Dropping my gaze to my own hands—these hands that no longer feel like they belong to me—I pinch my palm, grounding myself, but the question slips out anyway as a carriage passes—a thing pulled by horses so pale they seem almost invisible, gliding through the midnight air.
Inside, an older man sits between two young women, the brief glimpse unsettling me in a way I cannot name.
“How do you know all of this?” I ask, voice low, watching Harmon’s face.
He repeats the word, a ghost of a laugh that carries no mirth. “How?” He pauses, then breathes the word out like a curse and a blessing both. “God.”
The word unsettles me more than I care to admit. My body loses weight. “God?” Echoing it, beer still burning faintly in my gut, I eye him.
“God told me everything.” His eyes lift, drifting past me to the golden moon, and I follow his gaze. Its cratered face glares down, oppressive, as if staring into me, and I feel the abyss in it returning my stare.
As long as it works out... My stride lengthens, each step covering nearly three times the space Elena’s would. Why I think of her even now, I don’t know, but the thought won’t leave. Thɪs chapter is updated by 𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙚𝙡⁂𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚⁂𝙣𝙚𝙩
“And how will everything work out in the end? In this great plan of yours—sent from God, I mean?”
He scans the road, the scattered passersby, the tramps shrinking from our eyes. He walks tall, his frame two heads above mine, every step radiating calm fury.
“Elaborate,” he says.
I grit my teeth. “How will we lead your kind and mine into letting them leave? How will we convince them that the Reds belong there? How will we succeed in driving them from the island without stirring the continent’s wrath? Even if we deceive every Orange, every Green, every Blue beyond Ruby’s borders, what’s to stop them from returning? Weeks, perhaps a month at most, before they come back.”
The questions churn, and they are only the beginning. Too many answers fail to surface; how will the Reds ever believe we are their saviors? How—
“There is no guarantee.”
The words hit harder than expected. He says them so casually, as if it were nothing, and I halt mid-step. He halts, too.
“What do you mean by that?”
His eyes meet mine, cold yet burning, a volcano buried under ice. “It isn’t guaranteed that we succeed, or that we will succeed afterwards.”
A fly bursts from the glow of a lamp, crossing before my nose before vanishing again into the dark. My breath escapes with it. “Do the others know about it?”
He tilts his gaze upward, high enough that it feels as though he is looking at the golden moon itself.
“Mostly not. They aren’t as sharp-minded as you. Drink, eat, fight—that’s all they care about; their hearts are in the right place, but their minds...” His voice trails.
My teeth grind. Silence stretches, but he leaves me to wrestle with it.
Finally, he says, “We all gave our lives from the start. What difference does it make if the chance of success is less than expected? I would do it even if it were certain to fail; most of us would.”