“Wait,” Hallie says. “Is that…did I just…” She looks from the board to my face and back. “Maxon. Did I win?”
“You won,” I confirm.
And then her whole face breaks open. I have seen this female frightened, exhausted, guarded, fierce, sad. I have not, until this exact moment, seen herjoyful. She presses both gloved hands to her mouth. Her eyes are shining. “I beat the best player on the whole planet?”
“You did. You beat me.” I’m grinning so wide it hurts. “You took me apart. It wasn’t even close, at the end. I never saw the sacrifice coming. Hallie, that was utter perfection. You just became the best Karrec player on Timbur.” Then I look down at the board, at the piece she used to finish me, the one that moved anywhere it wanted and took everything in its path. “The Queen.”
“What?”
“That’s the human name for the piece you play like.” I touch it, the most powerful piece on the board, sitting in the wreckage of my defense. “Not the king. Everyone spends their whole game protecting the king, hiding it in the corner, keeping it small and safe. That’s not you. The Queen moves anywhere she wants, as far as she wants. Takes anything in her path. The most powerful piece on the board.” I lift my eyes to hers. “That’s what you are, Hallie. My Queen.”
“Careful. A girl could get a big head, around here. You beings hand out compliments like they’re free.”
“I’m not handing out anything,” I say. “You earned it.”
And that gets through. I watch it get through. The lightness falls off her and her eyes go bright and too-full, and when she speaks again her voice has dropped to something small and raw.
“I’ve been the pawn my whole life, Maxon.” She’s looking at the board, not at me. “Do you understand that? The little piece you spend without thinking, the one nobody guards. I spent three years on Chronos keeping everyone’s most precious secrets and not one of them would have crossed the room tokeepmesafe. I was useful. I was never…” She swallows. “Nobody has ever called me powerful. Nobody has ever looked at me and seen the Queen.”
“Then everybody before me was a fool.” I lean in over the board, careful, my voice low and certain. “Here, with me, you’re the Queen. The strongest piece on the board, in the whole compound, in my whole…” I catch the word before it escapes.
She looks at me then. Really looks, the way she did in my room full of trophies.
Her lips part.
My pulse is loud in my own ears. I am not enflamed. I can’t be, not yet, my body stays dormant until the clasp, but thepullof her is so strong it’s nearly a physical thing, a current running under my skin toward her, toward the one bare touch that would change everything.
My gloved hand drifts across the board, slow, toward where her own gloved hand rests on the table’s edge. Her hand moves too, the smallest nanco, toward mine. Both of us reaching. Our hands hover, a breath apart. Close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off her gloved fingers through two layers of fabric.
One more small movement and her hand would be under mine, and everything that’s been building all week, all the careful not-touching, would finally have somewhere to go.
And then…
She jerks back. The same instant I do.
Both of us, at once, drawing our hands back to our own sides of the board, as if we’d each reached the same conclusion in the same heartbeat.Not yet. Not like this. Not with everything still hanging over us.
We sit there, a board’s width apart, both our hands fisted in our laps, the almost still ringing in the air between us.
Chapter 8
Hallie
The Fever Brothers all have the front room tonight, and the women have the courtyard.
“Once a cycle,” Jana tells me, dragging a chair across the stone with a screech that would wake the dead if the dead weren’t already three rooms away and fast asleep. “The males take the offspring and the worry. We take the courtyard. And nobody,”—she drops into the chair and points at me— “is allowed to talk about the mine until at least the second drink. Sit down, Hallie. You’re one of the women tonight.”
I sit down.
The back courtyard is a square of stone pavers open to the sky, walled on three sides by the compound and on the fourth by the jungle, which presses in close, dark and dripping just past the low fence. Someone has strung crystal-light along the eaves, little captured glows that throw everything soft and gold. Two moons hang overhead and a light breeze smells like blossoms.
The males are a low rumble through the wall behind us is Chief’s voice, then Heavy’s, then a laugh that can only be Rook’s. Tonight the fathers are on watch and not drinking, so the brides can have their own bonding moment.
“Okay,” Roxy announces, producing a dark bottle from somewhere with a flourish. “Let’s assess the situation.” She sets the bottle down and looks around the table, grave as a physician delivering a diagnosis. “Ines is six months along.”
“And feeling every day of it,” she agrees.
“Naomi, who can no longer locate her own feet…”
