“Is that what they’re going to become?” I murmured. “Again, they’ll become sacrifices for the greater good?”
That’s how it always had been, for us. We were expendable. And everything I did had just perpetuated it.
“We won’t let that happen.” His eyes went far away. “What she showed us was…”
Horrifying.
“Do you believe her?” I asked.
“She wasn’t lying. She couldn’t fake what she showed us. You would have been able to tell. And I….know her well enough to know, if it wasn’t real.”
Gods, the things we had seen. I hated her. It made it even worse, somehow, to see and feel all of her thoughts firsthand, and watch how they came to such horrible conclusions. I had no doubt that Nura had truly loved Max. And she had decided that her love gave her absolution for all the bloody sacrifices she would make on the altar of her good intentions.
“And if what she showed us was true… if what Ishqa told us was true…” My words faltered, and I closed my eyes, a headache buzzing beneath my temples. Ishqa. Fey. An invitation to go be a weapon in yet another war.
Max let out a breath between his teeth. “As if our petty mortal problems weren’t enough.” Then his gaze flicked to me, and something shifted in it. “I don’t know what we do with this.”
He said it like a shameful confession. The expression on his face twisted a dagger between my ribs. He’d gotten out of all of this. And I’d dragged him back in, only for him to end up fighting for terrible leaders and terrible causes, with bigger sacrifices still on the horizon.
He deserved so much better.
“I think about it often, you know,” I whispered. “How much I wish I had gone with you. When you asked me to leave Ara with you, before I made my Blood Pact.”
It felt like a betrayal, to say it aloud.
“You were the one who wanted to save the world,” he said, quietly. “I just wanted to save you.”
If I hadn’t been so sad, I would have laughed, because that was so blatantly untrue — even if Max himself didn’t realize it. But my chest ached with love for him, both for the lie he told himself and for the deeper truth beneath it.
“I need to tell the refugees. About… the loss.” I nodded to the hands.
“I’m with you,” Max murmured, and gods, I never knew how precious three words could be.
It was jarring, how the refugee dwellings looked exactly as they had when I had last been here. I stood in a street bustling with all the activity of a beautiful winter afternoon, Max beside me, utterly silent. I was living in a different reality than these people were. They still lived in a world in which the future was bright and the sun warm and their lives, slowly, were creaking towards normalcy.
They still lived in a world in which their family and friends were still breathing, somewhere.
Max’s hand slipped into mine. Maybe someone else would have argued, would have said, Maybe it’s a mercy that they don’t know. But Max knew as well as any of us how precious the gift of knowledge was to people who had spent decades being told what they did or didn’t deserve to know. He understood as deeply as I did that they deserved the truth, and those lost lives deserved to be mourned.
“Tisaanah!” I turned to see Serel approaching, a grin on his face. “I didn’t expect to see you around here for a while longer...”
He got closer, and his voice faded just as his smile did.
“What’s wrong?” he murmured, because of course he knew me well enough to sense it.
The sight of him made my eyes burn. Yes, I knew what it was to dream of an impossible embrace. And in Serel, I had gotten my miracle.
But so many of these people would never get theirs.
“Help me gather everyone,” I said, and Serel nodded, suddenly serious.
The last time I had stood here, surrounded by the refugees, I had let them see me as a vengeful goddess. I had let them believe that I was untouchable. Maybe I had even let myself believe it, too. But now, I had never felt more powerless. The words spilled out of my mouth, dry and bitter like ash collecting at my feet, as I told them of the deaths — nothing else, but those were more than enough. I watched the happiness drain from their faces and grief well up in their eyes.
For the first time, I was grateful that my magic was gone. The looks on their faces were more than enough to skewer me without feeling their emotions, too.
Serel stood in the front of the crowd, those beautiful blue eyes damp. Beside him was Filias, face hard with rage.
“They can’t have killed all of them,” a weak voice said in the crowd. “Waste their resources like that? No… no, it must be a trick. Perhaps they just took the hands.”
“We have seen too much of their cruelty to believe in fairytales,” another muttered.
“We were just… here,” one woman murmured. “We were here, free, while they were… while they were being…”
Her voice trailed off, and her gaze lifted to the apartments, as if seeing a sudden darkness in the happiness that had begun to bloom here.
I understood. She was feeling the same sickening guilt that I had felt — that I still felt — when I realized I was finding undeserved contentment in Max’s garden, all while others were suffering.
Just as I understood, when Filias approached me with clenched fists, why I was the recipient of his anger. The Zorokovs were an intangible evil, half a world away. And I was standing right here.
“You told us this wouldn’t happen,” Filias said. “You told us you had found a way to give them more time, and we didn’t act because of it.”
“I did,” I said, quietly.
“And
