Page 11 of Keeping Sarah

“Call them off,” he commanded.

“You don’t give the orders here, Rex.”

The eyeless birds set upon his severely burned and injured mercenaries, feasting. The men’s screams would have been enough to make me sick, if they had been coming from anyone else. Instead, their terrified screams made me smile. It was a relief to know they were being taken from the world. I hoped no one burned their bodies—the traditional funeral rite for aLadrian on Halla, where they would then be born into the ether and become a ghost, like Rex.

The microplanet would be better off without them.

“Fine,” he said angrily. “I don’t give orders, but they’re devouring them in cold blood. You are too kind a person to allow this—"

“Cold blood is all those men ever had.”

Rex wanted to turn away from the sight. But he wouldn’t. Not because I stopped him, but because he thought to look away would somehow dishonor his men. Their deaths should be witnessed, in his strange code of honor.

“Why do you insist on watching this, if it upsets you so much?” I asked him in my mind.

His voice was far quieter than before. “Ladrians believe death is the next step in our life cycle, that we should witness and embrace death. We are born. We die. We become our ghost. And when our ghost dies—reborn to the ether, we like to say—we travel to the ether to be remade. Most of us, anyway. To witness death is to embrace everything a person was and to be with them as they take the next step.”

“Is that why Justice’s executions are public?” I asked, needing to think of anything other than my predicament.

Some part of Rex smiled. “His executions are public because he likes to show off. But originally, his father held public executions to comfort the doomed. So they would die surrounded by their community.”

Strangely beautiful.

As the jem’hora flock continued to feast on their meal, Rex said, “We should work on getting down from here.”

I looked to either end of the cable holding me up and swallowed hard. “I don’t know how. I’m ten feet from each tree, there’s no—"

“Let me do it,” he said.

He almost made me laugh. “Are you joking? You think I’ll give you controlnow?”

“Unless you have some sort of gymnastics background I don’t know about, then yes, I do, because I am your only hope of getting out of here safely.”

I glanced down at the birds. “Maybe I can get the jem’hora to give me a ride down, like I did in the tree—"

“With their talons soaked in my crew’s blood?” Inside me, Rex shuddered. “Does that sound like a good plan to you?”

I sighed, careful and controlled. A billow of smoke wafted into my face, choking me. I fought to keep the spasms in my stomach from rolling me off the cable and almost failed.

“Sarah,” he intoned more sternly. “Please.”

“Why do you care? You’ll be fine from a fall.”

“Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. I have never heard of a ghost being taken the way you took me. I don’t know what the rules are. But Idoknow that if you fall with me in your body and your bones snap, then they can skewer me as much as they can skewer you. Itmightnot be fatal for me, but it could be, and I do not want to take that chance. Let me help us get to safety.”

One of the ends of the cable wobbled as that piece of the ship shifted in the tree.

“Sooner rather than later, Sarah,” Rex nagged in my head.

Another wobble and the cable drooped a few more inches. I held on for dear life, before I finally, reluctantly relinquished control to Rex. A passenger in my own body, I watched as his nimble reflexes allowed him to inch us to the higher side of the cable. My heart surged with each movement.

From there, he told me, “You don’t want to see this.”

But I watched anyway.

Rex half-swung and half-dropped to a branch, before he leapt from the limb to a more stable branch and used another tree’s branches as braces to walk us to the trunk. Letting him usemy body, I felt the shift in my weight, but not the leaps or the climbing. The gnarly bark felt as though it was covered in thick fabric—the vague shape of the texture, but not the roughness. From there, he carefully climbed down and eventually dropped us to the ground.

Once there, he gave me control back without a word, shocking me.

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