When Stars Burn Out (Europa Book 1)

by Anna Vera

  He whispers, “You’re okay.”

  “Am I?” I whisper back—feeling suddenly weak and afraid and unsteady on my feet. Rion gets off the wall, taking a couple steps closer to me. Now he really is like a shadow.

  “Yes, for as long as he needs you to be.”

  “And when he doesn’t?”

  There’s a pause, during which Rion stuffs his fists into his pockets and shrugs. “I’m here.”

  “All right,” I say, studying him. “I’m ready.”

  “I’ll be right behind you,” he adds, throwing an arm out in front of me and pushing open the door.

  The room is packed. Mia, Silas, and Jac crowd one end of the room while Merope, Cyb and Apollo gather in the other. A series of others—whom I’ve never met—stand with restraints and one holds a syringe full of amber liquid at the ready.

  Mia’s eyes jump off me, skittering to Rion, her expression strangely suspicious. Then, click, and she’s back to being cryptic and enigmatic and unreadable—as always.

  “He’s been asking for you.”

  “Sorry,” I say hoarsely, walking in. Instantly, I know Rion was right to warn me. Lios isn’t himself at all—a pale husk of who he once was, ill and empty and mirthless.

  Cyb kneels beside his bed, whispering soothingly. He won’t hold her hand. I can tell she’s trying hard not to lose it altogether and burst into tears—just like me.

  “Hey,” I say, sitting at the end of his bed, patting his foot through the covers lovingly. “What’s wrong?”

  Lios’s foggy, incoherent eyes regard mine with a hostility they have never expressed before. To anybody. Ever.

  “You—you’ll help me,” he growls. “Won’t you, Eos?”

  “Of course.” I look to Rion questioningly. He shakes his head a fraction of an inch, a gesture that I interpret to mean, The others don’t know your real names. They don’t know the truth about who you really are . . . We’ve got to keep it secret.

  “Eos, please, tell them—”

  “My name is Elizabeth, Lucas,” I add resolutely.

  “You too?” Lios’s voice cracks hysterically, his eyes red and bloodshot, flitting around the room. “All of you? Really?”

  “Shh,” I soothe.

  “Where are we? Where’s Onyx!?”

  “Lucas, just try to breathe deeply and relax—”

  “No, get me out of here!” Lios thrusts a heavy arm directly at Cyb’s chest, shoving her out of the way. He sits up, so fast his stitches tear with a sickening rip!

  I launch to his side, helping Cyb and Merope pin him back down in bed. Even Apollo finds a way to help, whispering firmly and hastily, begging our friend to calm himself.

  But Lios raves on. “Who are they?” he asks, sneering at the hordes of other people standing stagnant in the room. “Get your hands off me! Let me go, I’m leaving this place!”

  “You’re hurting yourself,” I say, surprised to hear my voice escalate to a yell. “Stop moving right now, or they are going to sedate you, and we won’t see you again for another week!”

  But he’s absolutely out of his mind—thrashing, far stronger than the rest of us combined. I see spots of blood bloom through his white hospital gown, and feel myself officially panic.

  He’s not just hurting himself . . .

  He’s killing himself.

  “LET ME GO,” he screams, flailing.

  “STOP.” I grab his jaw, forcing him to face me, forcing his eyes to look at mine. “Stop right now, Lucas!”

  “THAT IS NOT MY NAME.”

  “LIOS!” I cry, voice quaking. I breathe heavily, watching his sapphire eyes fill with tears. “It’s okay, Lios. We’re here.”

  He breaks, crying in earnest now. I pull his face onto my chest and rock him back and forth, feeling tears burn along the edge of my eyelids threateningly.

  “Eos,” he weeps. “Eos, I knew . . . I knew you’d . . .”

  “You’re going to be okay, Lios.”

  “Promise?” Lios’s dry lips brush against my chest.

  “Do you trust me?” I ask him, but find myself peering at the other side of the room—at Rion. “You do, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “I’m going to help you feel better, okay?” My eyes shift to look at Mia now. One step ahead of me, she collects the syringe from an apprentice and starts closing in.

