“None of your family seems very safe right now as it is,” Navi pointed out. “Despite everything you’ve done for them.”
Eliana laughed. “You’re right. All my work, and Mother’s still gone, and Father’s still dead, and Remy and I are at the mercy of people I used to hunt. And Harkan…” We can’t know for certain. He could still be alive.
She dragged a hand through her hair. “What’s the point, then, of any of it?”
Harkan had asked a similar question, the day of Quill’s execution: God help us. El, what are we doing? It felt to Eliana as though years and years had passed between that day and this one. She felt every one of them digging hotly into her shoulders like grasping fingers.
Navi was quiet for a long time. “Perhaps if nothing else, what’s happened has taught you that there is more to life—and even to war—than simply staying alive. Perhaps this is the point.” She rose and pressed a gentle palm to Eliana’s chest. “That you are beginning to awaken and remember your humanity.”
Eliana shoved Navi away with a harsh laugh. “That assumes too much of me.”
“You are very unkind to yourself.”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
Navi inclined her head. “Perhaps.”
“I am unkind to the bone. It’s all I’m capable of.”
“I don’t believe that. I don’t think you do either.”
“I have to believe it! Otherwise—”
Eliana fell silent. A terrible hissing panic simmered just underneath her skin. Her breaths came fast and shallow.
“Eliana.” Navi took her hands. “Please, sit. Breathe.”
But Eliana moved away from her. “It sounds silly, but…I have always imagined a monster dwelling inside me instead of a heart. And that’s why it was so easy for me to kill, to hunt.” She backed against the far wall. She angrily wiped her eyes, glared up at the ceiling. “That monster is the reason why I liked being the Dread. I told myself that. I started to believe it too.”
“Monsters do not weep for the dead,” Navi said, “and they do not regret.”
But this was no comfort. Eliana shook her head, the room a blur of shadows and shuddering candlelight. “If I am not a monster,” she whispered, “then what excuse do I have for the things I’ve done?”
“Eliana, look at me.”
She obeyed, realizing that she had slid to the carpeted floor and that Navi was now crouched before her, holding her hands.
“We are all of us dark creatures,” Navi said, “but if we linger in those shadows, we’ll be lost. Instead we must seek the light when we can, and that’s just what you’re doing. I see it happening.”
“You believe too easily,” Eliana muttered.
“And you don’t believe enough.”
“Belief doesn’t keep you alive.”
“But, given time, it can win wars.”
Eliana’s breath was running away from her. A hard heat felt ready to burst from her chest. “I don’t agree with you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I want to. I used to be like you. Like Harkan.” Harkan, God. She scoffed, wiped her eyes. “My fucking hands won’t stop shaking. I can’t stay like this, or I’ll get killed, and then we’ll never find Mother—”
Words failed her. She could hardly breathe past the fear spiraling wildly through her body. She wrapped her arms around her legs, leaned her forehead on her knees.
Then, warmth, and a hand drawing slow circles between her shoulder blades. Like Harkan used to do when she had trouble sleeping. Like her mother had done when Eliana couldn’t eat for missing her father. Together they had sat in the dying candlelight of their quiet house, waiting night after night for the sound of his steps in the hallway.
“Navi,” Eliana whispered, fists clenched. “I don’t know how to do this.”
“Do what?”
Seek the light.
Fight a hopeless war.
Believe.
She didn’t answer. After a few moments, Navi shifted, opening her arms, and Eliana moved into her embrace without thinking. She burrowed into Navi’s front and closed her eyes, listened to the steady beat of Navi’s heart and the in and out of Navi’s lungs.
Slowly the tension knitting her muscles into knots began to loosen.
“Tell me about your mother,” Navi said.
Her mother. Eliana closed her eyes.
A memory surfaced, swift and painful: her mother’s arms around her, Eliana nestled in her lap as Rozen guided her tiny fingers across the face of her necklace.