Page 58 of The Song Rising

We sat there for a long time. I wanted to take it back; with difficulty, I stopped myself. It seemed like a lifetime before he spoke again.

“You need not justify your choices.”

“I wouldn’t choose it. Not if it wasn’t necessary. If it were different—” I looked away. “But . . . it isn’t.”

He didn’t deny it.

Jaxon had been right about words. They could grant wings, or they could tear them away.

Words were useless now. No matter what I said, how hard I tried to articulate it in a way that he could understand, I would never be able to express to this Rephaite what it would do to me when I surrendered him to the war we had started, or how much I had wanted our stolen hours to continue. I had thought those hours would be my candles, as our days grew darker. Points of light, of fleeting warmth.

“Perhaps this is for the best,” Warden said. “You already dwell too deep in shadows.”

“I would have gone into the shadows for you,” I said. “But . . . I can’t allow myself to care about you this much, not when I’m Underqueen. I can’t afford to feel the way I do when I’m with you. We can fight on the same side, but you can’t be my secret. And I can’t be yours.”

When he moved, I thought he was going to leave without saying anything. Then, gently, his hands clasped mine.

If I ever touched him again, he would be wearing gloves. It would be in passing. By mistake.

“When I return,” he said, “we will be allies. Nothing more. It will be . . . as if the Guildhall never was.”

It should have been a weight off my shoulders. My life was already too dangerous. Instead, I felt hollow, as if he had taken something from me that I had never known was there. I went to him and buried my face in his neck.

We sat with our arms around each other, holding too tightly and not tightly enough. Once we left this place, there would be no more talks beside the fire. No more nights spent in his company, when I could forget the war and suffering that loomed on the horizon. No more dances in derelict halls. No more music.

“Goodbye, little dreamer,” he said.

I almost voiced my answer. Instead, I pressed my forehead against his, and deep in his eyes, a flame was kindled. As his thumb grazed my jaw, I committed the way his hands felt on my skin to a hidden vault in my memory. I wasn’t sure which of us brought our lips to the other’s first.

It lasted far too long for a farewell. A moment. A choice. A mirror of the first time we had touched this way, behind the red drapes in the nest of the enemy—when danger had been everywhere, but a song had still been rising in us both. A song I wasn’t sure that anything could silence.

Our lips parted. I breathed him in, one more time.

I stood up, turned my back, and walked away.

PART II

Engine of Empire

10

Manchester

December 3, 2059

The train glided across the snowbound English countryside. Not that we could see any of it—the four of us were hidden in a small baggage compartment—but Alsafi’s contact had given us a satellite tracker, a requirement for safe passage, allowing us to watch the progress of our journey.

We had met the contact outside Euston Arch station, and she had sneaked us on to a non-stop service after pressing the tracker into my hand. Another member of Alsafi’s network would take us to a safe location in Manchester.

I had decided, in the end, to take Eliza with us, too. She and Tom had long since fallen asleep, but Maria and I were alert.

“So,” Maria said, “the plan—such as it stands—is to locate this person Danica thinks can help us—”

“Jonathan Cassidy,” I said.

“—locate the factory where the portable scanners are being made, and infiltrate Senshield’s manufacturing process. Find out how they build the scanners. That’s it? That’s the famous plan?”

“Well, it’s a start. If you want to dismantle something, you should know how it’s put together. There must be a point at which an ordinary piece of machinery is converted to an active Senshield scanner.” I sighed. “Look, we don’t have any other leads. And you never know: we might unearth some information about Senshield’s core, and how it’s powered—and where it is.”

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