Max raised an eyebrow. “No?”
“Not four of us,” I said. “Five.”
HIM
“It’s the start of Eridanus, the river.” Each step felt like dragging lead weights, but I gritted my teeth and walked, focused on the swirling patterns of sand beneath my feet. “We can’t see it this far north, but it’s said to flow from the foot of Orion, all the way to the southern hemisphere. See how it winds and twists across the sky?”
I couldn’t do much pointing in my current state, so Resi followed my gaze.
“It’s so vast,” she whispered.
“Yes, ma’am,” I agreed, shoving down a twinge of victory. “They say it’s a river so long that no one has ever reached its end. And there’s another legend, ma’am. About a slave.” I caught the flicker in her eyes. “Who ran away to follow the river of stars.”
She hummed softly, her thumb tracing circles on the back of my bandaged hand. What I could feel of it through the opioids resembled squirming maggots, but I allowed it. I even attempted to squeezeback.
“Tell me,” she urged.
“The slave… Her name was Adrasta, but nobody knew that,” I began, my voice steady despite the knot in my throat. “She belonged to a cruel master, much like… Well, like most of us, she dreamed of freedom. Every night she would gaze at that river of stars from the tiny window of the room her master kept her chained in, dreaming of the lands it could take her to.”
This was brutal. Poetry had been hard enough. But fiction had been good enough for Louisa, and Maeve, and my mother, and surely they couldn’tallbe crazy. Maybe if I thought of it as lying.ThatI could do.
“One night, pushed to her limits, Adrasta decided to follow the river of stars. She escaped from her chains and ran into the night, guided by Eridanus. Through forests. Across mountains.”
“Careful, Starling,” Resi murmured when I caught a stone, sending it skittering into the darkness. I gasped a little at the pressure she put on my crushed, bandaged fingers, pulling me back. “Wouldn’t want that pretty face more messed up than it already is.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Was the irony really lost on her? I glanced at her profile, silver in starlight. To my shock, she was hanging onto my every word. Or at least pretending to.
“So did she… find freedom?”
“She did,” I forged on. “She—she finally reached the end of the river of stars. Under Orion, she found a place where no one knew her past. Where her name was hers again. Somewhere where no one would hurt her ever again. And she never looked back.”
I let the quiet linger for a moment longer before breaking it. Showmanship, you know.
“It’s said that if you trace Eridanus from its source to its end,” I said, nodding upward, “you’re tracing the path of Adrasta’s journey to freedom.”Too cringe?
Resi followed my gaze across the sky, and it didn’t surprise me that her grasp on my hand tightened slightly as she traced Adrasta’s journey.
“Starling,” she whispered, her voice laced with an unhinged hunger that twisted my insides, the heat of her body searing through the chill, the glint of moonlight in her eyes no doubt reflected in mine. “Tell me you’re mine. Make me believe it.”
All right, let’s win that Oscar.
“Mistress,” I murmured, letting the word roll off my tongue like a caress. I saw the flicker of triumph in her gaze. Could she really be misreading my submission as desire? She couldn’t bethat stupid. But just in case, I had to keep going, and in the shadow of a single ocotillo, our lips came together. I closed my eyes, calculating each feigned moan. Resi’s chest rose and fell with shallow breaths.
“I’m yours, ma’am,” I whispered, the words scraping against my tongue like iron shavings. “Your Starling.”
She kissed back but then stopped dead in her tracks, jerking my chain and sending my head flying forward, then snapping back. But neither had I planned on staring at the fence that had suddenly consumed our horizon and now shimmered dreadfully under the naked starlight.
Miles upon miles of chain link, as far as I could see in any direction, stood threaded with vicious strips of razor wire twisted into cruel knots and loops—including part of what I’d likely worn on my wrists earlier. A massive sign printed in faded blood-red still hung from one of its diamond-shaped openings.
Cebolla Canyon Copper Mine - Danger - Keep Out
Though it might as well have read “keep in” for the thousands of poor bastards sold here while it operated, whose last glimpse it had been of the world outside—even if most of them hadn’t been able to read it.
Well. Noam’s pickaxe. The blue vein in the rock. The strangely singed, sparse landscape. Resi’s lantern. And above all, the careful, even, measured ridges on the rock formation on the horizon, a giant’s stairs in the stone, the kind IknewI’d seen depicted somewhere before, and not just on postcards.
As I’d suspected for a few hours now, there was nothing natural or quaintly Old West about any of it.
What a time to beright.
