Page 128 of The Blood Rites

Too exposed.

My stomach drops.

Kael—

I need to find him.

Seventeen

Light returns to the world—wholly, violently. Blinding shards, all of them too bright.

I blink away the rain—my tears—and sunlight ricochets off every flat surface; a thousand blades aimed at my raw eyes. Even the rain, gone now, leaves prisms of glare that slice across my vision. I am on my knees, the glass ground slick with blood, and Marissa is a heap of trembling limbs in my arms.

She is breathing steadier now. I whisper her name, hoping for a response, but my tongue is made of dust. There is only the wet, metallic stink of blood. Her eyelids twitch. Her lips work around words she cannot get out.

I shift my weight. That’s when I feel it—the agony, sudden and pure, blooming from my shoulder in a hot, white burst, as though my body has only just realised my arm is dead weight. The pain pulses—sharp enough to make me retch. My sleeve is saturated, torn where a shard of the cracked ground sliced me open. My palm is a ruin of deep red, trying to knit itself together—one slow clot at a time. I tear a piece of my shirt hem and wrap it around my palm. I make the mistake of forming a fist and nearly pass out.

My other arm fares better—only strained. It cradles Marissa, the only thing holding us together, but it trembles.

Marissa’s leg is a wreck. The wound is sealed but it’s hideous. Another strip of my uniform is tied around her thigh, stained through. Where the sword sliced her open, the skin is now fused in a lumpy ridge, the burn so raw I can smell it over everything else.

She opens her eyes. I expect them to be glazed. Empty, even. But they’re not.

“How did you do that?” she hisses, peeking at the wound beneath the scrap of fabric.

I bat her hand away. “Don’t touch it,” I snap.

She tries to sit up and nearly howls. Her leg won’t cooperate. “You’re an idiot,” she manages. “You should just leave me. I’m only getting in your way.”

I want to tell her that she’s wrong. That I couldn’t have left her. But the words freeze in my throat—choked by the truth of it. She’s right. Surviving is so much harder when someone else matters.

Around us, the mirrored arena feels smaller than before, shrunken and broken. The three concentric rings have realigned themselves into steps, each one higher than the next, all leading to the central dais. Above the dais, the Mother Shard’s crystal floats, pink and purple, the number eight boring into me like a stare.

Movement stirs atop the dais. A black flare—shadow, writhing and alive. The flare expands, forming a hemisphere of swirling darkness across part of the dais. Around it, flecks of fire spark and vanish.

“Kael,” I say. Not a question. A direction. A need.

Marissa sees it too. She clings to my sleeve, her fingers cold and weak. “You should go,” she says. “You have to help them.”

“I’m not leaving you,” I say. “We can go together.”

She shakes her head, tears already welling. “My leg’s useless. You’d be carrying me. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your busted arm.”

I don’t answer. Instead, I hook my good arm under her and lift. Pain lances through my injured arm, so sharp it turns my vision white. My knees give out, dropping us both to the mirrored floor.

Marissa grits her teeth. “You have to. I’ll be fine. I can hide—”

“There is nowhere to hide here.” The words rip out of me, louder than I mean them to. But the arena is naked. Just swords and pillars and glass. “If the sword rain starts again—”

She punches my chest, feeble but desperate. “Listen to me! They’re not hunting me. They want you and Kael.” Her eyes—brown and gold—cut straight through me. “He needs you. Just go.”

I shake my head, refusing to hear her. My mind cycles through every possible outcome, and none of them end with her alive and safe.

A shriek interrupts us—not human, but the sound of fire clashing with something denser. On the dais, the shadow dome shudders under assault. A pillar of flame lances up, splitting the darkness for a second before it knits closed again, slick and seamless as water.

Marissa claws at my wrist, dragging my gaze back to her. “He saved you. Now save him.”

It’s so unfair. The choice is a blade at my throat.