The Sacred Luna

Chapter 2

(Sanya’s POV)

The oak is bigger in the dark.

I've seen this tree a hundred times in daylight — climbed it when I was twelve, carved my initials into the bark when I was fifteen, sat under it with Aaron on more afternoons than I can count. In daylight, it's just a tree. Old, wide, the kind with roots that buckle the ground around its base and branches low enough to grab.

In the dark, it's something else. It's a shape without edges. It's the place I've been told to be, and I'm here, and he's not.

I got here early. An hour before we agreed, because I couldn't sleep, because I couldn't lie in that house for one more minute with Derek's snoring through the wall and Garrett's boots by the door and the feeling — the heavy, pressing feeling — that if I stayed until morning, I'd lose my nerve and never leave.

So I'm early. And now I'm waiting.

The pack wrapped around my back is light. I didn't bring much. A change of clothes, the papers, the money I've been hiding in a slit I cut into the lining of my mattress six months ago. Everything I own in this world fits in a bag I can carry with one hand.

That should probably make me sad. It doesn't. It makes me fast.

I lean against the trunk and watch the eastern road. The moon is high, bright enough to turn the packed dirt silver, and anything moving on that road I'll see from here. I'll see him from here. He'll come from the south path, the one that cuts behind the grain store, because it's the only route that avoids the border patrol rotation. We planned this. We planned every step.

He's not late. Not yet. There's still time.

I count my breaths because it gives my hands something to do besides shake. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The night air tastes like dirt and grass and the faintest trace of smoke from someone's dying cook fire, and the quiet is so big it presses against my ears like water.

One hour.

The sky hasn't changed. The road is empty. I shift my weight from one foot to the other and then back again, and I stare at the place where the south path meets the road and I wait for his shape to appear against the tree line.

It doesn't.

I tell myself he's being careful. He has to be careful — the border patrols are unpredictable this close to the boundary, and Aaron doesn't have the kind of rank that lets a man walk unchallenged past a checkpoint. He's careful because he has to be. He's slow because he's smart.

That's all it is.

One hour becomes something longer. I don't check the time because I left my phone at the house — couldn't risk it, couldn't risk the tracking — so I measure the wait in other ways. The moon moves. The shadows under the tree shift direction. A bird cries once, sharp and short, from somewhere in the canopy above me, and the silence after it is worse than the silence before.

I press my back against the bark and whisper his name.

Not loudly. Just into the dark, the way you speak to someone you believe is close enough to hear. The way you pray without closing your eyes.

"Aaron."

Nothing.

"Aaron, where are you?"

The road stays empty. The trees don't move. The world gives me nothing back.

I slide down the trunk until I'm sitting on the roots with my knees pulled to my chest and my bag in my lap. The bark catches on my shirt. I don't fix it.

Something is wrong.

I know it the way I know things sometimes — not with my head, but with something lower, something behind my ribs that tightens when the air changes. I've always been this way. I feel shifts before they arrive. Not visions, not prophecies, nothing as clear or as useful as that. Just a sense. A wrongness in the texture of the night, like a thread pulled loose from cloth that was holding together fine a minute ago.

I can't name it. I can't prove it. I just know that Aaron Knight would not leave me sitting at this tree unless something stopped him.

Two hours.

The sky is paling. Not dawn yet — the grey that comes before dawn, the part where the dark loses its nerve and starts giving ground, slow and grudging. The stars are going out one by one, and the silver on the road is thinning into something flat and ordinary.

He is not coming.

I stand up. My legs are stiff, and there's a cold ache in my lower back from sitting on roots, and my chest is doing something I can't control — a fast, shallow thudding that has nothing to do with running and everything to do with the growing, spreading certainty that something has gone very, very wrong.

I take three steps toward the south path.

The hands grab me from behind.

I know whose hands they are before I turn around. I know from the grip — too tight, always too tight, the grip of men who hold things the way they hold opinions, like letting go would be losing. Derek has my left arm. Garrett has my right. They came from the north path, behind the tree, which means they've been watching me. Which means they knew.

"Let go of me."

"Walk." Derek's voice is flat. No anger in it. Worse than anger — control. The careful, measured voice of a man who has already decided what happens next and is simply executing.

"I'm not going anywhere. Let go of me — Aaron is coming, he's just late, he's —"

"He's not coming." Garrett yanks my arm. Not hard enough to bruise, just hard enough to move me. "Walk, Sanya."

I twist. I plant my feet and pull against them with everything I have, which isn't much — I'm smaller than both of them, always have been, and they've spent their whole lives being bigger and acting like that means they're right.

"Something happened to him. Something's wrong — I can feel it. Please. Just give me ten more minutes. Five. Five minutes."

