If I was a smarter man, I would have known from the very beginning that it was all trouble.
Even when I had known her for mere hours, Tisaanah was wringing concessions out of me before I realized that I was making them.
I’m inviting you inside, but only because… You can stay here for tonight. Just tonight. I don’t know why I believe you.
If you go, I go.
Always a step further, a step further. She drove forward with such relentless determination, always, no matter what. How could I not follow? And while every one of those steps hurt, like muscles creaking back to life after years of disuse, they still felt so right. A slow, tentative, utterly fucking terrifying return to a natural state.
Still, I didn’t realize.
Not when I agreed to let her into my house, or my mind, or my past. Not even when I realized that every time I was without her, I found myself collecting little stories and oddities to tell her about when I saw her again, like stones that I slipped into my pockets.
Maybe just a dash of it seeped through my thick skull that night, when I stood behind her, barely touching and
yet drowning in her scent and her skin and my own roaring blood:
Trouble, Max. Trouble.
But that was nothing compared to this moment. The moment that I stood there, watching her walk up the steps to the Towers, knowing that nothing I could say or do would stop her.
And could I blame her? There was still so much I couldn’t tell her. And it was almost poetic: that the very thing that had made me let her in that night, nearly six months ago — that determination, that powerful tenacity that made me believe in someone for the first time in so long… That would be the thing to wrench her away.
Despite it all, I still admired it, even as I hated it.
And it was only then that it became clear: all of those little steps were leading us right over the edge of a cliff.
I didn’t see any of it until it was too damned late.
 |
“Tell me that’s not hers.”
My voice came out in a frantic, desperate growl that I hardly recognized.
I am such an absolute fucking idiot.
I had stood there and stared at the doors long after she left, my fingers clenched at my sides. I felt like a piece of clothing with a loose thread, and she taken it with her, slowly unraveling me. It seemed like hours before I could even bring myself to move. When I could, I went to the Tower of Midnight, stood in the lobby, and I waited. And waited. And waited.
Hours had passed. The daily hustle and bustle of the Towers thinned, quieted. I stood, then sat, then paced, then sat.
I’m such an absolute fucking idiot.
When the doors to the main column opened and a familiar face greeted me, I took one look at her and felt like all of the blood had drained from my body at once.
“Tell me that’s not hers,” I said again, my hand catching Nura’s arm.
Nura looked down at herself, taking in the spatters of red across her white jacket.
“It’s fine. She got a little overly excited at her first blood pact.”
She said this as if it was supposed to be a relief. A relief, instead of the confirmation of all my worst fears.
“A blood pact?” I rasped.
My fingers unintentionally tightened around Nura’s arm.
She looked at my hand, then my face, and sighed.
“Walk with me,” she said, jerking her chin down the hallway.
“Nura, Ascended help me if—”
“Just— walk with me.” For one brief moment, so brief it was little more than a brush, she laid her hand over mine. Then, she pulled away and started down the hall.
A blood pact. A fucking blood pact.
I felt like my body had forgotten how to move. And then I followed.
|
Nura guided me through a maze of white, winding hallways until we arrived at a plain door, far removed from the bustling lobbies. As she unlocked it and gestured for me to enter, I realized it was her apartment. The space was as sterile, sparse, and oppressively empty as everything else in this damn place—white furniture on white floors against white walls.
Nura nudged the front door shut, then crossed the living room and headed to her bedroom. I stood in the doorway, watching as she began unbuttoning her bloodstained jacket.
“Where is she?”
Maybe there was still hope. Maybe there was still time.
Maybe I was wrong.
Nura lifted one finger to point to the ceiling. “Up there.
Recovering.”
Recovering.
I had to force my next words up my throat.
“You gave her Reshaye. That’s what you were asking her to do.”
It was the first time I had said my theory aloud, and I wanted so desperately to be wrong.
But Nura said, “Yes.” Fuck. Fuck.
“She’s a good candidate,” she went on. “And we need it now. We’re on the brink of something worse than the last one.”
I couldn’t speak. My hands clenched at my sides until they trembled. The room brightened in a grotesque lurch as all of the lanterns in the room flared at once.
I had never been this angry, this horrified.
“Even for you,” I choked out. “Even for you, this is— This is—”
“Calm down.”
“Calm down?” Another flare. “That thing should be
destroyed, and you know it.”
“It’s too useful.” Nura cast me a sidelong glance, and there was something about that look that I hated — hated how much it made her look like the girl I fell in love with when we were twenty and much happier and stupider than we were now. “It won’t be like last time, Max. And she didn’t do anything she didn’t want to do.”
“She doesn’t know, Nura.”
“She would have done anything to save her people. It wouldn’t matter if she did.”
She was right. I knew it and hated it. Because back then, I had done the same thing. I’d sat in the Arch Commandant’s office as he offered me everything I’d ever wanted. Selfish things. Petty things. That’s all it took, and I signed away my soul.
I’d deserved it, at least. But Tisaanah– Ascended above,
Tisaanah, and her noble causes–
I didn’t allow myself to think about the next words that flew from my lips.
“I’ll do it,” I said, desperately. “I’ll do it instead. Take it away from her and give it to me.”
Nura had been halfway down unbuttoning her jacket, but at this she froze, then slowly turned to me. For a moment, she looked genuinely sad, and the rawness of that glance might have been startling under other circumstances. “You don’t mean that.”
“I’ll do it now,” I said. My hands were already at my sleeve, exposing my forearm and the scar from the last pact I’d made all those years ago. “We have history. I’d be better at Wielding it. It will listen to me.”
