Incarnate: Infinite Part 15

"That's it?" Stef shook her head. "There were more parts than just a floor, ceiling, and bars. That can't be all he's building."

"More importantly," Whit said, "what is he building it for?"

"I don't know." Sarit sounded young and alone and frightened. Armande had been like a father to all of us. He was Sam's father in this life.

When Stef and Whit were finished talking, Sarit said good-bye to them, and I sneaked outside once more with my SED. I didn't make it back to the tree, though. Just stopped halfway there, unable to control the tears coursing down my cheeks.

Armande was gone. I'd never again see him, hug him. He'd never again open his pastry stall in the market field and feed me m.u.f.fin after m.u.f.fin, as though terrified I wouldn't eat enough without his constant vigilance.

"What are you going to do?" My voice shook with grief and winter.

"I don't know." Our connection crackled, reminding me of the distance between us, reminding me we wouldn't be able to talk after tonight. "I don't know. A few people have tried standing up to Deborl, but most of them get put in prison. Maybe I can get them out. Or maybe . . . I don't know. I'll keep hiding. Keep up with what they're building. Maybe I can figure out what the rest of the parts are for. I just have no clue."

Everything in me ached for her. She was alone, hiding in Heart without anyone to console her or help her through this grief. "Just be safe," I whispered. "Do whatever it takes to be safe."

"I wish I were with you." Her voice trembled. "I wish I'd gone with you."

"Me too."

I'll call you every night." Her voice caught on the words. She was trying to sound strong. "I'll call every night until you come back."

"And then you'll stop calling?"

She let out a strangled laugh. "Yeah, then I'll stop calling."

A few minutes later, we clicked off.

I stood outside, weeping in the snow until I heard everyone in the tent climb into their sleeping bags. Only when I was certain they were asleep did I sneak back in and shiver myself warm.

The next week was a thousand times lonelier than those before it.

Thunder cracked, startling everyone awake.

We hurried out of our sleeping bags and scrambled for the door to the tent, but the sky was clear and deep blue with coming dawn. Sylph hovered around our campsite, warming the air.

The thunder didn't return. Whit and Stef pushed back inside the tent to start breakfast, but Sam remained by the door, glaring at the sky as if his life depended on it. The thunder hadn't been real thunder.

I wanted to rea.s.sure him somehow, but I had no words. Only the same awkwardness we'd carried since my birthday.

"Go inside with the others. I'll fill up the water bottles." Apparently, I couldn't manage rea.s.surance. Just instructions and letting someone know where I'd be. After I'd wandered out on my birthday and Cris had come after me, Whit had pulled me aside and lectured me about telling people where I was going. If I insisted on going after dragons, then I'd best not get myself killed out of stupidity.

Sam looked at me. Sort of through me. He nodded. "If you see anything, come right back." There was a note of concern in his voice, but mostly he sounded hollow. He'd been worse since Armande died.

I put on my coat and boots and headed into the woods with an armful of empty water bottles. A few sylph trailed after me and hung close as I broke ice and filled the bottles in a fast-moving creek. While I worked, sylph dipped tendrils of shadow into the full bottles and boiled the water clean.

We were almost finished when thunder cracked again.

I glanced at Cris, my eyebrow raised, but he didn't move. The other sylph, too, remained motionless as the snap of leather wings came again.

Above, I saw only pine boughs, stark against the infinite blue.

And then, just to the east, a sinuous body flitted above the trees, darkening the fragmented sky.

I placed the last water bottle on the snowy ground. "Will one of you take me to see it?"

Cris dithered, and the other sylph hung back awkwardly.

"If you won't take me, I'll just go see it myself and possibly get lost again." I started walking, but after only a few steps, I turned and pointed at Cris. "Don't tell the others. I don't want them to scold me when I'm not even getting into trouble."

Sullenly, the sylph trailed after me as I followed the occasional crack of wings.

Cris sidled up next to me. -Consider yourself scolded.- I smirked and swatted at him, but a knot in my chest loosened a little. Whether or not he agreed with my plan, Cris still liked me. He and the other sylph stuck closer to me than my real shadow.

At last, we came to a break in the woods, and a cliff overlooking a white valley. Trees huddled under the weight of snow, majestic and silent. Above the valley, three dragons flew.

Their serpentine bodies slithered through the air, gliding without sound until they flapped their wings, which stretched as wide as their bodies were long. A deceptively delicate network of bones and scales shone translucent when a dragon veered and twisted toward the rising sun.

I gasped and took a step back into the woods. The dragons were so huge. After a year, I'd forgotten how big they were. But seeing them fill the sky as they flew through the air, my heart stumbled on itself. Templedark was not far behind us. I'd seen too many dragons then, seen the way they spit acid on the fields of the agricultural quarter or tried to land atop the city wall. One had been leaning over Sam and Stef to kill them when I arrived.

