I didn’t know how I’d react when I finally found him again.

The ice that fills me now feels right. His voice might be just as I remember. Just as knowing, just as thoughtful, just as tempered. But it no longer belongs to the boy whose whispers once warmed my ears. It belongs to the monster his master made of him. A stranger wearing the skin of a lover.

Another whisper, this one no memory, accompanies the blade that presses dangerous and sharp between my shoulder blades, directly behind my heart. “I warned you.”

I breathe out slowly, emptying my lungs. Breathe in again. Gauging the millimeters I have to work with- too few- as Cal roughly grabs my shoulder and hauls me to my feet, then pushes me towards the clearing where Thane waits.

“You’re going to regret this,” I murmur.

Cal’s reply is as friendly as her blade. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

My cracked reflection follows us through a forest of warped tanks. A girl with murder in her eyes and a storm in her veins. Her fists, the weapons of her father’s creation, clenched to the breaking point. I shake my head, lose my hairband, and let my mane roar. Long strands of white billow across my face as Cal shoves me into the clearing. Mangled decking and derelict technology rise around us like the pillars of some long-forgotten temple to scientific gods. Holotables splay orbiting projections of information through the air, flickering at their immaterial edges in a silence broken only by bootsteps and outgassing hydraulics.

All the while, he watches. Eyes like molten magma pouring over my silhouette. Every emotion hidden behind a cold mask of strikingly sharp features as beautiful as they are handsome. Drinking in the sight of me. Appraising, analyzing, dissecting. Like he’s looking at a weapon, not a woman. How someone so capable of love could be so equally numb to it is alien to me. Even now, through the maelstrom of emotion tearing at my guts, I still feel a pull towards him. I’ve always drawn strength from those instincts. Thane is a creature of an entirely different nature.

His blinks are slow, draconic in their patience. Savage brushstrokes of dark hair stir in the current of an invisible wind; the outward omen of his Shifter class activating. His staff waits untouched in that sling on his back. Straightening languidly, he paces forward till he’s mere feet away. Then closer still. Till we’re so close that I can hear the quietness of his breath as he reaches out to touch me. One finger brushing hesitantly down my cheek, like I’d disappear at the lightest pressure.

His gaze lingers on my prosthetic arm. Drifts coldly over the pallor of my skin. Spares a fading glance at the body my clothes reveal. Then my disguising colors, the marks and scars I’ve accumulated without him, and finally, back to the freckle-shadowed eyes.

He sees a stranger too.

“It’s been a while,” is the first thing he says.

I glare back at him like a caged animal, restrained only by the knowledge of the danger I’m in. And I’m gnawing at the bars.

“Heard I was supposed to be dead,” I growl. “Guess I’m just full of surprises.”

He sniffs out a single note of amusement. “Some things never change.”

“Can’t say the same to you.” My face tightens, freckles wrinkling over my nose as I jerk away from his touch. “Betraying Dad looks like the best decision you ever made.”

“Betrayal.” Cold caution fills his eyes. “After three years, I thought you’d bring a better rebuke.”

“And I thought you wouldn’t be scared to finish the job your master started. Yet here you are, bantering words with the girl you left for dead.”

“Do you really think banter is the reason you’re still being let to talk?”

“You’re the one with the pet assassin holding a knife to my neck,” I hiss. “You tell me.”

He lets out a disappointed breath. “If I wanted to hurt you, I could have done it plenty of times by now. Just hear me out. Please.”

“Listen. To you. After everything you’ve done?” My teeth gnash. “Did you bring me here because you really thought that there would ever be a universe where I would listen to you?”

He steps right past my barb. “Aren’t you tired of fighting? Of hiding from Gami? We can put an end to it. Right here, right now. Hate me all you will Tetsuka, just listen to what I have to-”

My eyes flash. All heat, I lunge at him before the familiar chill of a blade replaces itself like a collar around my neck. “You don’t get to use that name.” I snarl, jerking against Cal’s grip. “Not after everything you’ve done, you bastard.”

Thane flinches. The break vanishes than anyone except me would notice. Just a flicker in his inscrutable façade as he turns his back. “I didn’t want to do this the hard way. But I will if I must.”

I search his back for any sign of the boy I knew inside the person he became. Some kindred emotion. But there’s nothing. He’s a mask to me now.

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“Why?” It comes out barely louder than a whisper. “After everything we had… why, Thane? Why throw it all away?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.” His gaze drifts to the side, the empty growth pods. Cold green light casting his jaw from beneath. “You wouldn’t understand.”

I breathe out. Voice and mind hardening as one. “Then come and get me. Finish what your master started.”

“I assure you, I didn’t go to such lengths to find you just to kill you. I have higher needs for you than Gami does. Though they weren’t made on the assumption of you being cut off from your ki.” So he noticed. “We’ll start by fixing that. Making you receptive to my plans can wait for later.”

My stomach twists in a cold knot.

Leaning on a holotable, Thane lets his attention move on to black-haired girl behind me, giving time for his next words to choose themselves. “You’re ahead of schedule. And you didn’t tell me you were coming.”

