Free Ashes of the Stars by Elizabeth Van Zandt

deep, male voice ask incredulously. I jerked my head around to see a man covered head-to-toe in white. He was a broad man, a mass of pure muscle. He had a heavy travelling pack on his back and in his arms was a tiny white bundle. I could see nothing else.
    “Finn?” I asked in shock. Had I lost my mind already? Was I seeing things?
    “Hurry, help me get her inside,” Finn said by way of answering. I hadn’t seen anyone else with him, but I instinctively knew the bundle in his arms was Aili. He wouldn’t have anyone else with him. I shot to my feet and ran around the side of the tent, unzipping it and ushering Finn and his bundle inside as if I were welcoming them into my home.
    When I followed him inside the tent I zipped the door closed, and then I turned to look. He was laying her down gently on my sleeping bag. She was tinier than I remembered her being and her mask covered most of her face, but her closed eyes were disturbing enough. There were thin, angry-looking scratches across her eyelids and extending further down into the mask. Her lids were purple and swollen. She looked like she’d been ravaged by something wild.
    “What happened?” I asked coldly.
    “What the fuck are you doing here?” Finn snapped at me quietly. He barely glanced over his shoulder to ask me, he was too busy zipping my sleeping bag closed with her inside of it.
    “I came for her. What happened to her?” I snapped back at him. I didn’t have the patience for friendliness.
    “She’s destroyed herself,” Finn whispered. He let himself fall backwards. He didn’t even bother taking his pack off, he just watched her carefully and every once in a while would reach his hand up as if to touch her but then changed his mind.
    “She… I don’t know, she’s lost her mind. I thought it was coming but I wasn’t sure. She’s tried to be strong all her life, or at least all the time that I’ve known her. She never wanted to show weakness to anybody. I knew that she was dissatisfied with the way we do things, I knew she didn’t want to kill people. I should have taken her away a long time ago,” Finn said. I knew he was talking to me but it sounded as if he were talking to a ghost, like he wasn’t sure of his company.
    “We’d been home for two days. I went to her place to check on her because I hadn’t seen her at all. At first I thought she’d been sleeping because, well, she didn’t sleep except maybe an hour here or there after we left your camp. Then I got worried. She wasn’t showing up for meals. I found her on the floor in her living room. All of her clothes were everywhere and she hadn’t even changed out of her uniform from when we’d been on our mission. The house was cold like there hadn’t been a fire in the fireplace in weeks…
    “The smell hit me first, before anything else. She’d dumped out probably two gallons of bleach on her floor and was scrubbing at it with her clothes. She was frozen solid, too. There was blood on the floor from where she’d scratched at her face and where her hands had gotten ruined from so much bleach for so long. It was like parts of her hands had melted away. And then there was the whispering. She just kept saying, ‘I did this. All this blood, I did it. I killed them all’ and she wouldn’t snap out of it for anything. I had to pick her up to get her away from the mess she had created.
    “And then,” Finn took a deep, shuddering breath. “She attacked me. Said that if I was going to kill her, I should just get it over with. She wouldn’t stop attacking me, but she didn’t have the strength to really hit or scratch very hard. I took her to my mom because she’s a medic and she knocked her out with some drugs. She tended to her wounds for a few days, kept her unconscious, and then she told me to pack a bag and leave. She said it would mean death for Aili if she stayed, and if she left and I stayed, they’d kill me because they would know that I helped her go.”
    I stayed