The word comes out sharp and immediate. Childish only in the sense that he is, in fact, a child. There is nothing immature in the raw force behind it.
“Jamie,” Jack says, stepping closer.
“No.” Jamie backs up a step. “No, I’m not going. I’m not.”
The wind catches his voice and flings it around us. Behind him, the rift shudders again, and the blue on the other side—real blue, impossible blue, the colour of home, of Earth, of every stupid ordinary sky I’ve spent ten years aching for—sputters in and out behind the distortion.
Jack reaches for him. Jamie bolts sideways and crashes straight into Caly instead.
Not hard enough to hurt. Hard enough to cling.
The movement is instinctive. So is the way Caly catches him. One pale, almost translucent arm wraps around Jamie’s shoulders, steadying him without caging him, and for one painful second, the whole world narrows down to the shape they make together beneath the darkening sky.
“Don’t make me go,” Jamie says, his voice breaking wide open now as he presses into Caly like if he holds on tightly enough, the rest of reality can’t pry him loose. “Please. Please, I don’t want to go.”
Jack stops dead. Something on his face twists so hard, I have to look away for half a beat.
Solan, standing at his shoulder, goes very still. More still than any creature that big and that built for violence has a right to go. The fight is over for the moment. The guards are down around us in ugly, crumpled shapes, blood sinking into root and soil. We should be moving. We should be deciding. The sky shouldn’t be waiting.
But it is waiting, and so we’re trapped here inside this impossible, brutal pause where a boy has to be sent home and doesn’t understand why everyone else thinks that is salvation.
Caly lowers his head and says something into Jamie’s hair that I cannot hear.
I watch Jamie’s shoulders jerk.
Whatever the words are, they land.
Slowly, painfully, Caly disentangles himself.
He does it with more care than I would have thought him capable of if I didn’t know better now, if I had only the first impression of him—beautiful, clever, detached. Nothing about him is detached in this moment. His hands linger for one extra beat on Jamie’s upper arms as he eases him back, and when he lifts his head, there’s no naïveté left in his face. Only intelligence. Only sorrow. Only a discipline that looks ancient and far too practised for a body that reads so young.
“You must go,” he says quietly.
Jamie’s eyes go wide and wet. “No.”
Caly’s throat works once. “Yes.”
“No!”
The word tears out of him. It slams into my ribs because there’s no artifice in it, no posturing, no attempt to be brave. Just grief in its first, rawest form.
Jack steps in then, because he has to. Because he’s both the adult and the one who loves this boy enough to break him now in order to save him later.
He goes to his knees in the dirt in front of Jamie, not caring about blood or mud or the absurdity of kneeling in the middle of a battlefield under a ripping sky. He puts both hands on Jamie’s face and holds him there, forcing eye contact, forcing the moment into something real and inescapable.
“Listen to me,” Jack says.
Jamie shakes his head so hard, the medallion flashes wild light over both their faces. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“I know.” Jack’s voice cracks, and he doesn’t hide it. “I know, Jamie.”
“I’m meant to be here.”
The words hit me low and strange because I remember him saying them before, half defiant and half wondering, and hearing them now in this voice, in this broken little plea, turns them into something else. Not certainty. Fear. A child trying to cling to meaning because the alternative is too awful to hold.
Jack swallows hard. “Maybe you are. Maybe one day, maybe later, maybe for reasons none of us understand yet. But not like this. Not now.”
Jamie tries to turn his face away. Jack doesn’t let him.
