The Sun Dwellers (The Dwellers Saga)

by David Estes

  Could it really be a drug? My mind doesn’t even believe my own reasoning. It seems too farfetched, too sci-fi, too ridiculous.

  Something my father once said to me pops into my head:

  Sometimes the hardest things to believe are the ones that are the most true.

  But sometimes they aren’t, too. Right?

  Behind me there’s a scrape of cloth on rock and the scuffle of feet on hard ground. I didn’t even realize I stopped, but now I’m acutely aware that I only made it ten or so feet from the entrance to our hideaway before pulling up to puzzle over things in my head.

  I stride in the other direction, hearing Tristan say, “Adele, wait!” behind me. Breaking into a run, I wish with all my heart that he’ll just let me be, leave me alone for however long it takes me to come to terms with what’s slowly dawning on me: we’re not meant to be together.

  He doesn’t.

  Instead, he races after me, his heavier, louder footfalls drowning out my own. I know he’ll catch me because he’s faster, but I don’t stop until his hand grabs my shoulder from behind.

  I whirl on him, fire in my chest and eyes. “What!?” I scream, much louder than I should, given where we are.

  “Please, Adele. We need to talk,” Tristan says, his face a mixture of white concern and red exertion. He’s still bare-chested, his muscles tight from our fight. I try not to stare at them. “Please,” he repeats.

  Looking at his pitiful face, I can’t hold onto my anger, although I definitely try. He’s just so damn handsome, his wavy blond hair an inch from his evening-blue eyes, his lips red and full and a perfect match for his right-sized nose and strong jaw. And his voice is so full of longing that my mind draws a blank when I try to come up with a sarcastic comment.

  With my ebbing anger, my shoulders sag and my knees weaken. The adrenaline from our harried sprint catches up with me, and it’s all I can do to lower myself slowly to the ground, lean back against the wall and hug my knees.

  “I really don’t want to talk right now,” I say honestly.

  Tristan dips down next to me, looks at me even though I refuse to look at him. Puts an arm around my shoulders, and although I feel like I should, I don’t shake it off. Swarms of bats flap unbridled through my stomach. Right away, I feel bad about all the things I’ve said to him. It’s not his fault we got played, like life-size pawns in some real chess match. He’s been nothing but good to me, even if he wasn’t entirely in control of his actions.

  “Adele, I—I...”

  I’m scared of his next words, scared they’ll make everything even worse, even harder.

  “I just want to understand,” he says, and I let out a grateful breath. He deserves to understand. “Did Roc tell you something that you might have misunderstood? If he told you about what happened when I was fifteen, I swear I was going to tell you—”

  “No. He didn’t say anything about that. What happened when you were fifteen? That was the year your mom disappeared, right?”

  Tristan sighs, pulls my head into his chest, which I allow because I have no fight left in me. And because it’s pretty awesome to be close to him again, to his heart, which is beating against my cheek. “Yes, that was when my mom left us. I just don’t think it’s the right time to talk about it.”

  I pull back from him, anger surging through me once more. “When will be the right time?” I say, raising my voice. “Because you always seem like you want to tell me something important, something that might bring us closer, but then you never do.”

  Tristan hangs his head and I feel bad again. He’s been so calm and patient with me, and I’m throwing a tantrum. “Look, I—I just want to know you better,” I say.

  He shoots me a troubled stare. “That’s kind of hard to do when you’re acting like you don’t want to be with me anymore.”

  Good point. “It’s not that I don’t want to be with you, it’s just that something brought us together, and I don’t know how much of it was real and how much wasn’t. Every time I think that someone’s been messing with my life, I get so angry.”

  “Our lives,” Tristan says, and I tilt my head to the side in confusion. “You said ‘my life,’ but it’s both of our lives that are being messed with,” he explains.

