Every Star in the Sky Read online

  I’d never heard anybody talk so casually to him. Maybe this was just a training thing. I don’t know. I don’t care. I feel more empty and desecrated than a grecian ruin.

  “Exercise one, jog for five minutes, run for fifteen, jog for five, run for fifteen.”

  I don’t ask questions. As soon as we’re given the go-ahead, I jog. I manage to stay at the same pace as my sisters, though none of them are very quick, save for Kira. She was built to run.

  When the cue to run comes, at first I am reluctant, until I see Leon’s tired face, staring off into some invisible elsewhere. That fucking bastard.

  Fine.

  I’ll make him look.

  I thrust all of my power into the next few steps, and I am churning through the underground track, spitting dust and fire behind me, and there is nowhere to go but forward and faster. I pass Charlotte, then Lynn, then Regan, then Kira, and I see Leon’s indifferent face and I run faster, and faster, and he calls for us to jog and I keep running, and I sprint, and I am fire and ice and wind, a comet hurtling through space, towards the earth, and I know I’m going to crash but destiny has never stopped a comet before.

  I’ve outlapped my sisters a few times, and they are staring at me, looking concerned and mad and confused, and my skin reflects their gazes like diamonds reflect light, because I am a diamond and I am unbreakable.

  He calls for us to stop and I stop. I barf in the fake grass and sit on a weight bench. Everyone is looking at me like I’m crazy, but I have been called worse. I glare daggers into Leon’s back.

  I feel a gentle tap on my shoulder, and it’s one of the men that came downstairs with Leon. He has long, sleek black hair that he’s pulled into a loose ponytail, and his eyes are some sort of hazel or brown. It’s hard to see through the sweat staining my irises.

  But he is handsome, and my heart, instead of beating faster, slows. I feel okay being around him.

  “That was absolutely incredible, Miss Rose, and I’d like to commend you for your efforts.” His voice is lush, but quiet. He reminds me vaguely of an owl.

  I nod in thanks, but feel no need to speak. I don’t have the time or energy to make small talk.

  “Er, Ren. I’m Ren Kitagawa.”

  “Rose. Just… Rose,” I reply. An empty name for an empty soul. But to do what I must do, I have to be a different person. Being who I am would ensure failure. I don’t remember who I was, really, but it wasn’t nearly as capable. The old me would break under the pressure and stay broken forever. The new me breaks and pieces herself back together again.

  Next, we have to lift weights. There are too many reps for me to count on my fingers and toes; therefore, there are too many reps. My arms are weak but my resolve is strong. Ren volunteers to spot me as I bench press about 30 pounds.

  “Er… I don’t know if I need a spo--”

  My arms give out, but Ren catches the bar with his left hand just before it crushes my chest.

  “What is it that you don’t need, Miss Rose?” He asks.

  Normally I’d be upset by the snarky remark, but I’m so tired and out of my mind that I just roll my eyes. “Help.”

  “What’s the magic word?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sakes.”

  He shrugs. “That works too, I guess.”

  I try to slowly push the bar up and down, to exaggerate the impact on my muscles, but it hurts like hell and I’m not strong enough.

  “Try spreading your arms further out on the bar. Your grip will be more firm, and you’ll have more leverage in your elbows and biceps-- here.” He slides my hands down either side of the bar, and takes my elbows and squares them up and turns them out. I almost immediately feel stronger.

  The next rep is good, and the rep after is even better.

  “Count it out,” he says, and he counts with me. “One, two, three…”

  “Twenty two, twenty three, twenty four…”

  “Forty eight, forty nine, fifty. You’re good for bench pressing.”

  I finished behind everyone else, but nobody really seemed to care. All of our faces were red and slick with sweat and exhaustion.

  Leon is staring straight at me. He doesn’t even flinch when I meet his eyes, but a sudden look of pain comes over his face. He runs a hand through his messy brown hair and takes a swig of water. I somehow know that he wishes it was beer instead of water.

  Kira is staring at me too, analyzing the hell out of me. I can see the cogs in her head spinning at the speed of sound. I can almost smell the metallic tang, taste the fumes in the air of her desperate thought processes.

