Page 65 of Bone Year

Surprise flickers across her face, or relief perhaps that someone isn’t feeding her empty reassurances.

“I am losing my mind.” She slumps back against the pillows. “But thanks for acknowledging it.”

Now that I’m facing her, I can see the damage clearly. The right wing looks healthy enough. Dark-charcoal-gray membrane stretched taut across delicate bones, faint vessels visible when the weak light from the window catches it. There’s an iridescent quality to the healthy tissue. It’s beautiful in a strange way.

The left wing is a different story entirely.

A jagged slash nearly two feet long runs from the joint near her shoulder blade down toward the outer edge. The edges are ragged, torn rather than cut clean. This wasn’t a blade. This was something with claws like broken glass.

The membrane around the wound is discolored, the healthy gray giving way to sickly green and mottled black. Dark lines spread outward from the gash, branching and splitting as they creep toward the wing’s edge. Some of them look faded, like they’re receding. Others look fresh and angry, still pushing outward.

The wound itself is a mess of contradictions, partially closed in some places where vampire healing has tried to knit the tissue back together, raw and weeping in others where something keeps tearing it open again. The edges are thin and papery, threatening to split farther with any wrong movement. A dark fluid seeps slowly from the worst sections.

“It’s worse today.” Nella’s watching my face. “I can tell by how you’re not saying anything.”

I force myself to meet her eyes. “I’ve never seen a fissure wound before. I don’t have anything to compare it to.”

“Liar.” But there’s no heat in it. “You’re making the face.”

“Let’s agree on mildly concerned.”

“That’s more than mildly concerned. That’s approaching deeply troubled.” She turns her head back toward the window. “It was better yesterday. The lines were pulling back. I thought maybe...”

Her hopes have been dashed.

I lean forward in the chair. “Tell me what happened. How did you get this?”

She’s quiet, but I wait.

“My brother.” Her fingers find the stuffed fox, grip tightening around its worn fur. “He’s a second year Vanguard trainee at the academy in the Shadowlands. I wanted to watch him practice, see what he could do. I wasn’t supposed to be there but snuck out anyway. There was a breach. A small fissure opened suddenly, barely a crack, but something came through before anyone could react.”

“What kind of something?”

“A riftling about the size of a large cat with six legs and too many joints. Skin like burned leather stretched too tight over bones. No eyes, just smooth dark patches where eyes should be. A mouth that split its face in half, full of needle-like teeth.”

Something twists inside me listening to her describe it.

“It didn’t make any sound.” She’s staring out the window again, but I don’t think she’s seeing the sky anymore. “I didn’t even hear it coming. When I saw it, I panicked and got my wings out, thinking I could fly above it to get away.”

“And?”

“It was faster. It launched at me before my feet left the ground, slashing across my wing, and I went down hard. The Vanguards killed it a few seconds later, but the damage was already done.”

A fourteen-year-old girl, wings barely unfurled, trying to escape something with claws and a mouth full of needle teeth. No wonder she keeps that stuffed fox close.

“The corruption?” I ask quietly.

“Riftlings are full of fissure energy. That energy is in me now. My body keeps trying to heal the wound, but the corruption, rot, necrosis, whatever you call it keeps reopening it. They’re fighting each other, and I’m...”

“Stuck in the middle.”

“Yeah, stuck.”

I look at the wing again. At the necrotic lines that spread and recede and spread again. At the wound that heals and tears and heals and tears. A battle happening inside her body, and she has no control over any of it.

“What treatments have they tried?”

“Everything.” She laughs, but there’s nothing funny about it. “Current flushing is where they channel clean current through my system to try to push the corruption out. Hurts like hell and helps for maybe a day before the lines start spreading again. Bloodletting is great. Nothing a vampire loves more than having her blood drained. Some kind of paste made from burned ashroot and moonpetal has been smeared on the wound. It burns so bad I bite through my lip every time.”