Xander shut his eyes and wiped the blood from an injury at his temple. The nanites in his system were healing his wounds already. In another hour, he’d be completely recovered. “Are you going to challenge me or not?” When she didn’t answer, he just shook his head and took off his scythe necklace. “Then why did you even leave home?”

Home? Where was home? It wasn’t back at the palace on Macella, where she had left the gerulae to their task of dragging her victims’ corpses out of the training facility. Not back at the academy on Myndalia, either; nightmares forced her to recall every brutal session Mistress Heraia offered there. Neither of those places were safe. Nowhere in the galaxy was safe for her.

Discordia didn’t have a home.

She gritted her teeth. Stop it. “I left because my tracker indicated Urion was coming here,” she said a touch too sharply. “And you told me you’d be here.”

“So, you executed him to save me.”

A denial was on her lips. Save? She didn’t save people. She was the God of Death’s servant. She did not give life. “Did you want to lose to Urion?” she asked him.

Her brother went quiet. Some emotion worked through his features—a strange thing to witness that indecision. Survival felt like such a prominent aspect of their training that Discordia had mistaken it for intrinsicness. Something coded into their DNA.

“No,” he said softly. His eyes met hers. “I want you to be the one to kill me.”

Discordia did not expect such a statement to weigh so heavily on her. But it did. It hurt. Why did it hurt? Why did she care? “Another time, then,” she said, taking off her own scythe necklace. “But don’t get comfortable. You’ll be next on my list.”

Discordia ignored Xander’s smile and settled next to him. Together, they said last rites over the body of their dead brother.

—

Xander was having a nightmare.

It had been careless of Discordia to accept his invitation to rest before taking her bullet craft back—but it had been even more reckless for him to fall asleep with her sharing his tent. She had set up her cot several feet away, and she kept her back pressed to the trunk he’d used for their dinner table. Carelessness was one thing; trust was fatal.

But Discordia had been weary after killing Urion. She had wanted to sit and rest.

Most of all, she didn’t want to be alone. These days, she had thought too often of the freedom on Sergeant Gaius’s face when he died.

Stop thinking about him. Rest.

When she shut her eyes, Xander gave another rough shout. He had tossed and turned for the last hour, his prefect’s name uttered in some pleading litany. No, no, no.