Chapter 19
Everything ached, but Tayel had just the strength to pry open the med kit. Jace sat beside her, cradling his broken wing while she plucked an insta-ice pack and a sling out of the supplies. Across from them, Fehn leaned against the hold door, a rivulet of blood streaming down from where his injured shoulder rested.
“Fehn?” Tayel asked. “Do you—?”
“No.” His answer muffled against the steel his face was buried in.
“You really should…” She stopped, wary of how his shoulders tensed. “Xite.”
She smacked the ice pack between her hands. It cooled instantly against her still-sweating palms.
“Hold it here, Jace,” she said.
Jace chittered as she set the pack against his matted red feathers. He placed his talon over it, his eyes rolling shut. Tayel pulled at the sling’s packaging, tearing along the serrated plastic until the polyester-cotton fabric came free. She glanced over the instructions, and started wrapping Jace’s wing.
Bright white light mixed with trails of pink and orange shined through the viewports as she worked. She’d never been good at astrophysics, so guessing how long it would take to get to Modnik was pointless. Hopefully it would be long enough to patch everyone up.
She finished wrapping the sling and thumbed through the rest of the med kit. Gauze. Disinfectant. Burn cream. Her breath wavered. Finally, something to stop the pain.
She pulled the already loose ties of the curtain fabric around her arm free, grimacing at the sting of air against her burn. Bulbous yellow blisters covered her red, cracked skin all along the underside of her forearm.
“How did this happen?” Jace asked, his voice quiet.
He must have thought it was disgusting. She shifted right to hide it from him and thumbed the lid off the disinfectant with her free hand.
“Tayel?” he asked.
“Aetherion,” she said.
His beak clamped shut.
Tears blurred her vision as she disinfected the burn. The liquid contact sent searing pain up her arm, through her shoulders, and into her teeth. A cry caught in her throat, holding her breath there as her eyes watered. She squeezed pale blue burn cream over the area and groaned.
“I’m so sorry,” Jace said.
“It’ll heal.” She set the gauze to her arm and wound circles around it, building up layers of protection.
“Not just for the burn. For everything. You risked your life rescuing me. If you and Shy hadn’t come, I’d be dead. Or worse. I was wrong before. I should have listened to you about the portals — about the Rokkir.”
“It’s okay, Jace. I don’t think any of us were prepared for what happened. How did you get captured, anyway? What were you doing?”
He leaned back against the wall. “Originally I was going to the guard sector to… to turn you in.”
She frowned. “Really?”
“But I couldn’t. I kept going back every day, telling myself it would be the one I let them know about Shy. I thought of a dozen ways to tell the story without implicating you. Or Fehn.”
Tayel closed her lips over a frustrated sigh. The idea of Jace ratting Shy out annoyed her. She wanted to explain that Shy had been trying to help from the beginning, but it just felt like betraying him again. He was opening up to her. Now wasn’t the time.
“Which, considering I just found out in Castle Aishan that she’s the raider princess, maybe I should have,” he said.
Tayel remembered the muffled voice on the other side of the kitchen door in the castle, shouting that the raider princess was inside. The urge to defend Shy bubbled up like a physical sensation. He was bringing up issues that had already been put away, issues he could have seen solved, too, if he’d just come with her when all this started. She took a steadying breath.
“Sorry,” he said. “It doesn’t matter now, and I know what you’re going to say: she got us this far, and I know that. I know I’d be dead without her and without you. It’s an egg already snatched at this point.”
“She helped us see the truth, Jace. We were never safe in that camp even before we met her.”
“I know, I know.”
Tayel taped her burn wrap closed, and dropped the rest of the gauze back in the med kit. “So what did happen, then? When you were in the guard sector, I mean?”
“Well, after meandering around there for almost two weeks, I decided it was time. It had to be. You hadn’t stopped going to the woods with Shy, and I knew you were stealing fuel. You were breaking laws and camp rules and — I had to do it.
“I went to the guard sector after dinner one night — like I usually would — near the main tent where refugees could report problems, but I got nervous again. I kept thinking I’d tell the story wrong and that you’d be kicked out of the camp or jailed or who knows what, so I took a walk to clear my head. I played what I would say over and over in my head until I realized it had gotten really quiet. When I looked up, I’d somehow stumbled into the guard barracks area. You know, where refugees aren’t supposed to go? The tents were huge, and every single one had the Elshan military insignia on it.”
“Is it that easy to stumble into?” Tayel asked. “I thought a guard-only zone would be, well, guarded.”
“It must be that easy, because it happened. If every foot of the perimeter was manned, I doubt I’d have gotten in. It’s not like they keep anything valuable back there, right? It’s just to give camp guards a spot to meet, I thought. Or a place to take a break.”
“No idea.”
“Me either, but the point is I was there, and I was so scared I was going to be caught.” Jace wrapped his good wing around himself. “I was sneaking back to the main part of the sector when I heard muffled voices in one of the tents. I thought the guards inside heard me, so I froze, but they were talking about a group trying to escape camp.”
His face strained like he was trying to remember every detail. “They said they were going to deal with the perpetrators by… infiltrating their group. They’d captured someone’s DNA and were going to wait until someone was gone before… before shaping.”
“Shaping?”
“It’ll make sense in a minute, I think. When I heard all this, I couldn’t help remembering what Shy said the night she’d told us her plan: that Igador had been invaded by shapeshifting aliens. On top of that, I thought the guards must have been talking about you and Shy. I thought I’d been too late to stop anything. I thought — just for a minute, initially — that Shy had been right about the Rokkir. So when the two people talking left the tent, I followed them. They went back to a refugee cluster in the middle of the guard sector, and they just watched people coming in and out of this one tent for, well it seemed like forever.
“Something felt off to me then. Like, guards didn’t need to do stakeouts like this. And I didn’t know what they’d meant by capturing DNA or shaping or…”
“Is this when you told Fehn about where you’d been going?” Tayel asked.
“Yes. I found him” — he blinked — “Alhyt, I found him yesterday. Yesterday morning.” He shook his head. “This all feels like it happened forever ago.”
“I know the feeling.”
“After what I saw, I had to tell someone where I was.”
“…But not me?”
He winced.
“It’s fine,” Tayel said. “Just tell me what happened next.”
“W-well, last night I went to the guard sector again, around the same time as the night before. I wasn’t thinking about turning you in, I was just thinking about those guards and what they’d said. I found them in the same place, by the tent they’d been spying on. A lot of time passed. I don’t remember how much. I was just so nervous.