Nura was shaking her head. “Max…”
“Just do it.” I staggered forward. “This is what you’ve all wanted anyway, isn’t it? And I–”
“It’s too late, Max.” Nura’s voice sliced through mine, loud enough to echo and hang in the air. She let out a breath and dropped her gaze. “It’s too late,” she repeated, more calmly. “And even if it wasn’t…”
I was still clutching my sleeve. I looked down at my shaking hand. At the sun tattoo on my wrist, at the scar just below it. All the signs of the commitment I’d once had for the Orders, and marks they had left behind after they had taken everything from me and thrown the rest away.
Just like they would do to Tisaanah.
And the horrifying truth was beginning to sink in – that there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to stop it.
I didn’t look up, but I heard Nura let out a long breath. Heard her jacket fall to the ground. “And even if it wasn’t,” she muttered, “I don’t think anyone wants to play with that kind of fire anymore, anyway.”
Slowly, I lifted my gaze, only to avert my eyes again. “Put some clothes on,” I muttered.
“Why, does this make you uncomfortable?”
She turned to face me fully, presenting her naked body…
…And the burn scars that covered it.
Every inch of that albino Valtain skin was mottled with red and purple, melted into something almost unrecognizable. The scars ran all the way from her shriveled toes up past her collarbone, over her throat, ending behind her left ear. She covered them up with her high-necked, long-sleeved jackets, but you could see the edges at the back of her neck if you knew where to look. The healers only barely managed to save her face. Practically peeled off all the skin and regrew it from scratch.
I didn’t answer.
I had seen her body like this only once before, after the end of the war — after Sarlazai, after my family. She showed up at the door of my apartment, and we practically devoured each other with frenzied, manic intensity. But everything about our tryst felt toxic, like we were trying to fuck something dead back to life and pretending we didn’t both smell the rot. We didn’t even speak. When we were done, she rolled over, put her clothes on, and I didn’t see her again for years.
The truth was, it did make me uncomfortable to see her this way.
And that felt wrong, because I was the one who did it to her.
“We both made our sacrifices,” she said, quietly.
I almost laughed. Sacrifices. If that was what we wanted to call it.
Murder. Slaughter. “Sacrifices.” Sure.
Eight years ago, on the second-worst day of my life, Nura and I had stood in bloody chaos in the mountains, fighting a battle we could not hope to win. And she had reached into my mind and forced me to decimate the entire city of Sarlazai. A betrayal that won the war, killed hundreds, and completely eviscerated me.
And yet, sometimes I forgot that when she made that decision, she fully expected to die for it. Sacrifices.
Just the thought of that day made my nostrils burn with the smell of burnt flesh. And we were about to step back into that. Tisaanah was about to be thrown back into that.
Nura approached me, her features imbued with a softness that I hadn’t seen for many years.
“You and your bleeding heart, Max,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I really am.”
I choked out, “I need you to tell me that this wasn’t why you brought her to me. I need you to tell me that I haven’t been grooming her for this.”
Silence. “Nura—”
“It’s obsessed with you. We thought that a connection to you would make it easier for her to control it. Make it more likely to accept her.”
I let out a strangled sound that was something between a bitter laugh and a grunt, as if I had been punched in the stomach.
“But I meant what I said, that day. I thought— I thought it would be good for you, to have something to do with your life.” She tilted my chin towards her. “Help us help her, Max. You can guide her through this.”
I pulled away. “Like hell I can.”
Not after what that thing did to me. Not after what I, however unwittingly, did to Tisaanah.
I shot Nura a glare. “I’m sure you’re about to tell me it isn’t a request.”
A little smile flitted across her mouth. “It has to be a request. Tisaanah wrote it into her pact.”
“She— what?”
She strode back to her closet. “She was smart. Very specific her in requests. We couldn’t get out of our promises if we wanted to. And one of them was about you.” She selected another one of her identical white jackets. “That you’re released from all Order obligations. Fresh slate. Congratulations. You’re a free man.”
Words abandoned me.
I didn’t deserve her. No one deserved her.
Nura slid her jacket over her shoulders, covering her burnt skin with spotless white. It hung open as she turned to me once more, pausing.
“I did try,” she said. “I tried Wielding it. It wouldn’t accept me.” She said this as if it were some great shame, some terrible failure. “It wouldn’t accept anyone — and we tried so many. But… then she showed up. And it was really just a hunch, at first. Maybe because she’s Threllian. Maybe something else, I don’t know. But the minute it tasted her blood, it liked her.”
Her brows lowered over those sharp eyes, mouth tight. I recognized that look. She was jealous. Jealous – but not because of me. Because of it. She was jealous that Tisaanah got to have this thing tear her apart.
My anger devoured me so completely that it burned itself out, and suddenly, I was numb — like every emotion became the deafening ringing left behind after a loud noise.
I couldn’t. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t watch this thing destroy Tisaanah the way it had destroyed me — and it would, even though she was better than I was in every way, stronger, kinder, more deserving. Still just another light to be snuffed out. Another tool to be wielded.
And I, however unwittingly, had fed her right to them.
Nura buttoned her jacket, sealing away her scars and with them, that brief glimpse of human vulnerability.
“She’s made her choice, Max. Now you just have to make yours.”
“There is no choice,” I spat, and started for the door. “Where are you going?”
Anywhere. Wherever was the farthest from here — wherever was the farthest from this damned tower and these people and that thing.
“I will not be a part of this, Nura. I won’t do it.”
I can’t. I can’t do it.
I threw open the door and started down those oppressive, winding hallways — hallways that drowned me in open space. It was silent save for my rapid footsteps, a reminder of everything I couldn’t outrun. But all I could hear was Tisaanah’s lilting voice, from our day in the city all those months ago.
I heard it over and over, following every step:
If I become lost, I will never be found again. I will never be found again.
