This should have been a routine mission. The city of Sarlazai was not even supposed to be their final destination. But the rebels had been waiting, and they ambushed them — ambushed them here, practically destroying their own city. The sheer callousness of it overwhelms her.
By the time she makes it back to the rendezvous point, it is clear that this is a slaughter, with no path to victory. An awful realization has fallen over her when she finally recognizes a familiar face in the smoke. She grabs her friend and yanks him back into an alleyway, sheltered, albeit poorly, from the fighting.
Max is a good fighter. His knife is at her throat immediately.
“Don’t you dare kill me,” she says. “There are a hundred rebels who would rather do that instead.”
His knife drops. The look of sheer relief on his face when he recognizes her is gutting. Then she sees how badly he is bleeding, and her stomach drops.
“How much of that is yours?” he asks, taking in the blood on her own jacket, and she shakes her head.
“How much of that is yours?”
“That bad?”
“Very bad. You don’t feel that?”
His eyes are wide open, but she can tell that he is weaving in and out of consciousness. Dread clenches in her chest. He will not remain standing, not like this, not without a healer. Not without…
“We need to retreat,” he tells her.
But Nura is tired of retreating. They will retreat today, and leave behind a slew of corpses that gave their lives for nothing. Tomorrow or next week or next month, she will be cradling another dying child or weeping mother. She will be tossing the ashes of another comrade out to sea, where they will be swept up and lost, like a million others before them.
It will never stop.
And she has nothing more to give.
Her hands are at his cheeks. “We have you,” she whispers. “We have you.”
Revulsion careens across his face. “Hell no.”
“If they want to shit in their own beds, they can lie in it.”
The words are so harsh that they sting her lips. But she is angry. These are innocents, suffering here. And the rebels did start this here, setting fire to their own home.
Yet, the hurt that flickers across her friend’s face clenches her heart. It is so raw. Even when everyone else grew cold out of sheer exhaustion, he held onto that wonderful — dangerous — naiveté.
“I can’t,” he tells her, and she understands it is the truth.
He had been given a gift. But he is too gentle to use it. Even if doing this one terrible thing saves the lives of thousands.
She loves him. She had never let herself think of it in those terms, not even alone to herself. It is a dangerous word. Only now, at the end of the world, does she let herself feel it.
Her fingers move to his temple. She can feel his mind beneath her magic. She already knows the shape of it. She has never known anyone so well.
It would be an honor to let him kill her.
“That bleeding heart will get you killed one day,” she murmurs.
And then she reaches into his mind, pushing brutally hard, deep. Ripping open the door he has so carefully guarded.
Releasing the incredible, war-ending power within him.
She sees the exact moment that his eyes change, betrayal to fear to fury. She almost tells him she’s sorry. She will never know if the words escape her lips.
Because then, the fire is everywhere, and she is on the ground, seeing nothing but flames and flames and flames and death reaching out its hands for her.
Nura remembers nothing but pain.
She slips in and out of consciousness. One time, she opens her eyes and sees healers holding sheets of her own burnt skin. She can move only enough to tilt her chin down and look at herself. What she sees does not even look like a human body, just an expanse of malformed, charred flesh. She screams, but the healers put her back to sleep. If she is lucky, the darkness will be death.
She swears that she saw Max’s face, staring down at her between curtains of unconsciousness, but she reaches for him and he is gone.
Nura is still in agony, but she is awake. Yet the pain of her body is nothing compared to what rips through her when she hears what had happened to the Farliones. The family that had accepted her into their homes, who had loved her when no one else did — they were gone, and in the most heartbreaking way she could ever imagine.
Sammerin tells her softly, calmly. She says nothing until he leaves the room, and then she lets out a mangled scream through torn-up vocal cords. It echoes through the room and the hall and the Tower, until healers come rushing in to see her, and she turns her head away so they do not see the tears streaming down her face.
They give her a wheelchair that she can use to move around until she is well enough to walk. Even that hurts horrifically, but she listens until she finds out where Max is and wheels herself to his room elsewhere in the Towers.
The sounds she hears from within make all her muscles freeze.
His voice is mangled with agony. There is crashing, as if things are being thrown or fists banged against walls. She listens as his outburst roars to a crescendo and then collapses into muffled silence.
Her own tears are falling down her cheeks, silently. One hand is pressed over her mouth, her eyes squeezed shut.
All of this is her fault.
She wants to be with him. She wants to hold him until the world
