I didn’t know if I should ask. Didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
Then, with a soft, sweet kiss, Elise lowered herself astride me. A ragged breath escaped me, and I pulled her forehead to mine, shock and pleasure cascading through my body. This was happening. We began to move together, slow at first, uncertain, then building in tempo as the sensations began to take hold.
I was lost in the feeling of her. Needed more. Needed everything. Without thinking, I reached out and caressed her mind with my own, desperate to be closer. Whether consciously or not, she pulled hungrily back. Excitement screaming through my body and mind, I gave myself over. Completely.
I think my heart nearly stopped.
We shared a sharp gasp as our each and every sensation—our very senses of being—all came crashing together, intertwining into one. We felt it all. Every thought in our two heads. The way we felt about each other, about this moment. The pain, the fear, the hope—all of it swirling in an infinitely complex nebula of everything that was her, that was me. That was us.
We felt it all, together. All at once. All crested by each plunge of ecstasy rushing through my body, and every blissful tingle building in hers.
It was too much to handle.
We clung to each other, mouths frozen breathlessly open, and convulsed as our link took us over the edge, rocketing us into a field of bright, blinding bliss, so intense I thought we’d both pass out.
Then the light began to dim to a soothing, glorious glow, and Elise collapsed on me even as I crumpled back into the skimmer seat, unable to move or speak or do anything other than lie there in one another’s arms, catching our breaths, until sleep took us.
31
Empty Nest
The light of dawn struck with a veritable parade of aches and pains marching across my body. It wasn’t gentle. That I’d managed to sleep at all seemed a testament to the severity of the scudstorm we’d survived yesterday. Or maybe just a testament to how completely Elise had…
Elise.
It hit me like a bolt.
She wasn’t there. Not on my chest, where I thought she’d been for most of the night, and not in the front seats either. I scrambled for the door, found my left leg and arm mostly asleep with pins and needles, and nearly toppled out of the skimmer. My bare feet found the grass just as the blanket wrapped around me snagged on something and yanked taut—helping me catch my balance, if not maintain my modesty. Sniffling to the left spun me around before I could worry about that.
I let out a relieved breath at the sight of Elise sitting against the skimmer. Then I took in her red eyes and runny nose, and my relief soured. She looked surprised by my sudden appearance— not that I blamed her—but there was something else. She was clearly upset, and I got the immediate impression it was the kind of upset I wasn’t meant to stumble in on.
I wanted to ask if she was okay. Wanted to vanish and pretend I’d never interrupted. For a long handful of seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then her eyes flicked downward and back up. “You’re, uh…”
My cheeks burned hot as my attention returned to the salacious lack of cover my snagged blanket was currently providing.
“Right.” I tugged the blanket and freed it enough to adequately cover myself. “Yeah. I, uh.”
A faint smile touched her tear-streaked cheeks as she watched me squirm.
“Pants, then breakfast?” I said.
“They teach you that one in tyro academy?”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. The sound brought a little life to Elise’s smile, and she waved me on to go get dressed.
“How long have you been up?” I asked as I sat down next to her, clothed and bearing half of our remaining rations.
She took the food I offered her, shrugging. “An hour. Maybe two. Couldn’t really sleep after…” She looked at me, then away to the tree line when I held her gaze too long. “I don’t know. After everything.”
Everything. Everything as in our only friends and family being potential prisoners or casualties of the Legion? Or everything as in us?
Probably both. Everything was everything, after all.
“Elise…”
I didn’t know what to say. Was she regretting what had happened between us? Part of me suddenly felt as if I’d taken advantage of her emotional turmoil in allowing it to happen. I wanted to reach for her hand, but it didn’t feel right.
She let out a long breath and shook her head. “Sorry, I just… It’s a lot to take in right now. I wasn’t expecting any of this. And last night…”
“Was a mistake?”
The words slipped out of my mouth without permission, reeking of guilt and insecurity.
