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“I saw the girl,” he said. “The one in your bathroom. She’s a real stunner. Where’s she from?”
I turned away from him.
“I don’t want to talk about her,” I said.
He looked at me sideways. He recognized a raw wound when he saw it.
“She must be something to get you to forget about Jeyell for a while,” he said.
“I didn’t forget about her,” I snapped.
If anyone else had said that I would be breathing fire. But I could never stay angry at my brother.
“She got under your skin, didn’t she?” he said.
I nodded.
“The best ones always do,” Qale said. “You should try to see things from her side, try to get a handle on what made her do what she did. I’d bet she only did it because it made sense at the time. Maybe things look different to her now.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I was listening to advise from my angry elder brother.
“What?” he said.
“You. What happened to you out in the wood?”
“I got tossed from the shuttlecraft, miles out in the middle of nowhere. My armor burned up something fierce and scalded my skin. I tried to get it off but couldn’t.”
His face took on a faraway, dreamlike quality.
“And then she came,” he said. “She brought buckets of water to ease the burning and, once she could put her hands on the metal, opened it up. What she saw under there wasn’t pretty.”
A Titan’s ability to heal was legendary. It came from a long existence taking punishment deep beneath the moon’s surface, mining. It could be a hot and inhospitable place. Our bodies learned to heal fast, to become whole once more—otherwise, we would perish. It was the only way to survive. Since then, it prepared us well for battle. It would be a deciding factor in whether we would manage to repel the Changelings from our soil.
“She took me in and fed me, bathed me, rubbed ointment into my wounds,” Qale said. “We’ve lived so long in the castle we never got to remember the simple things in life are the most important. A delicious meal after working hard on the farm, the warmth of a fire after a long day in the cold, the love of a good woman.”
“Some of us never forgot,” I said.
“No, not you, little brother. You always had an understanding of the people. Far more than I ever did.”
“That understanding was what got me locked up down here,” I said. “Fat lot of good it did me.”
“But it did, don’t you see? I heard about the attack on the front lines and I leaped into war. It made me predictable. They had no trouble knocking me from the sky. They would have succeeded too if a guard hadn’t shoved me back at the last moment. And when I heard the decision you made—to refuse to let our people die needlessly—I knew you’d done what I failed to.”
“I dishonored us,” I said.
Qale slapped me on the back.
“No, little brother,” he said. “Don’t you see? You brought us the potential for great honor. You did what no other Titan could. You saw through your anger and rage, the thick mist that so often descended on me when it came to war, and instead, you chose peace.”
“You’re saying we shouldn’t fight?” I said. “But your messages—”
“Titans can always fight. We’re born ready. But that doesn’t mean we should fight where our enemies decide. You provided us with a much better battlefield. Now the enemy is among us. All we needed to do was prepare ourselves—something I’ve been working on in the shadows. I let you know updates in the messages. You should be the one to light the beacon. You deserve that honor. To send us into victory over these creatures. The people are ready.”
“They were ready. Now they have Changelings fully prepared for the war ahead. There’s a whole war frigate over the town!”
“Don’t underestimate our people,” Qale said, voice a little tight.
“I refuse to send them to the slaughter just for honor,” I said. “When the perfect time comes, when they least expect it—”
