Free Borderlands by Skye Melki-Wegner Page B

he whispers.
    I swallow. ‘Fine.’
    Lukas must hear the discomfort in my voice, because he stops his own stretching to survey me. He detects the hunch in my shoulders, the twist in my limbs. ‘You can’t move?’
    â€˜Not a lot,’ I admit. ‘But I’m fine.’
    After a while, Lukas shifts his weight and places a hand on my shoulder. I tense up, but then he begins to rub. He kneads my shoulder gently, squeezing through my coat.
    â€˜Where’d you learn to do that?’ I say.
    â€˜We used to get cramped in the biplane cockpits,’ Lukas says. ‘Not a lot of space to move, and sometimes we’d be in the air for hours. Our instructors taught us this so we could help our friends when we landed.’
    I fight a sudden urge to recoil. I know why a royal biplane pilot would be in the air for hours – to bomb the northern cities. Suddenly, I don’t want a bar of this massage. It feels like something toxic: a way to reduce the pain of killers while their victims burn.
    And Lukas used the word ‘friend’. I’ve never heard him call his fellow biplane pilots his friends before. Suddenly I imagine him living in the airbase, learning to fly, training alongside a dozen other teenagers. Did they take classes together? Eat dinner together? Drop bombs together?
    â€˜I’m fine,’ I tell him stiffly. ‘Please stop.’
    Lukas stops. There is silence.
    I twist away from him and lean back against the log. I know I’m being unfair, that Lukas never dropped a bomb on a city. He risked everything to escape from that life.
    But all I can think of is my family. They died in the smoke and flame of a biplane’s bomb, while alchemical spells filled the wreckage with stars. And in those hours afterwards, while I sobbed in the husk of my home, triumphant pilots were massaging the stiffness from each other’s shoulders . . .
    This time, the conversation really does end for good. I can’t bring myself to speak, and Lukas seems too uncertain to break the silence. So we just sit there, awkward and stiff and sore.
    Sometimes I hear movement in the foliage, but I can’t tell whether it’s a hunter or an animal. Perhaps it’s too dark to scout properly. I hope so. I haven’t heard any shouts or screams, so I guess my friends must still be hidden. So long as my illusion holds, they should be safe.
    I don’t know how I slip into sleep, but I do. One minute I’m weary and aching and feeling oddly ashamed of myself. The next minute I’m dreaming that I’m running through a forest of clouds and stars and signal flares. They burst around me in patterns of gold, scattering unnatural light through the air. I trail my hands out sideways as I run, brushing my palms through the sparks, and they nibble like tiny insects at the skin of my fingers.
    Then the air smells like apricot syrup and the wind whirls around me, and everything sinks into darkness until I stand alone in a field of utter ­blackness . . .
    I wake.
    The log is empty.
    Lukas is gone.

For a few minutes, I just sit there. It’s lighter outside now – not quite dawn – and every breeze sends shadows dancing through the leaves. I clamber out of the log, too shocked to care about the throb in my limbs.
    â€˜Lukas?’ I hiss. ‘Lukas, where are you?’
    Nothing. The area is deserted. I whip my head around for any sign of a trail, but I know nothing about tracking – how would I even start? I see broken branches and trampled flowers, but those could be from my own footsteps last night, or hunters prowling in the dark. They sprawl in all directions, more of a mishmash than a trail, and I realise how Sharr must have felt upon spotting our tangled foxary tracks in the Knife.
    Lukas could have been gone for hours. I’ll never find him on my own.
    I hurry back the way we came last night, recognising the cluster of trees where I hid