Elise shook her head without hesitation, looking startled that I’d even suggest such a thing. “No. No, I don’t mean that. I just… We need to find them, Hal. My dad. The others. Last night, I was scared—still am scared—and I just wanted to feel…” She shook her head again. “I think what I’m trying very poorly to say is that I’m sorry.”
Her? Sorry to me? I couldn’t be hearing her right.
“It’s… okay?” I shook my head. “Nope, that doesn’t feel right. Look”— I took her hand and was relieved when she didn’t shy away—“I know it’s scary right now, but we’re gonna do this thing together. We’ll find out where they are, and we’ll do whatever we have to.”
She turned to meet my eyes, gauging the sincerity of my words.
“And you have absolutely nothing to apologize about, by the way,” I added. “No way. I’m not sorry that we—I mean, I… I really like you, Elise. You’re… Meeting you has been the best—”
She put a finger gently to my lips. A quiet smile had crested her mouth, more beautiful than any dawning sun. “I…” she started. It was only then I noticed the soft sadness behind her smile. “Can you tell me another time? After we’ve found them? I just… I can’t…” Her brow was creasing, her lips threatening to tremble.
“I’ll wait,” I said, giving her hand a squeeze before standing up. “As long as you want. Whatever you need.”
I didn’t fully understand, but I wasn’t about to press the issue when she needed support more than ever.
She dropped my gaze, looking relieved, and some of the life returned to her smile. “Oh please. I bet you say that to all the girls you swive on the run from the Legion and their evil overlords.”
I cocked my head, considering. “You’re not wrong. That has been my move one hundred percent of the times I’ve found myself in this situation.”
She shot me a look.
I offered her a hand. “Ready to face the day, outlaw?”
She took my hand and rose until we stood within a few inches of one another, nearly eye to eye. Close enough that I could smell the sweet tang of dried fruit on her breath.
I should have stepped back, given her space. But my body didn’t want to—wanted instead to pull her tight, close the spare inches between my lips and hers. Forget about the rest of the world just a little while longer.
She put a gentle hand to my chest, distancing me in gesture more than in physical space. “Renegade outlaws first, teenagers second?”
I forced myself to nod, struggling to rein in the part of myself that wanted to just kiss her anyway. She was right. “They teach you that one in renegade outlaw academy?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Mine was better.”
No arguments here, I thought to say. Except I still couldn’t seem to back up and look away. Just like I couldn’t not see the part of her that likewise didn’t look away even as she bade me to. Even after everything we’d shared last night, my head spun with the simple closeness of her.
“And if I find myself overwhelmed by the desire to kiss you in the meantime?” I heard myself say, my voice barely a whisper.
She brushed lightly at my cheek with her thumb, then leaned in and planted a soft kiss on the spot before pushing past me to the skimmer.
“Well, I guess you are an outlaw, aren’t you?
”
Despite my bravado that morning, renegade outlaw life, it turned out, hadn’t magically become an easy, rewarding venture overnight. Mostly, it continued its long string of tough breaks with a particularly well-placed gut shot.
The temple was empty.
I’d known it as soon as we’d found the place and hid the skimmer, I suppose. But I still held on to hope right up until the moment I pushed the big hardsteel door open to a roomful of silent darkness.
No one flipped on the lights and yelled, Surprise! As far as I could tell, nothing had changed at all since the last time Carlisle and I had set out for Franco’s… Alpha, had it really only been last cycle? It felt like entire seasons had passed.
Looking around the room, I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. That we’d walk in and find them all there, waiting, perfectly fine? That Carlisle would turn, clap me on the shoulder, and tell me I’d done a good job? No. Deep down, I’d known this was coming. Elise, on the other hand…
The look on her face made me ache with sympathy.
“Oh,” she finally whispered.
“They could still be out there,” I said, too quickly. “Lying low somewhere. They might be on their way right now. We should give them at least a day before we get too worried.”
