“No, I do,” Rumor said softly. The blanket was pulled up to her chin, and she was mumbling into the fabric. “I think we should leave if we can, and I would love to see Allium. I used to read books about our old planet. It’s always fascinated me. I fell in love with the diverse climate and changes throughout the land. Not that we’ll know if any of it still exists today, but when I was stranded here growing up, I craved something warmer, something different.”
“Then why are you scared it’s possible?”
“I’m scared it’s going to hurt more,” she admitted. “It was our dream growing up. Vallie and Miles,” she paused on his name. “It’s our childhood dream coming true, and the fact that he isn’t here to witness it… it just sucks.”
“I’m sorry,” I said as I kissed the top of her head again and pulled her tighter into my chest. “I never knew him, and I know this doesn’t make losing someone any easier, but he’d want you and Vallie to be happy.”
“I know,” she sighed.
The monorail came to a halt, but this time it wasn’t one of Kallon’s stops to set up a portal. We were here. I’d never been to Backerly, but I was aware the land was mountainous, even more than LakeWood. We’d been traveling at an incline for the past hour, and the town was built into the peaks themselves.
Rumor stood first, shrugging off the blankets. She went to open the compartment, but I grabbed her arm before she could slide the door open and pulled her into a hug. She exhaled as she pressed her forehead into the crook of my neck.
I love you,I said into her mind.
I love you too, Tezya.
Backerly wasthe most tech-heavy town out of the six villages in Tennebris, and I found I liked it the most. It was colder, being at a naturally higher elevation than the rest of the kingdom, making it closer to the top of the shield. But the mixture of electric heat and warmth from the fireplaces made it more cozy than dreary.
Each building was built into a different mountain with interconnected bridges linking them, and the rooms themselves were designed on a vertical incline with the top floor circling the peak. It made the need for stairs everywhere. I couldn’t stopsmiling at Rumor’s complete dread. I knew her legs were killing her. Despite the obvious shake she had to them, she had told me multiple times now how she never planned to come back here after today and kept condemning the stairs with each new flight she saw.
The AASP was located on one of the peaks. Floor-to-ceiling windows, similar to the monorail, took up the length of the room, and the view was breathtaking. It overlooked everything.
Several Tennebrisians greeted us when we arrived, all eager to show off their work. Everyone was silent during their tour. By the time we finished, the day had passed, even though the darkness remained the same.
“So you guys are really going to go then?” Savannah asked later that night. We made it back to the castle in Palm well past midnight, but everyone was too anxious to sleep.
“Yeah,” Peter replied. “I can’t believe it.”
“We still have to win the war first,” Dovelyn deadpanned. “And we just barely survived this battle.”
I loved my sister, but she was a realist to a fault. No one wanted to think about the next fight in Lux. I especially didn’t. Not that I was personally dreading it. I was ready and knew the Lux King needed to die. But whenever it was brought up, Rumor went further into her desolation. She didn’t believe I was going to survive it.
“Right,” Wells said as he pushed his glasses back up his nose after wiping the lenses on his shirt. “You guys should make another broadcast with the information about the spacecraft and going to Allium. It might help sway some of the Tennebrisians to want to fight, and you need all the numbers you can get. We lost—”
“Let’s not focus on that,” I cut him off. The first day after the battle we went through all the names lost. They deserved the acknowledgement. It was something I did after every fight when I was forced to attack the rebels. To the Luxian soldiers, I wouldlist all the names of our own military, and then later at night, when it was just Rainer, Brock, and Kallon, I would list all the rebels who died. I sent the list to Dravenburg, knowing he’d share it with the new recruits at the camp when the time was right.
But tonight, right now, I didn’t want to focus on death. “We’ll make another broadcast tomorrow morning. We can see if anyone else wants to join, but I want to make sure it’s clear it’s not mandatory. No one is required to fight.” It was something I hated about our society. If you were strong within Lux, you were forced into the army. I’d watch countless men, who had no stomach for bloodshed, change.
Everyone was silent after that. Savannah made us coffee—which she claimed was decaf, but I didn’t believe her—and we all sat around a fire, holding the warm beverage, and letting our final night sink in.
We were attacking Lux in two days, and similar to when we came here, Kallon and Rumor were going to start portaling everyone in waves tomorrow night. Which meant this was our last night of peace. Our last night of waking up without having to go into war. It might be our last night all together. We might not all survive past the next battle, and I didn’t want to think about my chances of making it were even less.
But I knew what I had to do, what I would do.
“Let’s go to bed,” I whispered to Rumor as I helped her up. Our coffees were now cold. I’d been reheating them over the past hour we’d been sitting here, but I wanted to leave now.
If tonight might be my last night alive, I wanted to enjoy heraloneand planned to make the most of it.
SIXTY-NINE
SCOTLIND
I wokeup with a sense of dread. In a few hours, we were going to start portaling everyone into Lux. It didn’t seem real. Tezya and I barely slept. When we got to our room last night, we practically attacked each other. After we had sex, we just held each other for hours.
It was only after he drifted off to sleep that I snuck out to meet Dovelyn at the library. We read through as many texts as we could, trying desperately to figure out what the prophecy meant and how to save Tezya before we had to go to the broadcast. We found nothing. Absolutely nothing indicating what a sacrifice from Light and blood from Dark meant.
Dovelyn and I spent hours scouring all the books in the royal library, but still came nowhere closer to answers than when we started. I even sucked up my pride and knocked on Vallie’s door half way through the night.