  Cyb and Merope nod at me, their grip on Lios tightening.

  “I don’t want to go back to sleep,” he begs. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”

  “Never,” I lie.

  “Tell her to go away,” he snarls, glaring at Mia, but she pins his arm down with the alacrity of an experienced professional, swiftly injecting the amber liquid.

  Lios wilts. “Why?” he asks, looking at me. “Why did . . . ?”

  My jaw feels jammed shut, unable to say another word, to utter another lie—even if it’s a helpful one. Lios regards me with open betrayal as he fades, slipping back into himself. I feel him wither in my arms as he falls asleep.

  I rest Lios back on his bed, feeling weirdly compelled to rid myself of this strange, unfamiliar side of him—a side I don’t like and am pathetically afraid of.

  Mia pulls up his hospital gown, identifying several stitches that have torn. “Damn . . . We need more rags, hot water, and another strong dose of antibiotics,” she remits. The others bustle off, gathering her requested supplies hastily.

  Cyb nudges my side, standing. “Let’s get out of their way.”

  Merope and I follow her out of the room, the three of us left utterly speechless. Apollo files out after us, shaking his head with grim defeat as he passes, exiting the cabin without anyone there to escort or supervise him.

  “Why is he allowed free rein?” Cyb asks, her eyes still puffy and red from crying.

  I shrug. My energy is gone. I can’t shake the look on Lios’s face when he registered that I’d lied to him—that I’d helped put him back to sleep, even though he begged me not to.

  It was for his own good, Eos.

  You didn’t have a choice.

  Jac and Silas wander into the living room, badgering Rion with a series of whispered questions. Rion raises his eyes to find mine, though, apparently ignoring them both.

  “Can I talk to you?” he asks, tearing way from Jac and Silas, who stare irritably at me—as do Merope and Cyb, though maybe it’s tonight’s experience that’s warped their expressions.

  “Yeah,” I say, nodding a hollow goodbye to my friends, both pale and emotionally beat. I exit Mabel’s cabin alongside Rion, bursting into the starless night.

  It’s snowing really heavily, now—so heavily, it’s like getting caught in a wedding veil. The world takes on that unique, stifled silence that it only adopts when it snows.

  “I see Apollo isn’t being supervised,” I note. “Am I still?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Is that what you wanted to talk about?” I ask and he gives me a subtle nod, his hair collecting snow. “You aren’t supervising me anymore? Really?”

  Smiling slyly, he adds, “Not unless you want me to.”

  “Stop.” I scoff, grinning despite myself, and trudge through the knee-deep snow into the dark.

  The night blanches a shade lighter.

  I can’t sleep. I lie awake, eyes glued to the sagging ceiling.

  In these early, solitary hours, I can feel Earth’s sharp edges carving into my soul, eroding everything I was before all this and reforming me into somebody different.

  The people living today aren’t like the people that lived here generations ago. They have been reduced to varieties of despair, strength, and ceaseless, blind fighting.

  They are Silas—killers, out of necessity.

  And now I’m becoming just like them, day by day.

 
I glance sideways at Rion. His hair is still stuffed inside the warm carapace of his hat—eyes rimmed in a fan of black lashes, his chest rising and falling peacefully with sleep. I get the oddest desire to rest my palm flush against it, to feel his breath and the warmth of his body, to—

  His eyes are open.

  “Do you watch me sleep every night?” he asks, groaning as he stretches, the vodka fully worn off in favor of what’s likely to become a brutal hangover.

  “This is the first time I’ve really seen you sleep.” I roll over so my back’s facing him, keeping the blooming blush in my cheeks to myself as I look at the opposite wall dancing with shadow and firelight. “You were talking.”

  After getting sick of arguing nightly over who had to sleep on the cold dirt floor, with a threadbare blanket and a pillow that failed miserably to offset the discomfort, we began sharing a bed.

  And every night, if he slept at all, he’d sleep-talk.

