<Lies.>
“Not lies. I told you that Janan had warriors who hunted and captured a phoenix. Those warriors became sylph. They are with me now, my army and my armor, and I’m sure they remember how to capture something that doesn’t want to be captured. If you hurt my friends, we will come for you and every other dragon in existence.”
<The phoenix song. The one with the song.>
<We must destroy it.>
<She knows the one with the song. She will use the song against us.>
<If she wanted to, she would have.>
<Kill her to be safe.>
<She will use the song if we try. The one with the song will do it. See how he hovers.>
<But she wants the temple destroyed.>
The dragons’ ringing intensified, filling my head like a swarm of bees. I staggered and caught myself on a boulder, raw hands scraping on stone. Voices called my name and sylph closed around me, but I pulled myself up and glared at the dragons and summoned what was left of my voice.
“I. Will not. Give up.”
Acid Breath blew a long stream of rancid air over the ledge, rustling trees and making sylph moan. Blue targeting lights flared, but I held up a hand again.
“Don’t.” I couldn’t look behind me—I didn’t have the energy—but the lights turned off. I focused on the dragons again. “Do you understand me?”
Acid Breath glanced beyond me as more heat pressed around. The sylph I’d left at the wall had arrived. Just a dozen sylph had fought them off before. Twice that number . . .
They weren’t afraid of the sylph, though. They were afraid of something else. The phoenix song. The one with the song.
<Your friends will not be harmed.>
I nodded, carefully, so my thoughts wouldn’t swim. “And will you destroy the tower on Soul Night? The spring equinox? Will you use your weapon?”
<We will decide. You have the one with the song. You refuse to let us destroy it, yet you ask us to destroy it. We will decide.>
Before I could respond, Acid Breath and the others pushed off the earth and into the sky. Trees cracked and fell under their power, and the cliff shuddered. Dragon thunder ripped, and I watched their receding forms as exhaustion and darkness overtook me.
But this time when I fell, there were hands to catch me.
20
CONNECTION
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED IN sharp fragments, like shards of glass and light. Warm water on my face and neck. Sips of thin soup. The scent of ozone. Voices that seemed as though they came from the other end of the earth.
A dark figure with his knees to his chest, face buried in his arms, shoulders hunched and heaving.
When awareness settled and stayed, I found myself wrapped inside my sleeping bag, wearing clean clothes and listening to a piano in one ear. My SED lay just outside my bedding, the wire of one earpiece twisting its way to me. The second earpiece played music at nothing.
“It’s crooked.” My voice rasped as though I’d been screaming. Maybe it was just waking-up raspiness. “The music. It’s crooked.”
A quiet din I hadn’t been aware of until now suddenly stopped, and someone gave a long, relieved sigh. Sam. “You did that. You said one earpiece was for you, one was for us, and when I suggested using the SED speakers for everyone, you said you didn’t have time to argue.”
“Oh.” That did sound like me, but I didn’t remember the discussion. I pulled the earpiece out, silencing the piano sonata, and pushed myself onto my elbow. My whole body was stiff and aching.
Whit and Stef were sitting on their sleeping bags, paused from tapping at their SEDs while they looked at me. A pot of soup sat near the open tent flap, steaming with a sylph coiled around it. Slanted light fell through the opening, making the gloom of the rest of the tent darker and deeper.
“Look who’s finally awake,” Whit said. “When I said you should get some rest, I didn’t mean this much.”
I made a face that might have been a smile.
Sam sat just beyond my SED, in the dark, so close I hadn’t yet focused my eyes the right way to see him. But now I noted the folded paper in his hands, the slumped posture, the way he’d been right beside me when I awakened.
I sat up the rest of the way, ignoring the twinges of pain in my back and shoulders. “Sam.” His name came out in a breath, sorrow and hope and longing all tangled up in three letters.
“Hey.” His voice was soft, rough, and for a moment we looked at each other and there was nothing else in the world.
Light rippled in the corner of my eye as the others got up and left the tent. Even the sylph vanished, leaving Sam and me alone.
He swallowed hard and leaned toward me. “Ana, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”
I rubbed sleep from my eyes and shimmied out of my sleeping bag. “Maybe start by telling me how long I was”—not unconscious, even if that was the truth—“asleep.”
“Three days.”