“It looks safe up here,” Finnegan said. “Come light a fire downstairs. I think it’s going to be cold tonight.”
They all huddled around the grate, Aurora’s fire warming their faces and knees as the cold of the night crept steadily across their backs. Lucas prepared them a quick meal of salted meat and bread that they had packed from the city, but Aurora barely tasted it. Her skin prickled, like the skeleton was still watching her from the shadows.
Finnegan sat close by her side, and his elbow bumped hers every time he moved. Aurora did not move closer, but she did not move away.
His sleeve grazed her bare arm, and the urge to kiss him rushed through her.
Lucas leaned close to the fire. The flames lit the hollows of his eyes. He had seen so much, she realized, out here in the waste. He had seen it before the dragons came. He had watched it change.
“Lucas,” she said. “Could you tell me what happened, when the dragons came back? What you remember of it?”
Lucas shifted closer to the fire. “They appeared out of nowhere,” he said, “and we had no defenses against them. Most people didn’t think they’d ever existed, and suddenly they were burning everything to ash. No one believed the tales of those who survived the attacks. A dragon burned the city? More likely a fire got out of control, and the survivor has been driven mad by grief. Or guilt. It was a while before people accepted them as real.”
“When did you accept it?” Aurora asked.
“I suspected it from the beginning. From the things I had read, the things I heard—I knew they’d existed, and I believed they were back. I must have been one of the first people to see them and live to speak of it. I was young and foolish, so I went out to find them. To prove the rumors true. And I did.”
Aurora watched the flames, trying to picture it. Creatures descending out of myth and burning your world away. “What did it feel like,” she said, looking at him again, “when you first saw one?”
Lucas stared into the fire. The light darted across his face, highlighting the lines there, the whites of his eyes. “It was terrifying,” Lucas said. “Of course it was terrifying.” But the way he spoke, it was almost as though he were convincing himself.
Had he felt like she felt when she’d first glimpsed one, captivated and alive, like nothing existed in the world beyond this?
“Are you ever glad?” she asked. “Do you ever think . . . at least I got to see them?”
“No.” He spoke so sharply that Aurora almost jumped, her hands tightening on her knees. Lucas still stared at the fire, but he was frowning now, the lines deepening around his eyes. “Never. The death, the screaming . . . what would be worth that?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think.”
“No,” Lucas murmured. “Neither did I.” He let out a deep sigh. “I’m going to rest. Put out the fire before you two sleep.”
The fire flickered even as he spoke. Lucas stretched out a few feet away, his back to them.
“That was thoughtless of me,” Aurora said to Finnegan, in a low voice. “I just wondered . . .”
“Wonder away,” Finnegan said. “I’ve wondered the same.”
She fidgeted with the corner of her tunic, twisting the material between her fingers.
“Not regretting coming out here?” Finnegan said.
She thought of the bones above her head, the bones she would become herself, tomorrow or one hundred years from now or someday. The bones she should have already been, if the world was just.
Perhaps her curse had given her a gift. She had the chance to live in a time she should never have seen, to become friends with Rodric and flirt with Finnegan and hunt down dragons across a waste that had been full of life before she closed her eyes. She had so much opportunity, here across the sea, even while her kingdom threatened to tear her apart. She wouldn’t give that up now, not for all the security in the world.
“No,” she said. “No. Right now, it’s exactly where I want to be.”
But as they settled down to sleep, she imagined that she could feel the dragons, their heartbeats pounding against her skin.
She ached to slip outside, to see them glow in the dark sky, but she did not dare to leave. A sliver of common sense remained, telling her no, she must stay. She must