The Midnight Star (The Young Elites #3)(73)

And I do. It was a sun-drenched evening, and I pulled Violetta through the fields of great golden grass that spanned the land behind our home. She laughed, asking me repeatedly where I was taking her, but I just giggled and pressed a finger to my lips. We made our way across the expanse until we reached a sharp outcropping of rock that overlooked the center of our city. As the sun threw purple, pink, and orange across the sky, we crawled on our bellies to the very edge of the rock. Sparks of color and light danced on the city streets below. It was the first night of the Spring Moons, and the revelers had started to appear. We looked on with delight as early fireworks lit up the sky, bursting in great explosions of every color in the world, the sound deafening us with its joy.

I remember our laughter, the way we casually held hands, the unspoken feeling between us that we were, for a moment in time, free from our father’s grasp.

“Sisters forever,” Violetta declared, in her tiny, young voice.

Until death, even in death, even beyond.

“I love you,” Violetta says, hanging fiercely on to me even as my strength dies.

I love you too. I lean against her, exhausted. “Violetta,” I murmur. I feel strange, delirious, as if a fever had wrapped me in a dream. Words emerge, faint and ethereal, from someone who reminds me of myself, but I can no longer be sure I am still here.

Am I good? I am trying to ask her.

Tears fall from Violetta’s eyes. She says nothing. Perhaps she can no longer hear me. I am small in this moment, turning smaller. My lips can barely move.

After a lifetime of darkness, I want to leave something behind that is made of light.

Both of her hands cup my face. Violetta stares at me with a look of determination, and then she brings me to her and hugs me close. “You are a light,” she replies gently. “And when you shine, you shine bright.”

Her words are starting to turn soft, and she is beginning to fade. Or perhaps I am the one fading. The whispers in my mind are gone now, leaving the inside of me quiet, but I don’t miss them. In their place, there is the warmth of Violetta’s arms, the beating of her heart that I can hear against her chest, the knowledge that she will leave this place and return to the living.

Please, I whisper, and my voice comes out as quiet as a ghost’s. Tell Magiano I love him. Tell him I’m sorry. That I’m grateful.

“Adelina,” Violetta says, alarmed as she continues to fade away. The feel of her is growing faint. “Wait. I can’t—”

Go, I say gently, giving her a sad smile. Violetta and I stare at each other until I can hardly see her. Then she disappears into the darkness, and the world around me blurs.

I feel the cold ground beneath my cheek. I feel the pulse of my heart die down. Over me, the looming figure of Moritas bends to enfold me in her embrace, covering me in a merciful blanket of night. I take a slow breath.

Someday, when I am nothing but dust and wind, what tale will they tell about me?

Another slow breath.

Another.

A final exhale.





Violetta Amouteru




There is an old legend about Compasia and Eratosthenes. As Violetta crouches, crying, over her sister’s dying soul, she thinks of it.

Adelina had first told this story when they were very small, on a bright afternoon in the gardens of their old home. Violetta remembers listening contentedly while she braided her sister’s silver hair, wishing her own hair could look so beautiful, grateful and guilty that she did not have to bear the consequences of it. Long ago, Adelina had said, when the world was young, the god Amare created a kingdom of people, who ungratefully turned their backs on him. Hurt and furious, Amare called on the lightning and thunder, and pushed up the seas to drown the kingdom beneath the waves.

But he did not know that his daughter, Compasia, the angel of Empathy, had fallen in love with Eratosthenes, a boy in the kingdom. Only Compasia dared to defy Holy Amare. Even as her father drowned mankind in his floods, Compasia reached down to her mortal lover and transformed him into a swan. He flew high above the floodwaters, above the moons, and then higher still, until his feathers turned to stardust.

Every night, when the world was quiet and only the stars were awake, Compasia would descend from the heavens to the earth, and the constellation of Compasia’s Swan would transform back into Eratosthenes; and together, the two would walk the world until the dawn separated them again.

Violetta does not know why she thinks of this story now. But as Adelina made a bargain with Moritas for her life, so does Violetta find herself kneeling at the feet of Compasia, her own goddess, begging for the sister who had once cast her out, who had struck at her, who had nevertheless fought and hurt for her. She finds herself dreaming of the night they stood together, sailing through a sea and sky of stars.

Violetta aligns with Compasia, the angel of Empathy. And she makes a bargain of her own.





I am death. And through death, I understand life.

—Letter from General Eliseo Barsanti to his wife





Adelina Amouteru




There is a small, singular light somewhere in the distance. It is brilliant and blue-white, something reminiscent of the color I’d seen when we entered the immortal realm through the origin. It is a light of immortality, a light of the gods, a star in the sky among billions. I find myself yearning toward it, struggling through the night in order to grasp that spark of warmth. I can see, for a moment, the world beyond ours, the heavens, the stars that burn alongside me.