The Last Starborn

Chapter 4

She gave herself exactly forty-eight hours.

That was the deal she made with herself in the parking lot, keys in hand, the silver thread of that text still glowing on her phone screen. Forty-eight hours to put her affairs in order, tell the hospital she needed emergency personal leave, pack a bag, and decide whether she was the kind of person who drove three hundred miles north with a man she had met in her own emergency room.

She was, it turned out, exactly that kind of person.

She did not examine this too closely.

She packed light. A week of clothes, her medical kit, the small locked box from the top shelf of her closet that she had carried from apartment to apartment for six years without ever opening. Her guardian had left it to her. She had never been brave enough to look inside.

She put it in the bag anyway.

Cael was waiting outside her building at five in the morning, exactly when she had told him to be there. He was leaning against a dark vehicle she did not recognize, arms folded, watching the street with the particular stillness of someone who had spent centuries learning how to wait without visibly waiting.

He saw her the moment she came through the door. He always did, she was starting to understand. Some part of him was permanently oriented toward her, like a compass that had only one direction.

She found that more comforting than she was prepared to admit.

“You came,” he said.

“I said I would.” She loaded her bag into the back without being asked. “I keep my word.”

He was quiet for a moment in the way she was starting to recognize as him choosing between things he could say and the one thing he would actually say.

“I know,” he said finally. “I have been watching you for eight months.”

She paused with her hand on the door. “That sentence has at least three different implications and I am choosing to address exactly none of them before I have had coffee.”

She got in the car. He got in the car. And for the first hour they drove north through a city slowly waking up around them, and neither of them said anything at all.

It was not an uncomfortable silence. That was the thing she kept noticing about him—he did not fill silence with noise the way most people did, out of anxiety or performance. He was simply present inside it, the same way he was present in every room she had seen him in. Like he had already claimed the space and was merely allowing her to share it.

She thought she should find that arrogant.

She did not.

✦ ✦ ✦

When the city finally gave way to highway and the highway gave way to the kind of open road that makes the sky look different—bigger, somehow, like it had been held back and was now expanding to its proper size—she turned in her seat and said:

“Tell me about the twelve.”

He glanced at her. Then back at the road.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything. Names. Ages. How they survived. What they know about me.” She paused. “Whether they have been told I am coming.”

“They have been told.” A pause. “They have been told for the past eight months, each time I set out and came back without you.”

Something moved in her chest that she chose not to name.

“Names,” she said.

And he told her.

Seren, twenty-six, who had been four years old during the Culling and remembered only the running. She was the pack’s best tracker and the person most likely to test Zara immediately and without apology.

Finn, nineteen, who had been born after the Culling to a mother who died three years later of a wound that had never properly healed. He was the youngest and the one Cael worried about most, though he did not say that last part directly. Zara heard it anyway.

Mara, thirty-one, the closest thing the pack had to an elder now that the genuine elders were gone. She kept the old records, the bloodline charts, the histories that could not be lost. She had been the one who found the trace of the Ashveil name in an archive three years ago and brought it to Cael.

“She found me?” Zara said.

“She found the thread. I followed it.” He paused. “She will want to speak with you privately. I would let her.”

“Why?”

“Because she has questions I cannot answer. She knew your mother.”

The road unspooled ahead of them. Zara looked at it and breathed through the thing that sentence did to her ribcage.

“How many more?” she said, when she could speak evenly again.

He named the rest: Devlin, who handled security and had not smiled in eleven years. Asha—“Not the same Asha,” he said quickly, reading something in her face—who was seventeen and already showing the early signs of a shift ability none of them had seen in a generation. The twins, Cora and Cole, twenty-two, who finished each other’s sentences and had the uncanny ability to be in two places at once by methods Cael had stopped trying to explain. And six others, each with their own survival story, each carrying the weight of a world that had tried to erase them.

Twelve people. All that was left.

“They are going to look at me and see what they lost,” Zara said. It was not a question.

“Yes,” he said. “And what they might still have.”

She turned to look at him. The early morning light was doing something to the planes of his face that made him look—not softer, exactly. More honest, maybe. Like the careful control he wore in every other moment had been given the morning off.

“And you?” she said. “What do you see when you look at me?”

The silver of his eyes found her for just a moment before returning to the road.

“Everything I have been looking for,” he said. Quietly. Simply. Like it was not an enormous thing to say.

Zara faced forward. Watched the road.

She did not say anything for a long time.

But she did not move away from the warmth that had settled somewhere in the center of her chest, either.