by Dany Stone
KI
My LifeScreen doubles as a mirror as I change into a fresh uniform. Shoes freshly polished, everything in place. Clip-on necktie to prevent me being struggled by any inmates desperate for some violent attention.
Just another faithful member of the World Order.
Selling my soul to get by another day.
I brush a longish strand of brown hair from my eyes, and find I hate the face looking out at me. Hate the weakness I see in my eyes.
I should be strong.
Should be strong enough to protect Lux.
And yet, everything in me screams victim rather than conqueror.
No wonder she left you.
I tug at my bulletproof vest, takes a major struggle before I manage to get it snapped in place. The vest presses tightly around him, heavy as wet clay. Already getting hard to breathe.
I straighten. A final study of my reflection in the screen.
Bulletproof.
How. Touching.
Just go, won’t you, idiot?
I make one last check of my weapons and feels the bump of the cord shoved into the cartridge holder on my gun belt.
An inevitable reminder of what I’m expected to do tonight.
Time to see how much worse a night can get.
Who knows – maybe by the time they call me in, Lux’s interrogation will already be over and they’ll discover she had nothing to do with the shroud.
Hell, while I’m dreaming, maybe she’ll turn into some magicless saint and this entire nightmare will be over.
My stomach rolling, I nudge open my bedroom door and stride into the communal kitchen. My stroll easy, practiced, nothing to show the inner turmoil eating away at my insides. Smiling even though the chain around my neck is clenching around every tendon in my neck.
“Off to work?” Katch stands in front of the open refrigerator, guzzling straight from a gallon of milk while he stares at me.
So young and gullible it’s just irritating.
“Actually, I just got off.” Off to sell my soul to the highest bidder.
I stride past the table, headed to the door, but Katch sidesteps me. His frown quizzical.
He still hasn’t stopped staring.
“Deuce.” He wipes at the trickle of milk spilling out of his mouth. “What happened? What is that?”
Katch is just noticing my bruise?
“This?” I touch it like it doesn’t even hurt. My finger comes away feeling sticky. “I was tired of being so classically handsome.”
Katch’s eyes narrow. “You questioned your CO?”
Shit.
Apparently I’m transparent along with my other flaws.
I step around him without answering. Don’t trust myself to remain under his scrutiny any longer.
Not without giving away some hint of what’s happening.
How much I don’t want to do this.
I slam the front door shut without looking back.
LUX
“I still have rights, you know.” I fight Greyson as he escorts me toward the elevator. All the prisoners in cell block eight watch us through their doors, an underlying hiss of my name echoing through the chambers.
Whispers mingled with threats.
They certainly don’t leave things to the imagination.
“You lost those rights the moment you laid hands on the Shroud,” he growls. His face is iron, closed off against my scrutiny, and there is a coldness to his voice that shrivels something dark inside me.
His very stance an irritating reminder that he’s a heavenly warrior.
And I am just a shifter.
Bound.
Sentenced to hell.
There is nothing that connects us.
So why does my body respond to his touch? Begging for more even though I know he hates me, that there never can be anything between us?
KI
Everywhere I look, I see Lux’s face.
Every LifeScreen in the security area playing the footage of her arrest, the attempted heist, everything that’s no longer supposed to be part of my life. The love I lost by default.
And in spite of all my inward warning, I can’t tear away my gaze.
Devouring every little detail.
Scavenging for every forbidden memory.
In the full center of the footage, she tilts her head, saying something to Aiden Caravel, and in the video he laughs softly in response. Just the two of them, no matter how many others surround them. The way it used to be for us, locked into our own special world. A oneness I never thought would be broken.
We were supposed to be this way forever.
Made for each other.
The Lux she used to be.
Used.
To be.
The crawler across the bottom of the screen flashes boldly, tugging my attention away from Lux’s face.
Out of the past into the empty present.
“Star-crossed lovers? Magic outlaws steal the hearts of the nation.”
I will not share her with him.
Will not.
But she’s not even yours.
The hell it matters. Caravel will never get near Lux again, not unless he wants his ass served up on a platter.
She’s mine
mine
mine.
I can’t keep standing here like this. Can’t watch this and think I’ll be strong tonight.
She already has too much power over.
You never meant anything to her in the first place.
Nothing more but her little pawn.
An eager puppy-dog of a pawn who was too much in love to question her.
I gave up everything for her. My common sense, my reputation. Nearly my citizenship.
And you are still are wrapped around her little finger.
I would give it all up again just for things to go back to normal.
Even if I knew she’d been using me the entire time.
Hands clenched, I exit the break room and take the first elevator to Level 5.
The interrogation floor.
Twenty-One
LUX
The light is white in its violent intensity, probing beneath my eyelids. I struggle to lift a hand, anything to block the light, give my eyes relief.
But my hands have turned to stone.
