Oren pushed away from the bars and turned, sliding down to sit on the ground. He let his head drop forward, hair falling into his face. “Why is it that I always end up caged when I’m around you?”
I gritted my teeth. It’d be easier to keep him at a distance if he’d stay confused, only half-himself. It’d be easier if he’d never come at all. Then he could stay a monster, someone who betrayed me. Someone I never wanted to see again.
I held out the knife, gripping the blade and offering him the handle. “This is yours,” I said shortly.
His gaze lingered on it for a moment, then lifted to meet mine. I jerked my eyes away, but not before he would’ve seen the hurt there.
After a silence, he retreated back against the bars. “It was a gift,” he said quietly. “It’s yours.” He fixed his eyes on the back wall, not looking at me. “Besides, you may need it.”
“If I run out of magic and you try to kill us both, you mean?” There was still a little of Tansy’s magic left—I could feel it, tingling, singing through my veins. Tansy herself had fallen asleep as soon as she stopped moving. I could hear the soft sounds of her steady breathing coming from the back corner of our cell.
“You had the chance to get rid of me,” Oren said. “I asked you to kill me.”
“Just because I’m not capable of cutting your throat doesn’t mean I want you here.” The words were out before I can stop them. Anything to keep him at arm’s length.
“Lark—”
“We’re not a team, Oren.” I glanced at Tansy, who stirred in reaction to the sharpness of my voice but didn’t wake. “It’s not like it was. It can’t ever be again. You know that, right? You shouldn’t be here.”
“I didn’t want to be here,” he hissed back. “I don’t control it, when it takes over. I can’t tell it to leave you alone. It—that thing—isn’t me.”
Except it is. Because I could see the ferocity of the monster even now, the brilliant gleam in his eye, the strength in his shoulders and in the grip of his hands as he balled them into fists.
“You’re not even human.” I turned away.
“And you are?”
The words hit me like a blow. The silence drew out between us, tense like wire. Then my lungs remembered how to work again. “I’m human. I’m—I’m me, all the time. I make my choices. This power, this is something that was done to me.”
I could feel Oren’s eyes on me. Only, where they’d once made my spine tingle and my stomach tighten, now they made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. He didn’t move, but it was like I could hear him anyway. I could feel the shape of the air around him. I knew exactly where he was, though I kept my eyes away.
“Just as this was something done to me.” His voice remained quiet, pitched low so as not to wake Tansy. “By the wild. Knowing it doesn’t change who I am, only what I am.”
The buildup of betrayal was less now. It was still there, simmering quietly, but not fighting to get out—as though by venting it, I’d released some of the pressure. I swallowed, closing my eyes. “I wish I didn’t know.”
For a long time, it seemed like Oren wasn’t going to answer. The tension in the wire pulled between us was less, but I could still feel it tugging at me, making me fight to stay away. Then I felt him draw breath to speak.
“Then I guess that makes two of us.”
The silence stretched out again. Oren was watching the back wall as though he could see anything but shadow there, beyond the pool of light cast by the spherical glow by the door. He looked thinner than the last time I’d seen him. Older, despite it only having been a couple of weeks. I fought the impulse to reach out for him, to feel that telltale tingle that spoke of the flow of magic between us.
“Does it help to talk about it?” I asked, watching him. I’d intended it to sound sympathetic. Instead it sounded hurt.
“No.” Briefly the muscles in his jaw stood out, and he turned his head. For a quick moment, he caught my gaze, searching.
Then it was back to the wall again. I could see the struggle of emotions on his face as clearly as if they were my own. I realized he’d never really lived among people as an adult, had never learned to hide the things he felt and saw. Though he spoke little, he said volumes.
“It’s like an unbearable ache,” he said, softly. “Hunger— except that it’s not something that food can solve. We eat because it’s the only way we know to consume what we really need. It’s incompletion, being severed, half of a whole. It’s needing something you can never get, not completely.”
He closed his eyes, letting his head back to rest on the bars. “And it feels as though if you could only fill that void a little, the tiniest bit, you could come back to yourself. And you’d do anything to feel that way again.”
I barely managed to suppress a shudder. The more he spoke, the more I recognized the things he was saying. The hunger, the need to feel whole—the need to take what’s yours. How quickly and thoroughly I’d consumed Tansy’s power. And how quickly I’d wanted more.
“And when you make the kill,” he whispered, “in that instant you know it’ll never be enough. That you have to keep hunting. Keep searching. Keep killing.”
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t look at him. He glanced at me, and I could sense his shame and self-hatred, his fear that I loathed him too. How could I tell him that the revulsion he could see on my face was for myself?
“Lark,” he said softly. “Say something.”
I knew what he wanted me to say. He wanted me to forgive him, to tell him it wasn’t his fault, that he couldn’t help what he was. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the warm light washing over his face, glimmering in his hair, softening the angles of his face. He wanted me to absolve him.
I wished I could turn into that light, let it touch my face too, wash the both of us in its golden glow. Part of me wanted to comfort him as I had the night he was caged in the Iron Wood, distract him from his claustrophobia. But my tongue felt like lead, my throat choked with fear. I just kept staring straight ahead, my eyes on the shadows at the back of our cage. I couldn’t even deal with my own fear; I had no way now of helping him with his.
Eventually he turned away to curl up on his side on the stone and close his eyes. I stayed awake, shivering, hand clenched around the handle of his knife. I wanted to tell him how true his words had rung for me. I wanted to tell him I didn’t despise him.
But I knew he despised what he was, and I couldn’t bear the thought of him hating me too. Perhaps I was no more than a shadow myself. Was that what my city had done to me in their experimental Machine, tearing out my magic and then synthesizing it again? A shadow killer more perfect than any monster in the wilds—they could only destroy and eat and hunt, never truly sated. I could harvest what I needed from someone with a single thought.
I could feel the tiny trickle of power that flowed from me to Oren even without touching him. I knew I was all that was keeping him human, and yet a part of me wished I could sever that connection, hoard the power for myself, hold onto this feeling as long as I could. Because even if I didn’t feel whole, even if I didn’t feel perfect, it was better than the hunger.
Surrounded by stone and iron, we were wrapped in silence. I closed my eyes, trying to think past my horror and revulsion. But it was hard to see the point.
I knew my brother wasn’t here. Our city had done to him what it had done to me, turned him into the same thing I was now—and I was falling apart. Perhaps my brother had made it this far, and perhaps he hadn’t. Perhaps he was one of the cursed townsfolk, oblivious, fearful of the dark.