“Phoenix Above, boy, it really is you.”
Akaros dropped his hand and stepped back, his eyes full of an emotion Yassen had never seen him wear before.
Hope.
Unbridled, untainted hope.
Why would he look at him this way?
Yassen began to speak again when the fire hissed. A stray flame rolled out and inched toward his metal coffin. Yassen pulled back in alarm, but a part of him, a deep guttural instinct, bade him to stay.
The flame’s tip flickered, as if testing the air, and then latched around his ankle.
He yelped—but the pain did not come.
Yassen Knight found then that he did not burn.
He feltalive.
The flame’s heat vibrated through him, from his bones to his very cells. It was like a comet, distant and sure in its beauty, but when he focused on the flame’s touch, it became a bright blaze fueled by momentum and speed, careening to an end point he did not know, was afraid to know.
Slowly, carefully, he opened his hand. At once, the flame shot up and tightened into a small ball in his palm. He stared in bewilderment. It hummed, waiting.
“What…” he said, his voice foreign to his own ears. “What is this?”
Akaros’s eyes glistened in wonder, but his lips curved into a cold, knowing smile, and Yassen felt more afraid of that than the fire that no longer burned him.
“We have been waiting for your return for a long time, Cass.”
Yassen could only gaze at the fire, a slow dread building within him. This was a hallucination. A dream. He would wake up in the cabin again to find Elena puttering about in the kitchen, attempting to wrangle together a pot of tea. He dug his nails into his palms to wake himself. But the room did not change. Akaros’s watchful gaze did not blur into Elena’s honey-brown eyes.
“Please,” he said, his voice scratchy, his tongue like sandpaper. “I—I don’t know what you mean. Where am I? What happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?” Akaros said. He gestured to the fire lapping at his feet. “Haven’t you already figured it out?”
“But the last thing I remember was the cabin. No… there was something else.” Yassen’s voice trailed off as he looked down at his chest. Memories, bitter and frayed, swept through him as he remembered the explosions, the fire, Elena’s desperate voice as she grasped his hand.You’d better.And then there was the sound of a bullet. The hot pain in his chest. The soft press of the earth beneath his back as he looked up at the flames… Slowly, Yassen pulled up his kurta and hissed at the scar, red and angry, slanting diagonally above his heart.
“Youshot me,” he said.
“And I saved you,” Akaros replied. He paused then, glancing up to a silvered screen above them. “We saved you.”
“Divsaved you,” the girl snapped, finally speaking. Yassen saw a quiet rage in her eyes, made only fiercer by the desperate angle of her lips, the tension in her jaw. She stood beside another metal chamber, as if protecting it. There was a shadow of a face in there. Young, boyish. He leaned forward to get a closer look, and she blocked his vision.
“Jaya,” Akaros said, a warning in his voice.
“You said we would wake Div after the third,” she said. Fresh tears formed in her eyes. “You lied.”
“We will. Give him a chance—”
“Wake him up, then,” she said.
“Jaya—”
“Wake him,” she said, this time leveling her gaze at Yassen.
Despite the flame, Yassen felt a chill skitter down his spine under her glare. There was so muchangerin her eyes, and he half expected her hair to rise and shred him into ribbons of flesh.
“I—I don’t understand,” Yassen said. “Why did you save me and not Elena?”