Impossible to lift.
I try to move my feet. My back. Anything, everything, in a frantic attempt to get up.
An attempt that yields nothing but panic.
My body locked into a paralysis I can’t pull myself out of. Can only lay there like I’m trapped in steel claws.
Unable to walk again.
This isn’t real. A continuation of a nightmare I thought was to be my life. In a few minutes I’ll wake up in my real identity. Back in the Undone. Reunited with my magic and curled up on Aiden’s lap as we plan our next heist. Laughing at my gullibility to believe danger could center around me.
The light shifts abruptly, focused on something beyond me now. No longer probing.
One eye.
Just open one eye.
Surely it’s no longer skin on my eyelids but metal. Painful to budge the slightest inch. My eyelids rub into my gritty eyes, itching, totally irritating, like I had been buried in sand.
I force my eyelids open. Gaze shuttering away from the light. Too weak to focus.
Maybe someone was beyond that light. Someone who’s come to help me.
Someone like –
“Ki?” The whisper barely scrapes my tongue.
The light shuts off. Spots dancing in the sudden blackness. Movement from beyond my range of vision.
I blink. Blink harder.
A shadow moves at the edge of my vision.
I fight to lift my arms, to kick my legs out of their paralysis, but my struggle succeeds only in moving my torso slightly. With every attempt, a sharp pressure holds me down. Biting into my wrists and legs.
When I look down, I see the restraints.
Strapping me do
wn on the bed.
He drugged you.
A stab of memory. Greyson escorting me in, and for once his voice was soothing.
This was supposed to be a hearing.
Not an interrogation where I have no voice.
I scan the room with frantic eyes, willing everything to be the same. For this all to be a dream.
Even if it means waking back up in the cell with Damien Bone.
But instead I’m enclosed in a room of dark stone, bound with spellcast silver.
A heavy suppressant that weighs on my veins.
Drawing out and destroying any fragments of magic that remain.
The cuffs on my wrists burn my skin, their power increased by the curse of silver.
Keeping me bound on the cot.
And on the other side of the room, almost hidden behind a horoscope and a realm of orbs, Greyson sits alone. His wings framed by a bone chair dyed blood-red.
“I see you’ve returned to the land of the living,” he says quietly. I fight to understand the words. “The magic of this room doesn’t seem to agree with your stripped condition.”
He’s mocking me.
Softly smiling and mocking me.
And I can do nothing but lie there and blink.
“A clever game you played, replicating the Shroud.” He leans back. One foot propped up on his knee.
Playing into a casualty that belies the intensity burning at the back of his eyes.
“I’ll admit, it fooled me. So much so that it wasn’t until I examined it by witch light that I noticed – well, let’s just say you don’t know as much about the Shroud as you would like to believe.”
Don’t let this be real don’t let this be real—
What the hell did we miss?
“Following that discovery, we had opportunity to reach Aiden Caravel by phone. He says he’s on the run – from hitmen you sent after him. Because you didn’t want him to reveal you hid the real Shroud.”
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
It’s a fucking lie. At least, most of it.
But enough truth to it to slam the door on every dream of ever breaking free of HAVOC Penitentiary.
No one left on the outside who will do anything to help me.
The hatch in my mind seals shut. Sealing me in. Darkness. Closed in.
Five-year-old Lux locked away in sight of the street, watching the ordinary world pass by, just out of reach of my tiny fingers. I spent my entire childhood closed into my solitary habitat, the internal hunger gnawing away my insides.
Even then I had the uneasy gaze of a Rarity.
Even then they found it difficult to control me.
It wasn’t until I learned how to strike out that
I blink to clear away the scene. To block out Greyson and the chilling racks just beyond.
This is almost over.
Almost. Over.
When I open my eyes, Greyson’s smile tells me it is far from over.
That the hatch that has just closed me in is only the beginning of many.
“Aiden had some interesting things to tell us,” Greyson says. His smile thins. “We discovered some mutual enemies.” His fingers brush the arms of his chair. Twisting the metal end, effortless, without apparent realization of what he’s doing. The metal bends between his fingers. “Although perhaps I shouldn’t share any names.”
He doesn’t have to.
I know who their mutual enemy is.
Me.
The hatch quivers on my eyelids every time I blink.
You’ve done this to yourself.
You built this hatch.
It isn’t just HAVOC that closes me in. I’ve long ago built a cage around myself to protect me.
Shut out the ones who loved me.
So I would be safe behind the bars that protected me.
I clench my hands on my lap, and this time the handcuffs don’t make a sound. To anyone watching on screen, I am there of my own will, unrestrained.
Inside I am kicking away at the hatch, desperate to break my way free.
“You know there’s no exit,” Greyson says. softly. Reaching into my mind and twisting.
He releases the metal and takes my hand.