  “What are you doing,” I say.

  “Trying to figure you out,” Kira says back, hiding nothing. Why would she? It was pretty clear she didn’t care what anybody else thought or how they felt.

  “There’s nothing to figure out,” I spit. I turn to Leon, “When the hell is this sword bullshit happening?”

  He blinks a few times and looks at the track. “Hand to hand combat first.”

  The other men distribute boxing gloves to us, and equip themselves with padded ‘armor’ and mouthguards.

  Ren gestures for me to follow him to the field, but then Leon speaks up. “Ren, I’ll take her. You take Kira.”

  All ten of us are out on the field, and I’m openly glaring at Leon. I shudder when I remember what we did last night, and I feel a white-flamed fury seep into the marrow of my bones.

  “I’m sorry,” Leon whispers. “I just figured… Maybe we could be friends--”

  I slam a fist into his stomach and he staggers back, shaken. I unhook my cape and throw it behind me, so that all that’s left is my tank top and exercise capris. I deliberately cut the top a little lower than it was meant to be, so I could haunt him with my femininity.

  “Rose,” he murmurs.

  I punch him over and over again in the weird foam shield he holds up with his left hand. My ugly hand and arm feels like it’s going to break, so I punch harder.

  “You’re going to hurt yourself,” he stresses.

  “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” I hiss, hurling a fist into his chest with every iota of power in my body.

  He falls backwards, hard on the dirt floor, gasping for air.

  The part of me that wants to kick the living shit out of him while he’s done submits to the part of me that waits for him to get up, glaring at him without mercy.

  “I thought I’d have a better sparring partner.”

  “You don’t understand, Jay--”

  “THAT’S NOT MY NAME,” I scream, and I slug him across the cheek. The sound is a roar, an explosion, and his head is whipped to the side.

  Everyone is staring at me, but once again, the sweat serves as a feeble mask for my tears.

  Leon shudders and closes his eyes. Blood is trickling out of his nose, but he wipes it away carelessly.

  “A baby could hit harder,” he says, face free of any emotion at all, but his jaw is set hard, and he crosses his arms.

  I lunge for him, but I feel Ren’s strong arms grab me and hold me back.

  “What are you being such a bastard about, anyway, Leo? This is fucking ridiculous. If you’re gonna treat her like that then I’ll fight you myself. You don’t treat a woman like that, man. Knock it off or I’ll have to knock some sense into you.”

  “Need I remind you that I am your captain?” Leon hisses.

  “Need I remind you that I don’t give a damn? Stop being such a little bitch. If you’re going to throw a tantrum, go do it in the corner.”

  Leon takes a sip of water, but I suddenly realize by looking at it that it’s actually vodka. And then another sip. And then he drinks the rest of the bottle, and drops it on the ground.

  “C’mon t-then, Ren, I’ll fight you, let’s go.” He’s visibly waving back and forth.

  Ren steps forward but I grab his wrist. “Please don’t,” I say.

  “Rose?”

  “He’s hurt. I’m going to take him to see Rolphe.”

  Ren sno
rts, “Not alone you’re not. He’s in bad shape. There’s no telling what he’ll--”

  “I said I’m taking him to see Rolphe,” I say sternly.

  Ren sighs. “Okay, then. Go.”

  He is barely conscious, so I manage to loop Leon’s arm over my opposite shoulder without much of a fight. I move him towards the stairway, and when we get in the stairwell, he reaches for a bottle of booze that isn’t there.

  I feel my eyes glaze over with tears. This is not the same person I thought I knew.

  “What are you trying to escape from, Leon?” I ask. My heart is throbbing. I hate him but I am desperate to help him. I feel as much empathy as I do hate. “Why do you need to escape?”

  He is drunkenly sobbing, “I don’t know any more, Jay. If this is all there is to life, then what’s the point?”

  I narrow my eyes and hold onto his shoulders. “Leon. What happened?”

