I turn to glance at Lorcan and find he’s already staring at me, his hand on his throat. His mouth opens and he works to swallow. And then, so quiet I barely hear it, he croaks out one single word:
“Mine.”
I stare at him. That one word—the only word I’ve ever heard him say—changes everything. I don’t care what kind of game we’re all playing anymore.
“I’m not yours,” I say.
“Would it be so awful?” Kiran mutters.
“Yes!”
He doesn’t understand. It’s okay for a Trader to come and go as he pleases, to have no obligation to help or stay. It’s not okay for family. What would have happened if I had disappeared whenever I wanted? Who would have been there to do the hunting, to keep the twins safe?
I’m trying to meet Kiran’s gaze to figure out what I should say next, but he won’t look at me. He’s staring at the ground, and even from here I can see his jaw flexing under the skin.
Kyna adjusts her place on the crutch, and in her hand I see a spoon, not a knife. She pulls a bottle filled with green syrup from her hip pocket. Medicine.
“You’re a doctor,” I say.
In Kiran’s fever dreams he had said that Kyna needed a doctor, but he’d been delirious. Maybe he’d meant that she is a doctor.
Her brows rise. “I’m as close as he’s going to get to one out here.”
My shoulders fall. I’m no doc, I know that. But when she says this it sounds like I didn’t help at all.
“So she’s the half-breed,” says Kyna, as if she’s settling something.
The word stings.
Kiran looks up at me then, but there’s no hint of the boy I know. His amber eyes are hard and uncaring, and they make me feel small.
“Yeah,” says Kiran. “She’s a half-breed.”
That piece of me that belonged to him is crushed in his fist and thrown aside.
I lift my chest and narrow my eyes. I stand strong so they can’t see how much it hurts to belong to no one. Because it shouldn’t hurt. No one owns me. Not before, not now. Not ever.
The girl in the boy’s clothes laughs cruelly.
“They snipped her da’s voicebox because of her ma,” she says. “And they sliced her ma’s face because of her da. That’s some love story.”
I look back at Lorcan, hoping this isn’t true, that he wasn’t the reason my ma was cut. And when I think of how I asked the same of Kiran it makes me a little light-headed.
“Time for you to move on, Aiyana,” Kiran says.
He might as well have slapped me across the face because that’s what his words feel like.
His friends are all watching me. Staring at me. The freak. The outcast.
Kyna approaches him and slips beneath his arm as though she always belonged there. She watches me curiously over her hunched shoulder. The joke’s on me, and she feels guilty. Well I don’t want her pity.
Kiran’s found his people, now I need to find mine.
“Yeah, all right,” I tell him. “You were just slowing me down anyway.”
Kiran’s face is expressionless, like it was so many nights in the solitary yard. I can’t stay any longer. I turn and walk back into the woods, soul sick that I will always remember him that way. With a face of stone.