Page 25 of Retrograde

“Aaah, the Oceanics. Very nice. Sunny. Big spiders, though.”

“I couldn’t refuse. I couldn’t. Four siblings, one still a toddler, and my parents. All safe forever. I couldn’t say no to⁠—”

“Ah, that’s the thing, Hotshot. You could have. And you absolutely should have.” His voice could cut through steel. “You gave us hope, and then you took it from us, and you stomped on it. And that makes you not just a traitor, but the traitor.”

“It’s so easy for you to judge my choice, isn’t it? There is no right or wrong when it comes to people you love. I hope for your sake that you’ll never find yourself in my position. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. No matter what you choose, the consequences are impossible to live with.”

“You won’t have to live with them for much longer,” he assures me dryly. “You’ve made the wrong call. And you know it because you know this was way bigger than your family. But let me finish my story, since you were so keen to hear it.” He leans a little closer, eyes boring into mine. “It wasn’t my sister’s death, my friends’ death, my mother’s death, my father’s and brothers’ deaths. It wasn’t even the war or the nukes that made me what I am today.”

It finally hits, where he’s going with all this, and it’s like the ground has opened beneath me and I’m in free fall.

“It was the day I saw you in that hideous mustard yellow for the first time. That finally did the trick. That night, I still went to sleep as Aron Krasnik.” His lips curl in a smile that freezes the blood in my veins. “But come morning, I woke up as the Necromancer.”

9

SEVEN YEARS AGO, HAQIF

It happened so fast. One minute, I was sitting at my table in the mess tent, eating from a can of beans.

And the next thing I know, I’m on my back, the sky is on fire, my ears are ringing, and there’s a sharp smell of burnt meat in the air.

I remember the explosion—the blast, the boom, flying backwards and feeling my ribs snap as I crashed against something hard. But I never actually lived through it. It’s only a memory.

There is pain.

Oh god, there is pain.

A sharp, searing ache deep inside, just below my ribcage. And a duller, more intense pain in my left leg. As seconds tick by, that one turns to agony.

I cannot move, but I can scream! And so I scream, even as my head starts spinning and throbbing like from heatstroke.

“Haqif!” A figure crashes to the knees next to me. “Oh my god, Haqif!”

Krasnik. Unharmed. Pale. Shaking.

“Stay with me, Haqif.” He’s undoing his belt.

“Help me up!” I groan. “The tent’s going to collapse.”

“I’ll get you out,” he mumbles, moving his attention to something lower below.

What is that clown even doing?

He wraps the belt around my leg, which is strange, because I don’t feel him lift it. But I do feel it when he tightens the belt above my knee.

“GAAAAAAAAAARH!”

“I know, I know, I know, I’m sorry, I know, I’m so sorry!”

Krasnik’s face is wet. Not just with sweat. He’s crying, his features scrunched up. He looks a lot younger right now—like he did when we were twelve. My pals and I ganged up on him, beat him up, and took his money. He cried then, too, pleading with us to give it back. He said he needed it to buy a birthday present for his little sister. We laughed him off and kept it. The next day, I ended up in the hospital—my bike’s brake cables had been cut, and I had a bad fall. Since then, Krasnik and I have had more fights than I can count. Some I won and some I lost. But I never ganged up on him with my friends again, and he never sabotaged my bike a second time.

Krasnik grabs me under the armpits and starts dragging me out of the tent, and it’s like my whole body is being pulled apart. I scream. I piss myself, and the front of my trousers gets all wet. Then I look down.

Krasnik’s black belt. Shreds of charred meat. A jagged edge of a pale bone.

My leg is gone.

Bile rises up my throat. My vision goes black, and I drift out of consciousness.