She was uneasily certain that had he demanded that she kill herself, she’d be bleeding before she’d fully processed the command. Regardless, her palm was against his palm before she’d had time to form intention. Or anxiety. In a disturbing way, obedience felt as natural as breathing.

“You have questions.”

She didn’t, but the minute she heard the words, she did. “Why were you here? Why were you trapped? How could Azoria—how could anyone—imprison you?”

“We do not die as you die. We do not live as you live. You have seen my blood,” he added, “before you injured me here. It was not the only blood I shed, not the only blood required to build what we desired to build. We are purpose, Kaylin.”

She hadn’t given him her name, but wasn’t surprised to hear it. She had healed him, after all.

“My purpose was to die.”

29

Kaylin examined him as a healer, looking for death. She couldn’t see it. The connection between them—two palms—didn’t imply death. She’d touched corpses before, while watching Red in the morgue. This was nothing like that.

“No. I told you, death for us, death for you, it is very different. You are so slight, all of you—even the one whose vestigial name you seek. I gave what I was meant to give.”

She felt no resentment in this being. No anger. No sense that his life was a universal injustice. No Why me?

“Are you dead now?”

“No. No, Chosen. I am not, and I find it strange. I had purpose. I had meaning. I did what I was meant to do. Without purpose, what point life? I am one of the youngest of my kind,” he added. “And more attuned to the living because of it. The eldest were not; they could barely see the living, and could not always countenance their import, except in an intellectual way.

“But the youngest could. We were born—and that is not the right word, but it will have to do for now—into a world, into the many worlds, where life dwelled. Those worlds were replete with the idle creations of the elders before us. And we marveled at the mutations of those creations, achieved without further interference. Always, always, the delight of the unexpected, the unpredicted. It was the unpredicted that quickened us; some sought it actively, seeing in change the reason for life at all.

“That was not my purpose. It was not the reason I was born, the reason I became.”

He fell silent. That silence was broken by the warbling of birds.

Kaylin felt...outrage. Outrage that his parents—if they could be called that—had birthed him simply so he could die. She had seen neglected children, children who would have been better off as orphans, and children whose parents treated their entire existence as accessories. This was worse.