  “I know, Tristan, it’s not your fault, but when I fell for you so hard—I mean, you’re the first person I’ve really ever liked like this—I really wasn’t prepared for it.” My voice is shaking as my emotions spiral out of control, and I worry the tears might start falling soon. I pause, take a deep breath, try to get control, wait for Tristan to reply.

  “What did Roc think?” Tristan asks, making me glance up at him.

  “Roc?”

  “Yeah, you talked to him about it, didn’t you? That’s why you were so weird when I interrupted your conversation. Roc’s usually right about things. I don’t know how and sometimes I hate to admit it, but he has really good instincts. I trust his opinion.”

  “Well, after discussing all the facts, he thinks it’s possible our relationship is a sham,” I say bluntly.

  “He said that, did he?” Tristan says, his lips curling into a one-dimpled smile that takes my breath away. “‘Sham’ just isn’t a word I would expect him to use.”

  I find myself smiling back, taking yet another strange twist on the endless emotional miner’s cart ride I seem to always find myself on. “Okay, maybe not sham, but definitely fraud.”

  “Mm-huh,” Tristan murmurs, not trying to hide his disbelief.

  “Okay, okay. Technically he didn’t say that either. He just said ‘I don’t know.’”

  Tristan grins again. “That alone is enough to scare me,” he says. “Roc usually always has an opinion.”

  “So now you’re worried too?” I raise an eyebrow.

  “Nope. Because I trust my feelings for you. They’re as strong as they’ve ever been. When I’m near you, when I touch you, when I just think about you, I just feel good. That’s enough truth for me.” Tristan’s cheeky grin is gone, replaced by big earnest eyes and a serious mouth.

  The desire to kiss him wells up like hot lava bubbling from a crevasse, and I can’t stop from leaning into him and doing just that, crushing my lips to his. His hand burrows into the hair on the back of my head, running through it to my scalp. He leans back, pulling me on top of him as we move our lips back and forth and up and down hungrily. My want—my need!—to be close to him is so strong that I’m losing control of myself, running my hands along his bare chest and sides, feeling his hard muscles tighten and contract as we enjoy each other. Our tongues find each other’s, moving across and around. Before Tristan, I’d never kissed a guy. And before now, I’d never kissed Tristan like this. It feels amazing and I want it to go on forever, but then Tristan laughs mid-kiss.

  “What?” I say, frowning and staring down at him, while he continues laughing to himself, as if at some inside joke. “Am I doing it wrong?” I ask, suddenly concerned that in my zealousness I’ve made some grievous kissing mistake due to my naivety.

  “No, no, sorry,” Tristan says, still cracking up. “Trust me, you’re doing everything right.”

  My concern dissipates and I look at him curiously. “Then why the laughter?”

  “Because as we were making out I had a funny thought.”

  “You mean you weren’t thinking solely of me while we kissed?” I joke, punching him lightly in the stomach.

  “Oh, I most certainly was. The funny thought was about you,” he says, laughing again.

  Oh great, so I’m some big joke. “Would you mind sharing with the group?” I say, wanting to know what it is about me that’s so freakin’ funny.

  “I was just thinking that a few minutes ago you seemed ready to kill me—literally—and now you’re all over me. It just made me laugh.”

  My face flushes because he’s right. I’ve been acting ridiculous, like I’m made up of nothing but mind-controlling emotions and crazy hormones. Not my usual, logical self, willing to discuss the facts, an
d figure out a solution to a problem. “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “You already said that,” Tristan says. “But please tell me that we’re okay.”

  Like Roc, I really don’t know. “I can’t,” I say. “Look, Tristan, I still have feelings for you, but how do I know that it’s not just someone controlling me?”

  “Your mom said it was no accident that we met, right?” I nod. “That could mean anything. And she might not even have all the facts straight.”

  “But there are other signs,” I argue. “You yourself said that you noticed a change when we were near each other. You didn’t feel the same pull that you did before.”

  “No, that’s not right. I still feel a pull toward you, an attraction. It’s just different, more natural. Are you saying you’re not attracted to me anymore?” His lips are so close to mine I could reach them just by inching forward a little.

