The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,127
Mist gathers around her, flickering along with the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes. “Not after everything you’ve seen.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes to stop you from doing this. How can you think I’d do anything else?”
The silence stretches out between us as our eyes meet, and she’s the one to break it.
“You say none of this is real. But if you will go, I must tell you now. You are, North. You are real. The pull I feel toward you, the way my heart wants to reach for you—those are real.”
My breath stops. I twist my fingers together, fighting against the compulsion to respond—because now she’s speaking the way she used to. Not as a goddess, but as the girl who made me want to tie a red sash around my waist just to wear her colors, who asked me what it felt like to be kissed.
She must see the warring desires in my face, because she steps closer, eyes searching mine. “Are you going to pretend that’s madness too?” she says softly. “Will you tell me you haven’t been watching me, as I’ve been watching you? That what you told me as we climbed this cliff, that you and I were destiny, was a lie? That you don’t …” For the first time since she woke from her daze, she hesitates, biting at her lip. “That you don’t feel as I do?”
She doesn’t drop her eyes or look away. She’s offering up her heart, along with her faith, and as the sun breaks through the spindly trees and traces across the curves of her face, across her lips, lingering in the moisture on her eyelashes … I want to take what she’s offering.
“Of course not,” I whisper, reaching out with one hand. When we met, she would have flinched away in terror of being touched—now, she waits, trusting, eyes never leaving my face as my fingers trace the curve of her cheek a breath away from her skin. I can feel the warmth of her in the cool morning air. “Of course that part’s real.”
She lifts her hand as well, and I bring mine even with hers, hovering so very close to it. “Then stay with me,” she pleads. “We will send a message to your people and tell them that you are safe.”
I linger in the moment, feeling the air singing between us. Yesterday, these words would have lit my heart with fire—yesterday, I would have said yes.
Yesterday, I didn’t know she wanted to destroy the world.
I take a step back, withdrawing, feeling the cold against my fingertips as I let my hand fall. “I can’t,” I croak.
Color rises to her face, her full eyes snapping with sudden hurt and a tiny, unvoiced question. My own chest aches as if I’d wounded myself when I wounded her. I curl my hands into fists.
When her silent appeal gets no answer, her expression grows chilly, remote.
“I could make you stay,” she says, eyes square on my face. A finger of mist swirls into visibility and stretches between us. It grows into a reaching arm, curling around me until I can actually feel it pressing in, an invisible band of force that threatens to gather me close to her. The coming dawn had been turning the light around us slowly golden, but as her power ripples out through the mist, everything is white, as if a snap frost had overtaken us. “I could do that now—I could make you stay.”
I back up, my right hand wrapped over my chrono on my left wrist, putting space between us, measuring the distance to the trees.
“So this is what you are now?” I ask her. “You talk about caring for your people, about how all this death comes from a place of love, but whatever the prophecy’s made you, it sure as skies isn’t anything to do with love. You could make me stay? What’s happened to you? This time yesterday, I’d have sworn on my life that you wouldn’t dream of betraying a friend, someone who trusted you.”
“I have waited all my life for this,” she shoots back, the power of the mist around her seething and roiling. “For you, North!”
“To force me, to break my will? To make me stay, when I want to go home?”
She stares down at me, and all I can hear is my own ragged breathing, in and out, in and out.
And then all of it’s gone, and she’s a girl again, staring at