Chapter 16 It’s a No-Brainer
It's a No-Brainer
The cold hung in the halls, creeping down the tunnels until it found its way into the hollow behind Alina’s sternum, where it rooted and pulsed.
She woke shivering, as she always did now, the taste of iron and old fear still coating her tongue.
She lay flat on her back for a while, staring at the curve of the stone ceiling above her bed.
The furs she’d buried herself under did little to banish the cold.
Maybe if she lay still for long enough, she could freeze solid and forget the shape of her own thoughts.
No such luck. The ache in her arms pulled her upright, and the fresh scab on her cheek split again, weeping blood.
She sucked in air and squeezed her eyes shut, just until the pain faded to a dull, familiar throb.
When she opened them, she felt as empty as her room was.
She was cut off from everybody else. Cut off from him.
She had seen it in his face. She was truly alone.
Her only consolation was that Finn and Maven had survived.
They had been here when Alina and the others had come back from the mission that had gone so terribly wrong.
Not only had she almost hurt her own people, or worse, killed them.
But they hadn’t achieved what they had set out to do.
None of the so urgently needed supplies had been won.
And on top, her father and his cronies now knew what she was.
And with whom. All because she had lost control.
All her fault. At least she didn’t have the deaths of Finn and Maven on her conscience.
Outside her room, no early-morning sounds were audible—the Caves had shifted into their usual cadence of the day. She had slept late.
She threw on the first shirt that didn’t reek of old sweat and shame and draped her jacket over her shoulders, despite the mud from the night before still staining the material and the tear at the left elbow.
It was the only one she had, and, tattered as it was, she still felt a little bit protected by it.
Less exposed. The wool was coarse against her skin, but she hardly noticed.
Her hands trembled as she laced her boots, and the shiver made the bruises on her forearms flare dark and angry beneath the skin.
Out in the corridor, the torchlight was weak and yellow, just enough to catch the smudges of soot along the walls.
To the side of the cave-in the rubble had been cleared, but the section was closed off.
She moved quietly in the other direction, half-expecting to run into someone, half-hoping she wouldn’t.
Down the main passage, past the empty kitchen, she skirted the mess hall, still sticky from last night’s spilled ale and low spirits, and found her way out into the courtyard—or at least what passed for one here.
It was little more than a muddy basin where the rebels dumped their boots and, on rare occasions, themselves.
The morning mist had already begun to curl up off the stones, casting everything in a blur of half-seen shapes.
It was quiet, too, the kind of quiet that felt like it was holding its breath, waiting to see if the day would be any different from the last.
Alina pushed through the warped door and let the morning slap her awake.
The air bit into her lungs and made her teeth buzz, each breath a low ghost curling in her ribcage.
She blinked hard, swiping her fist under her leaking nose, and watched her breath coil out in a fragile line, pale and inconsequential.
If she squinted, she could almost see herself drifting away on the updraft—a princess reduced to vapor, dissolving before the world even bothered to take proper notice.
She started walking, not sure if she was running away or toward something—just that stillness had become unbearable, that if she kept moving, she might outrun the ache behind her eyes.
Her feet found the old bridge without her mind catching up, and for a moment she leaned over the splintered rail, watching the thin thread of water unspool below.
Moss and lichen clung stubbornly to the wet stone, and the slow creep of morning fog softened the hard edges of everything, transforming the world into a painting done in breath and blurred memory.
Alina let herself be shrouded in it, stripped of the jagged realities that waited back in the stronghold, and allowed herself to dissolve into unknowing for the first time since…
No. No, she would not think of the battle, not of that moment when her legs had frozen and the world had gone silent except for the roar in her head, white and void as a struck bell.
She would not think of the first arrow, the one that split the air and split her open, the way her hands had trembled in useless protest. She would not think of Marcus’s grunt as the crossbow bolt found his shoulder, or how the blood soaked through his shirt so quickly, like ink spilled on a letter.
