Chapter 69: Chapter 69: Crying

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Chapter 69: Crying

Kairan let a moment pass before answering, his eyes still on Lena, while her last words hung in the darkness of the room.

“Don’t think about it anymore,” he said finally. Then he stopped and immediately corrected himself it was a stupid thing to say to someone right after a story like that, and he knew it. “That’s not what I meant. I meant… it doesn’t have to be the only thing on your mind. It happened. It’s over. But it doesn’t have to weigh on you every night for the rest of your life.”

Lena watched him in silence, her knees pulled to her chest, the blanket having slipped off one shoulder.

“Those who only look back end up tripping as they move forward,” Kairan said, his voice low an old saying, repeated countless times by others before him. Lena tilted her head slightly, waiting for him to add who he’d heard it from, or where and when but he didn’t, and she had already learned not to press the issue.

“And what does that mean?” she asked simply.

“It means the future hasn’t done anything to you yet,” he said. “It’s the one thing no one can break yet. You can think about it however you want, and that thought keeps you afloat even when everything else is sinking.” He paused. “Dream big, Lena. Really big. And when things go wrong because they will; that’s what always happens in here think about where you want to go, not where you fell.”

“And what if I dream big and then none of it happens?”

“Then you’ll have spent your worst nights thinking about something beautiful instead of something that hurts,” Kairan said simply. “That’s not nothing.”

Lena didn’t answer right away. Then something inside her broke silently and the tears began to fall again; they were different from before no longer the story pouring out, but something melting away in the aftermath. She leaned forward and hugged him tightly, burying her face against his shoulder.

“You’re radiant,” she said, her voice muffled by the fabric of his robe. “Just like Ezra.”

Kairan stood still, unsure of where to put his arms, letting her hold him as tightly as she wished. “Tell me about it,” he said finally. “What he was like, how you met him.” He waited for her to pull back slightly. “And I promise you, Lena: we’ll get him out of there.”

Lena wiped the back of her hand across her face and sniffled; for a moment, she seemed to be deciding whether she really wanted to go through with it.

“He was the eighth one,” Lena said. “He arrived in the middle of the night, just like you. I’m a light sleeper I can’t help it and I saw him from that window as Hargrove was bringing him in. Once she’d left, I spoke to him. I didn’t want him to feel the way I had on my first night alone amidst seven empty beds. It wasn’t much; I just said hello. But he introduced himself properly ‘Nice to meet you, my name’s Ezra’ in a dark dormitory, at three in the morning, with eight beds. Who introduces themselves like that?” A small smile crossed her face the first one since they had started talking. “That’s just how he was. Kind, even when there was no reason to be. And he was beautiful, Kairan. Blond hair, a bit tousled over his eyes which were blue, too. Fair skin, almost white. Tall taller than all of us, and he was only seven. He snored incredibly loudly for someone so thin. The first night, I thought it was a mouse inside the wall. The others teased him every morning, and he’d get genuinely angry; he’d say it wasn’t true, that his nose was just stuffy. His nose was never stuffy.

“We were together for only five nights. Five, not one more then they called him in for the procedure, and I never saw him come back. But in those five nights, I did more things with him than I did with anyone else in a whole year in here. One evening, someone had left the chessboard in the hallway that old one missing two pawns, where we use buttons instead and Ezra taught me how to play… or at least, he tried. He never lost a game in those five days. Not even against Gregory, who was already eleven back then and thought he was unbeatable. Gregory would get angry and accuse him of cheating, but he never cheated he just won, every time, quietly, without even looking happy about it. He said playing chess was the only time he could stop thinking about anything else.”

“He beat Gregory, too?” Kairan asked.

“Always,” Lena said. “The rest of the time, we’d talk in whispers, while everyone else was asleep about what we wanted the future to be like. He wanted to be a surgeon.” He wanted to heal people; he always said he’d become the best in all of London, and he never joked when he said it his eyes would light up every time. One night, he told me that once he was all grown up, he’d come back here to treat anyone who’d grown up in a place like this for free. I told him that was a huge promise to keep. And he said, “Small promises are useless.” He never stopped dreaming of it, not even on that last night, before they took him away.

“I used to tell him I wanted to be able to face any battle mental, physic anything and win it. Always. He would laugh and say that one day I’d need a good surgeon, for when I eventually lost one. “I told him I wouldn’t lose any of them.”

She stopped speaking. Her face contorted, and the tears returned this time without her trying to hold them back.

Kairan said nothing for a moment. Then he placed a hand on the back of her neck a simple, steady touch, the same gesture he would use for someone wounded in battle, though he didn’t know exactly where the impulse came from.

“I know,” was all he said.

Lena closed her eyes beneath his hand.

“I know,” he repeated, more softly.

They remained like that for a moment, seeking no further words, while the rest of the room around them continued to breathe in its sleep.

“Do you really think we’ll make it?” she asked finally, her voice now almost dry. “To get him out?”

“Yes,” Kairan said, without a second thought.

“And how can you be so sure?”

“Because I’ve decided it’s going to happen.” He shrugged it was the most obvious thing in the world. “And usually, when I decide something, I make it happen.”

Lena looked at him, and for the first time that night, there was nothing broken left in her expression. Kairan withdrew his hand and gave her something like a smile not a cheerful one, but a genuine one.

“Sleep now,” he said.

Lena nodded, stood up still wrapped in her blanket and returned silently to her bed. She lay down, pulled up the sheets, and for the first time since they had started talking, her breathing became slow and steady.

Kairan sat there for another moment, then lay down himself, hands behind his head, eyes fixed on the peeling ceiling.

Lena was asleep, finally.

He wasn’t. He kept thinking about that world the one everyone called the Human Kingdom, the one that from the outside seemed made only of… …of glass towers and lights that were never turned off it could be ferocious beneath the surface. As ferocious as the Demonic Realm he had fled. Perhaps even more so. In the Abyss, at least, cruelty showed its true face: a demon who wanted you dead would tell you to your face, often while already drawing his blade. Here, however, the same thing arrived with a slender needle and an academic voice, and recognizing it required a sense that almost no one possessed.

Perhaps it is even worse, he thought. In the Abyss, no one pretends to be kind while draining you dry.

He thought back to Lena, two beds away, now sleeping with her breathing finally at ease. To Ezra locked in a windowless room for a year, snoring so loudly he was teased every morning, yet now, who knew, lacking the strength even for that. To a man who spoke of veins and blood in the same tone Renoir used to speak of vegetables. And then he thought of himself Kairan, Prince of the Abyss, reduced for the time being to an eight-year-old boy chopping carrots and winning races in a packed-dirt courtyard, while the only thing that truly mattered remained undone: finding Ezra, figuring out who Grimsdyke really was, and staying alive long enough to return home one day.

That was his last thought before sleep overtook him.

Misael. Only a day has passed since I left our kingdom, and since our father died. It already feels like so much longer. I wonder how you’re managing, all alone with everything they’ve left on our shoulders. And Zaphira I wonder what she’s doing right now,