Taya stands beyond me, deep in the Solarian tunnel. She’s human again and bloodied from the fight, blood streaking her arms and trickling from the corner of her mouth. Wreathed in fog, she’s standing right in front of the doorway, framed in its eerie light. The crack in the Solarian door is wider than ever. Its orange light spills over her, making her look cast out of gold. Her hair flies in all directions; her arms are slightly raised as if in self-defense. Her back is to the door, and her eyes are wild.
And the doorway is reacting to her, seeming to expand and contract with each heave of her chest. Flashes of different, unearthly colors play around the edges and cracks into the world beyond. I catch glimpses of a blazing golden sky and a hill gleaming with buildings.
Her world.
Taya’s chin is high and her eyes are fire. Even though she’s soaked through and gaunt and shivering, knee-high in the Prince’s flood, she stands straight and strong. She’s beautiful and terrible bathed in the Solarian light. It’s hard to believe I ever thought she was human. She is tied to the door and the door to her. I know it at the cellular level. The power rolls off her like the rays of the sun. As tangible as the fire and hail.
The Silver Prince’s mouth is still frozen in a cruel smile, but his eyes are wide. He is afraid. He is afraid of Solaria, just like I used to be, but I know fear can be as volatile as gunpowder. I want to go to Taya and pull her away from the door, away from the precipice it feels like she’s balanced on, but the Prince still has his knife on me.
“Go back to Oasis,” Taya tells the Prince. “Or I’ll bring this whole place down and you’ll never have your throne room.”
Her words are trembling, like she’s bearing up under a great weight. She raises her right hand high, and her palm is bloody. When she places it against the stone, a shock wave tears through the tunnels, the ground convulsing beneath our feet.
I twist away from the Silver Prince as we both stumble in the moment before I hit the ground. The Prince lunges toward Taya, but the ground heaves and he tumbles backward into the juncture, the knife clattering away. I seize it when it skitters in my direction and shove to my feet, getting between him and Taya, so he’s halfway between us and Brekken’s sword.
“Go!” Taya snarls. The earth continues to tremble, thrumming like a living thing beneath my shoes. If I closed my eyes, I could be standing in the aisle of an ancient, rickety bus as it climbed up a mountain.
The Silver Prince stands stock-still for a seemingly endless moment, waging war with his eyes.
But then he breaks.
He turns and shoots into the Byrnisian tunnel, so fast he’s a blur. The door opens before him, and I see a fiery orange sky, a broad metallic wall. And then he’s gone, the ground convulsing as one last gust of angry wind whooshes through the juncture.
Relief fills me, and I feel a grin spread across my face as I look at Brekken. For a second, he grins back. But then the smile falls away, quick and sharp as ice cracking.
“Taya!” he yells. “Get back—”
I whirl around as the earth seizes once more, so violently I fall to my knees. The Solarian door flares up, wide open for a heartbeat, spilling blinding gold light. I see Taya’s silhouette in it, hair flying in all directions, face tilted up in wonder or horror.
Then the door slams shut, and she’s gone.
25
That night, the mountain twilight spills lavender light over Brekken’s face through the windshield of the inn’s jeep. We’re parked in front of the pizza place in town, waiting for them to carry out our order—as many pizzas as you can make. The radio plays, too soft to make out the words to the song, just enough to fill the silence.
This is the kind of stuff I didn’t think about when I was a kid dreaming of becoming the Innkeeper. How people need to eat even when the earth has literally shifted under your feet, even on a day when several people have tried to murder you and you’ve watched your friend evaporate into another world. Even when you don’t know if Solaria sucked her in or if she meant to go, and you don’t know which one would be worse.
Even when Nate—and I can hardly even form the words in my head—Nate might not be dead. Even when most of your kitchen staff has fled the inn and the idea of pouring a bowl of cereal for yourself, much less figuring something out for fifty confused and scared and angry delegates, feels unfathomable. Even then.
So, pizza.
“Taya will be all right, you know,” Brekken says, looking over at me from the passenger seat. “That’s her world.”
“We can’t know that,” I reply, keeping my eyes ahead, watching the pizzeria’s neon sign flicker against the darkening sky.
I’ve cracked the windows, letting in the sounds of crickets and frogs and wind through the pines. It feels absurdly peaceful down here, impossible to believe that only a half mile of road and a few hours separate this from the hail and fire and blood of our battle with the Silver Prince. Part of me just wants to keep driving until I’m back in Sterling. There are no choices to make there. No one else who will get hurt because of me.
You’ve hurt people in the real world, something in me whispers. The old voice of guilt—if you had screamed, if you had done something, Nate wouldn’t be gone.
But it wasn’t my choices that hurt my brother, I know now. Someone broke into our house. Someone took him. Not one starved soul-devourer, but a conspiracy too deep and dangerous to comprehend then.
And too big for me to fight now. Soon. But not now.
“We don’t know anything about Solaria. It could be a wasteland,” I say to Brekken. Even though I know that Solarians—at least some Solarians—aren’t evil, it’s hard to erase the image I built up in my head for so many years. That Solaria is a world of darkness, of hunger and monsters. I don’t want to think of Taya there. And Nate. My brother—not my biological brother, as I always thought, but still my brother. A Solarian, all along.
Brekken looks steadily at me, an unspoken question in his eyes. I look back and smile, but it feels like someone is playing tug-of-war with my heart.
He looks exactly how I remember him from our first night here, just a little more worn, a little sadder. Even dressed in jeans and a Boulder T-shirt borrowed from Jayden, playing with the tab of his Coke can, he looks like a soldier, his posture straight and his copper hair neatly combed. Strong. Safe. Like I could bury my head in the space between his neck and shoulder and shut out the world.
He would let me. He would protect me. I could lean over the dashboard right now and press my lips to his cheek and chase everything else away for a little while. I could turn back time and be the girl kissing him in the hayloft, feeling nothing but light and want and the summer stretching out ahead of me like a trail of sun on Mirror Lake.
But something has shifted between us. I want to kiss him, want to feel his arms around me, but there’s a sharp edge buried in the longing. I know all the secrets were him trying to protect me. I know he and the Heiress thought Marcus was supplying the black market by smuggling the silver objects out of Havenfall, before he knew what they really were—fragments of captive Solarians’ souls—and maybe Brekken thought my loyalty to my uncle would win out over doing what was right.
But still, it’s a lot to get used to. Everything could have been so much simpler if he’d just told me. Trusted me, his best friend.