"He's not coming because he was never coming." Garrett's grip tightens. "Now walk."

They drag me. My feet scrape the dirt. I fight — I kick and twist and try to pry their fingers loose — but my body is tired from two hours of waiting and my heart is doing something terrible and fast, and I can feel the fight draining out of me the way warmth drains from a room when the fire goes out.

I look back.

One last time, over my shoulder, at the road — the empty road, the south path, the place where his shape was supposed to appear against the trees — and that's when I see it.

The smoke.

It rises from behind the far tree line, from the direction of Aaron's pack. A column, pale grey against the paling sky, climbing straight up in the windless dark. Not cook-fire smoke. Not someone burning leaves. This is thicker. Wider. The kind of smoke that comes from something big burning — a building, a house, a home.

Every cell in my body goes cold.

"Aaron!" I scream it. The sound tears out of me raw and shapeless, nothing like my voice, nothing like a word — just a sound a body makes when it understands something the mind hasn't caught up to yet. "AARON!"

Derek's hand clamps over my mouth.

I bite him. He doesn't flinch. His palm presses harder, fingers digging into my cheeks, and I scream against his skin until my throat burns and the sound dies into something muffled and wet and useless.

The smoke keeps rising. It doesn't care about my screaming. It just keeps climbing, slow and steady, into a sky that's getting lighter by the second, and I watch it through the blur of tears I don't remember starting.

"Stop." Derek's mouth is close to my ear. His breath is warm and his voice is the voice he uses on horses that won't calm — firm, flat, empty of anything I could reason with. "You're making a scene."

Garrett pulls my other arm and turns me around. He steps in front of me, blocking the smoke from my view, and his face is the face of a man who has practiced this speech.

"He never planned to come, Sanya."

I shake my head. Derek's hand is still over my mouth.

"He was never serious about you. Men like him don't keep promises to women like you. They use them. They pass time. And when something better comes along, they disappear." Garrett says it with the certainty of someone reciting a fact. Like the sky is blue. Like water runs downhill. Like the man I love never loved me back. "He used you, and he left. That's what men like Aaron Knight do."

Derek lowers his hand. Slowly, the way you lower a lid over something that might still bite.

I don't scream again.

I don't because I can't. Because the words are sitting on my chest now, heavy and cold, and I hate that they're there but I can't push them off. He was never serious about you. I don't believe it. I don't. Aaron wrapped coconut in cloth. Aaron cut his fingers shaving it. Aaron said a sweet start with that quiet voice of his, the one that sounds like a promise even when it isn't making one.

But.

But he's not here.

And the smoke — the smoke from the direction of his pack, the smoke I can't see anymore because Garrett is standing in front of it like a wall — the smoke sits in my chest next to the words and neither one will move.

"Where is he?" My voice is nothing. A scrape. "Something must've happened to him."

"Nothing happened to him." Garrett's hand on my arm adjusts. Gentler now. The gentleness of a man who thinks the fight is over. "He lied. He never wanted you. That's all."

I look at Derek. His face tells me nothing. It never does.

I look at Garrett. His face tells me everything he wants me to believe and nothing that's true, but I can't prove that. I can't prove anything. I'm a woman standing in the dark with empty hands and a bag full of everything I own and no one on the road behind me.

They walk me home. I don't fight. There's nothing left in my arms or my legs to fight with, and the smoke has taken something from me that I can't name — not hope exactly, not faith, but the thing that sits underneath both of them. The floor they stand on.

The sky turns pink. Then gold. The sun comes up the way it always does, without asking permission, without checking if the people underneath it are ready.

I am not ready.

My brothers walk me through the front door. Garrett pulls my bag off my shoulder and sets it on the table without opening it. Derek goes to the kitchen. The house smells like morning — coffee, cold stone, the stale air of rooms that were closed all night.

I stand in the hallway. The light from the front window falls across the floor in a long pale stripe, and I stare at it, and I think: He's alive. He has to be alive. Whatever happened, whoever that smoke belongs to, he's alive. I'd know. I'd feel it if he wasn't.

I'd feel it.

I close my eyes.

Creator. I don't ask for much. I've never asked for much. But if You're listening — if You hear me — please. Protect him. Wherever he is. Whatever has happened. Keep him safe. Bring him back to me.

The prayer doesn't have words, exactly. It's more like a thing my whole body does at once — a leaning, a reaching, a throwing of everything I have toward something I can't see and can only hope is there.

I open my eyes.

The hallway is the same. The light is the same. Nothing has changed.

I go to my room and close the door and sit on the edge of the bed with the bag I didn't unpack, and I wait for something that isn't coming, and the smoke behind my eyes keeps rising long after the real smoke has gone.