Chapter Twelve: For the First Time

CHAPTER TWELVE

FOR THE FIRST TIME

Warm blood from my nostrils pricks me awake. My mind sways like it’s being expelled out of a deep underwater storm. I want to wipe my nose, but can’t summon the strength to move my arms.

Two shafts of foggy white light lance through the darkness. Everything smells like metal. Did I fall asleep in the tool shed? Why would I—

A mass shifts behind me. Chains rattle.

My drooping eyes widen. The facts of reality crash back to me, but they don’t make sense. My hands lie on the yin seat’s armrests, released from the armor. No cold corpse fingers between them.

A zipper purrs closed. Behind me, Li Shimin rises and steps out, knee scuffing my shoulders.

He lived? And so did I?

What?

How?

Did we finish the battle? Wasn’t one of us supposed to kill the other?

It hurts to think, so I stop. His heavy steps clang toward the cockpit hatch, accompanied by a rhythmic jangling of his chains. Blood continues to trickle from my nose, pooling between my lips, tasting like iron. Words fight their way out of my throat.

“Hey,” I finally manage to murmur. My voice comes out husky, like I’ve actually been choked.

His next footfall lands with a particularly loud ring.

Silence.

My tattered robes rustle as I pivot to look over my shoulder.

His orange jumpsuit glares through a frail white mist sighing down from two new holes in the cockpit, where the command speakers must’ve been. Several heartbeats thump by. He’s still facing the hatch, not moving. As if afraid to believe what he just heard.

“Hey,” I utter again.

Slowly, he turns back, leash swishing over his jumpsuit. His eyes bloom wide over his muzzle and collar, watering, glistening in the lucent vapor, as if he’s lived his whole life in black and white and is only now seeing color for the first time.

A laugh tumbles out of me. I wipe the blood from my nose. “Surprise.”

He staggers back toward me, steps lighter than before. My smirk fades. The raw tenderness in his gaze transfixes me.

It’s heart-stopping, seeing and feeling an emotion that’s not some variant of anger from a boy like him. I have to remind myself that those are the same vicious, red-lit eyes that glared at me with bloodlust in the mind link. He is not innocent. Not framed. Not misunderstood. I know that for certain. I have lived through the burning, screaming depths of his mind.

Yet I can’t look away.

Without really being sure why I’m doing it, I unfurl my arm over the back of my seat, offering him my hand.

When he takes it, a startling shiver in his bones travels into mine, humming deep into me and taking root.

Our fingers curl together, much gentler than when we were trying to take each other’s lives.