Chapter 29: The Unspoken Truth
My gaze snapped to the clock on the mantle. The hands, sharp and black against the ivory face, read 4:17 PM. I’d sat down just after two. Two hours. Two entire hours had vanished into that snow-swept hellscape, leaving only a chaotic paper trail as proof.
A cold, electric panic shot through me. They’d be back any minute.
I scrambled off the couch, my injuries screaming in protest. I dropped to my knees, my hands sweeping across the worn rug, gathering the scattered sheets. The woman’s face stared up at me from a dozen angles, her knowing eyes a silent accusation. I was a factory of nightmares, and this was my unsanctioned production line. My sketchbook swallowed the stack with a protesting creak of its broken spine. I shoved the bloated thing into the kitchen, yanked open a drawer cluttered with mismatched utensils and spare corkscrews, and buried it under a tangle of oven mitts.
The sink water was a shock of cold. I scrubbed at the graphite smudges staining my fingers, the black dust swirling down the drain like corrupted blood. The metallic scent of the tap water mixed with the faint, earthy smell of the soap. Just as I was drying my hands on a rough towel, the heavy barracks door groaned open.
A tidal wave of exhaustion rolled in with them. Alex entered first, her beanie pulled low, and without a word, she face-planted onto the couch I’d just vacated, her muffled groan vibrating the cushions. Hannah brushed past, her caramel hair frizzed from the damp outside air, giving me a weak, tired smile before disappearing into the bathroom. The sound of the shower hissing to life followed a moment later.
Aria came straight for me, her violet eyes scanning my face, my posture, everything. “How are you holding up? The medic said hairline fractures. That’s brutal.” Her voice was soft, but her gaze was forensic.
“Sore. Stiff. Bored out of my mind,” I said, the lie coming easier than the truth. I turned toward the small kitchen alcove, an escape. “You hungry? I can start something.”
“Let me help.” She followed, shedding her leather jacket and rolling up the sleeves of her grey tunic. She began pulling root vegetables and a knobby squash from the cold storage crate. “Patrol was… long. Quiet, which is almost worse. The silence gets inside your head.”
I grabbed a knife, focusing on the rhythmic thud of the blade against the cutting board. “Anything?”
“Just shadows stretching too far. The usual creep.” She started peeling, her movements efficient. “Garreth and Leo were on perimeter sweeps with Xenon’s unit. They didn’t look at us once.” She said it casually, but I heard the satisfaction beneath.
I kept my head down, concentrating on dicing an onion until my good eye watered. “Good.”
She let the silence sit for a beat. “You sure you’re okay? Not just the ribs.”
“I’m fine,” I said, too quickly. I could feel the weight of the hidden sketchbook in the drawer four feet away. It felt like a neutron star, warping the space around it. “Just cabin fever.”
Ren was the last to enter. He didn’t announce himself, just the solid thunk of his boots being kicked off by the door. He moved through the common room like a silent current, grabbing a book from the shelf before settling into an armchair. He propped his feet on the scarred coffee table, right next to Alex’s dangling hand, and opened the thick volume. Principia Strategicum: Engagements in Low-Light Environments. The barrack’s ambient hum was punctuated by the soft, definitive rustle of him turning a page.
Alex rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling. “I’m so hungry I could eat the ass end of a shadow beast.”
“Charming,” Hannah called from the bathroom, her voice echoing.
“It’s true!”
As Aria and I worked, the conversation meandered. Alex, revived by the smell of food, swung her legs off the couch. “So, Aria. Your birthday’s in, what, ten days?”
Aria smiled, a rare, unguarded expression that made her look younger. “Eleven, but who’s counting?”
“We are!” Hannah emerged, wrapped in a towel, her skin flushed from the heat. “We’ve been planning. I was thinking we could get that spiced wine from the market, the one that tastes like burnt honey and poor decisions.”
Alex grinned. “And we could commandeer one of the smaller training halls. Move the mats, get some actual music playing instead of tactical chants.”
I stirred the stew, watching the vegetables bob in the broth. A flicker of normalcy. It felt fragile.
Ren’s voice cut through the planning, low and without looking up from his book. “I hope you plan on asking your squad leader if you can have a party.”
The air in the room tightened. Alex and Hannah’s eyes locked onto me with desperate, comical intensity.
Alex mouthed the words, her hands clasped in mock prayer. Please.
Hannah mimed tipping a drink, her eyes wide with appeal.
“He has a soft spot for you!” Alex hissed, a stage whisper that carried.
