Page 138 of The Space Between Stars

“You’re welcome.”

What had she done to him?

What had it done to her?

“With my best interests in mind. And I decided it was in my best interest not to listen. How do you feel?”

How did he feel? He’d just learned the depth of their connection: shared Ruxian blood. Compromisingly dimwitted and morbidly anxious, for one. And she—she already knew they had something in common. She—

His tilt toward derangement leveled in a glance. She looked cold and frail, and a whisper of the queen he’d seen on the Repository’s rooftop almost three moons ago.

Calver rolled from the cot and dropped to his knees beside her. For years, the thought of anyone laying a hand on him had been repulsive. Now he wanted nothing more than to pull her close, and he couldn’t do it.

She scrunched her speckled nose. “Careful. I might start to think you don’t resent me.”

“Death is irony at its core, and it is a little bit funny, Cal.”

Her eyes widened in the silent way that said ‘You are, in fact, the brunt of my joke.’ “I hear it’s hereditary.”

Hereditary.

He held in both a laugh and a cry. Death as a result of saving her certainly was.

“No. Decent folk are asleep at this hour.”

“You don’t see what I see, Calver. I don’t live without you. And I know you don’t want to live without me.”

He didn’t want to… the words couldn’t find purchase in his mind. They just kept slipping away into blackness. Maybe Ruxians couldn’t see as far as the Tera’thian coronation. He shook his head.

“It’s not so much Fate as listening to the space between stars.”

A chill of remembrance ran through him. Why did that sound so familiar?

“Toronoff’s theory of void space?” She looked at him like he should have it written down and folded in his pocket, obviously. They had conversed at length on Toronoff in the cave outside Chira’na. Fankalo had owned dozens of Toronoff’s volumes, and the void mantra Calisto had taught all his students had originated from his works.

Calver started.

“For only in nothing can you find everything. When you seek answers, seek the space between stars, and the space between stars will fill you,” she finished. He had forgotten the rest of it. “Toronoff said Ruxians who mastered the space between stars were the most powerful. I’ve been practicing the meditations he documented, but… they’re difficult.”

The void space theory. That couldn’t be the same void space—his void space. Calver shifted. Swallowed—an impossible task, given the dryness of his stump. Knowing what he now knew, why had he become so attached to the void mantra? Calisto had read them hundreds of philosophies. Why had he pushed Calver to fixate on that single phrase?

Raimee watched him like she was picking him apart. “What is it?”

he lied. When he paused, Raimee scooted closer to him and cocked her head. It had nothing to do with Toronoff’s theory of the void space, but it might be believable.

“What was she like?”

Calver knew she didn’t mean his mother, this time.

“How so?”