I clench my hands tighter around the handcuffs.
He takes my fingers in his, his hand brushing my wrist beneath the handcuffs. He bends my forefinger back. Pushing until pain builds within me. Screams through my veins. “What would you do if these beautiful fingers were broken?” Almost a caress. Painful caress. Pain so intense it’s almost a caress. “No more magic. No more celebrity. You would be broken, in more ways than one. Do you really think anyone would stand by you then? When you are worthless to their agendas?”
I already know I’ll be worthless. I look down at my palms. Tracing imaginary lines from my palms to my fingers, creating troughs that will divide my fingers from his grip and free me. Stare so long it almost becomes real. I tug, testing, but I can’t get free.
Freedom exists only in my imagination.
“Try to break free,” Greyson says. His whisper reaches deeper. “There is no harm in trying, right? No harm in taking steps against the Peace. No harm in risking the leaders’ lives.” He leans forward. Into my face. His knees brush mine. “Do you realize what you have risked? So many years of salvation— and you seek to destroy it. Lives. Civilization itself.” He sits back and my eyes burn as they adjust from his being so close. His face clears by degrees. “And for what? Your own selfish desire to be human? Well, congratulations. You failed.” The constant blinding pain as he pushes my fingers in and out. In and out. “You were never capable of being human, beast.”
“We were all born human,” I say. “No matter the powers we have.”
But I am a beast.
Gods know I’m nothing more than a beast.
He jerks back on my thumb, and the pain in me explodes into a lava flow of agony. Too much pain. Can’t hold it in. My scream escapes me before I can gather control of myself and fight back.
There is no fighting back when he’s already won.
“He will never give you the Shroud,” I say. “He’s too selfish for that. So let him feed you his lies.”
“Say whatever you want, Lux. Do you think anyone is listening?”
“Depending on others has never been my weakness.”
Greyson smiles, the darkness in his eyes marring his perfect face as he leans close.
Close enough for me to see the syringe clenched between his fingers.
He prods my arm for the right spot. The cold dot of the needle against my skin. He extends his hand, giving me a chance to study the syringe, and somehow, unexplainably, I know what’s about to happen.
A flashback to a not-so-distant past.
Pain.
Terror.
The memory of a forever goodbye.
The coldness beneath my skin spreads, widespread as fear itself.
The fear that this isn’t the end.
Then it all ends in a bewildered haze as the needle plunges into my arm.
Contents shot into my bloodstream.
Every blink attacking the dizziness that lays seize to my senses.
Medication locking down my resistance and I can’t get free, no matter what I try.
The world warps before my eyes.
Twenty-Two
KI
“Stay steady.” Blade’s hoof brushes my shoulder and I nod over the beep of a dozen wires.
Hope he can’t see the way my heart is flogging my rib cage.
Can’t see all the betraying thoughts that are running full circle through my head.
All the regrets.
“She’ll know it’s a dream,” I say. “I’ve never been able to lie to her.”
But Blade is shaking his head. “We pulled magic from the strongest siren inmate we have. Enough power to dull and hide anything that doesn’t register as an authentic memory to her.”
Just tell him no.
My entire being screams to end this.
And yet I stay where I am.
Connected by a labyrinth of cords and wires to an enormous LifeScreen where an oddly calm version of me waits for my mind to join.
You’ll be alone with her.
The only one she trusts.
The way it used to be.
“You’ll enter her memories and pull every detail about last night and the heist.” Blade tweaks a cord. Igniting a dull stab of pain. “Discover where they would have taken the real Shroud and then you pull out. Nothing more, nothing less. Am I understood?”
I want to nod.
But can only blink.
“Ki. You are the only one close enough to do this.” The harsh contours of the Minotaur’s face are already blurring. “Possibly the only one she will let past her defenses.”
Possibly?
“I won’t let you down,” I say. Although it is probably a lie.
Because I have failed at everything.
“Good luck, McAllister.” Blade steps back from the box. At his signal, the fae orderlies make a final tweak of my wires.
And close me into the box.
LUX
In the dream, I am still alive.
Still am the Lux they think I am.
The Lux who is too powerful to be brought down.
In a world where I can keep the ones I love.
I sit alone in a park in the Undone. My shadow crisscrossed with the shade of palm trees and the few oaks that survived last year’s Southside bombing.
Alone, but clearly I am waiting for someone. I constantly look back, disappointment rankling through me with every betraying look.
He will come.
Will never let you walk away this easily.
I am doing this for his own good.
Doing this to save him.
But part of me —the real, hidden Lux—would rather die than lose him. Lose the one who once mattered most.
Exactly why I must go.
Because he matters.
Matters enough to live.
Hands clenched around tile, I lean forward until I can see my reflection in the courtyard pool. Staring deep into ocean-blue water, but it is not my own face looking out at me.
