Kieran cuffed me. As if I had any chance of escaping, with my shattered wings and the aching pain in my head that wouldn’t go away. I tolerated it with an ill-tempered sigh and roll of my eyes.

The sun on my face was worth it. I tipped my face up to absorb the sunlight, by step faltering for a moment as I relished the breeze against my face. Birds weren’t meant to be locked in cellars.

Then Kieran prodded my sharply, right between my wings, making me yelp and stumble forward. “Keep moving,” he commanded, his tone as deadly as the crystal knife he held in his hand.

“How do you do that?” I asked, nodding my head at his knife.

“If I tell you, will you keep walking?”

I gave it a moment’s thought before nodding. “I’ll walk as long as you keep talking.”

“Fine,” Kieran sighed. Still, he waited until I started to walk again before he spoke. “I have the ability to crystallize the poisons in my body.”

I stumbled, shocked. “There’s poison in your body?”

“There’s poison in your body, too,” he pointed out. My irritated silence, and the pause of my steps, did more to show my displeasure than words could have. He huffed at me.

“I have an immunity to poison- so long as I constantly ingest those poisons. They remain in my body, and I can use them as weapons, pulling them out of my body and putting them in a crystalline form. Once they’re in that form, I can change them back and let them absorb into somebody else.”

The sound that came out of my mouth matched my awed expression. “Seriously? That’s pretty cool. I mean, not as cool as my wings,” I said with a smirk. Then the awe dropped into confusion. “Does that mean… you’re a Vital?”

I knew it wasn’t possible; there were only five of us in the last generation, and the others had all either exploded- or had died at my hands. He affirmed that with a snort. “No, I’m not a Vital. I’m as human as your guardian. In fact, I’m probably more human than your little doll, the guardian of the Alpha Vital. God only knows what they did to him.” He sounded furious, and I turned to see the anger in his eyes.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, my tone low and cautious.

He shook his head sharply. “I can’t tell you that. In fact, I shouldn’t have said any of that. She’ll be furious with me if I tell you before she has a chance to. She threatened to decapitate me, or worse.”

“Worse?”

He grimaced, and his worried gaze flicked down to his crotch. It made me laugh, honest and free. “That is worse than dying,” I admitted, my nose wrinkling slightly as I imagined losing that crucial part of my body. Worse than death, because I might die from the loss of it, wasting away with grief.

Keiran grinned at me, and I smiled back- we were almost friendly in that moment. Then a shout pulled my gaze away from him, and I stumbled backward as a child ran into my legs.

“Sorry, mister- ooh, who are you? I’ve never seen you around before!” The kid looked up at me with huge green eyes, his face a deep tan that made his teeth stand out when he grinned. “You’re all chained up. Are you a prisoner?”

I didn’t know what to say, my mouth opening and closing as I stared back at him.

“You’re hurt,” the little boy said, his lower lip pushing out into a pout as he reached for my wings.

Panic flashed across my face, and I backed up so fast I would have fallen over if Keiran hadn’t pressed a hand against my lower back. The touch made me flinch, my eyes going wide and my breathing coming fast enough that it made me light-headed. My eyes found the little boy again, and he looked more confused than scared. It relaxed me slightly, enough that my taut muscles unwound, and I didn’t try to pull away from Keiran’s supporting hand. The quick movement had made my head spin; my stomach twisted, and I was worried I would vomit if I tried to move again.

“Rafie! What have I told you about wandering off on your own?” The child was swept up in slim, tanned arms that set him up on jean clad hips. The woman, his mother with the same green eyes, looked at me with hatred and distrust in her eyes. Then she looked at Keiran. She changed immediately, a warm and welcoming smile on her lips as she cocked her hip a little more and arched her back.

I could have smacked her.

“Afternoon, Gemma. Little Raf giving you trouble again?” Keiran asked, reaching out to ruffle the boy’s copper curls.

Gemma turned her smile up a notch. “Just as much as ever. Kid really needs a dad to keep track of him,” she said, giving a twittering laugh that made me grind my teeth.

Keiran laughed back, making me frown. He turned his head so she couldn’t see, and winked at me. I had to press my lips together and look down at the ground so I didn’t give him away. He dealt with her chattering and flirting for a few minutes before he cleared his throat, hooking his fingers in the chain that connected my wrists and pulling me forward.

“Anyways, I have to take this one to see the Grey Queen. This is the one we’ve been after.”

“Really?” Gemma gasped, looking me over with a critical eye. “He’s not what I expected. He’s… short. And skinny. And so pale.”

“He lived in Elozan.”

Gemma’s lip curled into a disgusted sneer. and she backed away from me like I could spread some kind of terrible disease. “Keep him away from Rafie, then. I don’t want him putting any fool notions in Rafie’s head,” she spat, before turning her back on us and walking away.

I glared at her retreating back. “If she was any more judgmental, she would belong in a courtroom,” I muttered, yanking at my chains as I tried to reclaim my arms.

Keiran didn’t laugh like I had expected. “She has every right. You don’t understand, yet, why we hate Elozan. We live in fear under the city’s shadow. While its people live easy lives, put up like fat cats on soft beds, we’re left to scrape a living out of the desert left after their war. Judgmental is the least of what we are. Just take a look around you.”

I did what he said, and I was shocked by what I found.

There were none of the tall steel and glass building, glittering and sharp against the horizon. Instead, there were small makeshift homes spread out along the desert as far as I could see. People buzzed between them; they were all tanned like Gemma and Rafie, and they were all smiling and laughing, shouting down the dirt roads between rows of houses to get people’s attentions. It was warm, and friendly- and completely alien.

They should be scurrying past with their heads down. The important ones shouldn’t even be leaving their houses. They shouldn’t be mingling together in the dirt, shouting like that. So free that I couldn’t understand any of it. It didn’t make sense how they could be happy living like that.

Or maybe it did. Because for all the luxuries they didn’t have, they had one thing I never had in Elozan: freedom. The open sky, nobody watching them to make sure they didn’t step out of line. No labcoats checking their pulse every three hours. No comms attached to their skin to track their every move.

There was a lump in my throat as I turned to Keiran. “I don’t understand,” I said, my voice weak. “How can… this all exist?”

“I know it’s hard, at first,” Keiran said with a soft, tolerant smile. “It was hard for me, too. There’s a large difference between Elozan and Kyrn, and it’s only grown larger since the years after the war. The people here… they grew up not knowing if they would have dinner to put on the table for their kids at night. But they also grew up knowing they could go hunt that food down themselves. It’s… a different, hard life… but it’s a free one.”

I just started at him for the longest time. Nothing about it made even the slightest bit of sense. I’d been told nothing could survive outside Elozan’s walls, that anything living fell prey to the Soulless or the scars of the war.

But there was a whole city, and I was standing in it. There were obviously many things they hadn’t told me. More things they had lied to me about.

Keiran waited patiently while I struggled. Eventually I pushed out a heavy sigh, ducking my head for a moment while I shut my eyes tightly. When I looked up again, it was with a determined expression.

“Take me to see the Queen.”