  “Obviously, I am,” I say, kissing the dimple in his cheek. “What about your fainting?” I say, raising a finger in the air.

  “In the past,” he says, shaking his head. “I haven’t felt that way in a long time, plus it has no bearing on how I feel right now.”

  “And how is that?” I ask, flirtatiously running a finger from his shoulder to his chest.

  “Like I’m in lust with you,” he says, cracking up again.

  “Jerk,” I say, slapping him playfully on the cheek.

  “You asked.”

  An image of Tristan’s scar pops into my head. I have to tell him. “You have a scar,” I say.

  “Umm…what?”

  “You have a scar on your back—I saw it when we bandaged your wounds after the fight with Rivet.”

  “I have lots of scars, so what?”

  “But this one is different. It’s crescent-shaped, but that’s not the interesting thing...” My heart is pounding as I know this is the truth we’ve been missing, a clue to how a moon dweller girl and a sun dweller guy happened to be brought together at the most critical of times for the Tri-Realms.

  “What, Adele?” Tristan says, rubbing my back softly.

  “I have the same scar, in the same place.”

  I expect Tristan to say I’m acting crazy again, that he has a lot of scars from years of training, that any resemblance between our scars is merely coincidence. But he doesn’t say any of that. “Show me,” he says.

  Chapter TenTristan

  She turns away from me, sliding in between my legs. As she lifts the back of her shirt, I feel a certain lightness, a thrill, as if I’m discovering something new about Adele. Which I am, I suppose. Her pale skin is marked by circles of dark bruising, fresh, likely from when I tackled her to the hard ground during our fight. Despite the imperfections, her back is smooth and beautiful to me. When she gets partway up, she can’t lift the fabric any further herself, so I take over, gently tugging the thick battle tunic up toward her neck.

  A little past halfway I see it. A small scar, slightly raised, crescent-shaped. As the tips of my fingers graze over it, Adele shivers beneath me. “Where’d you get this?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I wasn’t even aware of it until Tawni noticed it. She thought it resembled a scar on your back, but we both sort of forgot about it. Where exactly is it positioned?”

  I run my hand along her vertebrae. “It’s on your spine. Maybe…three quarters of the way up.”

  “That sounds like exactly where yours is,” she says. “Let me see.”

  Dropping her tunic so it drifts back over her skin, I scoot back and rotate around to face away from her. Her knees are at either side of my hips as she kneels behind me. When her fingers graze my skin, sparks practically fly off of them. I could do this all day.

  “Do you feel where my fingers are?” she asks.

  “Umm, yeah. I feel them,” I say, holding back the extent of what I’m feeling.

  “That’s where your scar is. It’s a curved sliver, a raised bump, just like you described mine.”

  “It feels like it’s in almost the exact same place as yours is,” I note.

  “It is.”

  We sit in silence for a moment, her finger drifting back and forth across my spine. I don’t want to ruin the moment, but I know I have to. “What do you think it means?” I ask.

  “Someone did something to us,” Adele says angrily. “Injected a drug, messed with our spines, something. Somehow what they did linked us together, like as soon as we were near each other, we were inexplicably drawn to each other. That’s what the weird scalp-buzzing and spine-tingling was.”

  Not this again. “I don’t care,” I say. “I’m glad I found you, no matter how it happened. And now the effect seems to have worn off and I still want to be with you, regardless of who wants us to be together.”

  Adele’s sigh tickles the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. “It might not be that simple, Tristan. I want to be with you, but what if it’s your father who wants us to be together, to give him a reason to crush you? Maybe he sensed your rebelliousness and knew you’d cause him problems in the future. A scandalous moon dweller girlfriend would do just the trick. I mean, that’s possible, isn’t it?”

  I think about it for a minute. “Anything’s possible with my father,” I say. “And I didn’t exactly hide my rebellious side, so it’s likely he thinks Killen should succeed him as president, as he would carry on the Nailin family tradition of rule by an iron fist.”

