I hiss as I’m lifted by my hair. Fear—
A blow lands at my kidney, another in my stomach. Bile rushes up my throat and burns my mouth.
Don’t you dare use it on me! my father screamed as his open hand burned across my cheek. I know what it is! Don’t you dare!
Fear slips from me, like a wild animal on a tether, jerked free. My bones chill as the man holding my hair drops me, wheeling back as though I’m one of the monsters from the chasm.
But then Colson’s hands squeeze my throat. I claw at him, trying to breathe. My fingernails cut into the skin of his hands, but he doesn’t relent. I barely feel the following blows to my legs as the others barrage me.
Do what they want, think what they want, but I won’t let them kill me.
My fear explodes outward, a great boulder dropped into a lake. My body mirrors the sensations of horror I invoke so strongly that my heart threatens to split in two. Colson releases me, and I drop to the ground, gasping. My assailants step back as if I were a viper.
Fight or flee. These cowards choose the latter. They run back the way I came, trampling my shredded hope underfoot.
I kneel there, doubled over, every blow making itself known slowly, achingly. Tears run down the sides of my nose. Odd. I never cried when my father beat me. He hated tears.
I hear heavy footsteps and shudder. Perhaps I didn’t scare them off after all. Perhaps the human task force heard of this meeting, and Grodd has come to deal out his own discipline.
The steps slow. “Lark?”
That voice. How do I know that voice?
Holding my throat, wheezing, I look up and blink, peering through the darkness. A tall figure stands over me, not quite troll, not quite human. Perg?
I feel his strong hands on my elbows, just as the dim lights of the schoolyard wink out.
Danner’s palm presses against my mouth.
I startle awake, tasting the salt of his hand. It burns against a small cut at the corner of my lip.
Something’s wrong. I wait for Danner to tell me what, but he doesn’t speak, only climbs into the bed, crushing his sister, Finnie—but Finnie isn’t there. She fell asleep by the fire.
The moon shines full and bright, washing out the stars, casting the tiny room Finnie and I share in shades of blue and steel. I try to push Danner’s hand away, to ask what’s wrong, but he presses it down so hard my teeth cut the inside of my lips. The house sleeps; everything is quiet. Danner, four years my senior, slips under the cover.
I don’t realize he shut the door until his hand grabs my breast. I’m only fourteen. A year ago, I didn’t have a breast to grab. Tendrils of fear awaken in me, curling like hungry worms. Like the curse knew, before I did, what was going to happen. That I was going to lose all of them. Finnie’s parents were my parents. Finnie was my sister. Danner was my brother. They were supposed to be my family. The Cosmodian had promised me a family of my own.
I push at Danner, stalling him, but he’s stronger and heavier than I am. “It won’t hurt,” his hot whispers promise. “Shh,” he coos, like I’m a baby. “They won’t know.”
Tears come, but still Danner doesn’t move his hand from my mouth. His other slides up my nightdress. I push again, I plead, the sounds dying against his palm.
When the fear flies out of me, almost of its own accord, Danner flies with it. He leaps back from the bed like it’s made of hot embers instead of cotton-wrapped hay. He screams, loud enough to wake the house.
He sputters truths mixed with lies. “Monster,” he says. Truth. “Tried to kill me,” he says. Lie.
But he is their son, her brother. They are family, and I am not. And so I flee with everything I can carry, everything I can grab as Finnie’s father rains blows on my back.
My road breaks a little more.
That was Terysos. The Cosmodian had not been in that township, either.
I’m murkily aware of strong arms encircling me against a wide chest. Voices spin in senseless orbits. A light blooms nearby.
My body burns, bruises pulsing and radiating from my head to my ankles.
“What do you mean, found her?” Unach’s voice snaps like a whip.
“By the school where I live, with the humans.” Perg’s voice sounds close. It reverberates in his chest.
I blink. I’m in Unach’s apartment. Did he carry me all the way here?
“She’s awake.” Azmar’s baritone cuts through the muddled sounds. “Lay her here.”
My feet hit a doorjamb as Perg carries me into a dark room and lays me on something . . . not soft, but softer than the stone floor. A light follows. It illuminates Perg’s face, which hovers over me. It may be a trick of the shadows, but he looks remarkably human in this light.