Seabirds fly overhead; their cries are mocking laughter on the ocean breeze. Kyon’s eyes, the bluest of blue, stare down at me. He reaches for the nape of my neck, tying a red flower around my throat. It’s a black-ribboned choker adorned with the rarest bud. His elegant black dress uniform seems out of place in the fading light of the setting sun upon the water. With sand between my toes, I stare at the lapping waves on the beach. Gold and silver shine in the tide along the shoreline, a seaside with all the stars of the heavens captured within it. The thin veil covering my eyes parts, his eyes lean to me, bringing with them havoc within my bones. I stifle my instinct to recoil. “With this flower,” Kyon says, smiling down upon me, “I keep thee to me . . . always. Welcome home, Kricket.”
“Kricket . . . Kricket,” Trey rubs my arms that have gone slack around his waist. “Answer me. Are you okay?”
I lift my head from his back. We’re still moving stealthily through the underground tunnels on his hovercycle. I’m disoriented, but I manage to say, “I’m fine.” I hear the thickness in my own voice that makes my statement sound like a lie.
“Did you faint? Were you unconscious?” he asks, trying to discern the problem.
“No. I don’t think so. I wasn’t unconscious.”
“You had a vision, didn’t you?” Trey asks, continuing to rub life back into my dead hands.
“I don’t know.”
“You went limp against me—your skin is like ice—you were unresponsive.” He lists the facts.
I worry my bottom lip between my teeth. We’re both quiet for a second with only the sound of the hovercycle’s hum as we weave through the tunnels. “Something happened.”
“Did you see the future?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it was, it just turned on, playing like a scene from a movie with me starring in it.”
“Was it similar to what happened to you in my apartment before the Brigadets arrested us?”
“Yes,” I admit.
“What was it about, Kricket?”
“What I saw when we were in your apartment together hasn’t happened, so maybe this one won’t either.” I tell him quickly, attempting to minimize the impact of what I saw.
“Please explain what you mean by that.”
“I mean that I know who the man is from my first vision. It’s Giffen, but when I met him, the incident I saw didn’t resemble what actually happened. So maybe this one won’t either.”
“Okay. Back up. You think Giffen is the man who struck you in your vision?”
“I know he is,” I reply with certainty.
“But he didn’t hit you when you met?”
“Well, he hit me, but not with his hand. He hit me with a metal crate that he moved with his mind. Oh, and he twisted my arm when we were in the overup. And he pushed me out of a moving overup. And he hung me on the wall when I tried to get away from him, but he never hit me in the face.”
The muscles of Trey’s abdomen and back stiffen. After I tell him everything I know about Giffen, he says, “Tell me about the vision you just had.”
I feel myself growing pale as I stammer, “I think . . . I . . . I think Kyon and I—Kyon was in it.”
“Do you think he lived through the explosion back there?”
“I know he did.”
“How do you know?” Trey asks.
“I’d feel it if he died.”
“Why do you say that?” he asks.
“Because our lives are so tightly wound together that I’d know,” I reply, trying to explain the unexplainable.
Trey doesn’t argue with what I just said. He accepts it. “What was Kyon doing in your vision?” he asks.
“He . . . he tied a ribbon around my throat—it had an exotic-looking flower on it—I’d never seen a more beautiful bud—”
“It’s a copperclaw,” Trey says in a low tone. “The Brotherhood uses it in their ceremonies when a Brother commits to his priestess. It’s symbolic of the binding.”
I’m having trouble at the moment being inside my skin. I want to escape from it—let my skeleton spill out of me. I need to tell Trey everything. It feels like a confession when I whisper, “Then he said, ‘With this flower, I keep thee to me—’”
“‘—always,’” Trey finishes for me. His tone is grim.
“Yeah,” I whisper. Neither one of us says anything. The silence makes me feel smaller and smaller. After a while, I straighten, finding my spine. “We don’t know if it’ll happen. Like I said, Giffen didn’t slap me when we met. He forced me to meet the future, but he never slapped me to get me to do it.” I sound desperate. When Trey still says nothing, I blurt out, “I’ll change it—I’ve done it before—I can do it again—I can change it.”
Trey lifts my hand to his lips, kissing the back of it tenderly. I feel it tremble against his mouth. “You’re not alone, Kricket. I’ll help you change it. We’ll do it together. Now, tell me everything that’s happened to you from the time that I was separated from you until this moment.”
When Trey’s tunnel ends, we move into the drainage line leading out of the city that they had shut down a couple of rotations ago. Not long after, Trey cuts the engine to the hovercycle and lifts the lid to the compartment when we arrive at the end of the pipe. There’s a service tunnel with connecting drains that leads outside. The sun is still up, streaming light into the grate that covers the hole to the outside world, the opening of which is hidden in a drainage ditch. Beyond it, a large pasture spreads out for as far as the eye can see.
All of the Cavars dismount from their hoverbikes, stretching their arms and legs after being slouched in the same position for so long. “We’re going to rest here until the sun goes down, Kricket,” Trey explains.
I scan the cement tunnel that leads to the drainage cover. It’s only wide enough to fit one of us at a time. The hovercycles won’t squeeze through it. Turning to Trey, I ask, “Are we leaving the hovercycles?”
Trey nods his head. “We can’t take them, Kricket. They have a heat signature that’s easily detected.”
“We’re mammals. We all have a heat signature,” I point out.
“What’s a man-imal?” Wayra asks, wrinkling his nose. “I’m no man-imal.”
Jax looks puzzled. “Sounds like she called us half man, half animal in her Earthling.”
“It’s English,” I say with a grin.