I'd almost seen a dragon kill Sam.

My heart ached as I stared at the sky and lowered myself to my knees. I couldn't stand anymore. I couldn't think anymore. I could only watch as a dragon switched course and dove into the valley, its wings folded along its sides. The immense golden beast disappeared into the forest for a heartbeat, then erupted a short ways beyond with a deer in its jaws. Ice and snow and branches sprayed behind it, having been caught up in the dragon's path.

"Oh, Cris." My words were hardly a breath. Just mist on the frigid air. "How am I supposed to even get close enough to one to speak to it?"

Cris curled around me, warm but silent. He offered no advice.

I couldn't bring myself to move from this spot. Snow soaked through my layers of clothes, but Cris and the other sylph stuck close, keeping me from shivering.

Soon I'd have to go back to camp. To Sam, Stef, and Whit. And I would have to tell them that I'd seen dragons and I had no idea what to do now. The dragons were hunting in the forest below. They must have had keen eyes to see that deer. And unlike the roc, they had no trouble diving into the forest.

They could s.n.a.t.c.h us up, too.

"We're going to need extra cover," I whispered. "We definitely don't want to be caught in the open. Even in the forest, we'll need to avoid looking like food."

Cris nodded, trilling softly by my ear. -We will protect you.- "Thank you." I lowered my eyes and didn't try to stop the tears, but what should have been a torrent came as only a trickle. I'd trekked through the cold woods before, gone hungry, been beaten, but I'd never felt like this. I'd never felt broken, like my spirit had split in two.

What hope was there? Stef had been right about the dragons. There was no chance of talking to them. They weren't people. They weren't sylph, who needed something from me, or centaurs, who'd been satisfied to have their children returned unharmed, and cowed by the presence of the sylph.

No, now we were in a huge winter forest, far, far from home and anything familiar. We'd taken weeks to get here, and for what purpose? There was no way I'd be able to convince the dragons to help us. What was I going to do? Shout from the cliff and ask for their a.s.sistance? Ask if I could borrow this mysterious weapon they had? They'd swoop in and eat me whole before I finished introducing myself.

And worse, I'd pushed away Sam with my secrets. It drove me crazy when he hid things from me and didn't tell me what was going on, so I should have known. Instead, I'd become a hypocrite. I'd hurt his feelings and dragged him into the land of his nightmares because I had a plan.

"I can't help you, Cris." My whisper came out rough, broken. "There's no way I'll be able to speak to the dragons. They won't destroy the temple for us. They won't use their weapon for us. They'll probably eat us. Janan will ascend and Range will erupt. Sylph will be cursed forever."

Only the crack of dragon wings answered.

"I wish you hadn't put your trust in me. I wish you had sided with the others to talk me out of this plan. We should never have come here. I made a mistake."

Cris hummed. -I believe in you.- I sagged, too weary to hold myself up anymore. "I don't."

As I wiped tears off my cheeks, reflected sunlight caught my eye, drawing my attention north.

A white tower pierced the sky, brilliant and bright against the shadowed forest. Like the temple. And below it, a white stone wall ringed the tower, cutting through the forest like a knife.

It wasn't perfectly white like Janan's temple, though. Age and weather had dulled the shine of stone, and there were places the forest had toppled the wall, but this prison had certainly survived the millennia better than the one Cris had found in the jungle.

"We're almost there."

Cris nodded.

"It doesn't matter." I stood and brushed snow and slush off my clothes. There was no point to being here now. I'd seen the dragons. I'd seen the futility of my plan.

The sylph dried my clothes as I took one more look at the valley and the dragons moving farther away, still hunting in the forest. Their wings snapping the air grew distant.

I trudged back to where I'd left the water bottles, but there was only a shallow hole in the snow where they'd been. Someone had taken them.

"Did one of your friends go tattle on me?" I glared at Cris, who hummed with annoyance.

"It wasn't the sylph." Sam's voice came from not far off, just a few trees away. He peeled himself out of the shadows and stalked toward us. "You were gone a long time. We came looking, and some of the sylph indicated you'd gone off with Cris." He kept his voice low, even, but couldn't hide the lurking power in there, or the disappointment. His gaze darted to Cris, and he tilted his head.

Without comment, every sylph left the area.

Sam turned on me. "I told you to come back if you saw anything."

I p.r.i.c.kled. "I didn't see anything. I heard something and went to investigate. I had Cris with me. He wouldn't let anything harm me." That last bit was meant as a barba"Cris still cared about mea"but if Sam noticed my intent, he didn't react.

"What would Cris do if you got into trouble?" His dark eyes narrowed. "What if a dragon carried you off? Or you slipped and broke a bone? He can't catch you. He'd have to go find help, and you'd have to wait."

