The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,38

came here to do.” Nimh’s shoving things into a couple of packs, her hands shaking. She pauses then, staring down at the supplies, going so still that for a moment I think she’s returned to that same shock I tried to wake her from.

Then she stands, hefting a pack in each hand, and tosses one of them toward me. Her eyes are wide, wet with unshed tears. She’s quiet for a long moment, tension in her features hinting at some internal debate.

“You may be safer if you do not come with me, cloudlander,” Nimh whispers finally. “I could tell you which way to travel, how to find the temple, what to say to the guards to allow you to use the archives and find your way home.”

I look down at the pack she tossed at my feet and then back up at her, as confused as I was the first time she spoke to me, over the wreckage of the Skysinger. “What? I don’t—”

I take a deep breath and meet her eyes the way she met mine before, hoping that feeling of connection will get her to talk to me. Even now, in the midst of all this horror, there’s something about her that makes it hard to look away. She’s magnetic, drawing my gaze wherever I am.

Keeping my eyes on hers, I try again. “Why would I be safer without you? How can you be sure they’ll come back?”

Nimh swallows, looking very young, and very sad. “Because they were looking for me.”

The words hang between us, drifting like the campfire smoke. I should ask who’s after her—and why they want her. I should ask her why she’s so sure they’ll kill anyone who’s with her. I should demand she explain everything she’s holding back, every truth she isn’t telling me. But of all the objections and protestations flashing through my mind, all I’m left with as she meets my eyes is one thought: She’s all alone.

I lean down to pick up the pack and swing it over my shoulders. “I’m coming with you. Let’s go.”

SEVEN

NIMH

My thoughts are a storm of guilt and anger and fear, pulsing and shifting with every step I take. Jolts of pain strike me like lightning through the haze of urgency and danger. My cheek, where the blood fell on it, still burns like fire. Sometimes the whole world falls away, my whole self too, and I am just a tiny ember of hurt beneath a deluge that threatens to drown me.

I need to meditate, to find some tiny grain of stillness in my mind, or I will be next to useless if we’re discovered. I cannot work magic without the concentration of my will, and right now, I have nothing in my mind but chaos, as violent and uncaring as a mist-storm.

And then I hear North crashing through the undergrowth behind me, swearing strange oaths under his breath and slapping at insects, and I am all at once myself again, my feet on the ground, my eyes clear.

To let him go, to tell him he should go, was almost beyond my strength—to return without him, whether he is the Last Star or not, would be to give up on everything I’ve hoped for, to let everyone hanging in the trees have died for nothing. But if he is as important as I believe him to be, then North’s life means more than my own now.

And I am the only one who knows it. Without me, he would be safer.

Despite all that logic, all those reasons to convince him to make his own way, the one truth that pounded through my thoughts in that long, long moment as he stared at me was this: I don’t want him to go.

We move in silence for a time, until we’ve traveled far enough that low voices are unlikely to betray us.

“We will be out of the forest-sea soon,” I murmur to North, whose footsteps behind me are beginning to falter. He’s exhausted, and my throat tightens with sympathy, for surely there are no forest-seas in the clouds, and he could not have known to prepare for this. “We will go through the ghostlands, where you will find walking easier. It is a less direct route, but there are no trees, and those who are hunting me are most at home here in the shadows. We will be safer there.”

North draws a breath and then chokes, no doubt on the insects he just inhaled. “You—you know who those