Merrick’s announcement about the Sisterhood certainly broke a big chunk of it, and Beckett has been taking care of the rest every night for the last week. What’s the point of having a girlfriend you love if that girlfriend won’t even talk to you? Or worse, if she lies straight to your face and tells you she’s fine when it’s obvious that she’s barely holding on?
When it’s almost as obvious that you’re barely holding on.
Every day since Merrick’s life-shattering announcement—thanks for that, by the way—I spend hours wondering what to do. Wondering who I am. Wondering how either of us are ever supposed to go back to our lives on Serati.
And the answer is, I’m not. How can I when everything about my life, from infancy, has been a carefully cultivated lie? I was trapped in a monastery and told I could do nothing, be nothing, except the object of salvation for millions of people. Told that I needed to try harder, be better, live up to what it means to be a high priestess.
And it turns out I never had a chance.
No matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did, the task in front of me was always an impossible one. I couldn’t be a good high priestess, because I was never meant to be a high priestess at all.
I’ve spent a lot of hours over the last few days thinking about this—and thinking about the fact that a lot of people had to be in on this lie for it to work.
Kali’s parents.
My parents—whoever they are.
The Sisterhood elders.
The sisters who cared for me as a baby and beyond. Maybe most of them didn’t know, but surely there was some gossip, some speculation.
They all knew about the lie being perpetuated, and they didn’t care. They just kept telling it, until it got bigger and bigger and harder and harder to control. Until it stole my life, Merrick’s life, Kali’s life—maybe even Kali’s father’s life.
Because I’ve been thinking about that, too. And I realized that an organization that would do all this—that would lie and betray and steal—wouldn’t draw the line at murder. To keep their secret, they would do whatever it took. They would have to, because if the secret got out, they would lose everything.
No wonder Merrick was having such a crisis of faith.
If they can just fake things, if they can just substitute a fake high priestess for the real one, how can anything about the Sisterhood be real? In which case, we’re just as screwed as everyone else when it comes to the Dying Sun. Even though no one on Serati wants to admit it.
If the Sisterhood isn’t real, maybe the Light itself isn’t real.
Unable to lay in the dark for one more second—not when these thoughts are roiling around in my head from all directions—I throw back my covers and pull on my blue-and-pink jumpsuit, then prepare to spend the night roaming the ship.
But tonight, my feet don’t roam. Instead, they carry me to the bridge—to Beckett.
I want a hug from her. More, I want her to wrap her arms around me and tell me everything is going to be all right—with my life, with her life, with our lives together. I don’t believe it’s true, but it would be nice to hear it just this once.
Except, once I get to the bridge, it’s to find that Beckett isn’t draped over her pilot’s chair, contemplating the universe outside of the Starlight, like she usually is at this hour. Instead, she’s sitting at the comms unit, her head in her hands and her entire body shaking.
My own discontent abandons me the second I lay eyes on her. Because it’s obvious, especially to someone who’s spent as much time studying her as I have, that something is very, very wrong.
I don’t call her name as I race across the distance between us—I think it’s better if she has no time to compose herself. No time to pretend that I’m seeing things and that she’s just fine. Not because she wants to lie, I don’t think, but because she’s never had anyone to worry about her before and she doesn’t know what to do about it.
“Beckett.” I put a soft hand on her shoulder, and she jumps up so fast that I’m a little surprised she didn’t knock me over—or land on her butt.
“How long have you been there?” she asks.
I search her face, wondering what has her in such a state. And I’m absolutely astonished to realize she has tears trembling on her eyelashes. In all the days I’ve known Beckett—and in all the situations—I’ve never seen her cry before.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, my own problems forgotten.
She shakes her head, and I know what she’s going to say even before she says it. “Nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing,” I say. And while part of me wants to yell at her until she’s honest with me, I’ve never yelled at anyone in my life. I don’t have a clue how to even go about doing it.
“I’m fine,” she says, shrugging off my concern yet again. “You should go back to bed.”
I try not to let it hurt me, this incessant need she has to push me away. But it’s getting a little harder with every day that passes.
Still, I have to try. I can’t just leave her like this, suffering. It’s not in my nature. More, it’s not who I want to be. Not because of the high-priestess thing, but because of me. Rain. The last thing I ever want to do is deliberately turn my back on someone who’s hurting.
Especially not Beckett.
So I put my arm around her waist, bolstered by the fact that she only fights me a little as I guide her away from the comms link and out the bridge door.
I’d like to take her to our bedroom—she has a much harder time lying to me the fewer clothes I’m wearing—but Kali is sleeping there at the moment. So I take her to our storage room, and after getting her situated on the cot we put up inside there, I start to gently, gently massage her head with my fingertips.
“What are you doing?” she asks hoarsely.
“Loving you,” I answer as honestly as I can. “The only way you’ll let me.”
“Rain—”
“Hush,” I tell her, deepening the massage just a little. I’m careful to avoid the scars on her head—I know them as well as I know my own body these days—but I dig a little deeper into the muscles at the top of her head, over her temples, and along the back of her neck on either side of the scar along her spine.
Beckett holds herself rigid for most of it, but as I hit the muscles at the base of her skull, her whole body arches off the cot. “Did I hurt you?” I gasp, immediately lightening up on the pressure.
She shakes her head, and her voice is hoarse when she says, “Please. Do that again.”
I can no more turn that down than I could cut off my own hand. So I carefully dig deeper, running my fingers in steady, deliberate circles over the back of her head and up the sides.
By the time I get to the crown of her head, her entire body seems to have collapsed in on itself, but in a good way. So I keep going until she finally asks me to stop.
“Thank you,” she whispers, wrapping an arm around my waist and pulling me down until I’m sitting in her lap.
“You don’t have to thank me for that,” I whisper. “I hate that you’re in pain. And I hate even more that you so rarely let me help you with it.”