  “Anna has the plague, Jay. She’s as good as gone. She… she’s a girl… she wasn’t supposed to get it… I thought she was safe… And now I… My dad’s on his last few days, his last few days of breathing, and my mom is in this horrible depression-- she locked herself up with dad and she won’t leave him. Julian’s gone, and he’s always been gone, Silas won’t leave his fucking lab trying to figure out the plague, Elliot’s trying to find a wife so he can sweep all the broken pieces of our lives back together like magic, and Benny’s gone mute and he won’t talk to anybody. And then you come along, and you make everything seem happy and full and bright, and I wish you would just hold my hand, I wish I could kiss you, I wish I could do so many things with you but I’ve known you for only a few days and goddammit, you could die in this whole thing and it’s all my fault. So many people have died, Jay. So many people I could have saved. And I didn’t. I didn’t. I don’t know how to deal with this kind of pain any more.”

  I can’t move for a moment, but then I wrap my arms around him and pull him close. He holds me so tightly that I wonder if he will ever let go. I nestle my face in his shoulder and we cry together.

  “How are you supposed to make the end of the world happy? How am I supposed to be myself when all I experience is loss and death and disaster and regret?”

  “Well maybe, all you can hear is the noise in everything, but my dad told me there’s music in everything. And maybe that’s what we have to look for, and we have to fight to keep that music alive.”

  “Jay.”

  He tilts my chin up, and I see the determination in his eyes.

  “You can hate me. I understand, and that’s okay. But just know that I am going to fight for you. Because you are everything that’s good in the world, and if I die and that somehow keeps your candle burning, I will do it. You made me feel hope again. I… God this is stupid.” He laughs.

  I smile, “It’s not stupid. You’re just really drunk.”

  He grins back at me like a puppy, “Yeah. Really drunk.”

  I help him to Rolphe’s room, and Rolphe lays him down on a cot.

  “Is there a reason why he smells like carrion but he’s smiling like an idiot?” Dr. Rolphe asks quietly so that Leon can’t hear.

  “He’s really drunk,” I say.

  In his cot, Leon’s face suddenly grows very serious. He looks up to me. “Jay. Please call me Leo. It would make me more comfortable.”

  “Okay, if you promise to stop being a bastard.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he says quietly, reaching out for my hand. I’m confused, but I take it.

  “Sing ‘Amazing Grace,’” he whispers, voice beyond earnest.

  I sing for him until he falls asleep. I let go of his hand but I crawl into the cot next to him. I understand him. And he understands me. And he needs somebody right now, and I’m okay with it being me, because when I think about his tears and trials and tribulations, I realize that the way he would slay my demons, I would slay his without a second thought. And sometimes, I forget that there are demons living inside me, when I look into his eyes or think about his soft brown hair or I think about the warmth of his hand. I don’t know what this is, what word to assign to the feelings I’m experiencing. But I do know that I will never forget the feeling of his lips digging into my every fear and every desire, and I will never forget the way he can caress such pain and emotion out of a set of piano keys. His hands are magic. He is like nothing I have ever known or imagined, and I want to hold him.

  I don’t love him. I can’t love. I don’t know how it works. But maybe, with a little more time, I could be his and he could be mine.

  I fall asleep to the sound of his melodic breath, reminiscent of Brahms’s lullaby.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I wake up to smoke and flame. I can’t see it, but I know the smell. I am back home, I see the piano burning, my father’s spirit disintegrating in front of my eyes-- no. I’m in the headquarters. I’m in Dr. Rolphe’s office.

  Something is burning.

  I turn to look next to me, and Leo is resting soundly, unaware. I shake him in a panic until his eyes flicker open. The register of the situation crosses his face, and his eyes are rain barrels in Africa.

  “We have to run,” I say.

  He starts to get up, when he coughs and his head shivers. He looks up to me, “I don’t… Fire?”

  “Yes, fire, let’s go!”

  I grab his arm and help him off the cot and we sprint through the hallways together as fast as our bodies will allow.

  “My sisters,” I manage as we run.

  The smoke is heavy all around us, a mist of sooty gray, but I don’t know where the fire itself is.

  And I see that it is coming from my room.

  It takes me five seconds to realize it.

