not even 8:00 a.m., and I don’t expect Taya to text back anytime soon, as I stand at the window, thinking over the paradox. Brekken’s unbending morality, or Nahteran’s farsighted acquiescence? Mom or the armor?
My phone buzzes, thankfully snapping me out of a thought spiral that can’t go anywhere good.
Great minds! Just thinking about you. Walk on the grounds before breakfast?
Just thinking about you. My eyes fix on those words a little too long, my cheeks heating. Thinking about me? In what kind of way?
I push the flustered feelings away. Taya’s spent the last few weeks learning how she fits in a whole other world. I’m probably the last thing on her mind. Or whatever fragile thing—friendship? something else?—was growing between us before everything happened. Before I discovered the soul trade, before she saved me from the Silver Prince, and before she got sucked into Solaria.
I feel guilty thinking about Taya, since Brekken and I have discussed being together. But it’s not like I’m just going to never talk with Taya. She’s my friend too. She saved my life, and I thought I would never see her again. But even as I’m trying to justify what’s running around my head, I know I’m not being fair to Brekken. Still …
Just thinking about you.
I meet her in the front hall, where she’s waiting with two mugs of travel coffee in hand. She’s wearing a new pair of skinny jeans and her signature bomber jacket. After she went through the Solarian door, I made sure Willow kept her room just as it was in case she came back. Even when it was a long shot. And now she’s here; she’s back.
Morning light streams through the windows and lands softly on her. I take the coffee, and we walk outside in silence, the sky a Creamsicle orange and mist still clinging to the grass.
Her presence feels like a comfort, a contrast to all the moments I’ve spent with Nahteran so far—which have been joyful, but also difficult and fraught. It’s easier to be with Taya. She challenges me—but we’re in agreement about the important things. Yet … I don’t ask her what she’d vote to do about Mom. I think I need to figure that out for myself.
By some unspoken mutual agreement, we start meandering toward the gardens. This early, the grounds are empty of delegates. We could be all alone in the world, just us and the mountains and the flowers, their bright colors muted by the mist.
“Nahteran has to come around eventually, right?” I tug my sleeves down over my hands. There’s the slightest hint of fall in the air. It’s not really that cold, but I shiver thinking of the haunted look in Nahteran’s eyes last night, the history he hinted at of his growing up in Byrn. “He knows better than anyone that the Silver Prince is evil.”
Taya looks at me with sadness in her eyes. “That’s not the whole story, though,” she says softly. “How many of us stay in a bad place because it’s all we know?”
My heart twists. “Let’s talk about something else,” I say, not wanting to think about my brother anymore, how he might have suffered and how he might never be the same. “I still haven’t heard much about Solaria. What was it like there? Were you happy?”
The last question slips out without my quite meaning it to. I wanted to keep it light, surface. But I should have remembered, it’s never like that with Taya. It’s as if her very presence scrapes the protective filter from me, pulls out the deepest questions swimming in my soul.
Taya takes her time answering. We’re in the midst of the flower beds now, in a section full of riotous, star-shaped green flowers. I don’t know which world these come from, but I know that every year, they bloom only when someone strokes their petals. A few bumblebees drift lazily from bloom to bloom, their hum underlying the smattering of birdsong coming from the trees.
Taya kneels down, facing the side of the path, and I stop walking. I watch curiously as she scoops up a handful of earth in her hands and straightens back up, holding the dirt carefully in her cupped fingers.
“What am I looking at?” I ask.
Taya flattens her hands so that the dirt spreads out over her skin, her eyes fixed on it. Following her gaze, I see, to my surprise, that there are myriad colors hidden in the dark of the earth. Red,