For revenge. The old thought pushes itself forward out of habit, but it sounds weaker by the second, more like an excuse than a true plan. It’s too hard to summon anger, too hard to remember why I came here and why I should want to ruin this boy’s life when really, really I just want to touch him.

I shift forward, letting the blankets drop to my stomach. When my fingertips brush the space between his shoulder blades, he freezes. For a few moments, neither of us speaks. I can hear my heart thrumming faster and faster, the blood rushing through my ears, pulsing at my fingertips in the places they skim the thin cotton of his shirt, just once, lightly, before I retract my hand again.

“What are you doing?” I ask him, even though he’s so obviously reading.

Very slowly, he flips another page. “Practicing gymnastics,” he says, his voice sarcastic as usual, but hoarser.

I lie back on the bed, my head angled toward him. “Can you read the book out loud to me?”

“What, like a bedtime story?”

“It might help me fall asleep,” I say, kicking my feet out to get comfortable. “I’d always doze off in class the second the teacher started reading something.”

His laugh is quiet enough to go unnoticed, if not for the shake of his shoulders. “All right …” He clears his throat. “As the train disappeared into the mist, he vowed he would never allow himself to feel any happiness again. Look what had happened to Caiyun, to Zhuji, before the fall, to him. Joy had made him mindless, complacent, disgustingly weak; it had shaken loose his heart from his bones and sold him the illusion that there could be something else for him in this life. There was nothing else. Not anymore. He shoved the blood-splattered letter deep into his coat pocket. The stars looked terribly brittle that night …”

My eyelids fall shut. I don’t pay attention to the story, only to the cadence of his voice filling the room. He could be reading poetry, a classic, a eulogy. If he’s the one saying it, anything could sound lovely. Nestled in the warmth of the blankets, with my eyes still shut, I tell him, “You have a nice voice.”

He pauses. “You must be tired.”

“What?”

“When you’re tired,” he says, “you forget to hate me.”

“I forget to hate you a lot of the time,” I whisper. It slips too easily from my tongue, without warning, turned by the darkness into a confession.

He says something else then, but before my mind can latch on to it, sleep drags me down into its depths. The last thing I remember is the sound of his breathing, as soft and calming as the rustle of orange blossoms outside my childhood home.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

We’re being attacked.