Saskaya rolled her eyes. “Your father is dead. You need to take care of yourself. At this rate, you’re not going to recover until sometime next year. Let’s see...you need to gain another 10-12 kilos before you’re back where you were before the invasion. That’s the minimum weight for your height, by the way. You went in there without much to lose.”
“I feel as though all I do is stuff my face.”
“No, what you do is play with your food and eat half of what you’re served. The shredding is a normal response to starvation, Zosia, but you need to actually put the food into your mouth and consume it for this to work. Not run around expending energy on things like climbing cliffs.”
Saskaya was pissed about my visit to the Temple, which compounded my sense that I could not do anything right. I hoped that giving my father a proper send-off might alleviate some of the guilt I’ve carried for months. If anything, it’s made my internal chaos worse—a state compounded by the standoff with Lorcan.
“The dirt bikes were fun, though,” I joked. My heart isn’t in it. I dropped my head onto my chin and sighed.
“Are things any better with your knight?”
“No.” I sat up again and pushed away the notebook Saskaya is using to record my health progress. I see she spoke with Raina about Dr. Wen, recently. I wonder what she makes of the antidepressants I’m taking. They don’t seem to do much, although the doctor said it could take a few weeks for them to start working.
“Sas. What was it like when Lorcan first came out of his coma?”
I don’t know what prompted my question. The thought of him being trapped in that eerie bunker for months weighs on me, that’s all. Waking up to that weird blue light, and trying to put himself together like a puzzle missing pieces.
“Poor kid flopped out of that fishbowl barely strong enough to stand,” Saskaya replied, absently. She’d gone back to tinkering with a small screw on a vial of concentrated violet energy liquid.
“Fishbowl?”
“The crystal-sided bed in the Temple. When the fourth wall comes up, it’s leak-proof. Put your patient inside, fill it, set the temperature, and you have cryogenic therapy. It can also maintain stable body temperatures, or act as a warming tank.”
Why didn’t they build it on top of Mount Astra, near the Sky Temple? Surely, freezing representatives of the goddess to nearly death isn’t a great long-term strategy for survival. I really wonder about my ancestors, sometimes. Wise women, my royal posterior.
“Wasn’t the water pretty gross after months of him floating in it?”
“It’s an amazing piece of machinery, Zosh. There’s a filtration system in the base. Diluting this stuff”—she shook the vial of concentrated energy liquid—“sterilizes the water. The risk of infection with a head wound like that was very high. I strapped him into one of Raina’s intravenous lines with antibiotics as a precaution. Waste of valuable resources. The Covari elders were smart people.” She tapped her silvery temple. “Speaking of smart, how’s your test prep coming along?”
“It’s not.” I haven’t told her that I won’t be finishing my degree. I’ve authorized a partial payment to settle Kenton and Bashir’s accounts. When—if—money becomes more readily available, I’ll pay mine, Lorcan’s, and Raina’s, so they can complete their studies if they so choose. I know Raina is working on hers. For me, there are too many other pressing priorities. My degree remains ever out of reach. “Tell me honestly. Did Lorcan really forget me? Or has he been using it as an excuse for his behavior?”
It’s confusing to me, the way he claims not to remember me, but then recalls details from events I was sure he’d forgotten.
Sas set aside her project, sat back in her chair, and crossed her arms. “Zosia, that kid was a mess.”
I arched one eyebrow. My friend sighed and returned her attention to the disassembled dirt bike engine on her desk.
“Your boy,” Saskaya continued, tilting the piece of machinery to get a different angle—
“He’s not ‘my boy.’”
She shot me a look. My cheeks heated. “I mean, beyond publicly.”
My friend glared with pure skepticism.
“He could barely stand up when he came out of the tank. Didn’t recognize me. Mistook me for my sister for a solid week. It was like having another baby on my hands.” Saskaya blows a strand of hair out of her eyes. “I never even wanted one. Suddenly I was raising Cata’s son and trying to put my sister’s protégé back together. To say I was grumpy about the situation is the understatement of a century.”
I laughed at that. “So, Lorcan was trapped in an underground bunker with a grouchy technologist for six months.”
“Three of which he was unconscious. That was fine, other than the chaos unfolding below. I was pinned down and in no position to fight off invaders, so I took the precaution of detonating the entrance to the Plateau to prevent the invaders from getting up to the top.” Saskaya cast me a lopsided grin. “Bored, but free to focus on my research. Which at that point consisted entirely of trying to override the hacked control system on the Sentinels.” Her grin faded. “What a nightmare. Zosia, I feel so responsible for—”
“Shh. Sas. You’re no more responsible for the invasion than I was.”
I know what she’s feeling though. The kind of guilt that cannot be reasoned away, only endured.
“No, but I’m the one who spent my entire adult life assembling five-hundred-year-old robot soldiers, only to have them malfunction and hunt us down.”
Saskaya pinched the bridge of her nose.