Ren snapped his book shut with a sharp thwack. “I can hear you guys trying to get Arisa to ask me.”
“Damn it,” Alex muttered, slumping back.
I wiped my hands on a cloth, my heart doing a clumsy beat against my sore ribs. The weight of their hopeful stares was a physical pressure. I walked over to his chair. He didn’t look up, pretending to be engrossed in his page.
“Ren,” I said, my voice quieter than I intended.
He finally lifted his gaze. His dark eyes were unreadable, the flickering lantern light carving his face into planes of amber and shadow. He held my look for a long moment, then slowly, deliberately, turned a page. The sound was loud in the quiet room.
“Fine,” he said, his eyes dropping back to the text. “But don’t drink too much.”
A collective, silent exhalation passed through the room. Alex pumped a fist in the air. Hannah clasped her hands together. Aria gave me a small, approving nod from the kitchen.
The rest of the evening passed in a soft buzz of relief. We ate the stew, the warmth settling in my bones, a temporary truce with the dread that lived in my gut. Ren read. Hannah braided Alex’s hair. Aria cleaned her sword with a ritualistic care. It was almost peaceful.
As people began to drift toward the sleeping quarters, Ren stood, stretching. His spine cracked. He caught my eye as I was stacking bowls.
“You’re back for drills in the morning, Kashikoi,” he said, his tone flat. “Just because you’ve had two days off doesn’t mean I’m going to go easy on you.”
I met his gaze, the memory of his dead eyes in the snow flashing behind my own. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”
He gave a slight, almost imperceptible nod, then turned and disappeared into the men’s corridor.
Sleep was a debt I had to pay. My body demanded it, and it pulled me under fast, a heavy, black curtain.
But the snow was waiting.
It was the same field, the same silent, suffocating white. The same bruised, dying sky. But it was not empty.
Aria hung upside down from a twisted, throbbing black vine that had erupted from the frozen earth. It was coiled around her ankles, her light brown hair brushing the blood-stained snow. Her spine was not just broken; it was gone, a gaping, hollow channel ripped from her lower back to her neck. Her violet eyes were open, clouded with frost, fixed on nothing.
To her left, Alex was a statue of clear, glittering ice. Her expression was one of mid-scream, her mouth a perfect, hollow O. Inside that frozen cavity, where her tongue should have been, was only dark, empty space.
Xenon lay further off. His head was separated from his body by a clean, terrible line. His silver-and-red hair was fanned out around his face, which was strangely serene, as if he’d been surprised by a gentle thought. His body was still propped against a ice-rimmed rock, one hand outstretched.
And Hannah. Hannah was on her knees, her beautiful face contorted in a scream so profound it seemed to vibrate the very air. A deep, horizontal gash split her torso in two. As I watched, frozen in horror, her upper half began to slide, toppling backward. Her intestines, a slick, blue-purple cascade, spilled from the cavern of her stomach into the snow with a soft, wet sound. She screamed and screamed, a sound that went on and on even as the life drained from her eyes.
I tried to run, to help, to look away, but my feet were welded to the ground. The cold seeped into my bones, a poison. From the edge of the tree line, the woman with the dark purple hair watched. Her severe, beautiful face showed no pity, no horror. Only a calm, terrible understanding.
I jerked awake.
The scream died in my throat, a strangled gasp. I was drenched, my thin sleep shirt plastered to my skin with cold sweat. My ribs ached from the convulsive heaving of my breath. The darkness of the barracks bunkroom pressed in on me, a thick, smothering velvet. Across the room, I could hear Hannah’s steady, sleeping breaths. Alex muttered something incoherent in her sleep.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to erase the images burned onto the inside of my lids. They remained, vivid and fresh. Aria’s hollow back. Alex’s silent scream. Xenon’s peaceful detachment. Hannah’s unraveling.
It wasn't just a prediction of Ren's death anymore.
It was a prophecy of slaughter.
It was a prophecy of slaughter, and its chill had soaked into my marrow, leaving me trembling beneath the thin blanket. I stared at the darkened ceiling, listening to the rhythm of their sleeping breaths—the very breaths I had just seen stolen in that silent, white field. Each inhale felt like a countdown.
A rustle of sheets came from Aria’s bunk. I felt her gaze in the darkness before I heard her voice, a sleep-rough whisper. “Arisa? You okay?”
I turned my head on the pillow. Her silhouette was just visible, propped on an elbow. The concern in her tone was a warm hand offered over a chasm of things I could never explain. I forced my muscles to unclench, to perform normality.
