Page 89 of The Heart Trials

His jaw flexes once, the muscle twitching like a tremor.

“What did you see?”

“No.” His voice is rough. Not cold, but heavy. “We don’t need to discuss that.”

I inhale slowly and shift to face him. The movement disturbs the fragile peace we’ve found, his leg shimmying away from mine. If he isn’t upset about the hallucination the strange memory filler gave him, then what?

He blinks slowly, then speaks. “The tournament is not a competition, Axira. It’s a harvest.”

My skin tingles like I’m being pricked with a thousand tiny needles.

“A kiss between the winning truest-love match makes a powerful magic,” he says, quieter now. “The magic we are going to steal.”

I straighten.

“The Benevolent claims the kiss is just a symbol—an ending to the tournament,” he continues. “But it’s more than that. My father drains magic from the contestants when they kiss. It unleashes something. I’ve seen it, once. At an Ascension Ceremony when I was ten years old. The magic appears like Heartfillers, small ones, thousands of them. My father duplicates them in his lab, and the more he duplicates them, the less potent they become. Eventually, he has to harvest a new set. About every ten years.”

I go cold all over, my thoughts scattering, racing to knit themselves into something that makes sense. I touch my lips, remembering Kade’s…“Is it all kisses?”

“Just the one at the Ascension Ceremony. He gives something to the contestants so that the connection produces magic.” He leans in. “And I figure if we harvest the magic, it will stop him from being able to keep the lowborn addicted to feeling good, their minds duller than an old blade, fixated on the pleasures, distracted, numb.”

I think of Miss Omon and Nichol, but also the others—Dorian, Ferdy, the Saltblood. Their slack eyes. Their manufactured happy. We could free them. We could free all of them. I blink quickly to dry the moisture forming in my eyes. “Then we would, what, rally them to fight?” I ask.

“No. No, we don’t want war,” Caelus says. “But if we take the weapon out of my father’s hands, we will have control. He will have no power without the lowborn oppressed.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “He has all the power in his position.”

“That’s what he wants you to think. He only has power because it’s given to him.” He says it like we have some kind of power. Like lowborn could choose to not give it. Like we weren’t born beneath the boot of it. I almost laugh, but don’t because of how he looks at me, like it’s true. I scoot closer to him.

He continues, “The magnitude of the power from the kiss depends on how much the kiss means to the people who share it. The more desperate for love, the more—”

“Power it has,” I finish, the words tasting bitter.

“Exactly. So he has made the districts as miserable as possible, stringing them along on false promises and temporary pleasures. He wants as many people as possible, the most desperate possible, to enter the tournament. And once you’re in here, watching people drop left and right, turning your attention away from—”

“Horrible things,” I whisper. Like Finn’s murder, and Orrick being manipulated into doing it. Like burning food while our families and friends starve. “They can’t live with the horrible things they’ve done. So they only become more desperate to win.” It feels like the floor vanishes beneath my feet. The Benevolent has built his kingdom from the desperation of his people. “He’s manipulating lowborn to fuel our own oppression. Making us believe we are powerless. That we need his Heartfillers.”

“Yes.” Caelus’s chin dips in shame. He’s carried this secret for too long.

I see Dorian cowering bloody on the ground, a contestant’s swollen purple lips, Kade’s stare, glinting with dark ambition. And Rhythe, pulling all the strings he can, just to reclaim a shred of power and control. I recoil—not with my body, but somewhere deeper. My arms cross my chest.

The lowest in society aren’t desperate by accident. People are hungry and sick on purpose.

We are desperate by design.

Engineered to be harvested.

I want to scream. I want to run. But I just hold my arms around myself like a shield. “Why are you just now telling me this?” I ask.

Caelus exhales through his nose, a quiet surrender in his shoulders. “I’ve spent years preparing for this moment, Axira. I worried that if I told you the truth, you’d walk away.”

“That’s preposterous!” I release my balled fists. I want to be angry and say he should have told me from the start, but if he had told me at the beginning—when all I cared about was Serafina and my orphanage—would I have stayed? I can’t honestly say I would have.

“So we have to steal the kiss magic,” I say, smoothing my clothes.

“Right,” he says, the corners of his mouth tugging to not quite a smile, but something resolved. He shifts closer to me, and I savor the warmth of him.

“How, exactly?”