Page 76 of Light Locked
Hands had grabbed her in repetitive motions, but there were no hands here, no living ones, and she wondered if she’d hallucinated in her terror, mistaken brick that had broken her fall for hands that had saved her.
As she lay gasping in the now quiet darkness, nothing else seemed to exist.
She closed her eyes and started to cry from the pain, hissingthrough her teeth as she pressed her head back against the column. Every breath hurt. There was so much blood. Her body wasn’t healing.
She was going to die.
“Clea,” a voice said.
She opened her eyes, and relief swept through her at the sight of Ryson kneeling in front of her. She gritted her teeth as he checked her neck, brushing the hair from her face as the blood on his hands marked a line across her cheek.
She tried to speak between each seizing breath, “It’s not”—she gasped sharply—“healing.”
“Breathe,” he said with complete and soothing calm, looping his hand behind her neck. She listened, that single word was the most settled and collected thing in all the chaos. In the wake of what calamity had just taken place, the weight in his voice became an anchor. “There’s cien embedded in the wound,” he said.
Clea choked on one breath, but managed another until her breathing was quick but even. She focused on the feeling of his hand, keeping her eyes closed.
“You triggered an explosive reaction,” he said.
“Am I going to die?” she asked between breaths, unable to understand the severity of her own wounds. The pain was unlike anything she’d felt before.
“I can’t heal you,” he replied, and it bothered her that he hadn’t addressed her question. “Look at me,” he said.
She opened her eyes and there he was, still somewhat hiddenin the darkness with eyes like the moon. Torchlight framed his face in flickering hues of red. She wondered in that brief moment how he seemed completely okay.
Where was Shiloh? Where were the other Venennin? The beasts?
“Cien can only act on malintent,” he said, “just as your ansra was bolstered so powerfully by your intentions to save someone else. I cannot heal you, unless my intentions are to ultimately cause some kind of harm as a result. Do you understand?”
She nodded, clutching his hand as she strained to breathe through her nose and gather herself. She hung on his words, his explanations an escape from the searing nature of the wounds.
“But it doesn’t mean you have to die,” he whispered.
Clea now noticed the medallion clutched in his other hand, and that there was something different in his disposition. Just as the abuses done to him had sent him into some other version of himself, the cataclysm had further resurrected those pieces.
The person in front of her was not Ryson.
He knelt before her, the medallion clutched in one hand, contained and controlled. He hadn’t avoided the damage; he’d embraced it, and while the others had suffered, for him it had been transformative.
“How badly do you want to exist?” he asked. The question had a peculiar weight, like he’d asked it a thousand times before, to a thousand other people.
Her breathing steadied, the pain still blaring through her as her mind reached a strange sense of clarity, instilled in her by the calm in his eyes.
“You’ve asked people that before,” she said, certain of that truth and yet unsure how she recognized it. She swallowed hard and wrestled her lungs down.
He didn’t seem surprised, replying with a simple, “Never a Veilin.”
The silence that lingered between them was filled with the presence of some dark gift, a bridge between their worlds. All she could think of were the bodies, torn open by the monsters.
“I don’t want to be a monster.” She shuddered.
“Never,” he said, seeming to have some sense of what she referenced. “Those bodies were planted with infected souls.”
“I don’t want a life full of suffering and hunger,” she whispered back, thinking next of the life of a Venennin.
His expression softened.
“What is your life now?” he asked, his eyes flickering over her again.