  “I was talking in my sleep again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You were spouting off numbers, as usual.” I drag the covers over my shoulder, readjusting myself. I can feel the heat of his body beat through the layers. “Aren’t you going to tell me what you’re dreaming about?”

  “I don’t remember anything.”

  “Liar,” I say, yawning. “Let’s go back to sleep, then.”

  “It’s dawn already,” he says, throwing the covers off him so he can get up. I roll back over on my side, facing him as he pulls on a clean, white shirt. His body is smooth and supple, skin as bronze as a summer holiday, utter perfection until my eyes get to his wrists and forearms, scarred beyond belief.

  My chest aches every time I see them.

  Yet again, he catches me looking. With a laugh, he tosses me a fresh shirt. “Your turn to change—my turn to stare.”

  “I don’t think so.” I snatch the shirt midair and dive under the privacy of the bedcovers, changing. When I pop back up a few minutes later, he’s dragging on boots, grimacing.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “I’m never drinking again,” he grunts.

  “You never really told me why you were in the first place.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “To me, it does,” I say, and Rion’s eyes find mine, looking up through the hair falling in his eyes.

  “Everything.” He gets up, rummaging through a pantry for a bit before pulling out the last of his water bottles. He thrusts it toward me and asks, “You want any?”

  “It’s okay,” I say softly. “You need it more than I do.”

  “I would agree,” he replies before downing all of it in a few deep swigs, his complexion improving. “I was drinking yesterday because I failed Mabel.”

  My mouth goes dry. “What do you know about us, Rion?”

  Rion tosses the empty water bottle away, grabbing his pistol to check if it’s loaded. He removes the magazine, stuffing a few additional rounds in its empty well, staying thoughtfully quiet.

  After a minute, he looks up. “I was drunk yesterday, Eos.”

  I sneer. “So what?”

  Rion sits against the wall, under the map of Europe, with a flexed jaw and a deep look of introspection. “So I shouldn’t have said anything—that’s what.”

  I stay perched on the edge of the bed. A sense of foreboding washes up, acerbic and sharp, as I consider telling Rion the one thing I haven’t even told my own league.

  “Somebody, a specimen, told me not to trust the Project.”

  “Really?” Rion asks, voice pitched low.

  “Tell me she was wrong.” My voice quakes as I ask—for the first time, truly, openly questioning my Purpose. “Tell me you know for a fact she is a liar, that she’s crazy.”

  “I don’t know that,” he says, rubbing his jaw. “But what I do know is you’ve been—you’re being—lied to.”

  “By who?”

  “Your people,” he says, nodding up at the sky. “How else do you think we know your names? There’s somebody aboard your ship, a traitor. They give us a list with everything we need to know about every league that deploys.” He sighs, chest rising and falling, his gaze fixed through the window to his left. “Apollo helped us during the pushback because of his records—we know he’s human. We also know he’s invisible to the Muted. We just couldn’t pass up his help, even though I wanted to.”

  Reflexively, my hand finds my throat—the bruises from his choking me have faded with time, but apparently Rion’s fury for what Apollo did to me hasn’t.

  “We’ve had specimens help before, during pushbacks, but without loyalty to us, they’d usually escape—that’s why we didn’t invite you to help,” he adds, and it all makes sense.

  “What—what else do you know?” I inquire unsteadily.

  “Deployment coordinates, so we can be nearby the second leagues land and harvest them.”

  “Harvest?” I say, standing, suddenly feeling hostile.

  “We get their names, ages . . . stats,” he goes on, eyeing me in a strangely fervent way. “Skillsets.”

  “And what did this list say about me?”

  “Nothing,” he says, taking a single step and bridging the gap between us swiftly. “We were told this league would contain four specimens—and yet we got five. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I lie.

  “The traitor aboard your ship gave us permission to harvest every deployed specimen, with the exception of one: an eighteen year old girl with a skillset dangerous enough to rip the war we’re trying to wage in half.”

  “War?” I echo, suffocating. “What kind of skillset?”

