“Are we related?” It felt like such a silly question given the circumstances, but it was a start.
“Half sisters.” She didn’t seem to care. “Same mom. Presumably different dads.”
The idea of having family provided me with some comfort despite the shitty situation.I can’t wait to tell Graysen…
Oh no.Graysen. His paranoid behavior suddenly seemed appropriate given there was a secret society of…something, that seemed to be out for me and mysister(s)? He had killed somebody—maybe multiplesomebodies—yet I wanted nothing more than to be curled up in his arms. I wanted to go back to the way things were before his past… my past…our pastscame back to haunt us.
“What’s our mom like?” Despite the desperate situation, the thought of having a family twisted the corners of my lips into a hesitant smile.
“A fucking cunt,” Dia sneered. My smile fell. “A whore of a goddess with a taste for shitty human men and the inability to use birth control to stop producing tenuously powered blonde babies.”
I nearly choked. “Goddess?”
“How does it feel to be a demigod?” She snidely grinned. “You have just enough magic to heal and be used as a human battery. Congratulations.”
I blinked the statement away, unable to process it in the moment. “Did you say all of us are blonde?”
“I guess the goddess of vitality has strong genes in the follicular department. Fuckin’ Goldilocks.”
My eyes fell to where taupe gray hair scattered across the hospital gown. Did Graysen know? Hehadtold me I couldn’t leave the house without dyeing it. “Save your energy for yourown healing” he’d said when I instinctively reached for his wound. The word choice was too precise. He knew. Why hadn’t he told me? If I knew I was something different, something endangered, I would’ve been more cautious. Right?
I thought back to the version of myself that was lost, confused, and disoriented. A damaged woman suffering from amnesia, and certain she had a life to return to on Earth. What would I have done if he’d told me the truth? That my human life was gone. That I was trapped in a foreign world, forced to face the strange and horrifying pieces of my history without a happy memory to call my own. Would I have let myself believe him, even if it risked my sanity? Could I really have just thanked him for the information and moved on happy and healthy?
“Did you say our origin was Earth? Do we have a past there?” I wasn’t sure if it even mattered anymore. I had a new life, one that I felt connected to. Still, I was sick of not having all the pieces to my own puzzle.
“You probably spent a miserable childhood there until your adult demigod body couldn’t tolerate the air pollution anymore and you got generously zapped by our mother to some random ass field in the dazzling world of Trebianna,” she sang sarcastically, her voice filled with venom. “Oureggdonor hardly has the best taste inspermdonors. Paternity has proven to set most of us up for failure on Earth. I’m sure you aren’t forgetting anything worth remembering there,” she said as if the notion should be comforting.
“It’s a lot to wrap my head around,” I breathed, trying to weave a tapestry of my life that felt increasingly like a net trapping me with every added thread.
“Whatdoyou remember?” A flick of empathy appeared, and immediately vanished again.
I swallowed. “I just remember being injured in the woods, then Gray—somebody found me and told me I wasn’t on Earth.” The memory of Graysen’s rescue caused tears to pool in my eyes. I wanted him here to save me now. I wanted to be in that carriage, wrapped in his smoke, processing everything out loud while he listened patiently and intently until I made sense of it all.
“You didn’t remember anything from before that? Nothing about Trebianna?” Her voice softened once her eyes tracked the tear that trickled down my cheek.
I shook my head.
Dia took in a deep breath. “Faeryn, right? I don’t know what to tell you about your past. If you don’t remember Trebianna, you probably weren’t here for more than a few seasons before getting captured. Some other escapees I’ve talked to remember the concept of this world existing, just not what they were doing in it.”
“I also don’t remember anything that happened on Earth.”
“Amnesia is complicated.” She shrugged. “None of the other pod women had life memories either.”
Brief or not, I had lived on Trebianna. My heart ached. I knew I’d lost my memories from Earth, but it never occurred to me that I had lost a lifehere. My mind raced. Everything that Graysen taught me, had I known it before? Did I have a place in this world? I might have even had relationships, a reallife… And now it was all gone. Just out of reach, on this very planet. I had spent so long trying to get back to what I thought was home, when it had been here all along. It wasn’t a galaxy away; it was right next door. And I had no way of recovering those chapters.
“Didyouforget anything?” I sniffled and tried to cut off my rampaging thoughts. I was finally getting answers, and didn’t want to waste another moment in ignorance. It was time to focus on what I could learn instead of what I could never recover.
“They never successfully hooked me up to a pod. I remembereverything.” Her voice was pained, like she would have preferred amnesia. “And they won’t get me into one. I’d rather die than give them a single drop of my life force.” It struck me that her desire to stay autonomous seemed more driven by spite than a desire to live.
“The pods, when do they—”
“Once we’re healthy, they’ll take you to them,” she stated factually, as if she had seen it happen before.
“Then why the fuck did you tell me to take that injection?” I snapped, my eyes wide. I wasn’t trying to accelerate my way back to amnesia before I could get out of here. What if I forgot Graysen?
“You were getting the injection either way. I just spared you being knocked out again.”
My pulse was accelerating. Now that she was the calm one, my rage was eager to take its turn. “What now?”
