Labyrinth of Stars(78)

He squeezed my hand, then raised his other to touch the Shurik clinging to his neck, the same little demon who had refused to leave his side this entire time. It writhed happily under his touch.

“You saved me,” he said in a quiet voice, holding my gaze. “I felt you pull me out of the darkness. But then I was stuck inside my head. I couldn’t reach you. My eyes wouldn’t open.”

You terrified me, I wanted to tell him. You cut me off. My heart feels empty without you in it. I’m scared and lonely and I don’t know what to do, or even how to save you.

“The Messenger did the real work.” I pointed to the Shurik on his chest. “And we had help.”

He grunted. “Answers yet?”

“More questions.” I looked at Jack, and a deep ache boomed through my heart: a twist, like a knife was slowly turning. “Talk to us.”

My grandfather didn’t stir from the steps. He tossed the rest of his sandwich into the grass and wiped his mouth with two large fingers. Those hands, which were still unfamiliar to me. The body I’d first known him in, the body that had known my grandmother and made my mother, had been slender and tall, with the elegance of a retired dancer. This one, stolen from a dying homeless man, was bulky with fat and muscle, and hairy as a bear. Sometimes, though, I could still forget the differences—his eyes were the same.

“I’m afraid to talk,” Jack replied, staring at the hill where my mother and grandmother were buried. “When I think about what I need to say to you, I’m reminded of all the ways I’m not human. I can’t pretend that I’m just an old man with a granddaughter.”

“I’m past caring.” Through the porch rails, I watched the Messenger. She looked alien to me from this distance, as alien as the others of her kind—too tall, too angular, with skin that was flawless and inhumanly pale.

The Mahati emerged from the barn, his long fingers twitching in agitation. His braids gleamed in the fading light, silver chains chiming softly. He stood beside her with an ease that surprised me—such familiar intimacy, such strange sympathy; the way they looked at each other with grave eyes.

Grant took my hand. His skin was warm. Just warm. Not burning with fever. I reached for our bond—found only the hole—but I lingered in that empty space, holding myself there, pretending there was something to wrap myself around, the memory of light.

A memory of light is the same as light, whispered the darkness.

I suppose you would know, I replied, trying to stay focused on my husband. You eat light.

And the light eats the darkness. Heat spread behind my mouth, like a smile—exactly what that sensation was. It is the eternal dance, Hunter.

It was almost sunset: light stretching, glowing, cooling. Usually the boys would have been tugging at me, itching to be free. Not today. So still, quiet, as if they were conserving their strength. Or maybe they just didn’t have any.

“Jack,” I said. “Who could impersonate you?”

“No one. It’s impossible.”

“Then you were the one who orchestrated the attacks on us.”

He gave me a sharp look. “Never.”

“Then how?”

“I don’t know,” he snapped. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“No way he was lying?”

“He believed what he was saying.” My grandfather scrubbed at his face. “Something else is happening.”

I swallowed. “Could Zee and the boys have been deceived?”

Jack tensed. “In what way?”

I knew right then. No matter what he said next. It was the way his shoulders hunched, and the instant wariness in his eyes. “When Zee said he knew who had ‘hammered the arrows’ . . . to whom was he referring?”

He flexed his gnarled, brown hands. “You already know that answer, my dear.”

I swallowed hard. “And the arrows? What are they?”

My grandfather finally looked at me, and if not for a split-second slip of pain in his eyes, I would have thought he was empty on the inside, absolutely hollow.

“You know that, too,” he said.

I stared at him, stared and stared, and my heart died even more; just cracked and crumbled, and fell to ash. Finally, the boys stirred. But it was nothing more than their pain echoing mine.

“You made the disease,” I said, barely able to speak above a whisper. “You designed the thing that’s killing us.”

“That is the one thing I cannot deny,” Jack said.

I squeezed Grant’s hand so hard, he stirred in his chair. “The illness is efficient,” I recited, recalling with perfect clarity the affable voice I’d heard as I’d fought for my husband’s life, deep within the cells of that poison. “But it must be altered. It must not be allowed to affect our flesh. Only the demons.”