Page 100 of Bone Year

I have no feelings for Malric other than disgust. I was saving myself for Jace or someone special, for when I knew it was serious. And I almost gave that up to a man I despise because I couldn’t bear the sound of my own grief.

I should have brought the damn bottle of liquor with me, but I wasn’t thinking straight. Not with Draven showing up like that. Why is he always showing up late at night when no one else is around?

I sit up and reach for the journal. My head spins a bit as I blink back tears and wipe my face. Poppy appears and pushes my arm up until she can snuggle underneath it and stare at the journal with me like she wants to read it too.

I open it.

Nella’s handwriting is messy and uneven, like she was always writing in a hurry. I have to blink several more times to focus enough to read. I think it’s a mix of the poor penmanship and the booze.

The first several entries are from when she arrived. Complaints about the food and the menders who treated her like a child. How much she missed her brother. How scared she was but wouldn’t admit it out loud.

I flip forward past the early days until I see my name.

My breath catches.

Maelis came by after her shift today, and I was having a bad night. I couldn’t stop shaking from the pain, and she climbed onto the bed next to me and started reading out loud from that ridiculous romance novel Draven brought me about a vampire and a shifter.

Draven brought her books? I knew she had other books that I didn’t bring her but I never thought Draven visited her too?

I keep reading.

She did voices for all the characters, even the terrible ones, and I laughed so hard I forgot about my wing for a while. But the strange thing was the whole time she was there pressed against my side reading, the pain wasn’t that bad. I think it actually dulled, like something warm was spreading from her. I didn’t tell her because she would have said I was imagining things, but I don’t think so. I’ve been in this bed for weeks, and nothing has made the pain ease like that. Not the tonics or treatments. Just her. I don’t know what that means, but I think there might be something more to Maelis. I wonder if she’s hiding it or maybe doesn’t realize it at all.

My tears start to fall, and I close the journal, tucking it under my pillow.

I want to tell her she’s wrong. That there’s nothing special about me. I want to tell her that I didn’t ease her pain. I couldn’t save her even when it mattered.

But she’s not here to argue with me anymore.

She’s never going to be here again.

Poppy burrows closer. She’s the only thing that feels real right now.

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Angels were not made to feel the way we do. When the pain becomes too much, they have a choice we don’t. They can simply turn it off.”

— Professor Clementine, Endurance of Pain

Three days pass, and I’m still breathing.

It seems the dead don’t haunt you. They sit beside you, quiet, waiting to see what you do with the time they didn’t get.

I do what Draven told me to do, going to class and muddling through the usual routine. I don’t look at Jace when I pass him in the corridors, and he doesn’t look at me either. We’ve become experts at being in the same room without ever occupying the same space.

At night, I read Nella’s journal a couple pages at a time, because that’s all I can handle before the tears come and I have to stop. Poppy curls against my chest, and we fall asleep with the journal tucked under my pillow.

By the time Professor Rowan’s class rolls around on the fourth day, I’ve perfected the art of being numb. I sit in the back row where no one will notice me. I take notes without processing anything. I exist without really being present.

It’s easier that way.

“Today, we’re continuing our lecture on wounds you will encounter in the field and how to help them quickly when time matters,” she announces, her eyes sweeping the lecture hall. She’s a thin woman with silver hair pulled back so tight it looks painful. “When you’re deployed to a fissure site and the wounded start piling up, you won’t have the luxury of careful consideration. You’ll have minutes, sometimes seconds. Hesitation will kill more patients than incompetence ever will.”

I grip my pen tighter.

“Let’s start with wound sealing.” She holds up a small pouch filled with black powder. “Ash powder is made from burned ironwood mixed with crusite mineral. When you don’t have time for stitches, you pack the wound with this and touch a spark of current to ignite it.”

She demonstrates on a slab of meat on the table in front of her. The powder catches fire with a hiss, burning fast and hot, leaving the flesh cauterized and sealed.