I almost cringed at how much it sounded—like I was trying to convince myself.
“Let’s just”—I looked around the room, not really sure where I was going with this—“get cleaned up. Have something more than dried fruit. Try to relax until we know more. I don’t know about you, but I could really use a hot shower.”
Elise’s expression was vacant. I wasn’t sure she’d heard me at all.
“We need to check the reels.”
I glanced at Carlisle’s node, wanting to argue but knowing she was right. As twisted and unreliable as the stories surrounding yesterday’s disturbances would probably be, I doubted either of us would be able to focus on anything else until we saw what they were saying. That said, I also wasn’t sure how Elise would react if and when the news—true or not—was the bad kind. I didn’t know how I’d handle it myself.
As short as our time together had been, those four men had become the closest thing to friends and family I had left. Especially Carlisle, who’d given me purpose and saved my ass on more occasions than I could quickly count. I couldn’t imagine facing the raknoth without him. But it was more than just that. I cared for the man. He was odd at times. Distant. But he was also kind, and undeniably good.
I wasn’t ready to hear bad news. And I was pretty sure Elise wasn’t either.
“I can take it, Hal,” she said quietly, apparently reading my indecision.
I studied her somber expression and found myself reluctantly agreeing. Ready or not, we both needed to hear something right now. So I woke the node on Carlisle’s desk. There were no obvious messages waiting for us. I tried not to think about what that meant as the newsreel headlines began populating the display.
It wasn’t hard to spot what we were looking for.
The top reels were comprised almost solely of variations of the same story. Legion Takes Decisive Action Against Divinity Terrorist Cell. Elise found my hand and gripped it tightly as I waved up the first vid. I wanted to roll my eyes as the reporter began detailing the situation. According to them, Legion officials had tracked the terrorist group behind the recent Vantage attack to their base of operations in Divinity and had been forced to move in to eliminate the dire threat to the city’s safety.
“Fortunately,” the reporter went on, “the tragic Legion casualties sustained during the raid were not in vain. Multiple key targets were eliminated during the operation, including Francesco Fields, the suspected head of the cell, and the man known only as Carlisle, one of the two perpetrators identified at the Vantage lab attack last…”
The reporter buzzed on somewhere far away. Elise’s grip was painfully tight on my hand, her lips trembling. I didn’t know what to do—what to say. The story was a lie. A raknoth fabrication. It had to be. Right?
In the background, I vaguely heard the reporter say something about Haldin Raish, terrorist, and his suspected accomplice, Elise Fields, remaining at large. Legion authorities were now offering a sizable reward for any information. I paused the reel, feeling sick, mind reeling.
“They lie,” I said, reaching for Elise. “We know they lie.”
She pushed my hand away and stumbled a few steps back, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I just… need some time. Alone. Please.”
The pain in her eyes hit me harder than Alton Parker’s fist. I wanted to pull her to me, take her pain for myself. But the look she gave me told me not to try. Not right then, at least.
So I watched her hurry for the door, fighting the instinct screaming at me to go after her—to hold her close and never let her go. I watched her go, my mind numb, and once she’d gone, I dropped heavily into Carlisle’s chair, buried my face in my hands, and wondered what in demons’ fiery depths we were supposed to do next.
32
Broto
When I was six, my parents had taken me on our first family camping trip. No training. No Legion. Just the three of us, an old, patched-up canvas shelter, and the northern woods right along the base of the Auborean Mountains for four entire days.
As far as I could remember, it had been one of the best trips of my life.
Until the third day, at least, when I’d ventured too close to a patch of wild puffscratch bushes and found out exactly where that ridiculous name came from. That was the day I found out just how itchy my flesh was capable of feeling. I remember being almost in awe of the intensity of it. It was revelatory. And what followed had been one of the hardest challenges of my childhood.
