Page 71 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

Faelan stops. Whatever he built his work on for centuries has just come apart in front of him and he’s looking at me like a man looking at a door that opened on its own. I can hold this down. Keep it in, keep working, be the useful one, get her out of this chamber and let somebody else work out what I am afterward. That’s what I’ve done with every hour of my life and it has kept me alive.

Or I can let it up. I don’t know what it does, don’t know what it takes out of me, whether it puts me on the floor, or whether the man standing here at the end of it is the same one who walked through that door this morning holding her hand. There’s nobody in here who can tell me. The five who might know are forty feet off holding a room together with everything they have.

She’s on my left with her shoulder open, hands full of flame, and there’s a man in front of her who’s been getting ready for tonight since before her parents met. So I stop holding it. I open my hands and I let it come.

It comes up through the floor, into both legs, through my chest, out along my arms. Nothing in me fights it. There’s nothing left in me that’s trying to. The heat goes past what a body ought to be able to carry. My hands come up. I put myself between Faelan and her and the chamber answers. Every column of light in it turns toward me at once. It comes at me from every direction and it comes fast.

“Valen.”

Nyxiana’s voice, from my left, cutting through all of it.

Faelan hits me again and it does nothing. He does it twice more, faster each time, and none of it touches me. He’s stopped saying anything at all. There’s something coming up in me and it isn’t finished.

I stand where I am with my hands out and my feet planted and I let it keep coming.

Chapter 42

Valen

It finishes coming up.

All of it at once, everywhere in me in the same second, down both arms to the ends of my fingers and up through the back of my skull. One second there’s a current coming out of the floor into me. The next I can’t tell the difference between that current and me. There’s still no pain in it. That’s the part I can’t get used to. Every hard thing I have ever asked this body to do has taken something out of me. This takes nothing. My hands are steadier than they were an hour ago. I already knew I was a living lock. Nyxiana told me that in her own doorway and I’ve been carrying it around since. What I get now is the rest.

I know which tear I was made for.

Not in words. Nobody says it to me. The thing in me does one job in one direction, and I can feel exactly what it’s reaching for, the way you feel which way is downhill in the dark. I was built to close a specific kind of tear. The kind that opens when one of the founders’ locks comes apart. One opened the day a woman at Ash Hollow came back from death with her soul put in by hand.

Harper.

I’ve stood on that perimeter for months with no reason I could name, and half of it was her. I never looked at her twice. The other half was standing next to me the whole time. I can’t get near that tear without Nyxiana. She’s the door and I’m what shuts behind it, neither one of us is worth anything alone. Whatever this is in me was pointed at the pair of them from the first night I stood in those trees, and I only ever felt the one. Everything since has been that pulling on me. The North Range. The founding stone under my palm with the ground lighting up around it. Every night on that perimeter at Ash Hollow when I couldn’t have told you why I stayed.

I followed it here. I thought I was following her. I did stay in that valley for her, hard enough that I should have walked out months ago and didn’t. That was true. It was never the only thing that was true. Under all of it there’s a cold part. Something has finally made room for me exactly where I’m standing. Not a person. A job. I have gone door to door my entire life asking people to keep me. Tonight the answer came out of a room instead of out of anybody’s mouth. I fit here because of what I’m useful for.

Relief and grief come up in the same place at the same time and I can’t separate.

Bancroft comes forward, two steps and no more. Behind him the light where he was standing goes thin, and the other four brace harder to cover it. Having him this close to me takes something out of them. They hold it anyway.

I have to keep deciding to breathe, I make myself do it twice while I look up at him. Past his shoulder Faelan hasn’t slowed for a second. There’s a low sound coming from what he’s doing, steady, the sound something makes when it’s being torn along a seam. These are the ones who made me. I don’t mean that the way people mean it. Five of them stood somewhere and decided a lock would be needed one day. They built one. They carried it north and put it down in a pack that ran boys out into the snow at thirteen to see which ones came back. Then they left it there and went about their business.

“Why?”

I haven’t planned a word of it. I’ve had nights to put that question together and never have, because until this minute there was nobody to ask it.

“Why that pack? There were a hundred packs in that country.” My voice goes quieter instead of louder. “Why let me spend my life thinking there was something wrong with me? You could have told me. Any year of it. Any one of you.”

Nothing moves in Bancroft’s face. “The instrument had to be ready when the crack came.”

The floor shudders under a fresh tear somewhere behind him. Neither of us looks at it.

“Ready?” I ask.

“Placed. Hardened. Unremarkable.” He says all of it in the same register. “A lock that knows what it is announces itself, and anything that announces itself can be found. You were none of those things for your entire life. That was the design.”

“The design,” I repeat.

“A lock hidden inside a man who believes he’s broken can’t be turned early by anybody who wants it turned. Not by Faelan. Not by us.”

“So you knew this crack was coming.”