Chapter Seven — Red Alert

The dream was old, and it came with the patience of something that had been waiting years to be remembered.

Kaelen was seven years old again, in the basement of the Court orphanage, and the girl was standing at the top of the stairs with a candle. She was new — three days new — and no one had told her yet about the boy with the black eye, so she'd done what no one else would do: she'd come down the stairs. She'd held out her hand. She'd said, "You look cold. Do you want to share my blanket?"

And Kaelen, who had spent three years learning that touch was a thing that happened to other people, had looked at her candle, and had felt something in his chest crack.

He'd smiled. He remembered that. He remembered the exact second the smile happened, because it was the last time he'd ever let one out.

The candle had guttered. The girl had screamed. Not because he'd done anything — he never did anything, that was the cruelty of it — but because the orphanage had taught her to scream at the sight of him, and the teachers had come running, and the boy with the black eye had been locked in the basement for the night with his smile still dying on his face.

That's what you are,* the darkness had whispered, for the first time. *A thing people scream at.

The director came down the stairs an hour later, holding the guttered candle, and he'd looked at the boy in the corner with the expression of a man checking inventory.

"You understand what you are," the director said. Not a question. "The prophecy is not a burden, boy. It's a fact. You are the Dark-Eyed Child. The world will never see anything else when it looks at you. The only mercy we can offer is to make sure you never have the chance to hurt anyone."

He woke with the void awake.

It came up like a whale breaching — all at once, enormous, hungry — and by the time the red alert hit the control room, Kaelen Vesso was on his knees in the corner of his cell with black mist pouring off his skin in ribbons. The holy-light barriers flared and screamed. The hundred and three cameras shook in their mounts.

And then the door to 7-Ω opened, and Laila Thorne walked in.

She was in her pajamas. Her hair was loose, sleep-flattened on one side, and she was carrying a flask of hospital coffee like a talisman. The alarms were howling, and she looked at the monster in the corner of the cell and said, in her normal voice:

"Red alert, Mr. Vesso. The whole building's having a panic. You want to dial it down a notch so I can get my blood pressure reading?"

The mist recoiled. Not from power — from surprise.

"I won't." She knelt in front of him, and her hands came up, and they were warm. "I've got you."

Her palms pressed against his temples. The dawnlight rose — a soft gold that spread through her skin and into him, and the void, the great black whale, hit it and stopped.

For one unsteady heartbeat, the two forces stood opposed: the oldest dark in the world, and the one light that had ever made it flinch. Then the dark lay down.

Kaelen's lungs unlocked. He gasped — a raw, ugly sound, halfway to a sob — and the mist peeled off him in shreds, burning away like frost in the sun.

He was left kneeling in front of her, shaking, his forehead nearly touching hers.

They were close. Far too close. He could count the freckles across her nose. He could feel the warmth of her breath on his mouth, damp and slow, and something in him that was not the void, had never been the void, rose up to meet it.

Her hands were still on his face. Her thumb had drifted to his jaw without her permission.

"Laila." His voice came out wrecked. "You have to go. The darkness woke up hungrier — because of you. It sleeps when you're here, and it wakes hungrier every time. It's feeding on — on the wanting."

On you. On the wanting of you.

He didn't say it. He couldn't. He'd spent twenty-four years learning to bury everything, and he wasn't going to hand her the one weapon that could destroy them both.

"I'm a healer." Her voice was very steady. "I've never once been scared of a patient's night."

"You don't know what I am."

"I know you're my patient." Her thumb brushed the corner of his mouth, feather-light, and his whole body seized. "The rest, I'll judge with my own eyes."

She pulled back, stood, and picked up her flask. At the door she looked back at him: "Get some sleep, Mr. Vesso. I'll be here at 7:40."

The door closed.

Kaelen sat in the corner of his cell for a long time, chest heaving, and watched the place where she'd knelt. The void was quiet. Sated. Curled up like a great dark cat with its head on its paws.

It's feeding,* he thought. *On the warmth. On the wanting. Every time she touches me, it drinks her light and grows.

He whispered, to no one, to the cameras, to the dark:

"The whole world sentenced me to death—"

He couldn't finish it. Because for the first time in his life, he wasn't sure the sentence was wrong.

Maybe I am a bomb. Maybe the kindest thing I can do is make sure she's never close enough to be caught in the blast.

* * *

In the control room, Commander Reyes watched the replay of Cell 7-Ω — the dark, the gold, the two of them kneeling together like the last people on earth — and said, to no one in particular: "…We are so, so screwed."

Reyes didn't know the half of it.

The sealed ivory box on his desk still contained Protocol Sunfire. And at the bottom of the box, beneath the calligraphy, was a second document the courier had been instructed to deliver without a signature page:

A transfer order for Attending Healer Laila Thorne.

Effective immediately.

The order was signed, in the small, precise hand of the Court's newest rising star:

Acolyte I. Van.