  “The girl belonged to your league, Eos.” Rion’s hand finds mine and pulls it up, tracing a finger along the microchip scar lining the inner side of it. “I think you’re that girl.”

  “Impossible,” I say breathily, pulling my wrist away, trying and failing to form a single coherent thought. “I don’t even have a skillset, let alone a powerful one.”

  Rion’s eyes rove over mine, as though now that he’s spilled his soul, there’s no holding him back. He wets his lips and comes closer, holding out a hand.

  “Not one you know about,” he whispers, cupping my cheek in his palm. Instantly I feel that distinct flare of warmth I’ve felt before, with him and with Apollo.

  I think about how every skillset feels differently. Making skin-to-skin contact with Apollo felt like a rhythm, a shrill song that I didn’t know the words to. With Rion, it’s deeper, wilder, and less a rhythm—more breathless, unpredictable.

  Like falling.

  I buckle under the influx of energy, gasping.

  Rion retracts his hand. The feeling dies instantly, and just like before, I’m left desperate and hungry, my desire to touch him once more as crazed and irrepressible as addiction.

  “All along, you thought it was Apollo’s skillset ability you felt when you touched him,” Rion divulges quietly. “But it wasn’t his ability, it was your own you were feeling.”

  “Apollo said it was—”

  “His, yes,” Rion interjects. “Trying to throw you off.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s trying to keep you out of—” But he’s stopped midsentence. There is a knocking at the door, a muffled voice added to it moments later—shouting.

  Exhaling sharply, he studies the door, as though deciding if he’s going to open or it or not. It continues to rattle under the fists of whoever is trying to gain entry.

  “Harvesting us,” I say, nostrils flared, “for what?”

  “For war.”

  “Rion, please,” I gasp wildly, shaking. “Tell me everything.”

  “When we’re alone,” he whispers huskily and jerks open the hut’s door with a heave, exposing Jac shivering outside with
a tall shadow at his back. A tall, smirking shadow.

  Apollo.

  Rion snorts, throwing the door shut in their faces. But it’s reopened a second later, hesitantly, by Jac. “Listen, man, I know you’re still pissed—”

  Rion glares lethally at Apollo. “Leave.”

  Apollo slinks in, eyeing the pistol on Rion’s shelf. “Hate to tell you, but you’re no longer in charge. Mabel’s back and she’s personally sent—”

  “Back?” Rion interjects, glaring accusatorily at Jac who, as a fairly large guy, surprises me by looking terrified. “Why didn’t you come tell me immediately?”

  “I know I should’ve, man, I’m sorry.”

  “What stopped you?” Rion approaches, fierce and predatory, so furious I feel myself tense, readying to break up a fight.

  Jac shakes his head, lips twitching. “I was only looking out for you, man.” His eyes widen, fierce in their own right. “But you got super drunk yesterday, and Mabel hates—”

  Rion finds his pistol, and for a heart-pounding second I’m afraid he’s actually going to pull it. Instead, he sheathes it in the waistband of his pants, grabs a jacket, and goes to leave.

  But just as he rips open the door again, two more people are standing there: Mia and Silas.

  “You can’t see her right now, Rion,” Mia declares, splaying her fingers over his chest. “She’s meeting with an ally, an ally we really need to—”

  “When can I see her?”

  “Today,” Silas interjects, swallowing. He looks to Jac in an imploring kind of way. “After the supply drop.”

  Rion’s deathly quiet for too long. Everybody tenses.

  At last, he says, “The drop?” His tone indicates he, like all the rest of us, completely forgot about it.

  Mia replies by way of holding out a calendar. “Today marks the start of a new quarter. The drop isn’t scheduled to land for a few hours, but it’s probably best if—”

  “First run?” Rion says coldly.

  “We’re heading into midwinter. We’re going to need all the supplies we can carry.” Mia leans in, gripping Rion’s bicep in her thin fingers, and whispers, “Mabel won’t see them until the job is done, Rion.”

  “Fine,” he says, turning to the others. “Who’s coming?”