“Your wing is broken!”
“Oh, and your arm is fully functional?”
The response went dry in her mouth as Fehn stepped out of Locke’s room. Embarrassment froze her to her core, but it only took a second to superheat to anger.
“What?” she yelled.
Jace turned around.
Fehn rubbed the back of his head. “Are you two okay?”
“Yes!” Tayel shouted.
“We’ll keep it down!” Jace yelled. “Sorry!” He waited until Fehn receded back into the room, allowing for a few seconds of silence before whispering, “I don’t understand why you don’t want me to help, Tayel. I thought you’d like me stepping up.”
Tayel spoke quietly, her temper evaporated from the interruption, “You stepping up is fine, but not now.”
“Okay, well you better start making sense because I’m wasting time I could be using to prepare for this thing.”
He wasn’t skipping a beat. Hadn’t changed his mind even slightly. Tayel ran her hand down her face. Everything considered, she couldn’t blame him. She’d done a hack job of being the concerned best friend she was supposed to be. And as painful and as embarrassing as the truth behind her vindication was, it mattered little in the face of the very real possibility he wouldn’t listen to her.
“I’m scared,” she muttered.
“What?”
“I’m scared,” she said louder.
He blinked. “And? You don’t think I’m terrified?”
“Just listen, okay? After the invasion, I thought about the way Mom died, almost every day.”
“Tayel…”
“Please? I’m not trying to throw a pity party, I promise.”
“I’m not going to die.”
“You said you didn’t understand, so I’m trying to explain myself better.”
He sighed. “Okay.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I pictured Mom all the time — especially on the refugee ship, you know, right after… I’d see her face as it fell under the road. I’d dream about her at the bottom of the city, dead or dying, or alive and scared. I’d think of her screaming for me — at me — demanding where I’d gone or why I left her to die. I felt so guilty, and so alone, and you have no idea how easy it is…” Tayel halted, willing the lump forming in her throat to dissolve. “How easy it is to get lost in those feelings. How easy it was to accept nothing would ever be better than those moments.
“And yet I pulled out of it. I teamed up with Shy, and fought Rokkir, and now we’re all here, taking a stand, and I try not to let that guilt over Mom’s death get in the way anymore. And when I think about what gave me the strength to press on like that, it’s you. You picked me up, you didn’t let me wallow endlessly when I could have. You gave me a reason to stand up to what was happening instead of just accepting defeat, even if you didn’t always like how I did it.”
He quietly whistled his assent.
“But if you go off to the mothership with us and face the real odds of dying and lose, I don’t know if anyone will ever be able to pull me out of that. I — I honestly think only you could. If I lost you — if I lost the last tangible happy memory of home I have left, I just don’t know how I could go on.”
He nodded slowly, eyes on the floor. “I didn’t get you out of that slump, Tayel. I supported you and encouraged you, but no one but yourself can pick you up and make you fight. Even if — and I don’t intend for this to happen — but even if I did, you know — you would make it through that loss.”
“Jace, please.”
“Originally I thought that, when you offered to help Shy, you were just trying to push away the reality of your mom’s death, and of Delta, and that you were just being reckless. I thought you’d accepted Shy’s story because you’d given up trying to reconcile what had really happened. But you hadn’t. You’d overcome it and were ready to fight back. You saw the truth when I was completely blind to it. That decision to trust yourself — to take the action you knew was right, was all you. I didn’t support you then. I didn’t encourage you. I wasn’t there for you. And that’s something I’ll always regret.”
Tayel stared down at her feet as the guilt from earlier resurfaced.
“You picked yourself up and fought back, and now, I finally have the opportunity to do the same,” Jace said. “I realize I don’t deserve it, because I wasn’t there for you that night in Shy’s tent, but I really want your support. You don’t have to like my choice, but I would like you to trust that I’ve thought this through and am making the best decision for me.”
“I want to support you, Jace.” She squeezed her temples until they hurt. “But I don’t get it. Don’t you want to be safe?”
“Safe? We’re in danger right here. Any moment those outer walls could crumble, and we could be swarmed. Even if I didn’t go to the mothership, that could happen. It could happen when you and the war packs are gone.”
Tayel winced. She didn’t know which would be worse. Being there with him if the worst happened, or coming back to learn it, and having to accept she couldn’t have done a thing. She remembered finding him in Castle Aishan, terrified, worn, hurt. She remembered Mom falling through the sky. Tayel couldn’t have done anything even when she had been there. Being there was worse. It had to be.
“Look,” Jace said. “I realize I wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for you. I realize I messed up and that I really have been in need of saving from my mistakes. But I’m ready to help now; I’m prepared to do anything I can. And it’s my parents who could be in that shuttle. I should be going.”
“But you could help here. If your parents are at the shuttle site I could bring them back. You don’t have to come with us to be valuable. So why? Why do you have to help this way?”
Jace grabbed a talonful of his head feathers and squeezed. “For a lot of reasons! Because I feel that’s where my skillset is most useful, because Locke needs the out, because — because of everything we’ve been through. The invasion, the camp, Castle Aishan, and even the crash yesterday. I… want to do this together, like we’ve done everything together.”
Tayel smiled despite herself. Seeing him standing there with chest puffed proudly was such a juxtaposition to the boyish Jace she grew up with. With everything that had happened, it was hard to remember they were once just two rowdy kids running around the under city streets with imaginary laser rifles and swords. At barely twelve and eleven years old they’d saved countless imaginary villages from the tyranny of who they’d very seriously called the evil ones. It all made her wonder where she and Jace would be right now, if none of this ever happened.
“I just don’t want all that to go away because I couldn’t protect you,” she said.
“That’s always going to be a risk, but if we work together with our friends, we’ll be a lot better at protecting each other.”
She resigned herself to a short laugh. “When did you become so smart?”
“Pretty sure it happened one mysterious summer morning when I was about six.”
“Intelligence sort of just manifested, huh?”
“What? That didn’t happen to you?”
“Ha.”
He clucked a teasing tone.
She closed her eyes. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I don’t like it — at all — but I do support you. I’m done asking you to stay behind.”
He beamed. “Thank you, Tayel. That means a lot.”
“Just promise you’ll be careful?”
“I’m not exactly reckless.”
“Fair.”
He hugged her, and she hugged him back, resting her chin among his head feathers. If anything happened to him, she’d never forgive herself. She thought of everything she wished she’d told Mom, everything she would never be able to say to her now that she was gone, and squeezed Jace tighter.