  “And the only way to do that…” Adele says, letting me finish her sentence.

  “Is to either kill me or throw me in jail. But you don’t know my father the way I do. He murdered Roc’s mother in cold blood, Adele. He didn’t need an excuse to hurt me. He could’ve just had one of his men “accidentally” kill me in training, or even kill me in my sleep and then make up a story about how it happened later. But mess with our neurological systems, draw me to a moon dweller girl just to create a scandal? It’s just not my father’s style—too complex and risky.”

  “But it’s possible,” Adele says, hugging me from behind.

  I shake my head. “No, I don’t think so. I mean, he could have easily done something to me, but how would he have gotten to you?”

  “I was trapped in juvie,” she says. “He could have had one of the guards put something in my food, in my drink, something…”

  “But your mom seems to know something about it,” I argue. “Otherwise why would she have said that to you—about it being no accident we met?”

  Her head slumps and I realize she was hoping for any other explanation other than her mother being involved directly.

  I capture her hands across my chest. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure it out,” I say. Feeling her body against my back, her arms around me, I close my eyes and let the cares of the world fall away beneath her gentle touch. “Do you still want to be with me?” I ask.

  A pause. I hold my breath, wait for the hammer to drop, crushing my heart into gravel. “Yes,” she says, and I let out my breath slowly, trying to hide the fact that I was holding it at all. “But I also don’t want to cost you the presidency.”

  “It’s already lost,” I say, knowing it’s the truth. “All that’s left is vengeance.”

  “We should go back,” Adele says, abruptly releasing me and standing. “It’s too dangerous out here and the others will wonder where we’ve run off to.”

  I clamber to my feet and then face her, sweeping my eyes across every inch of her majestic form. She watches me suspiciously. “What,” she says when my eyes return to hers.

  “You’re beautiful,” I say.

  “And you’re such a guy,” she retorts. “C’mon.” She grabs my hand and pulls me back down the tunnel. For me, despite scars and conspiracies and vengeance, the world is right again. If I die today, at least I’ll die with Adele by my side.

  But I don’t plan to die.

  * * *

  Every few minutes I feel Roc’s eyes on me, but I studiously avoid them, pretending to organize my pack or clean my weapons. I know h
e wants to talk, to ask me a million questions, but I’d rather not. It’ll only dampen my relatively good mood.

  Trevor continues to annoy, however, shooting comments like, “Ooh, the two lovebirds are back together?” or “You two make such a cute couple—when you’re not trying to kill each other.” Adele finally gives him a death stare and he backs off, his hands in the air, palms out. “Easy, wild woman,” he says, “I’m just kidding.” Since then, I’ve just had to deal with Roc’s silent stares.

  “We’re going to pee,” Tawni says, grabbing Adele’s hand and pulling her away.

  “But I don’t have—” Adele starts to say.

  “Yes you do,” Tawni says. Adele glances back at me, a shrug in her eyes, if not on her shoulders.

  I’m alone and unprotected. Roc saunters over. “What’s going on?” he asks, and I see Trevor stop rolling his bedding to watch our exchange.

  “Nothing,” I say. “All good.”

  “It wasn’t all good when Adele beat you up and yelled at you in front of everyone,” he says.

  “She did not beat me u—”

  “Yes she did,” Trevor comments from across the fire pit.

  “Like you did any better,” I retort. The nice, peaceful feeling from making up with Adele is gone, and there’s a fire in my belly once more.

  “We’re talking about you,” Trevor says.

  “Shut up, Trevor,” Roc says. And then: “Talk to me, T, I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m fine, I promise,” I say. “We’re fine.”

  “But what about—”

  “We’ve worked it out, Roc. We’re moving on—you should too.” My eyes challenge him to say another word, which usually doesn’t even come close to working, but this time it does. Roc clams up, fires a final glare at me, and then goes back to packing for our trek across the Sun Realm.