Free Dawnbreaker: Legends of the Duskwalker - Book 3 by Jay Posey Page B

you feel up to eating something?” she asked.
    “I could eat,” Wren answered.
    “Then you’re just in time. Come on in here and help me carry the food to the table, would you?”
    “Sure.”
    Wren followed Mol back into the kitchen where dishes sat filled with steaming vegetables, rice, and some kind of meat with an amber-colored glaze. They weren’t real vegetables, Wren knew. They were the manufactured kind, not like the ones he’d seen growing straight up out of the ground at Chapel’s compound so long ago. The compound that lay in ruins, now. The hand from his dream had laid waste to it, as it had Morningside.
    “Hey,” Mol said, crouching in front of him. “You OK?”
    The dream lingered at the edges of his wakefulness, tinted everything like a thin veil of fog. Wren blinked a few times, and then nodded.
    “Still waking up?”
    Wren shrugged. Mol made a face like she wanted to say something but didn’t know what it was.
    “I’m OK, Miss Mol,” Wren said. “Just had a weird dream is all.” He gave her a smile, though he could tell by the way it felt that it probably looked weak and fake. He picked up the bowl of meat and carried it into the other room. He’d seen Mol carry as many as five dishes before, all at once, so he knew she didn’t really need the help, but he was glad to do it anyway. He set it in the middle of the table. Mol followed after him and arranged the rest of the bowls and serving spoons. She said grace over the meal as was her way, and then they all sat down to eat.
    “Chapel,” Mol called. “Care to join us?”
    “Thank you,” Chapel answered. “But no.”
    Mol nodded and started serving out portions. It wasn’t a surprise that Chapel remained where he was. With each day that had passed, he’d seemed more withdrawn. He’d gone out several times, for increasingly longer stretches of time. Wren wondered what that all might mean, but he was too worn out to think about it just then, and it didn’t really seem like a good time to bring it up.
    Over the meal conversation was light and carefully balanced; Wren could sense it in the words and the glances. Haiku asked about Greenstone and jCharles’s livelihood. In turn, jCharles prompted Haiku for some history of his travels. No one wanted to venture too far into potentially painful topics after the earlier emotional work of the day. And it seemed like maybe neither jCharles nor Haiku wanted to reveal too much about either of their histories. Wren ate quietly, and though Mol kept glancing over at him to check on him, mostly the adults carried on, content to let him participate when and how he chose.
    Try as they might, however, the gravitational pull of their strangely connected history was too great to escape for long, and gradually, inevitably, conversation worked its way towards the unavoidable. There was a pause in the talk that grew longer than the usual break, almost to the point of awkward silence. Finally, jCharles wiped his mouth with his hand and dropped his napkin on the table, and leaned back shaking his head and smiling sadly.
    “You know it’s weird, though,” jCharles said. He looked hard at Haiku then. “I knew Three a long time, and I don’t recall him ever mentioning he had a brother. And you really don’t look all that much alike, either. But I’m jiggered if you don’t feel like his own twin.”
    “I should clarify,” Haiku said. “He is not... was not... my brother in the traditional sense. We share no parent, at least that we know. We are not related by blood, but rather by a bond much deeper. He is my brother nonetheless. We were raised in the same House.”
    He put a curious emphasis on the word house when he said it, like it was more than a building.
    “Three used to mention it sometimes,” Mol said, her voice quiet and still tinged with sorrow. “His House. Only ever in passing, though. What was it?”
    Haiku’s expression changed then, a slight shift. A cloud passing briefly across the