“Yeah,” I whispered back, the word sticking in my dry throat. “I’m okay. Just… can’t sleep. I’m just going to get some air.”
She hesitated. I could feel her violet eyes searching the shadows that hid my face. But she didn’t press. “Don’t stay out too long. It’s cold.”
I gave a faint nod she probably couldn’t see and slid from my bunk. The stone floor was icy under my bare feet. I moved quietly, grabbing my hoodie dress and leggings from the foot of my bed, slipping into my boots by the dim light bleeding under the door. The door’s latch gave a soft, definitive click behind me.
The silence of the common room was a different animal—hollow and expectant. I walked through it and out into the night.
The cold was an immediate, clarifying slap. It was around 0300, the large moon a bone-white disc high in a sky bleached of stars. Every exhale plumed into a brief, crystalline fog that hung before my face before dissipating. I hugged myself, the thick fabric of my hoodie no match for the deep chill out here in the outer grounds. The Academy’s central wards didn’t reach this far, and the air had a raw, mineral bite.
I walked a familiar path, boots crunching on frost-rimed gravel, around the back of our barracks past the silent, dark bulk of the training gym. Behind it, a small ledge jutted over a steep rock face, a metal railing bolted into the stone as a token gesture against the drop. I sat on the cold platform, drawing my knees up.
Small squares of light from other squad barracks dotted the surrounding cliffs like distant, lonely stars. I watched one flicker out. I shivered, a deep, convulsive tremor that started in my spine. The scene was peaceful, but the visions stained everything, layering ghostly images of ice and viscera over the quiet night.
“Can’t sleep?”
I didn’t jump. A subtle shift in the shadows, a faint scent of leather and ozone had reached me a moment before his voice. Ren. I sighed, the sound stolen by the vast dark.
“Not really.”
He emerged from the deeper gloom beside the gym wall, a silhouette resolving into solid form. He came to sit next to me, not too close, the space between us charged with the day’s unspoken tensions and the night’s intimacy. He sighed, a long, weary exhalation.
“You still haven’t figured out how to shut your mind off to get some rest?”
A spark of frustration cut through my numb dread. “You all act like it’s easy.”
“It is.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the small metal fence. In his hand, a cigar glowed a sullen red as he brought it to his lips. He puffed, and the smoke wreathed his head before the wind snatched it away, carrying the rich, burnt scent toward me.
I scoffed, the noise harsh in the quiet. “If it’s so easy, then why are you out here and not resting?” I nodded at the cigar. “Also, smoking is a nasty habit. I didn’t know you smoked.”
Ren chuckled, a low, rasping sound. “It may be a nasty habit for humans,” he said, tapping ash over the railing. “But remember, angelic blood. Makes us immune to most chronic diseases. The pleasure without the consequence.” He held the cigar out to me, a dark shape against his palm. “Try it.”
I hesitated, then took it. The paper was warm where his lips had been. I put it to my mouth, imitating him, and drew a tentative breath.
The heat was instantaneous and violent. It wasn’t air; it was liquid sandpaper scraping down my throat. I gasped, choking, a racking cough seizing my chest, making my bruised ribs scream in protest. Tears sprang to my eyes.
Ren laughed, a genuine, playful sound I’d never heard from him. He took the cigar back from my trembling fingers. “Okay, maybe some consequences for beginners.”
I wiped my eyes, still coughing weakly, but a faint, unwilling smile touched my lips. The fit subsided, leaving a raw ache and the stale taste of char. We lapsed into silence, the shared moment loosening something in the air between us.
He stared out at the rock face, his profile sharp in the moonlight. “I… apologize,” he said, the words deliberate, as if carved from stone. “For my behavior lately. After the beating. In the shuttle.”
I looked at his averted face, the tension in his jaw. The memory of his body in the snow was a phantom pain behind my sternum. “Well, of course I forgive you.”
He turned his head, his obsidian eyes capturing the moonlight, holding me. “Why are you so eager to always forgive me?” he asked, his voice dropping, serious. “I’m an asshole, remember?”
The question hung in the frozen air. I thought of his obsidian eyes going flat and dark in the snow. I thought of his relentless drills, his coldness in the shuttle, the rare, hidden things—like this quiet ledge, like his laughter just now—that felt like truth. The prophecy of slaughter was a clock ticking in my veins, measuring out heartbeats I might never get to share.
I would regret it if I never told him.
The words left me, simple and final, stripped of all artifice. “Because I love you.”
He froze.