‘Blue?’ Raeia’s voice brought a smile to my cracked lips, but my shallow joy was quickly stifled by the awareness of another energy pulse.  

‘Theo?’ I called. The thrumming from Theo’s dhaheri was steady but there were long spaces between each pulse, as if he was in hibernation. In Sommersgap I’d wondered if it would ever shift into something more volatile, but it never had.

‘I hoped they were lying when they said you were here,’ he replied.

Moisture came to my eyes. In the few conscious days I had at Sommersgap, Theo had been a thread to sanity for me after we’d become cellmates. (Why have they brought you here?)

There was silence, broken only by Ibictor Janice’s chuckle. She didn’t put words to her amusement. 

‘I came to read to you, Blue. Would you like that?’ Raeia said.

‘Always love to hear more of your pretty voice.’

Quiet again. I smiled, imagining the heat rolling from Raeia’s face as though I could touch it. 

‘Theo loves story time as well, isn’t that right?’ I continued and listened to the huff of laughter that might escape him. It did. My smile grew. 

I listened, expecting rejection as Theo made the outlandish request of being allowed into my cell. Janice did not chuckle, but Raeia made the same request, and moments later, both she and Theo were in the room with me, and the locks were sealed behind them. ‘Good luck,’ was all Janice said. 

‘I won’t hurt you,’ I said, sensing Raeia’s hesitations. The cell felt suddenly tiny, with the beats of our souls bouncing about trying to fill every space available. ‘And I’ll never bite unless you want me to.’

Raiea’s laugh filled my helmet and Theo’s bemused huff followed in a comforting blanket. ‘You’re very flirty, Blue. I’m not sure my girlfriend approves.

‘You’ve told her about me?’

‘Only that you’re sweet-tongued as a viper.’

I found myself chuckling, even though it rasped up my throat. I needed to ask for hydration but didn’t want either of them to see the feeding tubes and drips. I wished I could look at Theo and find comfort in his dark eyes, but now all I could see was the garish projection of his brother, whose face Corina had forced on me hours before. 

‘Well, make yourselves comfortable. The bed is pure luxury.’

Raeia came and sat beside me on the ground, not touching, but close enough that her warmth made me realise how cold I was. Theo’s presence hovered in place a little longer, then he sat against the wall across from us, close to the door. 

‘You’re like ice,’ Raeia said.

‘Better than burning, I suppose.’ I rested my mittens across my stomach and felt the distinct movement of tiny limbs trying to reach me. ‘Do you want to touch?’ I asked. ‘They’re moving a lot, so I guess they’re healthy.’ (I just wish I could touch them properly and assure them  – and me – that I’m here.)

Raeia paused, then reached out and pressed her palm across the bump. ‘A little to the left,’ I guided her movement to where the baby most frequently kicked. Her warmth against my skin was disconcerting. 

‘Ah, there you are,’ she said in a voice so soft it felt like silk to my ears. ‘You’re a strong little one.’ She gave the tiniest squeeze which made me both grateful for and jealous of her freedom. ‘Your mommy and I can’t wait to meet you.’ She stalled. I suspected she was looking at me in a sudden panic. I’d have smiled in reassurance if I wasn’t swallowed by sudden, unexpected emotion. ‘Is it ok to use ‘mommy’?’

I nodded, unsure if I could trust my voice to work. In all my dips in and out of reality, in all the flurries of wild emotion and cosmic emptiness, I hadn’t allowed myself close enough to reality to accept what the future might hold. A living being that would call me a parent. If Corina Bain didn’t snatch them away first.

‘I’ll read now,’ said Raeia and the pressure from her hand vanished, but she remained a little closer, so the warmth of her arm remained against mine. ‘Theo was helping me with translations in the library.’

‘I think I was stumbling about more than any help.’

‘You were great,’ Raeia assured.

‘I hope I get to see your library,’ I said.

‘You will.’ 

Raeia settled into her story. A sweeping myth of the origins of humans and the sacrifices made by the gods to create us. I’d heard it from my mother before, but I’d come to know Raeia’s tellings were always more delicate. She managed to weave violence and hope in an intricate web that was impossible to ignore. But even with her talents, my mind began diverging. Corina Bain’s words and the images she’d forced upon me kept springing back. The presence of Theo didn’t help. 

I tried to remember what he looked like. I could only make out the vague pieces of him. Curly brown hair and light brown skin, faceless. Did he have brown eyes like Dion? Was his face angular or soft? Soft eyes, surely. I would have remembered if they were embedded with rage like myself and his brother. I could feel his attention on me. 

‘Are you here to kill me?’ I asked, cutting Raeia off mid-sentence.

