Essi once asked me if I wanted to know its story. I smiled and shook my head. Heartbreak has a tone that echoes through the ages, and her voice was laden with it.
I don’t want to look at my favorite moon and think of things that hurt. I want to look at that small Moonplume and imagine it had a beautiful life full of happy things that make your heart heavy with love.
Perhaps that makes me a coward, but I have to pinch my smiles from somewhere. And that moon … It never fails to give me exactly that.
A smile.
Idrop from the wind tunnel’s mouth, using the abundance of cracks and divots to latch myself to the side of the wall and scale downward, threatened by a fringe of rock shards that hug the base of the wall below. The hungry promise of a swift and brutal death that hasn’t yet been able to chomp down on me. Or Essi.
Thankfully.
Gripping a jutting piece of stone, I transfer my other hand to the space beside it, then drop before what appears to be more flat wall—a perfect, runed illusion. I swing through what’s actually a large, ever-open window, into a snuggle of slightly warmer air rich with the smell of something rich … buttery … freshly baked …
I land in a crouch, my appetite returning with a salivating vengeance. “Yum, is that—”
“Buttermin loaf,” Essi says, slouched over a seeing scope at our small feasting table laden with tools, tinctures, and metal pots, scratching at whatever’s beneath the scope with one of her etching sticks. “I could smell the blood on your boots the moment they shot down the chute.”
Reaching the table, I pinch a finger of loaf from her plate and stuff it in my mouth, groaning through my first bit of sustenance since I set out last aurora fall—the dense pillow of savory goodness drenched in melted butter, slathered in a sweet layer of bogsberry preserve.
I smile.
I love bogsberry preserve. Essi doesn’t. Meaning she left this piece specifically for me, knowing I’d be ravenous the moment I swung in the window. Not that she’d admit to it.
Not that I’d want her to.
She pretends not to worry about me; I pretend not to worry about her. We coexist in parallel with zero expectations—bar the odd supply list and the fancy things she makes for me—and it works blissfully.
Perfectly.
I wouldn’t change a thing.
“Things got messy,” I say through my mouthful, moving into our rough-hewn kitchenette. I lift a cloth on the freshly baked loaf and slice off a fat chunk, topping it with a scrape of butter and a dollop of preserve. Cranking open the icebox, I root around for a bulb of bright-green fruit, slicing it into segments I pile on my plate. “Want some goro?”
“They’re not ripe.”
I spin with the plate balanced in my hand. “Sure they are.”
“The butt end goes yellow when they’re ripe.” She peers up from her task, red brows almost bumping off her pretty freckle-dusted face. “That one will blow your tongue off.”
I stuff a pale shard in my mouth, and my face screws up as I choke on the zesty tang. “They’re not ripe,” I sputter, spitting it into the trash bowl.
Essi chuckles under her breath, then tucks her head back down, peering through her looking glass and getting back to … whatever she’s doing.
I slide my fruit to the side and focus on the loaf while watching her work, my gaze shifting from the graceful, deft movements of her fingers to her delicate features. Tawny eyes. Nose slightly upturned at the end. A null clip is cut from the tip of her left ear that’s a little longer than mine and with more of a backward tilt, giving her this hypnotic, ethereal visage.
Coils of hair hang well past her hips like a thick ruddy cape that matches the metallic specks in her eyes—such a unique shade of red I’ve never seen before—the only splash of color that brightens her appearance. Ever.
I take another deep bite of loaf, thinking back to the dae she moved in. I told her she could do whatever she wanted to the previously sparse decor. Naturally, our shared living space is now the same color as her entire wardrobe.
Black.
The rough kitchen counters. The jagged ceiling. The fibrous rug that covers the uneven floor. Even our plump, heavily cushioned seater by the window, big enough to fit three despite the fact that we never have visitors. By choice.
My gaze lifts to the window specially runed by Essi to ward off intruders, remembering the slumber I woke to her standing over me in the midst of one of her episodes. Black smudged beneath her haunted stare as she waved a blade about, screaming at me to fill a cup with my blood. Now. That it was a matter of life or death.
The end result: an entrance that all but murders intruders. Stroke of genius.
“This is delicious, Essi. Thank you,” I say, taking another bite.
“Of course. Glad you like it.”
Understatement. She knows her buttermin loaf is my favorite. No idea what she puts in it, but damn, it’s good.
“What’re you working on?”
“A diamond cap for your tooth,” she says, etching away. “I’ve been trying to find an ore dense enough to withstand these fiddly runes. Freak accident, but I discovered diamond works. Oh!” Hand poised, she flashes me a wide-eyed glance that’s so full of life it renders me breathless—no doubt high on whatever thought just threaded through her spectacular mind. “Did you get my lark?”
“Mm-hmm.” I tuck my hair behind my ears and make for the oddly shaped stone basin that caught all the bits I pushed through the chute earlier. “I got blood on it but did my best.” I set the plate aside to rummage through my belongings. “What does the diamond crown do?”
“Emits an invisible, impenetrable barrier around your head and chest without cutting you in half.”
Hand stilling, I look over my shoulder at her. “Without cutting me in half? You mean … my body?”
She nods so fast her hair’s a sanguine churn. “Took me a bit to figure that out. Promise it’s good now, though.”
Right.
“Glad you’re thorough,” I say, gripping the bag.
“Always. It’s almost done. A few fine runes with that new etching stick and it’ll be ready to activate. Figured it’s a good time to attach it since Rekk Zharos is hunting you.”
“See you’ve been reading my messages again.”
She shrugs, adjusting the scope of her looking glass. “It flew through the window after you left. Bumped against the sill until its nose was squished. I put it out of its misery by unfolding it.”
“And reading it.”
“My eyes slipped.”
They have a habit of doing that.
I shake my head, sliding the bag across the table for her to rummage through. Flip side of using so much blood in the active runes etched around the window, the parchment larks sometimes think the window is, well … us. Ergo, the source of Sereme’s eternal frustration whenever she can’t get ahold of me.
Essi pulls her head from the bag, her face a tad paler. “No spangle poo?”
I blink at her. “I’m sorry, what?”
“From Yeskorn, the Undercity librarian. He’s got a pet spangle. Is it in your pocket? Please tell me it’s in your pocket.”
“There’s no shit in my pocket, Essi. Why do you need spangle poo?” She opens her mouth to speak, but I swiftly cut her off. “Remember my brain’s not as big as yours. If you start talking about biophysics, I’ll perish.”
She opens her mouth again, closes it, seems to think for a bit, then starts to talk. “The stone they eat is rich with a special ore that’s otherwise hard to find because it forms in minuscule drops that never grow larger than a pinhead. It doesn’t break down in their digestive tracts, so it’s the most effective way to gather it. It’s a creamy color, and it melts at a much lower temperature than most other ores, making it the perfect adhesive for binding runed caps to your teeth.”
“You’re joking.”
Her brows crush together. “For the first time in my life?”
All the warmth drains from my face, my hand whipping out to steady myself against the table. “That’s what you used to bind the other activation cap to my tooth?”
She nods.
“Spangle shit?”
“I rinsed the actual feces off, then sterilized the ore. But yes. It had been … shat.”