“It took me a while to find August,” he continues. “Almost a month, but when I found him hiding in a farmhouse outside Lohaw, he didn’t ask questions—he just took me in and promised to raise me as his own son. I was only fourteen at the time.” He flashes me a look, as if to see my reaction, but I remain quiet, letting him finish. Letting him get it all out. “I’ve been with August for four years, hiding from my father, always on the road.”
I try to imagine how he must have felt, hiding, afraid of what would happen if Holt and his men found him. Not only was he a traitor when he left, but he joined August—the very man who Holt blamed for his wife’s death.
“After a year, August started preparing me, telling me stories about the Astronomer. About the stars. I would be the next Architect once he was gone. He taught me the way to the sea, so that I could take her there—takeyouthere someday.”
When he looks at me, I’m surprised to find a gentleness in his eyes—no hate or regret.
He has just told me the truth about who he is: every scarred, awful moment from his past, laid out across the dry ground for me to see.His secrets are my secrets now. And when I look into his cold, sad, beautiful eyes, I feel a swelling beneath my ribs unlike I’ve ever known before. Like some part of me is breaking and blooming all at once. A thud in my chest, a tremor in my veins.
My mother is dead, but Noah might have just killed his own father. To save me. We are both orphans in ways that should shatter us. Destroy us both. Yet we’re trying to do what’s right and see thisthrough. Both bound by a past, a story that’s already been written for us. We are both broken. And I need him now more than ever.
But first, I need to get the words out before they rot inside me. “I’m sorry—” I shake my head, pressing my hands against my knees, knowing it’s not good enough. Not even close. “I’m sorry for your mother dying before you ever knew her. I’m sorry about your father, for what you’ve had to do, for yourself and for me. I’m sorry August died before he could tell you everything, tell you all the stories that my mom told me.” I breathe—I force myself to keep going, my eyes buried in his. “I’m sorry I walked away from our camp that night and got caught by Holt’s men, for making you come after me. I wish I could go back and undo what happened.” Tears push against my eyelids, then break free, but I wipe them away quickly, knowing he doesn’t want my tears. They aren’t worth anything. “I’m sorry she—” I lift my eyes to him, start again. “I know you loved Cricket…. I know she was all you had left.”
He drops the stick he had been using to prod the fire, onto the dirt beside him. “I did,” he admits, his jaw a stiff, measured line. “We saved each other’s lives many times.” For a moment, he looks away, like he might stand up and walk away into the trees—unable to talk about this, to hear my useless apology. But then he says, “She knew you were worth dying for. She tracked those men to Mill City, to where they’d taken you—she was never going to leave you behind.”
A line of traitorous tears thread down my cheeks.
But Noah levels his eyes on me. “It wasn’t your fault,” he says. “None of it. My mother died because she was sick; my father became a man with cruelty in his veins, a man I was afraid of, who I couldn’t trust. August died protecting you, which is what he wanted, apromise he made to his father, and his father before him. It was an honorable death. A better death than giving up slowly to the sickness, without purpose. He died the way he wanted. And Cricket—” His voice catches, and he clamps his mouth shut, holding back the pain. “Those men killed her, not you,” he says. “She knew you were important, and she did it for August, for me.” His eyes glisten with tears and I want to touch him, feel his warm skin beneath my fingertips, but I’m too afraid. Afraid of what will happen in my unstable heart if I let myself be that close to him.
I think about what Holt said in the schoolhouse, how we all play roles. Maybe we were always moving toward each other—the Astronomer and the Architect—and sooner or later we would have ended up here. Paths diverging in a wood, a story that was told long ago. A story about us, already written.
An Astronomer and an Architect.
“Back at the water tower,” Noah says, eyes bottomless, never looking away, “when you showed me the marks on your neck, I knew you were her and I knew I would stay with you until the end.”
The air catches against my teeth.
His eyes rake over me as his hand lifts, fingertips finding my throat, resting lightly against the place where Holt pressed the blade, where a pink line now rests—not fully healed. My pulse drives at my temples, and he trails a path up to my jaw, into my tangled hair. I feel the heat expand in my chest, the ache I’ve been trying to suppress—the burning that turns me to shreds whenever he looks at me. “I knew then that you were her… the one I’ve been looking for in the faces of every girl I’ve ever met. In every town and outpost, I would scan the crowds, hoping I’d find you.”
Blood swims in my veins. “You were looking for me?”
“Every day for the last three years.” His hand slides to the back of my neck, resting softly against the mark. “When I was with the Theorists, we hunted you, following any rumor we heard about a sighting of the Astronomer. No matter how far away. But with August, I startedsearchingfor you.” His river-deep eyes fall to my mouth, then back up. “I knew my father wouldn’t stop hunting you. I had to find you before he did.” He swallows, a half smile stealing across his lips. “But you found me.”
I draw the cool night air into my lungs, I let my gaze sink into his, and I find something ancient in his eyes—as if they have seen many shores, the wisdom of others living inside him. Just like it lives inside me. “It feels like… we were always meant to find one another,” I say, my heart knocking against my ribs.
His mouth parts a little, and I can see the question in his eyes. The same question in mine.
Air escapes my lips.
Please,I think.Kiss me.His eyes blink; his mouth parts like he’s going to speak, tell me a story about our past, about every almost-missed moment that led us to each other, but instead…
He leans forward, so close that I can smell his campfire-pine scent. Feel his breath on my lips. Feel every time his skin almost grazed mine, the unmistakable longing in my chest, all the nights when I stared at him and wanted to feel him this close. I exhale, letting my lips fall open, searching for a word, for a thought, that is long gone.
And in that half blink, in the second before my thoughts can rise up again—he presses his mouth to mine. Warmth and need andeverything else I’ve kept bottled up inside me, the ache I’ve tried to ignore, finally breaks across my skin.
His hand slides up the nape of my neck, back into my hair. Like he’ll never let me go—never let anyone take me again. No blades pressed to my throat, no cages inside abandoned towns. My fingers find his chest, his collarbone, coiling around his shirt—the parts of him I’ve wanted to touch for too long—dragging him closer, and I feel the sky spinning wildly overhead, breaking apart. Shattering me.
He kisses me harder, desperate now, like he believes there is hope woven into the fibers of my bones. Like I will save him. Put him back together. All the days we’ve spent together, the long, cold nights with his body so close to mine, and now, at last, that terrible pain inside me has calmed. It has found the thing it needed all along.
Him.
He weaves his other hand around the back of my neck, over the mark branded there, and I kiss him, wanting more than just his mouth on mine, needing him to never let go, a burning pain growing inside my solar plexus, deep within my gut. The truth resting behind my eyelids: I’ve wanted to kiss him since the moment I saw him beneath the water tower. He frightened me then, his dark, rigid stance as he squinted through the glaring sun at me, the black tattoos winding up his arms. But I also couldn’t bear for him to look away.
I needed the feel of his eyes on me, tearing me open, making me something else—a girl he’s been searching for.
I slide my hand up his jaw, tracing every line, every freckle, like constellations on the map ofhisdark skin. We each have scars. Markers of our past. His flesh inked by the tattoos of a friend who’s been lost, the starburst brand burned into his forearm from the Theoristshe escaped. His teeth graze my bottom lip, my heart battering in my ribs. He kisses me like I am starlight and darkness and the wind through the valley trees: this boy who is the last Architect. He kisses me harder, fingers along my skull, and the buzzing fear writhing along my joints sinks into the background.
His hands trace the bones of my spine, his mouth parting against mine,deeper, deeper, and I think: we have finally found each other.