Cal’s shoulders lift in a small shrug. “Didn’t have a chance. This one’s a handful.” She pats me too-friendly on my real shoulder. “Besides. You’re busy enough as it is. I could take care of one runaway on my own.”

“You did well. Thank you.”

“So. I brought her, just like you wanted. What’s next?”

Thane picks meticulously at his fingernails. “A fair question. Though it begs another in turn.” Those golden eyes drift back to me, though he keeps speaking to his sister. “When did you start asking questions, Cal?”

“Right around when you decided to start working behind the Champion,” Cal cooly replies, kicking the back of my leg. I fall to a knee with a gasp, the blade- long as her forearm- resting against my neck. “Keeping this one alive was more trouble than offing her outright. Double that for hiding her from Gami. It’s all risk, no reward. Gami killed her father- even if you had Valance melt her mind into a drooling mess, there’s no way she’d ever do anything but fight back.”

“You say that with such confidence, yet you chose to lure her here without alerting me all the same. As if the thought that she might be more dangerous than she seems never once crossed your mind.” Thane slowly shrugs off his cloak. “Or, perhaps you didn’t come to this place for me after all.”

Cal scoffs. “I don’t-”

He cuts her off with a raised hand. “Tell me- just how long has Tay had you fooled?”

Some subliminal change in his voice sends a shiver of warning down my neck. The hairs on my left arm stand on end. The pads of my fingers tighten against the ground as I line up the distance separating me from us. Tension builds in my limbs like a spring compressing. Willfully ignorant of how suicidal it would be to challenge Thane. Nothing can hold back the roiling maelstrom inside me now.

“You’re clever, Cal. You’re not an idiot,” Thane continues, not waiting for a response. Watching me war against my instincts, seeing if I’ll crack like he wants. Trying to awaken me the way he always has. “You knew Tay would recognize you sooner or later. You were prepared for it. And I warned you atop it all.” His eyes lid halfway. “You knew she was using you to get to me, and you let her do it.”

I blink twice.

“What?” Cal asks at the same time I think it. “I couldn’t give less a shit about who she is or what she’s done. I’m asking for you, Thane.” Her boot shifts fractionally to the side, toe pressing against a piece of char just within my reach. Free hand lifting her Relic up. “Do you remember what you told me when you gave me this?”

“Every word. But I’m starting to question if you’ve forgotten it yourself. You’ve never lied to me before, Cal.”

Cal’s eyes narrow. “I don’t lie.”

“Then answer me this: you felt it the moment you saw her. Didn’t you?”

Her fingers clench.

“Don’t look so surprised. You’re not the first to feel it, Cal. That magnetism.” Thane paces forward, index and middle finger trailing along the top of a holotable, scattering virtual sparks across its surface. “My mistake, assuming you immune to attachment just because it’s never interested you before. But you couldn’t ignore this feeling. Could you?” His golden eyes flick to me. “I would know.”

Cal says nothing. Thane carries right on.

“You don’t need to say more. I already know the story. It began, I assume, right around when you started to question if I was right. If this girl who you felt pulled to from the very first moment had more to her story than black and white details.” His patience fades, voice hardening. “Perhaps you even wondered if the brother you’ve trusted all these years might not be who you thought he was. So you brought her here to find the truth. Using her just like she’s been using you.”

Liar, my mind hisses.

“Maybe you were even considering helping her.”

Betrayer.

“But before you choose, you deserve to know what a mistake that would be.”

The ice inside me begins splintering, fissures multiplying as I suddenly understand where he’s going. He’d do anything to hurt me. He wants me to break. He wants me to remember what I am and what I used to be. To break free of the rust and chains claiming my heart. He’s forgotten why he should be afraid of me. So I’ll remind him. I’ll show him what breaking really means.

The violent impulse pounding through my veins redoubles. Shattering through my composure. Mania becoming vitriolic fuel my aether devours in greedy gulps to gather the strength for ignition. It rips through me like liquid fire. Burning from inside out.

Cal’s blade drifts fractionally away from my neck. “What do you mean?”

“Tay told you our Champion killed her father, didn’t she?”

In the corner of my eye, Cal nods warily.

“She lied to you,” Thane says, callously ripping into my heart with the sharpest blade he has. “She knew you never would have helped her if you knew the truth of what really drives her. Why she would kill me right where I stand if she could, and why she’s planning to do the same to you the moment you outlive your use.”

My composure cracks.

Gaps growing in my mind. Horror coming out behind clenched teeth and closed eyes. Reliving the day of my undoing. Thane stabs the memory into my soul with heartless patience, one word at a time. A body limp in rain-soaked sand. Red hair pooled wet and lifeless. Blood on my arms. Screams in my ears. Glass warping my vision. Fading pulse beneath my palm. My soul shrieking insanity, unable to contain its breaking, until I tore myself away from it forever so I wouldn’t unravel. Compartmentalizing. Blotting. Swearing to survive. Burying that day and the memories that precede it in the darkest corner of my mind.

Now it all comes rushing back. All of it. And it zeroes in on the man in front of me, consuming every ounce of my being.

Hating him.

Hating him.

“Because it wasn’t Gami who killed her father.”

Hating.

HATING.

“It was me.”