Phoenix Flame - Sara Holland Page 0,21
But it’s hard when frustration is mounting in me every second. “Mom, it’s not like I’m going to barge in on them Rambo-style or anything. I just need a name. Just a place to start.”
I didn’t expect her to resist like this. I thought that I’d be bringing her hope, in the possibility that Nate is alive. It didn’t even occur to me that we wouldn’t be on the same page. Why doesn’t the idea fire her up like it does me? My frustration overflows, and I snap, “Don’t you want to find him?”
The stare Mom fixes on me isn’t like her usual expression during these visits. It’s not dead or empty—but even fully present, it’s still bleak and cold, absent of hope. “We don’t know that he’s alive. The traders are cruel.”
That hurts to hear, but I don’t let it dissuade me. “But how can you stand not knowing? Don’t you think it’s at least worth looking into?”
“I don’t want to lose two children.”
That shuts me up. I stare at my mother, reeling, trying to figure out what to say next. But to my surprise, she goes on, slightly softer.
“We’re not meant to love people from other worlds,” she says in a low voice, the last word trailing off in a whisper. Like she’s trying to be gentle but doesn’t quite remember how. “We can’t save them. We can’t follow them. It’s better to just keep our heads down.”
How can she say that? I stare at her, stunned into silence. Coming to Sterling Correctional, the long boring drive, the invasive search—as depressing as it all is, I felt hope on the way here that I hadn’t felt in years. Hope that my mother was finally going to come alive, and we’d save my brother together. But now I feel that hope slowly being snuffed out inside me. “Are you saying I was—I am—wrong to love Nate because he’s a Solarian and I’m a human? He’s my brother.”
“No—just …”
Mom shifts in her seat, and I register a flicker of twisted satisfaction that I’m making her uncomfortable. For ten years she lied to me about what had happened to Nate, sat here in safe silence while I tore myself apart with grief and guilt.
“I’m not saying—” Mom seems flustered, a bit of color rising to her sun-starved cheeks. She shakes her head, her ragged braid swinging from side to side. “It’s because of love that the traders found us.”
I blink. “What do you mean?”
Mom bites her lip and turns her face away. But there’s just a blank wall there, nowhere else for her to look except at me. And in a sick moment, I’m grateful for it. I want her to be forced to meet my eyes. I want to understand.
“Tell me,” I insist, leaning forward about as close as I can to the plexiglass without pressing my nose against it. “Please, Mom. I promise I won’t do anything stupid, I just want to know.”
For a long moment she doesn’t say anything, and I brace myself to sit here for twenty minutes of painful, loaded silence. But finally, when I’ve just about given up on hearing more, she lets out a heavy breath and speaks.
“I fell in love with a man of the Realms,” she says, so quietly the mic barely picks her up. “I fell in love, and everything fell apart.”
My heart is racing, even as I sit as still as a statue. Inside, I’m rifling through my memories for any mystery man in our childhood, but I can’t picture a face, just a tall shadowy figure that might well be a manufacture of my imagination.
“Did he betray you?” I whisper.
She nods. “He would have never had knowledge of us or Nahteran if I had been wiser. But I trusted him. I was a fool.”
“What was his name? The man you loved?” I ask.
The question falls from my lips breathlessly, thoughtlessly, like a little kid eager to hear the ending of a bedtime story. For a moment, I don’t care that the name might be the key to cracking the soul trade, to finding Nate. I just want to know this one thing about my mom, who has always been so mysterious to me. I want to know the name of the man she loved.
She waves her hand dismissively. “It’s not important.”
“Please,” I whisper. My hand is against the glass, and I don’t remember putting it there. “Mom …” I don’t know what makes me say it, but I hear