"It doesn't matter!" Shouting felt good. I didn't fight it. "Nothing happened. The point is, he was there. I didn't go alone. You're just angry I didn't run back and tell you."

"Is that what you think?" He advanced on me, expression hard and fists curled at his sides. "You think I only care about knowing where you are and what you're doing?"

I backed away, wary of the set of his shoulders and that dark look in his eyes. He looked like a creature barely contained.

I hated the way my voice shook. "You don't seem to care about much else lately." Not that I could blame him. My heel hit a tree trunk, then my shoulders and my spine. I'd backed away all I could. "You barely talk to me. You let Cris go out and find me the night I got lost."

"I asked him to find you."

"It was still dark." I tried to edge away, but Sam pressed his palms to the trunk on either side of me, caging me. I steeled my voice. "You don't speak to me. You barely look at me."

He was looking at me now. His face was so close we could kiss, and all his weight leaned toward me, making him seem bigger than he really was. "What do you want me to do?" he rasped. "Say it doesn't matter that you hid something so important from me? Say Armande's death isn't ripping me apart? Say I don't care that we're traveling back to the place I died so you can make friends with the things that killed me?"

"I knowa"" The words came out wispy and weak. "I know this is the last thing you want to do."

"But I'm here, Ana. For you. Because you said you believed this would work. But you can't expect me to be cheerful about it."

"I don't." I felt like I was hardening, like ice. Without the sylph nearby, cold nipped at my nose and cheeks. Even the heat of Sam's glare did nothing to warm me. "But you don't have to suffer alone."

That was the thing, though. He wasn't suffering alone. He had Stef and Whit, even if he was still upset with Stef for hiding the truth. She'd hidden it at my request. They both understood how awful this was for him in a way I would never be able to comprehend.

I wasn't worried about him suffering alone. I was worried about my suffering. My loneliness.

Before he could see the shame in my eyes, I turned my head. My voice was pale and weak, almost s.n.a.t.c.hed up by the wind cutting around trees. "I made a mistake. Lots of mistakes." Avoiding him was one of them. Sarit had told me to take action, but I'd been too afraid. I'd kept my distance and made little effort to comfort him when he needed it, too.

He didn't move. With my head turned aside, I could see only his forearm at my shoulder, and even with his coat on, I could see the strain and tremble where he held himself up.

"I shouldn't have hidden the truth from you, but I hoped you wouldn't have to know, because you shouldn't have to feel guilty about something you did five thousand years ago when you were young and scared."

"Of course I have to feel guilty." His tone softened. "Because of my decision, a hundred newsouls have beena"" His breath caught. "It could have been you. I died shortly after Ciana. You and I were born only weeks apart. Everything was so close, you might have been the soul exchanged for my rebirth. You could have been one of those souls in the temple, paying for my selfish decision. I think about that every day. I think about it every time I look at you. How can I not feel guilty? How can anyone live under the weight of so much guilt?"

From the corner of my eye, he looked pained and pa.s.sionate, like it took everything in him to stay together.

"You're trying to absolve me so I won't think about what I've done. What we all did. You're trying to keep your friends good and blameless so we can continue on as we'd been before, but that's not going to work. Let us accept the blame for what we've done. Let us deal with that blame. It's not pleasant for any of us, but you can'ta"and shouldn'ta"try to stop it just because it makes you uncomfortable."

Without another word, he spun toward camp and vanished into the woods.

17.

DEFIANCE.

HE WAS RIGHT. I'd been making decisions based on what made me most comfortable.

Forcing them to come north with me. Not telling them the truth about reincarnation. Keeping my silence with the group. Avoiding Sam.

But now I knew what to do.

It was a terrible plan, but as I stood there with my spine against the tree, my breath misting on the frigid air where the heat of Sam's body had already dissipated, I knew it was the right plan.

My eyes closed and my face lifted to the treetops and sky beyond, I whispered, "Please," to nothing. To everything. To something greater than me. "Please let this be right."

Only the wind answered, howling through the valley and around the trees. Ice clattered and h.o.a.rfrost trembled. No wonder the phoenixes had built a prison this far north: dragons, freezing weather, and utter solitude.

I shivered and pushed toward camp again.

Inside the tent, Stef glanced up from the tray of rabbit jerky as she dropped the finished strips into a bag, but she didn't speak. The sylph a.s.sisting her hummed and twisted darkly, and Sam, with his knees pulled up to his chest, rested his forehead on his arms.

Unbidden, my mind conjured an image of the three of them in the temple's skeleton chamber, offering their wrists to Janan's Hallow. Silver chains clattered and gleamed. A million souls said yes to the exchange. A million souls traded countless lives for their own infinity.

My friends wore chains inside the temple.