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Wood shavings sprinkle down around my feet, floating through the air from where Kane hovers above my head. He uses a pocket knife to carve a small chunk of wood.
“But why?” Skylenna asks, voice high and fairylike.
“Do you know what a beacon is?” Kane blows away a cloud of wood dust, cleaning around the edges of his work.
She shakes her head.
“It’s a guiding light that helps a ship return home. It’s for—both of us. I don’t know what this experiment will do to me in the long run—or to you. I don’t know if I’ll get mean or harmful. I don’t know if you’ll lose your kind spirit. But, maybe… these beacons can help us find our way back to who we really are. To each other.”
Skylenna nods, but it doesn’t seem like she understands. I get up from my seated position to look at what he made from the wood of this tree.
Four carved figurines. A cross, a wolf, and—
My stomach does a flip. The basement. Dessin had me hold these beacons and tell him what I felt. I think back to that day, swallowing down the unsettling emotions rising to the bed of my throat. Holding them again unscrewed the lid on my bottled depression. Pain. Heartbreak.
The beacons must have triggered feelings from my missing past. They reminded me that I’ve lost something. I lost Kane. I lost the memories ofhim.
A deadened agony pangs through my middle.
Before I can determine how much more of this I can withstand, a fifteen or sixteen-year-old version of me stands on the edge of the cliff facing the lagoon.
But… I remember this. It was after I went to live with Scarlett, after my father put me in the infirmary. Something was missing. I was suffering a horrible loss—grieving, mourning, suffering. I absentmindedly went searching for it. My legs carried me to the Red Oaks, where I stood over the lagoon, tears dripping down my cheeks as I searched the open fall forest.
I couldn’t understand why I went looking there. Why my mind was drawn to that one spot… until now. I was looking for Kane. For the boy I lost when my memories faded.
I focus on younger Skylenna until my attention is pulled to the far right. Deep into the trees, I catch a swift movement. Maybe a trick of the eye. But I follow it, standing from my post to race past the trees. A magnetic pull tugging me in that direction, guiding me to a spot in the shadows of the heaviest cluster of red oaks.
A pair of large cinnamon eyes watching the lost, hopeless Skylenna. DaiSzek crouches low under a low-hanging branch, fixated on her every move.
I wonder why he isn’t going to her—
A large hand reaches down to stroke the top of DaiSzek’s head. Bronze, smooth skin, and a light dusting of hair going up the strong forearm. In the shadows, Kane, the age of nineteen or twenty, lingers. Eyes welling with tears, jaw flexed, and chest moving up and down with great frustration.
I make a noise, a cross between a whimper and a squeak. He’s so close to the age I last saw him. Less stubble, but it’s the same man. My Kane. And he’s—devastated watching me. He knows what I’m looking for. Why won’t he go to her? Tome?
“Why did you waste so much time with me?” I ask him, my tone shriveled and weak.
He doesn’t hear me, of course, only the sound of the fall wind and the water brushing up against the eroded cliff wall. He doesn’t hear me calling to him from years ahead of his time.
“I would have believed you!” I raise my voice, the inevitable cry rising in my lungs and draining my heart of any happiness left. “We could have spent your last months talking about these moments. Sharing stories of how you’d rescue me from the basement. Telling me about our picnics and dances in the rain. About the time we saved DaiSzek. About how you buried his family. I could have loved you sooner or realized”—air whooshes from my chest—“I’ve loved you my whole life!”
Those words, like poisonous daggers piercing my core, rupture the last bit of restraint I had on my tears. They flow without a beginning or end now, enough to fill a bowl. I gaze through blurry sight into those warm, welcoming eyes and scream. Like I’ve never screamed before. A blind annihilation takes root beneath my surface like an explosion has gone off in my body.
I buckle down in front of him, holding my waist as if to keep my rib cage from scattering around me. My bellows seem to come from every pore, every particle of skin, pumping into the air like a toxic storm of rage and fire.
He took care of me. He sheltered me from the evil around us. He guarded me when there was no one to protect me. And now he’s ruined me. Thrown me into a hurricane where I’m hurled around the sea, desperate to stay above water, yet drowning slowly.
“How could you leave me?” My throat burns from the viciousness rising from my middle to my mouth.
Kane remains still, except one fist is now pressed to his mouth, like he’s suppressing a cry merely from the sight of younger Skylenna wandering the Red Oaks alone. Desperate to find what she lost.
“I hate you!” I wail, falling to the soft dirt with a thud. Fists pounding the grass without purpose. “I fucking hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”
A pair of determined arms wrap around my waist, carrying a thick scent of woodsmoke and a salty ocean breeze. I struggle, jostling against their hold with the dangerous goal to seriously harm whoever is trying to restrain me.
But through my tears, I catch a glimpse of the discolored, morphed skin of their hand and wrist. Bright pink and—burnedbut healing. The man sobs against my back, holding me for dear life as he waits for my breakdown to dim.
I recognize his moans muffled by my cloak immediately. Smell his burned, recovering skin. Feel the aura of a chosen brother surrounding our embrace.
