Folding the Sky

-50-

"Aldric."

No. He swallowed. His throat was hoarse, his voice leaving him. Don't you dare say it.

"Aldric, it's okay."

Aldric ducked his head, his fist still pressed into the door as he slid to the ground, shaking. "This is all my fault. All of it."

A sigh. "No it's not, Aldric."

But it was. He'd said it before, several times before, but the truth of it struck him in the face now, set his frightened heart pounding within his ribcage. The blast at Mulaim, the declaration of war, and here, now, Chike with his lips and fingers tinted a perilous violet-blue—it was all his fault.

If his father could see him now, he would laugh at him. He would laugh and he would tell him, I told you so, and Aldric would have nothing to say, because he'd be right.

In the end he knew how to do nothing else but take lives, didn't he?

Aldric crossed the floor, shimmying himself in close beside Chike, knowing well enough that his own body heat would do little to nothing, but still stupid and stubborn enough to try.

Chike shuddered violently against him. "Say something, would you?" he stammered. "I don't want it...I don't want it to be quiet."

Three words lingered at the end of that sentence, and though unspoken, Aldric heard them anyway: When I go.

"Back in Naino," Aldric said, closing his arms around Chike, wishing just this once for something he'd stopped wishing for ages ago: for warmth, for life, for normalcy. "Forever ago. When I asked you to make that uniform, and told you my name was—what, Adam, or something?"

Chike laughed, but the noise was weak and flimsy. His chest barely rose. "I believe it was Albert."

"Albert, right," Aldric replied, and smiled, though it strained his lips. "You're telling me you really didn't find anything about that whole exchange remotely suspicious?"

"Is it so hard to imagine that someone might trust you, Finck?"

Aldric's own consciousness was beginning to flicker, the edges of his vision going fuzzy. He would be here to hold Chike as he went, and then he would not be here much longer.

He paused to take a shaky breath. Then he told him, "I am not made of trustworthy things."

Blood and steel and darkness—these were the things that had forged him, and they were not things you trusted.

"And yet I trust you anyway," Chike said. "And yet all of us do anyway."

Aldric jolted. "Chike, I—"

"How long is it going to take you to realize it?" Chike went on, as if Aldric hadn't spoken. Beneath Aldric's touch, his skin was ice. "How many times do we have to tell you? Your life is in your own hands. You shape it before anyone else. Your parents may have tried to make you into something, but at the end of the day the decision is yours."

"But I..." Aldric's eyes were stinging; he didn't know why. "I don't know how to do anything else, Chike."

Chike laughed again, though it was half a wheeze.

"You do," he said. He shuddered again, violently, his eyes falling closed. "In fact, you're already doing it."

It ambushed Aldric then, all of it. How badly he needed him to stay here. How empty he and the world would be without Chike Lee in it, a solar system without its sun. He thought of Chike's family, his siblings and his mother, waiting for him, praying for his return. And suddenly Aldric's face was wet. "Chike," he said through a strained throat. "Chike, don't you dare—"