“Where is she?” I demand of the nearest one, yelling so my voice can be heard over the scream of multiple alarms. He shakes his head, so I grab the arm of the next and shout, “Where’s the terrakin?”
“She left with her mate,” he says hurriedly, shrugging off my hand so carelessly that my claws leave deep grooves in his hide.
“Not that one, the younger—” A deep, terrifying vibration stops everyone for a split-second before the chaos resumes at an even faster pace.
I give up getting any information from these bleating animals and simply follow the herd to the hatchery.Of coursemy stupid little mate is there. I can smell her even through the smoke. I can hear her coughing from across the room.
I push through the panicked parents scooping infants from their artificial nests and find her fighting a frixing wall of fire next to Harl, her cheeks smudged with ash, hair drawn back into one of her hateful leashes.
I wrap my hand in it and pull her into me, cursing her and the day I scented her.
“Stop!” she squeals, hands going to her head, and then she realizes it’s me and drops them. “You came back.”
“Why did I bother when you’re trying so hard to die?”
“Because you love me.” She beams up at me, then coughs so hard into her elbow that I have to let go of her hair so I don’t pull it out by the roots. She bends down and heaves a heavy, sodden piece of dark fabric from a bucket of water on the floor. “Here, use this. We have to work fast.”
It’s my shadowcloak, I realize. She’s been using it to smother the fire. She shoves it in my hands, but I let it drop back into the water.
Instead, I scoop her up. “The only help I’m giving you is into my ship.”
“No, not yet. Not until they’re all safe!” she gasps, eyes streaming from the smoke and making mud out of the charcoal on her face. She turns to sweetgrass jelly in my arms, syrupy and soft as she tries to slide out of my grasp. It only makes me grip her tighter. “Harl! Help!”
The Frathik emerges from the swirling smoke at her call.
“I won’t hesitate to kill you if you try and stop me,” I warn him, pinning a squalling Lena to my side so she can’t reach my eyes with her blunt claws.
“Take her. I told her to go with the first evacuees,” Harl growls, dunking a fur into the bucket at my feet. He’s in worse shape than her, half his eyes swollen shut, blisters on the back of one shoulder.
“I’m not leaving without you!” Lena yells, now as furious with him as she is with me.
“There are more important things to save than my hide. Go.”
“What about Lele? She needs you alive!” Lena wails as the flames lick hungrily toward us, the heat almost unbearable. Harl slaps them away with his watery weapon before turning back to answer.
“She’s in nest forty-six, if they haven’t evacuated her yet,” he says calmly. He’s at peace with whatever comes. I can see it on his face. “Take her. Tell her she was wanted.”
Chapter 29
Lena
Ihold the squirming bundle tight in my arms as Lyro makes the frigid dash from the hangar to his ship, tears freezing on my face and Harl’s words ringing in my ears.
Tell her she was wanted.That’s all I ever needed from my own father. So simple, but I never got it.
My mom would make up stories about him, excuses really, about how he was secret royalty and that’s why he couldn’t visit us. About how we had to practice our manners and act like young ladies because we could be called to court at any time. Ada and I believed her because the alternative was acknowledging that he just didn’t want us.
When Mom died, part of me genuinely believed a royal family would swoop in and take us. The same way I stillhopedthe Tooth Fairy was real even though, at ten years old, I knew for a fact that she wasn’t.
“I’m keeping her if he doesn’t make it,” I say to Lyro when he sets me down inside the ship and flips a metal seat out from the wall.
“Buckle your harness,” he orders.
Shivering, I fumble the buckle with one hand while he does something with the controls that makes hot air blast from a vent near us.
“Did you hear me?” I ask him when he comes back to adjust the straps. He grunts, a meaningless sound that doesn’t mean yes or no. “If Harl dies—”
“He’s not going to die,” he snaps, skin turning all the ugly colors. “Frathiks are not as weak as terrakins.”