“Don’t touch it, sweetling,” my mom had cooed as my dad stormed back to our shelter for the gloves and wipes. “You’ll spread it and then you’ll itch all over. Dad’s coming, sweetling. Show mommy your hands and let’s just—No, Hal! Don’t!”
Some itches, it turned out, are better left unscratched. And that’s what I told myself over and over as I sat there in the hideout, trying to accept that Elise needed her space for now. I did my best to keep busy. Cleaned myself up. Got some silverleaf and fresh bandages on my wounds. Tried to meditate. I even fired up a racing sim on Carlisle’s node. Nothing worked.
Which left me alone with my dark thoughts.
Were the stories true? Half-true? There was no way to know. Alpha be damned, they probably could’ve called the raid a training exercise and no one would’ve questioned it. But what about the others?
I tried to convince myself that Carlisle would’ve made it out alive—that he was too strong to fall to anything less than a raknoth and that, on top of that, I would’ve somehow felt it if he’d died when I was anywhere nearby. But how long should we wait here for him? Where else would we even go? And what about the Vantage data, and the raknoth themselves? The question churned in my mind like spoiling dairy, thickening the dread in my stomach.
But on the bright side, I only had an entire day to kill.
I paced until I was ready to burst, then I paced some more. I thought of the puffscratch bushes and my parents until the yearning ache was too much to handle. My thoughts drifted back to Sanctuary. To my old home, my old life. To Johnny.
I realized with a pang of guilt that I hadn’t thought of him for days. Realized with another jolt that I’d even missed our graduation, which should’ve been this past Honorsday. Just two days ago. It felt like a bad joke—my peers swapping their tyro tunics for new posts as active legionnaires even as half of Sanctuary was busy patrolling the streets for me.
Scud, some of my classmates were probably out there with them now.
But what would Johnny be doing? What must he be thinking, seeing all these reels? The Vantage attack. My mysterious resurrection. The raid on Franco’s last night. And with nothing but the word of the Legion and the WAN to go by…
Alpha be damned, my best friend probably thought I
was a terrorist. He might even be hunting me.
I thought of the message he’d sent, right after my funeral. Wondered if I should have answered it. Before my brain could properly chastise me about the risks, I was already back at Carlisle’s node. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore. Maybe now was exactly the time to risk turning to him.
Either way, I needed to do something.
So I navigated to my personal messages and scrolled through a long line of official-looking Legion notifications detailing just how breathtakingly gropped I was if and when they caught me, looking for Johnny’s old message. Something else caught my eye first.
A new message from Johnathan Wingard.
It was dated from yesterday, with a header that was more a running stream of profanity than an actual coherent thought. I probably had that coming. I almost didn’t want to know what the rest said, but I took a deep breath and tapped the message open anyway.
Hey broto,
* * *
Saw the funniest damn thing on the reels today.
What was it, you might be asking yourself? I’ll get to that in a minute. But first I want to focus on the fact that you’re asking yourself anything at all. How? Why?
BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT GROPPING DEAD, YOU GIANT, TRAITOROUS BEARDSPLITTER!!! THAT’S GROPPING WHY!!!
Sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t swipe in anger at a lifetime friend, right? That would just be downright scuddy of me.
KIND OF LIKE LETTING YOUR BEST GROPPING FRIEND THINK YOU’RE GROPPING DEAD!
Then again, if even half of what they’re saying about you is true, I guess I don’t actually know if we were ever really friends to begin with. I can’t picture it. I honest to Alpha cannot imagine you could do the things they’re saying. When did you start planning all this? Why? How could you?
I just can’t believe it. Didn’t believe it at first. I told myself they must be wrong about Vantage. That there’d been some confusion. But then I heard about the raid this morning and… Well, all I seem to have is evidence, Hal. Evidence, and a dead best friend (who’s apparently not so dead) who hasn’t seen fit to give ol’ Johnny a peep to the contrary. So I guess my friend actually is dead, even if his body is still running around out there, reading this message.
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