening to him talk, though she didn’t understand the words.
Thankfully, she didn’t see Xallix again.
She hovered at the edges of the command deck, a respectable distance away, holding Airik’s microwave manual, which he’d given her to keep busy while he and Torren fussed over screens.
After another hour or so, while she’d been staring at the blinking sensor light, Airik came to her and surreptitiously slipped her a small white bar.
“A little like chocolate,” he explained, eyeing the surveillance sensor before turning back to her.
“Not so sweet, but not bad. There are better things in my world. When we return, I will give you everything. But…we must stay here a little longer, until the end of the day, when Xallix disappears the planet.”
Nora frowned. “Disappears?”
He paused. “Breaks the planet, I mean. This world has reached the end of its life.”
Nora dropped the bar. This again. “What does that mean? There are animals living here that haven’t reached the end of their life at all. We saw them—”
“Nora,” Airik said, his tone suddenly stern. “I told you before—I was here to break this planet because it holds poison. What did you think that meant?”
She sank into her designated chair in the corner of the room. “I…thought you said it wrong, that you meant something else. Like, blow up the city or something.”
Airik hesitated before speaking. “We break entire planets—so small until all that is left is sand. Anything that lives here will die in seconds. This world would have died anyway. The shooting stars—they’re not stars at all but machines that fix the air so life can breathe it.
One day, there won’t be enough of them for the air to be healthy.
” He bent low, so their eyes were level.
“Do you still think I mean something else?”
Something terrible turned within him. She could see it in the fierce glow of his eyes that pierced her, holding her still.
“I have done so much worse than breaking a planet.” He stepped closer. “I am— You called me a soldier. I thought you knew what I was.”
“Our soldiers don’t destroy entire planets.”
“If they could, I think they would. It is only that humans don’t have the tools to do it.”
How could she argue with that? Fighting memories of the Abeona from rising, Nora steeled herself and said, “The other planets that you’ve…broken. Were they abandoned by people, too?”
After a long pause, he answered. “Usually.”
“Do you… Don’t you mean always?”
“No. I mean usually.”
Nora pressed back against the wall, her chest feeling like it might burst. She had always known he had done things that could forever remain unspeakable. But she hadn’t expected them to be on a world-ending scale.
“You didn’t know what I did. How I was made to be.” He spoke so quietly she could barely hear. “Maybe you should know this, too—about all the things I’ve done. If I am…sorry.”
Nora’s leg began to bounce. She slapped a hand on top of her knee, forcing it to stop.
The glow in his eyes trembled. A faint line of blue had gathered on his lashes.
If she condemned him now, the cracks he had just revealed would shatter.
She felt it just as strongly as the heartbeat racing in her chest. It would be as if everything he had suspected about himself were true all along, confirmed by his sense that she disapproved of him and of what he had done.
She would not be afraid of him.
“It doesn’t matter to me whether you’re sorry,” she said. Hoping he remembered their signal, she grabbed a loose strand of hair and touched it to her lips. “We don’t ever have to talk about it. I’ve never fought like you, but if you want to tell me, you can. I think you were forced—”
“Always,” he hissed. “It is always by force.”
At the sound of his admission—sharp and blistering—both of their heads whipped back to the other side of the command deck, where Torren had been sitting.
Torren’s back was still turned. His head bobbed from side to side. Two small wires stuck out from his ears. He tapped his head, and the music he was listening to grew louder. Above him, another sensor blinked.
When she looked back at Airik, he stood resolute, but his eyes had grown dull, betrayed by exhaustion. Not just from last night’s lack of sleep, she thought, but perhaps from his entire life.
“You see our medicine—how it can heal. There’s so much more that the world I belong to can do that is good.
Most want it. Even if not all of it is used right.
” His voice dropped lower. “But what my body does is not for me to decide. My body—my mind—they carry the bad weight, and all I can do is hope. That what I do will help. Even if it hurts me. And—” He cut off, his throat bobbing as he swallowed—bearing all the pain that had once been hidden, now bleeding to the surface.
She resisted the urge to turn around, wanting to go back to just moments before and not question what he did. Because she couldn’t hold him or tell him that no matter what he said, she didn’t believe this was the man he would have been if things had been different.
He leaned over her, blocking the blinking sensor’s light. Her skin flushed as the heat rolled off him, like standing too close to an open flame.
“I am not sorry,” he said with a weary force.
“Even when I was small, when I was afraid to die, I was not sorry for what they made me do. And now, I will never be sorry for anything I’ve done—because it brought me here and I…
found you.” His gaze dropped to her lips, then away from her altogether.
“Now I understand what it was that for all my life I had been hoping for.”
Unable to stop herself, she reached for him.
Before she could touch him, he abruptly left. The sensor light glared back at her, softly blinking. Clutching the hundred-year-old manual to her chest, Nora listened as he sat beside Torren and began speaking hurriedly in their own language of clipped syllables and long vowels.
Even when I was small, when I was afraid to die, I was not sorry for what they made me do.
Those words weren’t a mistake. Quietly, she sat in her designated corner, her hands clenched in her lap, consumed by emotions she didn’t allow herself to face.
Another realization dropped like a boulder from the sky.
The following days, weeks, months, maybe even years played out in her mind.
This would be it. Her on the edges of Airik’s life, waiting alone.
The best she could hope for was a little of the Veynari’s good Airik spoke of and that they’d let her keep Lucky.
The possibility of that was slim. How good could a world be that used children to fight in wars? Not one that cared about her keeping her pet.
She wiped her eyes, staring at the old woman’s face on the book’s cover, proudly holding a plate of microwaved chicken and vegetables.
Airik looked at her as if she were the life-giving sun. She’d never been anything good to anyone in her life. Even if her future would be hell, she would go wherever she had to go if it meant they stayed in the same world.
She retrieved the white “chocolate” bar and took a bite.
It tasted like tomatoes. Though she didn’t like it and felt she was about to throw up, she tried to eat it anyway because Airik had given it to her.
Her leg started bouncing again as the thoughts sank deeper.
Back to Earth. To Joe, the Abeona, her mother. This time she didn’t bother to stop it.
Utterly lost, all she could do was reread the manual’s same stupid line over and over: Cooking in a microwave means there’s less mess to clean up!