Before She Ignites (Fallen Isles Trilogy #1)(23)

In the back of my cell, I pulled the dress from inside my shirt to inspect Tirta’s work.

She’d folded the cloth. Not that folding meant much to silk; it slipped against itself with hardly a whisper, unspooling into a big square. Another length of no particular shape fell out and puddled onto the floor.

When I wrapped the square over my hair, it was the perfect size. And it might have been my imagination, but it seemed as though she’d tried to wash it. The remainder of my dress went inside my pillow, out of sight.

Across the hall, Gerel stretched her arm across her chest. “Your silent friend is trying to get your attention.”

I crawled under my bed, muscles shivering with exertion. “What?” It came out colder than intended.

“Rude before. Sorry.” He didn’t sound sorry, just quiet. “You were kind.”

“I’m trying to be, but you don’t make it easy.” Ugh. Even if it was the truth, I shouldn’t say that. “It wasn’t nice of me to accuse you of not being real.”

Light under the bed was weak, but I could see pieces of his face through the hole: hollow cheeks, thick eyebrows, lidded eyes. In spite of the patchy stubble, he looked young, maybe my age, but it could have been the dim space. “I understand. I was rude too.”

“Maybe we can start over?”

“Yes.”

Idris was a serious, silent place. A place that valued politeness. I’d never been there, but Father had, and that was what he’d told me about the island. Very quiet. Very reserved. Very secure, when he’d stepped off the ship and had to be searched. He’d tried to joke with the inspectors that it must have been such a pain to search every single passenger from every ship, but he’d received only a glare. The entire exchange had been one-sided.

Even the Idrisi I’d met on Damina had always seemed uncomfortable, avoiding conversation. They thought the rest of us too free with our speech.

“There was a tremor,” I said. “On Idris. Sixteen days ago.”

“I know.” His voice squeezed. So either someone had already told him, or he was a new prisoner, too. “People died.”

“Were you there?”

“Yes.” A great sadness filled that one word, shifting something inside of me. “Tried to help. Made it worse.”

I knew how that felt. “When did you get here?”

“Day before you. Early morning. It was still dark.”

He was just as new and uncertain as me. And maybe, like me, he hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d said he’d tried to help. And the first thing he did for me was offer water.

What had I offered him?

Usually a smile made people like me, but here, I was dirty, tired, and Aaru couldn’t even see me. Strip away the things that had made me special at home, and underneath I was just an awkward girl with panic attacks and a counting habit.

And reduced to this, I really needed my friends.





BEFORE





Ten Years Ago


IT WAS DRAGONS THAT BROUGHT ILINA AND ME together.

“Where should it go?” I lifted a new purple dragon, making the amethyst eyes sparkle. Its wings were delicate arcs, like it wanted to fly off.

Ilina considered my display case. “You could separate them by type. Glass here. Metal here. Stone back there. They could fight.”

“We’re building an army to battle Zara’s unicorns. In-fighting is bad for morale.”

She rearranged the ranks of figurines. “Put it there.” She motioned to an empty spot near a blue, and there it was: a rainbow of dragons.

“Perfect.” My collection was almost three dozen strong. They were delicate, exquisitely made creatures. The stone took years to carve, or so I was told, and the metal came from the deepest mines on Bopha. It was an expensive collection, I was assured.

A hundred lumes for the pink sandstone, my first dragon; it was a birthday gift from my aunt, but Mother told me the price when she caught me flying it around my room.

Seventy-five lumes for the quartz, which I’d spotted in a shop window; the sandstone dragon needed a friend.

Two hundred eighty-seven lumes for the blown glass, this one translucent orange with a mesh of finely wrought gold scales across its body. Mother nearly swallowed her tongue when she saw the price, but Father bought it for me anyway.

After that, dragons began to arrive in small, silk-cushioned boxes, some from family, and others from the Luminary Council and important visitors. Zara had been jealous, so our parents started a collection of unicorns for her.

“There’s a baby dragon in the sanctuary,” Ilina said. “A yellow one.”

“Really?” I hopped with excitement. “Can we see it? When did you get it? How big?”

“No visitors yet.” We retreated to my bed, her sitting cross-legged, while I had to arrange my long, Idrisi cotton dress and sit with my feet to one side. Our parents had very different ideas about play clothes. “The adults either abandoned her or were killed. Someone heard her shrieking from her nest for three days before they sent for us.”

“Poor baby!” I pressed my hands against my chest. “What species is she?”

“Drakontos raptus. She’s as big as my palm.”

“So cute.” Drakontos raptuses weren’t rare, as far as dragons went, but they were the smallest. “Imagine living five hundred years ago, when the big dragons all flew around the islands. Drakontos rex.”