‘What?’ Theo’s voice remained low but trembled with genuine shock. ‘No. From the little I know, Corina would throw a fit if you died.’

‘Did she send you to kill someone else?’

Theo said nothing. It was unlikely he would reply with any direct level of honesty with Raeia present, but I was willing to wait and see if anything had changed since we’d shared cells in Sommersgap.

‘You speak very freely of killing, Blue,’ Raeia mumbled, first to break.

‘I speak freely about what I’m best at. You’ve seen it yourself.’

She shifted a little and the close press of her warmth left my side. She shuffled with pages, leafing through her discomfort.

‘Corina gave me no reason to my transfer,’ Theo said when the quiet became too much. It was for Raeia’s sake he broke. The discomfort radiating from her nearly made me shatter as well. 

‘She visited me earlier. Didn’t mention you,’ I said. 

‘I’m not here to harm you.’

I wanted to ask him if he’d feel the same now his brother had become a pawn in the game. 

‘Why did Tassuri have you in the first place?’ Raeia asked softly.

‘I know too much,’ he replied.

Raeia tensed at that. 

I twisted my head. ‘You can relate?’

Raeia didn’t reply verbally, but her silence was confirmation enough. 

Janice and Ivan’s shift change came before any of us could muster another avenue of conversation, their exchange was lewd as always. Stories swapped with the purpose of unsettling me. Theo and Raeia were no less perturbed than I was.

‘Anas, time to get out. Kestales is staying,’ Ivan called in.

‘Why?’ Raeia asked from my side.

‘Jealous?’ Janice mused. 

‘Out, Anas, the High Rector has work for you,’ said Ivan. ‘The both of you better not move an inch.’ The keys clanged against the metal, shaking my nerves. 

‘Go,’ I whispered. 

Raeia left without delay. When the door was shut, the ibictors teased her about leaving me with the ‘baby daddy,’ but she didn’t engage, and then she was gone. 

I was too tired to prompt speech, nor did I want to let anything slip with Ivan present, so I rested my neck agains the edge of my mattress and let the steady pulse of Theo’s dhaheri calm me. 

‘You’re different here,’ Theo said some time later. He spoke in Lern, my mother’s language, one of many languages we’d conversed in at Sommersgap to evade the Tassurian guards’ ears. 

‘Am I?’

‘You’re waiting for something.’

‘I am.’

Theo didn’t press for details, but I wanted to hear more of his voice and there was no energy in me to grasp for an alternative subject.

‘I always thought there was something inside me that shouldn’t be here. Something with a life of its own.’ I cleared my dry throat. ‘When I came here I…I started to hear it. There are…hums…there really is something inside me, Theo. I’ve been trying to talk to it…do I…do I sound crazy?’

‘My brother had something like that when we lived in Lyviana. He had to cut it out before it ate him alive’

My breath caught.

‘But I don’t think it’s the same,’ he continued. ‘Your energy doesn’t feel contaminated by a soulmaster.’

‘You can read dhaheri, too?’

Theo was silent. No shift of movement to denote a nod. Nothing. I continued, ‘So…Dion, how was he connected to a soulmaster? They can contaminate people?’

‘Dark energy that latches to your soul. Legends say they’re spawn of Monvourus.’ 

‘Bain wants me to kill him.’

Theo’s dhaheri didn’t falter. ‘That would be difficult.’ 

‘I haven’t decided if I will.’ 

The hums that never ceased to crawl around my head seemed to have quieted a little as Theo spoke, the same way they did when Raeia read me her stories. ‘Would you try to stop me if I did?’

‘No.’ Perhaps he read my dire need for conversation, because he didn’t allow us to fall to silence again. ‘What kind of violence factory are they running here?’

‘I don’t really care, as long as I get out.’ 

‘There are dozens of young people upstairs being bred and schooled like some acolytes in the deepest Hell,’ said Theo with a venom that rarely tainted his words.  

I wished I could look at him. I often wondered if Theo had been protected from alienation like my sister Lily had, and if that protection was where their hope originated from. If Dion too had been sacrificed so a younger sibling could hide their disastrous, gifted truth. I wondered if it had been a scheme hatched by one of their parents in the same way my dad had offered me up. I wondered if Theo resented his parents the way Lily had hated our dad for hiding her dhaheri. Then I’d realised I was projecting and there was no way anyone was as f**ked a parent as Eric Blake. There must have been a plausible explanation for Theo Kestales being the unknown shadow to a golden disaster. 

‘You’re the empathetic one here, Theo,’ I said. ‘You’re a better person than I am.’

‘You sound like him when you say things like that.’ His tone was unreadable.

‘Like who?’

‘Dion.’