Nine Moons in a River of Stars: Phase One (Marrow Book 1) by Xen

Author:Xen [Xen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-01-29T18:30:00+00:00

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IT WAS HAPPENING AGAIN.

Sho pressed his hands to the window; to cold glass that felt like it froze to his wet palms.

He might not be able to see, everything black and strange with faint tints of red from light filtering through the flesh of his eyelids, but he could feel—and what he could feel was that Naoki was falling away from him again, as if Naoki gave off his own radiant warmth.

And that warmth plummeted deep, sinking away, dropping below the surface of a darkness even deeper than the sea that tried to swallow him all those years ago.

If everything, for Sho, was shadow…

Then Naoki was a fading light, flowing away from him like a shooting star.

Sho thrust himself against the window, beating at it with his dripping fists, then scrabbled for the edge of the pane. He found it by touch, tracing smooth cool glass down to the ribbed, rubbery bottom, then digging his fingers in and lifting.

Everything was too loud:

The grating squeal of the window dragging upward, fighting tracks turned gritty with accumulated dirt.

The scrape of Sho’s fingertips gouging against the rubber.

The whistling of Naoki’s body falling through the air, his breaths, his soft startled sound that was almost comically mild, gently worried instead of the sheer scream of terror it should be.

Sho’s father in the hallway, his toneless, gruff voice drifting through the door, asking “Sho? What’s going on in there?”

Even the feeling of the cold air rushing through the open window to slap him in the face was loud; the touch and taste of November sea-brine air and the scent of something like bitter honey on the air, strange and new. They all screamed against his senses, as if the volume had been turned up on every perception his brain could possibly process.

But loudest still was the flump he knew, even without sight, was the sound of a body striking the earth.

“Sho?” his father called again, followed by a rattle—and Sho felt it like someone had clattered his vertebrae together, jittering with the shaking of the door against the frame and the twisting of the locked latch.

Sho ignored his father and thrust himself against the windowsill, reaching out.

“Nao!” he hissed, and listened hard, so hard, his heart twisting with the gravity pulling at him; the gravity of fear, ready to drag him over the edge and send him plummeting down to touch and feel and grope and search until he found Naoki, saw for himself with his own questing fingers that Nao was whole.

And he inhaled a sharp, acid breath as a low groan rose from below.

“I’m fine,” Naoki murmured, but the edge of pain in his voice was red to Sho’s straining ears. “Just a little bruised.”

Rustle of grass, of clothing. Sigh of breath.

Sho clung to the windowsill, leaning out harder, even though his body shook and hurt and he could hardly hold himself up; even though everything was slippery, and vertigo and darkness made it hard for him to tell up from down.

“Nao—”

“Go back in,” Naoki whispered.

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