Page 214 of The Space Between Stars

She’d been nearly this weak once before, after a day in Chira’na with a hand on his arm. His eyes raked the horizon. There was no Creation tree in Steila at the edge of the desert. Perhaps one of the swaying palms on the city edges… Perhaps a large patch of grass… Fucking idiot.

He needed to get her to a Red Wing medic. Calver’s throat seized painfully as he bundled her wet kaftan around her and pulled her into him, careful not to touch her skin. He stood, but his legs couldn’t seem to move as his mind spiraled into the well of inevitability that lay ahead. A medic wouldn’t do anything. He’d seen Tume’amic like this. Where their bodies failed and grew stiff from weakness and malnutrition. Not knowing what else to do, Calver started humming.

Raimee’s head lolled into his chest. Chin turned upward, she tried to smile at him. Her eyes were dark rings, her cheeks concave. It was more of a grimace. “It’s not you… It’s that shadow… in you…”

The hairs on Calver’s neck rose.

No. No. No no no.

It rode his despair like a leaf acrest a wave. Calver stopped humming. He sought the same solution as before: fought to focus on the man he wanted to be… But he didn’t want to be the person who killed her, and for that want, the Survivor did not dissipate.

Her speckles were stark against the spaces between them. “What if I can hold it away the same as—”

The Survivor lashed forward in a sudden jolt, and another trickle of energy released into Calver. Raimee pulled in a sharp breath that never moved past her throat.

Her body changed then, in the way a body did when whatever it was that occupied it left it behind. The Survivor returned to the void’s rim, leaving Calver alone, and taking the only thing he’d ever dared to dream for with it.

No no no. This wasn’t real.

Heart pounding, he set Raimee down and put an ear to her chest. It didn’t rise.

He couldn’t breathe either.

Calver huddled over her body and pulled her face into his hands as he’d imagined doing a hundred times. He imagined every ounce of life she’d poured into him flooding back to her. Imagination was such a wonderful thing. Beautiful, infinite… and appallingly useless.

There was a chain around her neck, tucked into her robes. He pulled on it. A familiar stained-glass dragonfly pendant sat on its end.

He’d done this.

The Survivor snaked forward. {A mercy.}

This was what it had wanted all along. Void.

{You don’t have to feel.}

And he shouldn’t. He should have long since turned to ash. He was a blight. A disease. Silence that begot silence. What was going to cure him?

{Your sacrifice at the coronation. I’ve seen all futures for you, Calverous. Your paths all merge in the end.}

He beat the Survivor away with all the mental ferocity he possessed. Void. Void. VOID.

And as though punching through paper, Calver tumbled into a deeper layer of the void than ever before. It spanned out in the eye of his mind—emptiness both imminently and infinitely—and engulfed him.

The pain disappeared.

FANKALO

As Fankalo sat beside Mitek on the pebble beach, the pool of warmth that had sat in her belly through the evening suddenly drained. Her Luck began to churn with darkness. She lifted her head from his shoulder.

Mitek cleared his throat. “Hey, Brat…there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I just wasn’t sure how to say it, considering everything that’s happened.”

Her spine stiffened.

“It’s about Calver.” Mitek ran his teeth over his lower lip. “You know how we’ve been redacting any transcriptions of the Ratka from Nelfinden medical records?” There were enough Ghosts now that those who fell ill or injured—or worse—might have their scarring recorded. Enough that the mark couldn’t pass as coincidence.

She nodded, unsure how much news surrounding Calver she could take. She hoped this was just an issue over a medic refusing their offer to pay him off.

“Well. There’s this doctor, Azim, out in Casowhatan. And he has this record of a fourteen-year-old boy with an infection on his arm. And…” Mitek’s eyes found the waves like he was hoping an answer might pop out of the sea. “He had a scar described exactly as being like the Ratka beneath his collarbone. Same side.”