2023
Excerpt from in-progress novel:
Derek, his temper, and I sat quietly in the briefing room. I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was waiting for me to look at him. He had Mom’s cobra stare on his face. They shared the same grey-green eyes, so the effect was the same, cold and lethal.
“Derek, I’m—”
He held up his hand for me to stop. “I don’t want your apology.”
I was afraid of what version of my always angry brother I was going to get. Derek stayed angry about something. He wanted to be right and he wanted perfection out of everyone, including himself. If anyone fell short of his standards, he would be relentless about what detail they missed or what skill they were deficient in. Derek was especially hard on himself.
I looked up at him, not prepared for whatever wrath he was going to unleash. His jaw was hard set, vein in his neck twitching, but when I looked at him, his eyes softened from Mom’s cobra stare to sorrow. He was beyond disappointed. It was like he was in mourning.
“Kyra, there are twenty-seven people willing to sacrifice themselves for you. Twenty-seven. They’ll leave behind nine children and siblings to die for you. They’ll endure torture for you. They’ll drop whatever they’re doing to come help you, change the plans they had for their life for you.” He rubbed a hand over the short knaps of his hair.
“I could never understand why Dad would try so hard to hide you from the truth until today. When Ohnelly’s fire missed you and he had his gun trained on you...” He shook out the thought from his mind. “I would’ve done everything in my power and beyond my power to stop him. I pulled my knife, Krya. I was going to kill him, a commanding officer in Alliance. I wasn’t gonna let anything happen to my sister even if it meant I would be executed for treason.”
He picked at a bit of plastic on his chair for a moment, bit his lip. “I don’t agree with Dad’s decision to hide arcana from you. And I don’t agree with what he put Mom through and what he made us all promise, but it kept you safe for almost eighteen years. We wanted that to last much longer, to give you the time to catch up on the training you missed, but you ruined that chance. Your actions, Kyra. Not Georgia’s, not Dad’s, not ours for keeping this world from you. Your actions.”
Derek pulled out a brass coin from one of his uniform pockets, about the size of a half dollar. The number forty-three was engraved on the side facing me. “When I was the leader of our division, I started carrying this with me. Forty-one is the number I started with, but whenever a new child is born in our circle, I get a new coin remade.” He flipped the coin over, showing four vertical marks scratched into the brass. “These are the people I lost as a leader.” He let out a long exhale and rubbed his thumb over the marks. “Tim Ware. Ronnie Butler. Davis Terrell. Danny Terrell. I’ve been thinking about putting in horizontal marks for Dad and Kai’s parents.” Derek flipped the coin back over. “This coin reminds me of the impact of my actions. It reminds me that it isn’t just my division that’s impacted, but it’s everyone that they love and that love them, too. It’s everyone that we’re fighting for.
“There are thirty-six of us in our circle now. Thirty-six of us depending on you whether you asked for us to or not. Think of all of their faces before you do something selfish again. Before you put yourself in danger.”
Derek stood up. He had no more left to say. He grabbed his rifle from behind him and held out a hand to phase us to the cabin, but I couldn’t move. It wasn’t lack of sleep or fatigue that held me in place, but the weight of what it meant to have thirty-six people depending on me, twenty-seven of them willing to die for me. Their belief in me was a force, but instead of feeling uplifted and supported, it pulled me down. They all believed in me in a way that I could never hold, would never understand.