Before She Ignites (Fallen Isles Trilogy #1)(10)

I sounded like a dolt, but if I was talking, I wasn’t panicking.

“Real.” There, that sounded like faint annoyance. “Hidden.”

He was real, but he’d been hiding when I’d walked by his cell? That sounded like something a hallucination would say. “You’re awfully quiet.” Which meant he probably wasn’t from Damina.

He grunted.

At least he agreed.

Well, I’d have to take his word that he was real. I was still thirsty, but I did feel like I’d had a drink of water. And I’d felt his breath on my knuckles when I’d inspected the hole in the wall. Those two things would have to be proof enough.

“What did you do to get here?” Ilina might have laughed at this one-sided conversation, but Mother would have died of mortification.

He sighed.

That was probably rude to ask. I was doing such a wonderful job of making a fool of myself.

This was getting uncomfortable, like a pressure building in the hollow of darkness between us. And yet, the questions kept falling out of my mouth. “How long have you been here? When do they feed us? Do we really just sit here for the rest of our lives and wait to die?”

That was a terrible thing to ask, probably, but I needed the distraction. From the panic. From the fear.

My heart thudded. Five times. Ten times. Twenty. I shifted around, trying to ease the tightness in my chest. Nothing helped. And I hated that he wasn’t talking to me. The Book of Love told us to seek friends everywhere we went. It said we should form bonds, and that those bonds would strengthen us in our time of need.

I didn’t want to be this stranger’s friend, exactly, but I did want to learn about my neighbors. I wanted to be a Drakontos mimikus.

“What’s your name?” I asked, one more time.

A loud smack hit the wall. I jumped and scrambled to all fours as the pounding shifted to the floor on his side. Longs. Shorts. But even as my shock subsided and I counted the beats, I couldn’t make sense of the pattern.

I faced the hole in the wall, gripping the crumbling stone between us. “What does that mean?” A harsh note of fury edged the question. It was too much. I knew. I wanted to yank back the tone and smother it, but it was too late.

The words seemed to rip from him, louder than I’d expected. “Don’t know. About dark. About food. About doing anything.” He released a wordless cry, then dropped his voice and hissed, “You talk too much. Please stop.”

I jerked back from the hole between our cells. “Sorry.” Shock hit first, followed by shame. Mother always said I didn’t talk enough. I wasn’t charming enough. I wasn’t Daminan enough.

“It’s lucky you’re so pretty,” she always said. Not that my beauty helped me here. My neighbor couldn’t see me. And didn’t that just prove that my face was all I had? “It’s almost enough to make up for your interest in that dragon.”

I missed LaLa, too. My golden dragon flower. I couldn’t shake Ilina’s words to me—that LaLa and Crystal were gone. Had they flown away? Had they been taken? If Ilina had known, she’d have said.

The uncertainty pierced me. I loved that dragon. As much as I loved any human. And Mother had never understood.

At home, I was too quiet. Too strange. My only friends were a Drakontos raptus, an apprentice dragon trainer, and my personal guard.

Now, in the Pit, I was too loud. Too chatty. Mother might have been proud, except for the prison part. And the panic attack. And all the near-attacks since then. And the rude questions I’d asked my neighbor.

He was probably most definitely real, and now I’d alienated him.

I shouldn’t have told the truth.

Haltingly, I crawled out from under the bed and gathered my blanket around my shoulders. With my back against the edge of my bed and my knees pulled up, I lowered my face and prayed. Could Darina and Damyan even hear me from another island, though? I had to believe they could.

“Please,” I whispered to them. “Please help me get out of here. Please help Ilina and Hristo. Please return LaLa and Crystal. Cela, cela.”

When I prayed at home, sometimes I could feel warmth coming up from the ground. A radiating peace. A sense of love. But I wasn’t on Damina. The Isle of Lovers was so far away.

Here, there was only the permeating sense of abandonment. Darkness. And the only person who’d made an attempt to be nice to me—well, he hated everything about me. Everyone doted on me at home. They said how pretty I was. How nice I looked in a new dress.

But this boy couldn’t see me, only hear my ridiculous questions. I couldn’t believe I’d asked if he was real.

My chest ached with pressure, but I wouldn’t cry. Not again. I just let the hurt flake and float off me, shedding it with every exhale.

One.

Two.

Three.

Muffled noise signaled movement in the next cell. Wood scraped the floor, like he was putting the cup back in place. Then his voice came from the hole under my bed.

“My name is Aaru. From Idris. I wanted freedom.”





CHAPTER FOUR




AARU.

Aaru from Idris.

I wanted to ignore him—to punish him for insulting me—but Aaru was from Idris, the Isle of Silence. That explained so much.

“Sorry.” He spoke more gently, with a quick triple tap on the floor. “Shouldn’t have yelled.”