And above all, she would not, would not, could not think about the hot, alien surge that had welled up inside her, the way it clawed for escape, the way it had felt right to let it loose.
But memory had its own tides, and there was no dam strong enough to keep them out. Each step she took was a step away from who she’d been, and a step toward something new and frightening, something with teeth and claws and a hunger that would not be denied.
She stopped walking and looked at her hands.
They were still shaking. She balled them tightly into fists, then shoved them deep into her jacket pockets, lined with old handkerchiefs and lint and nothing useful.
The shiver that lived in her bones made the bruises on her forearms pulse with fresh color.
She pressed her shoulders forward and folded herself in on the ache, determined to at least own her misery.
Once she was off the bridge, the trees quickly grew dense; ancient, gnarled things that loomed on either side of the footpath, their branches skeletal in the thin dawn.
Alina walked until the ground sloped down and the path vanished beneath her boots, until the fog thickened into something she could almost touch, until each lungful of air felt like swallowing a mouthful of clouds.
Only when the stronghold was lost behind her did she allow herself to slow down, to let her legs go soft and her pace stutter.
The sound of her own breath filled her ears, loud and raw, and the muffling hush drowned out the memory of the battle, just a little.
She stumbled upon a glade, a shallow bowl of brownish-green ringed by stones slick with moss and the memory of old rain.
Here the mist pooled so thick she could barely see the far side, and the silence pressed close against her eardrums, a hush so deep it felt sacred—or maybe just abandoned.
She let herself fall back against the nearest boulder, and only then did she realize her cheeks were wet, cold lines running from her eyes to her chin.
She wiped them away with the heel of her hand—furious, ashamed—and willed herself to look up, to actually see the world instead of living inside her own skull.
That’s when she noticed a person sitting on the far side of the clearing, on the splintered trunk of a fallen birch.
It was Finn, though the last place she’d have expected to find him was here, alone, and unguarded.
In his lap sat a battered guitar. Homemade by the look of it, it seemed pieced together from scraps of mismatched wood and a tangle of wire that couldn’t possibly hold a tune.
He was hunched over the instrument, focused on his hands on the strings.
His hair was its usual tangled mess of russet and gold gone wild in the damp, making his appearance as chaotic as ever.
He didn’t look up. He just played, fingers moving with a careful grace that seemed at odds with everything else about him: the way he slouched, the way his jacket hung askew, this general air of carelessness.
Alina watched, feeling suddenly exposed, as if by finding him here she had stumbled on something private, almost intimate.
She thought about turning back, but the effort of retreating was too great for her fragile body after the exertion it had taken to get here.
Instead, she exhaled and let herself slide down the boulder to collapse into the grass, hugging her knees to her chest.
After a while, Finn looked up. His eyes were tired, the skin under them blue-black from lack of sleep, but his mouth broke into a crooked smile anyway. “Didn’t expect to see you up this early,” he said, voice soft enough to not startle the birds.
Alina tried to smile back, but it hurt too much. “I could say the same.”
Finn shrugged, then returned his focus to the guitar. He plucked at a string, frowned, twisted a tuning peg, and tried again. “Can’t sleep lately,” he said. “Too much going on in this big, beautiful brain.”
Alina snorted, surprised by the edge of laughter in it. “You really think so highly of yourself, don’t you?”
“Someone’s got to.” He glanced at her from under his hair, and there was something gentle in the way he did it, like he already knew what she needed and was just waiting for her to ask.
She didn’t. She let the conversation die, watching as Finn kept fiddling with the guitar, coaxing it into tune.
After a minute, he started playing—not a song, exactly, but a wandering line of notes that circled and crossed, sometimes stumbling, sometimes soaring.
It was rough at first, the sound jarring against the perfect silence, but after a while the melody found itself.
It was a song Alina half-recognized, though she couldn’t place the memory.
It made her chest ache. She swallowed, hard, and focused on the ground.
Finn watched her, still playing. “You all right?” he asked, after a minute.