Page 78 of Phoenix Falling
He didn’t acknowledge me as I took the seat next to him. We contemplated our own thoughts in silence, watching the light rise, listening to the minute sounds of nature rising along with it. When the fiery dawn no longer burned across the phoenix, I spoke.
“Want to tell me how you know her?”
“I don’t need your judgment, Grim.”
The monotone voice didn’t fool me—Sun held a bubbling cauldron of emotions inside him, so strong they leaked out to me without any effort on my part. Uppermost in his mind was fear, though. He’d lost control and he knew it.
It might cost him the most important person in his life.
“No judgment,” I assured him. “Just trying to get a sense of the situation. I know we’ve had dealings with Risk—”
He made a choked-off sound deep in his throat. I ignored it.
“But I don’t know how you know Rissa.”
“I’ve been seeing her.”
So she was the female he’d been disappearing for. The one I’d warned him wasn’t important right now, with his father gone. It wasn’t often I had to admit I was wrong, but major miscalculation there, definitely.
“And you didn’t know…”
“Anything. Obviously.” He sighed, crossing his arms over his chest. “How could I not have known.”
“Risk has had decades to perfect her role, Sun.” Out of necessity—I wasn’t knocking her for that. She’d been forced to fend for herself, make it on her own, it seemed. How she’d managed to do that with her triggering, the manifestation of her gift, I didn’t know. The scars alone told the story of how hard it had been to survive. But she had.
That also told me she was as hard as steel when she needed to be. And likely just as unbending.
Not good. Not good at all.
“Her gift—” He shook his head. “I can’t even wrap my head around it.”
“I imagine not.” Her ability to glamour herself was cause for concern, but it wasn’t difficult for me to imagine. I’d spent my entire life living a dual existence. I recognized it in someone else, that fractured sense of self. Risk—or Rissa—and I were kindred spirits.
I doubted others would be so understanding.
“She’s not human.”
“No, she’s not,” I murmured.
“So which one is the real her, Risk or Rissa?”
That was a question that might keep a lover up at night. Unfortunately I didn’t have a good answer for him. “If I had to guess, she may not even know.”
He seemed to grapple with that for long moments. Then, “I don’t want to believe she’s a traitor.”
“But are you certain?”
Sun scoffed. “Despite the bastard everyone thinks I am, I didn’t look at everything in her mind. I got the gist on my way to what I wanted to know—emotions, impressions. I didn’t see evidence that she’s betrayed us.”
But he’d said himself, he hadn’t looked at every memory, every moment. “There is nothing to make her loyal to the Archai.”
“Except the other side,” he pointed out. “It was a group of Anigma soldiers who destroyed her life as she knew it. She has every reason to hate them. We are their opposite. That’s enough.”
I bent forward, planting my elbows on my knees. “Or was.”
More silence as our minds swept back to that moment in Sun’s quarters. He rubbed his fingers over his eyes as if his head hurt. “I fucked up.”
My snort was involuntary. “Badly.”
