A Fractured Light (Beautiful Dark)

slightly. As if he couldn’t hold it in anymore, a strangled noise escaped him. Oh, no , I thought, realizing too late that I was watching something I shouldn’t. I went to move, but my foot hit a loose floorboard that squeaked beneath me. Asher’s head shot up, and we locked eyes. I gasped.
    The storm that swirled in them threatened to overpower me. It was a look that I’d seen only once before, the night we’d gotten into a fight on my roof. What he’d said to me that night came rushing back as if he’d said the words yesterday.
    “Do you know why I joke all the time?” He stood up as if he’d been wound up and sprung. His eyes glinted in the moonlight. “Do you know why I’ve been keeping things all light and devil-may-care? Because if you knew—if you really knew what was happening—inside of you, within the Order, within the Rebellion, if you knew what the angels are saying, what’s waiting for you, you would be sobbing, Skye. You would be paralyzed with fear. That’s why I tease you. I’m doing it for you. Because if I didn’t, you wouldn’t make it. You wouldn’t last another week.”
    Asher tore his eyes away from mine. The fire fell to the ground abruptly, turning to smoldering ash as it hit the floor. I took an involuntary step backward into the shadows, pressing myself flat against the wall.
    He never showed me when he was worried or upset. That’s what he’d been trying to tell me that night on the roof. What I was seeing now was something I wasn’t supposed to. Some private moment that Asher hadn’t wanted me to see. Something he tried, every day, to hide from me by covering it up with wisecracks and banter.
    It was fear. Asher was afraid.
    Before he could say anything, I turned and ran back up to my room, snuggling deep under the quilt until morning. He didn’t come after me.
     

Chapter 4
    W hen I woke in the morning, sunlight was streaming through my window. Birds chirped outside, and if I closed my eyes and just listened to the music of the woods, I could almost imagine being back in my bed at home. My homesickness was an ache growing inside me.
    I turned to see if Asher had come up to my room in the night, but the rocking chair was empty. In fact, everything was strangely silent and still.
    In the hall, the quiet was deafening. No hushed conversations came from downstairs. No low tones. I was alone in the house for the first time.
    So I explored. In my little bedroom, in addition to the bed and the rocking chair, there was a low wooden chest of drawers. The drawers stuck a little from disuse, but I managed to get them open one by one. Inside were bits of evidence that the cabin had been inhabited once. An old cable-knit fisherman’s sweater was folded up in the bottom drawer. I pulled it over my head, and the heavy wool fell in baggy folds around me. It was a man’s sweater. But even though I was swimming in it, and even though it had belonged to a stranger, something about it felt comforting. I rolled up the sleeves and kept pawing through the remaining drawers, but they yielded nothing more.
    Next to the bedroom was a rusty bathroom with a warped mirror hanging over a chipped, white enamel sink and a toilet with an old-fashioned hanging chain. I stared at myself in the mirror, like I had done a few times since I’d been here. There was a bruise under my left eye and a giant scratch across my cheek. I ran my finger over it, remembering that my anger had caused the earth to rumble in the clearing and a tree to fall. Asher had swooped in to save me just in time. I’d been mad at him for keeping the Rebellion’s plans from me. He’d lied to me, but as I thought about the night before, I realized he had done it to protect me. To keep me sane when everything in my life was changing. He was doing it because he loved me. That was a crime I could never hold against him. It was nothing like what Devin had done.
    As my finger trailed over the dried blood and puckered skin, I could feel something in me changing. I glanced up to meet my own gaze in the mirror, and my eyes flashed—a bright, metallic silver. My heart beat faster and I gripped the edges of the sink, but when I blinked, they were gray again. I turned the handle of the faucet to try to wash my face, and the pipes gave a low, rusty hum, but no water came out.
    I would go back to exploring. I would try to forget about what could be making Asher so afraid. I had been powerful in the woods the night I’d almost died,