Taya sits down on one of the white-blanketed beds, clutching her shoulder and staring hollowly out the glass walls at the valley and the town below us. I go to the cabinet to get the first-aid supplies, my stomach clenching. I wonder what she’s thinking. Probably she’s wishing she’d never come to the inn.
All I wanted was to get away, get out of Sterling, spend my summer hiking the mountains, dancing in the ballroom, studying with Marcus, kissing Brekken. And now everything is so screwed up, and I can’t see a way to make it right. One bite at a time, Maddie, I tell myself. Fix Taya—that’s all I can do right now.
Fix Taya. Kill the monster on the grounds. Close the Solarian door. Wake Marcus up.
She slides off her jacket as I approach, and I stop dead, all the blood rushing out of my head.
It’s worse than I thought. Way worse. It looks like something has taken a chunk out of her shoulder. The whole arm and upper back of her blue T-shirt is stained red, and I think I can see the white glint of bone somewhere in there too. The first-aid stuff clatters to the ground as I reach out for the couch to keep me from falling. The world spins a little. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t eat breakfast, because it would be coming back up now if I had.
“Oh,” Taya mumbles, looking down at her shoulder. “That’s … I didn’t realize …”
A tumble of swear words falls from my lips. “You didn’t realize your bone was sticking out of your shoulder?”
How did she even walk up from the woods? This isn’t a matter for antiseptic and stick-on bandages. I can’t just stitch this up. She needs to go to the ER. But no, I can’t send her away without giving her forgetting-wine first. And no way I’m doing that in her current state.
Still cursing, I yank my phone out of my pocket and stab at Graylin’s icon, hold it to my ear while I pace.
Ring … ring … He’s probably still out in the woods.
“Hey.” Taya’s voice is soft and slow, her eyes sluggish as they follow my movements. “How come you got to keep your phone?”
“Innkeeper’s niece, remember—”
But then Taya’s eyes flutter and she slumps to the side. I rush over and drop beside her, propping her up against the headboard before she topples into the bed, shuddering as I feel the warm slickness of blood on my hands.
Keep it together, Maddie.
She sags against me, then blinks in confusion and straightens up.
“Sorry,” she mutters, her voice far away, drifting. “I don’t know what happened.”
Graylin hasn’t picked up; when the call goes to voicemail, I hang up and try again. This time I get him.
“Maddie? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” I say. “I’m in the infirmary with Taya. She was hurt by the Solarian. Could you help? Or send another healer?”
A pause. “So just to confirm, you’re not hurt?” Graylin asks.
At another time, I’d roll my eyes, but right now there’s no room in me for anything except worry for Taya.
“My ankle’s a little messed up, but I’m fine. Can you please hurry?”
I hang up and rotate to face Taya, keeping a hand on her arm as I do, trying to ignore the blood under my palm. We can’t both faint.
“Help is coming,” I tell her, feeling horribly ineffectual. “I need you to stay awake until then.”
Her eyes are lidded. “So-lar-i-an.” She draws out the word, lingering over the strange syllables. “Why do you call them soul-devourers?”
“Because that’s what they do.”
I don’t want to talk about that, don’t want to think about my close call or how the monster is still out there. I stick some pillows on either side of her. She’s getting blood all over the bed but that doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Needing to move, I get up and rush to collect the scattered contents of the first-aid kit. I can at least get her ready for the healer.
I return to her side and sit down carefully again, not missing how Taya sucks in her breath as the mattress shifts beneath her. I look her over, swallowing to get my dizziness under control. The Solarian’s bite has ruined her T-shirt, shreds of fabric clinging to the wound with dried blood. I need to clean it out, I realize distantly.
“I think I have to cut your shirt to clean this out,” I say, trying hard to keep the hysteria out of my voice. “Is that okay?”
“Why?”
“Because I need to disinfect—”
Taya shakes her head once, and then winces at the movement. “Not that. That’s fine. I meant why do you think the Solarian wants to kill us?”
I chew my lip as I take the scissors from their plastic case. “I guess it’s hungry.”
“What if it just wants to be left alone?” she mumbles.
I ignore this, taking Taya’s arm and extending it as gently as I can, but it still makes her jaw flex and her lips thin as she holds back the pain. “I’m really sorry.”
I cut from the hem of her sleeve to her collar, careful to avoid her braid and the soft skin of her throat. The back side of her shirt flops down when I make the final snip, exposing a black bra strap and a dusting of freckles on her shoulder blade, but the front side stays where it is, glued in place by blood.
The copper smell threatens to send me back to Mom’s kitchen, Nate’s blood spreading over the floor, me useless and helpless in the cupboard. But that’s not me anymore. I’m not a child—I can’t be a child about this, for Taya’s sake. I bite the inside of my cheek to chase the faintness away and unwrap gauze and antiseptic.
“The Solarian beasts are intelligent,” I tell her, mostly to give myself something to focus on besides the blood. “I know that much. Brekken said they have all sorts of wild technology in their world. Maybe they see us as so far beneath them that there’s no difference between us and deer.”
Taya speaks slowly, like even in the haze of blood loss, she’s choosing her words carefully. “What was it like when you saw it today?”
I shake my head as I dampen the cloth with antiseptic and screw the cap back on. “Terrifying.”
I hope my bullet did its job, hope the Solarian is in pain right now. Payback for doing this to Taya. My hands shake.
Calm down, focus on something positive, I hear Dad say in my head. I close my eyes briefly and call up memories of Nate—not the kitchen, not the end, but other times. Playing together on the little hill behind our house, racing down with flattened cardboard boxes for summertime sleds so often that the grass started growing sideways. Nate helping Mom bake brownies, his head barely clearing the top of the counter as he stirred a bowl of rich brown batter. When we played hide-and-seek and I would hide in the same place every time—curled in the nook behind the old tweed couch—but he’d always look everywhere else first and still pretend to be surprised when he found me.
Carefully, I peel the ragged edges of her T-shirt away from the wound. Taya’s breath hisses out through her teeth. Then I lift the damp cloth, its harsh chemical smell stinging my nose.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and my words have a weird sort of echo in my own ears. Like it’s someone else talking, telling me: “This is going to hurt.”