Scavenge the Stars (Scavenge the Stars #1)(72)

“Then you have to stop them,” she said, the certainty in her voice robbing him of breath. “Even if you love them.”

His throat worked as he tried to swallow. “Even…Even if it means they’ll be taken away?”

“Even if it means they’d die.”

The breeze sent a chill down the collar of his coat, and he shivered. She took a step toward him, so earnest and confident that it was the only thing preventing him from simply crumpling to the ground.

She was right—he knew she was right. His father had done so much harm already, and if Cayo allowed him to continue dispersing the counterfeit coins, even more people would be harmed.

He had to turn his father in.

He began to feel feverish again in the wake of that impossible decision, but there was also relief hiding beneath it, the chance to do the right thing. To try to make up for the harm that Cayo himself had caused.

The countess lifted a hand as if to touch his sleeve, then dropped it again. She parted her lips to speak, but the sky chose that moment to rumble and burst open, unleashing a sheet of rain over the city.

Yamaa yelped in surprise, and it startled Cayo out of his reverie. He held his hand out to her.

“Come on,” he yelled over the deluge. “I know a place we can wait this out!”

She hesitated, her fingers hovering over his. When she finally took his hand, it was like the sun and moon colliding, a brilliant and thrilling crash.

Cayo pulled her forward, and together they raced through the rain like stars shooting across the sky.





The magician smiled, and Neralia felt as if she were back among the stars. Together they danced through the ocean’s depths, leaving trails of radiant light in their wake so as to make the sky jealous.

—“NERALIA OF THE CLOUDS,” AN ORAL STORY ORIGINATING FROM THE LEDE ISLANDS



The touch of water to Amaya’s skin woke her from the dread at seeing her old neighborhood again.

When Cayo had asked if she was afraid, she had almost wanted to say yes, but not for the reason that he thought. She had been afraid of the ghosts that still lurked there, the shadow of her old home against the street, a garden overgrown with weeds. She had been afraid that if they stayed there a moment longer, she would erode like rock washed with seawater, turning into a ghost herself.

But as Cayo gripped her hand and led her toward the park, the two of them racing through the rain, her fear dissolved. She spent so much time living in the past that she had forgotten what living in the present was like—until now. Now, with soft, thick raindrops soaking her hair and her dress, her legs keeping stride with Cayo’s, a surprised laugh spilled over her lips as if she could hardly contain it.

Cayo pulled her toward a stone bridge. Amaya vaguely remembered it from when she and her mother would walk the paths on sunny days, when the humidity wasn’t strong enough to choke. The bridge had been built over a man-made creek that ran a serpentine track through the park, but the creek was running low after the summer months, only a thin trickle that would swell with the rainfall.

They ducked under the arch of the wide bridge, panting and soaking wet. They looked at each other and burst out laughing.

“You look like a drowned dog,” Amaya said as she pulled her hair over her shoulder and squeezed out the excess water.

“Oh yeah?” Cayo shook his head like the dog she’d compared him to, water flying from his hair and hitting her in the face. “You look like a shipwreck survivor.”

“What?”

“You know, like in the books.” Cayo gestured to her sodden dress, the mud from the creek bed staining the hem. “There’s a harrowing shipwreck, and it’s always the woman who escapes and gets washed up on some deserted island. And of course, there she meets a man who helps her survive on the island, they eventually fall in love, et cetera….”

Amaya grimaced at the memory of waking up on the atoll above the Landless comm. But she wasn’t some romantic heroine—she had more important things to do.

Like trying to pry more secrets out of the boy beside her. She had gotten too wrapped up in their conversation to think properly, to ask the right questions when he was so obviously baring his soul to her. Someone he knew and cared about had done something wrong. Was it his father? Had Cayo discovered something that could help her own plans in bringing Kamon Mercado down?

But the pain in Cayo’s eyes had been so stark that it had stripped away her motives. She understood that pain; she felt an echo of it in her bones. It was the pain of asking yourself, How could someone I love do something so horrible?

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it as an insult,” Cayo said, noting her dark expression. “It’s actually a good look on you. Just that, you know, you can pull it off. Like you and water belong together.”

He was beginning to ramble, so she gave him a wry smile. “Thanks?”

He raked fingers through his hair, pulling it back. Looking around, he hummed in surprise. “Looks like others have been here recently.”

Amaya followed his gaze to the underside of the bridge. It was covered in drawings and words and symbols she didn’t recognize, some done with paint, some done with the reddish clay runoff from the creek. A few of them looked old, but the ones done with clay were more recent, almost as bright as blood against the dark stone.

“People like to come here and leave their mark,” Cayo explained, putting his hand against a drawing of a sea serpent that was actually quite good. “It’s like a rite of passage. I remember daring one of my friends to do it, but he got caught. They usually have a patrol that comes around to check that no one is vandalizing anything new.”