  “BEAR!” I scream, tearing through the hall and throwing the door open. Flames lurch out of the door, sweeping around me like ribbons of orange death.

  “Bear,” I scream, and I can’t fight back my sobs. I can’t see him, but it is the bookshelf on fire, so he has to be safe… He has to be.

  Leo is behind me, grabbing for my arms, but I swat him away frantically as I kneel down and crawl through the smoke. “Bear,” I say hoarsely between coughs, the smoke taking residence in my lungs and filling my skull with white ash.

  He is hiding under the bed, trembling and whining. When he sees me, he slowly crawls forward and laps at my hand. A lot of the fur on the right side of his body has been singed off, and his skin looks red and burnt, like the sun had burst against his flank.

  I grab his collar and encourage him to run out of the room, but he doesn’t. Instead, he grabs my pant leg in his jaws and slowly drags me out of the room as the haziness consumes me.

  Leo is waiting, and one moment I am on the floor and the next I am in his arms, and the three of us are running.

  Leo is yelling something about the fire as he runs, probably warning the other Nightingales, but I can’t hear or see much. All I know is that a sizzling heat stabs my sanity over and over again and there is no escape.

  “Bear,” I keep mumbling to make sure that he’s following us. He is. He can run, even if he has to stagger and limp to do it.

  My big, strong boy. Keep fighting. Don’t stop. Keep fighting.

  The darkness is overwhelming, but the fire has spread to the door, and the other doors, and we are running on the surface of the river Styx, Charon nowhere to be seen.

  I have never seen Leo run as fast as he’s running right now. Soon enough we’re in the mess hall, and then the stairs.

  He is panting, hard, but he thrusts up the stairs, my body in tow, regardless.

  We are back outside in the brisk spring evening, and there are shaken Nightingales all around us, bundled in blankets or heaped together, crying, fighting, sleeping, kissing.

  Leo calls somebody over to lay out a blanket for me, and he lies me down. Bear rushes towards me, curling up next to me as close as he can possibly be, and I lay my face in his silky fur, rubbing his warm body and thanking the universe for his survival.

>   Leo sits next to me, and I put my head in his lap. He brushes through my hair with his fingers, and he lowers a kiss on my forehead. I cling to him and I cling to Bear and I cling to everything I’m fighting for. I know that the HQ burning down is the worst thing that could possibly happen to us, and that many people will, or already have, died.

  But I don’t want to think about it, because there’s nothing I can do. Instead, I feel only an impossible gratitude that Leo and Bear are alive and right next to me.

  “I can’t lose either of you, ever,” I mumble, half-lucid.

  “I won’t let that happen,” Leo says, taking my ugly hand and kissing it.

  Regan comes tumbling up the stairs with an unconscious man on either shoulder. She hands them off to Rolphe and his associates, who are treating the burns, and she rushes back in immediately.

  “I n-need to h-help them,” I stammer, starting to push myself up, but drinking in all the smoke that I did has dubbed my body useless.

  Leo pulls me up into his lap, kissing my forehead again. “There’s nothing you can do, Jay.”

  “Why… why do you call me that still,” I sigh.

  “Because knowing where you came from doesn’t change who you are. I met Jay Hart. Rose is the name of a daughter of Reya. But that’s not who I know. That doesn’t identify you. Your courage, perseverance, humor, beauty, intelligence, wit, compassion, caring, loyalty, strength, and honesty… That’s who you are. Maybe not to you, but to me.”

  I feel the feather necklace on my chest.

  Remember who you are. Remember where you came from. Remember the birds.

  She knew. She knew I’d be questioning myself, fighting my identity and drowning in uncertainty. This necklace was not some warrior’s belt of scalps. These feathers were the people who loved me and fought for me, exactly how I am.

  I notice that people are staring at Leo and my half-burnt dog and I. Wondering why the general, the captain, was being so affectionate with a girl.

  I cling tighter to his arm. Let them talk. They don’t know.

  My head in his lap, we fall asleep again so that our rest can fight off the smoke in our lungs, and that the light of the moon may heal us.