B rayan and I walked in silence. My head hurt so much that I probably wouldn’t have been able to hear anything that he had to say, anyway—
the sounds of our footsteps were drowned out by the throbbing of my own blood in my skull.
The only thought it let through was, I made a mistake.
We had only made it a couple of miles down the road when the strap on Brayan’s pack got caught on a hanging tree branch and snapped in two. Brayan muttered a string of expletives and sat on an overturned tree to try to mend it. I sat beside him, silent. I had a stick in my hand, which I’d been absentmindedly peeling bark from. Now I used it to draw in the dirt. I drew, of course, the same thing I always did—the three shapes, always in the same arrangement.
Brayan glanced at me. “Your lip is bleeding again.” I touched my face. “So it is.”
“I—It won’t scar.”
Ascended forbid Brayan apologize.
“Is that Brayan-Farlione-speak for ‘I shouldn’t have hit you?’” “You deserved it,” he said, though he sounded unconvinced.
I sighed. I didn’t actually care whether Brayan was sorry or not.
“We can do more good this way,” he said—gently, which was strange to hear. “For Ara. We can do more in Besrith.”
I wasn’t sure if I gave a flying fuck about Ara anymore. I said nothing and drew the shapes again.
Brayan nodded at my drawing. “We should figure out where that is.
Maybe we can go there, if Besrith isn’t to your liking.”
“It’s not a place.”
I shocked myself with the statement. It slipped from my lips without my permission, and immediately, I sat upright.
What did I mean, it isn’t a place? It looked like a place—like a map, a cluster of islands.
“You know what it is?” Brayan sounded confused. “I—”
I do.
I fucking do.
Ascended fucking above.
I picked up the stick with a trembling hand. Slowly, I drew a line—long, curved, encompassing all the frames, with a delicate point at the bottom. Then one in the middle, slightly upturned at the edges.
And at last, I drew two more shapes near the top. Eyes.
One green, in the center of the shape on the left. The other silver.
The shapes weren’t a map, or an island, or a code. They were the boundaries where tan skin met white. They were a face.
Tisaanah’s face.
I was such a fucking idiot.
Brayan looked over my shoulder. “Shit. You’re right. It’s not islands.” I stood. “I’m going.”
“What?”
“I’m going back.”
I was already walking down the path. With every step, my headache grew more intense. I felt like something was clawing at that door in the back of my mind, slowly chipping away at the metal.
You don’t want to go there— Shut the hell up.
“Max!”
“You can come, or you can go to Besrith,” I called back. Silence for a few footsteps. A muttered curse.
And he followed.
