Free Splinters of Light by Rachael Herron Page B

Antarctica was a continent—he never had to get his heart involved at all. She’d thought he’d meant it. She’d thought he was just careless and sweet and really liked being the smart one in his relationships. This whole time . . . had he been . . . ? God, what else had she missed along the way?
    Harrison said, “I mean, what’s wrong with
you
?”
    Nora’s heart juddered. “Nothing.”
    “Something is. You’ve been acting strange for a week.”
    A week? She’d been acting funny for three months, since their night together—she knew that. “What do you mean?”
    “It’s like . . .” He tilted his head. He
looked
. Nora realized suddenly she wasn’t wearing a bra. She wasn’t even wearing ChapStick. She felt naked.
    He went on. “You’re quiet. You stopped chattering to me. You’ve always chattered.”
    Nora couldn’t tell him first. She had to tell her daughter, her sister, she had to explain what she had, what she was carrying, but she had no idea how. She
couldn’t
tell him, so she’d stopped her mouth in case she slipped. She hadn’t thought he would notice.
    “I think something’s wrong and you don’t want to tell me,” said Harrison. He placed his thumb against the corner of her mouth. “I can tell by the way you’re in some other place even when you’re five inches away from me. I don’t know if it’s menopause or cancer or something else.”
    Something else.
She couldn’t make herself form the words.
    “But I’m not going anywhere. Well, yeah, I’ll go back to my house, but not until I kiss you a while longer.”
    “Oh.”
    “That okay with you?”
    “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah.”

Chapter Eleven
    T he music swelled through her headphones, and as Ellie raced her Healer back to the hut, she suddenly felt like crying with happiness. They were winning. The sick, dying Dragon Queen Ulra would be saved—healed—thanks to her and Dyl if they could just get this part right.
    Everything
should have a sound track. It would be amazing to take a test at school with violins and cellos upping the danger level. Or doing water polo practice with drums and cymbals encouraging speed. The best thing about learning how to drive was that you got to
pick
a sound track. Or, at least, she would when her mother finally let her drive with music. Right now she was still insisting—wrongly—that it would distract her. Her mother didn’t seem to understand that it would actually make things easier. If she had a symphony, complete with organ and choral voices like in
Queendom
, Ellie knew driving would go smoother. The quietness punctuated only by the graunching of gears andher mother’s audible terrified gasps made Ellie forget to check both her inside and outside mirrors. The last time they’d gone out to practice, it had been at night—like, pitch dark—and her mother had made her practice three-point turns using the white lines in the mostly empty Whole Foods parking lot. Two of the streetlights in the lot had been burned out and her mother somehow thought she should be able to use her headlights to figure out how to stay in the lines. Right.
That
hadn’t gone well. Both of them had cried, although only Ellie’d had a reason to. She’d been
frustrated
. Her mother had just been a passenger. And why Ellie had to learn on Harrison’s old Jeep was beyond her. She should have been able to at least learn on her mother’s automatic Prius. Something about
if you can drive this, you can drive anything
, but since she didn’t plan on driving a stick shift ever, it didn’t make sense. What was the point?
    Ellie directed her Healer up the grassy knoll and then over the covered fire pit. She entered the code to open her hut’s door.
    Inside was Dyl the Incurser.
    Holy crap.
    Hey,
she typed inanely. She’d given him the code, like, five days ago, and he’d never stopped by, not while her Healer was there, and it had kind of hurt—hella other guys were trying to get in her hut, claiming