Stormbreak (Seafire #3) - Natalie C. Parker Page 0,25

upper lip. Sledge had told her once that this stage of withdrawal was sometimes worse than the pain of detox. Aric’s emotional claws bit much deeper than his physiological ones.

“Just the ones you let die here? Or all of them?” Remi asked, a dangerous challenge in her eye. “Seems to me you only have room for sorrow when there’s no glory to be had.”

“There is no glory in this fight,” Caledonia countered. “There’s surviving and there’s dying, but I’ve never seen glory on the Bullet Seas.”

“I have.” Remi’s voice softened and her eyes unfocused as she let a memory pull her away. “I will again.”

Glory. Always glory. Aric had used that word so effectively it had galvanized his entire army. The deadly combination of glorious rhetoric and Silt had given his Bullets the justification they needed to take children from their parents and turn them into soldiers. Aric’s glory was a promise. One as violent as the guns he put in their hands.

“Glory shouldn’t have to come at the expense of so many others,” Caledonia said.

“That is the only way.” Remi laughed. “Sacrifice is the truest kind of glory. To give yourself, your life in the service of someone so much greater than you, is glorious.”

The thought sent a chill down Caledonia’s spine. How had Aric—and now Lir—convinced so many people that killing and dying for them was the truest form of anything? But she knew the answer. Silt, food, power. Aric had figured out what people needed and then he learned how to control it. Lir had learned from him and decided he could do it better.

Somehow, some part of Remi had resisted that power. Enough to choose to follow Caledonia to Cloudbreak where she knew this would be her future. The question now was whether or not she would keep making that choice now that she’d experienced the reality. In some ways it would be easier to do as Pine suggested and keep every Bullet they collected under lock and key until the fight was over. But as dangerous as it was to extend trust to a former Bullet, it was the only way to truly win in the end.

“I won’t let you die for him, Remi,” Caledonia said. “I want you to stay here. I want you to get strong again and make your own choices. As soon as you’re healthy, you can do just that: choose.”

Remi’s eyes watered as she watched Caledonia with a kind of agony. Her brow creased and her lips quivered as if something she needed were just out of reach. She drew a shuddering breath and said, “I don’t want your mercy, Caledonia Styx.”

“You have it, regardless.”

This time Remi’s laughter was disbelieving. “Why?”

Caledonia’s answer came without a breath of hesitation. “Because mercy is what is left when glory fails us.”

For a second, Remi only watched Caledonia with her mouth partly open, as if she couldn’t make those words make sense in her own mind. Then she began to laugh. It started in her throat and bubbled up until there were tears streaming out of her bleary eyes.

“Mercy.” She pushed the word out between spurts of laughter. “Mercy, mercy, mercy. You want to fight this fight with mercy? Caledonia, I think I overestimated you. Maybe Lir has, too.”

On the other side of the door, Sledge made a low sound in his throat. The conversation Caledonia had intended to have with Remi was no longer the one she needed to have. Dismissing everything else she’d come to say, she settled on a new approach.

“I have one question for you, Remi.”

“Only one? But I have so many answers to give. Don’t you want to know what I know about Lir? Where he is and what he’s doing now? Or Donnally? Wouldn’t you like to know what kind of face he made as he murdered Fiveson Decker?”

Caledonia stepped forward, ignoring everything except the information she wanted in this moment. “Why did you come with us?”

Remi blinked, unable to mask her immediate surprise before her mouth returned to its sneer and she exhaled slowly. “Maybe I just wanted to see it all for myself.”

“The inside of a barrack? Cloudbreak? Me?”

“How it all ends.” This time Remi’s smile spread slowly, exquisitely across her wide mouth into the kind of expression that suggested Remi’s mind might never recover from decades of Silt.

“How what ends?” Caledonia regretted the question immediately.

Remi tipped her head back, sighing sweetly as she said, “You, of course. And him. And the two of you and