The Rebel Assassin

Chapter 38: A Fragile Hope

I flew down the stairs, feet slamming on each step. "Wes! Wes!"

"God, Morane, keep it down—"

I brushed pass Dell without stopping. "Wes!"

He sat at the kitchen table, startled out of his conversation with Joshua. "What?"

"Come with me. Right now."

One look convinced him not to argue. He trailed after me into the hall. Nemia, who had come down on my heels, stood there with her arms around herself. She was wide-eyed and shaken but other than that looked fine, so I squeezed her shoulder and spun to face Wes.

"Jaden's alive."

"What?"

I ran a hand through my hair, yanking overgrown bangs back. Knots caught and tore but I didn't notice. "He's not— Nemia didn't— it wasn't him. Nemia, tell him what you said before— what he looked like."

"The man I killed," she said slowly. "He was probably around Morie's height."

Wes's eyes flicked to me, and I saw that he remembered — Jaden had had a few inches on me, at least. His face made the subtle shift from disbelief to shock.

Nemia kept going. "He had brown hair, longer than chin length, and dark eyes. I don't know how else to describe him, maybe I could try to draw..."

"That's alright, it's enough," I assured her. My heart was fluttering with more hope than I'd had since that night.

Jaden had black hair, cropped short enough that no one could have mistaken it for long black hair, and he had light green eyes.

"You said she had..." Wes whispered.

I shook my head quickly. It was almost impossible to keep my voice low when I wanted to yell and laugh and spin on one foot on the highest place I could reach. Words tumbled out faster than I could control them. "I didn't know. I thought I did, because Jaden was supposed to meet me in the training yards that night, but when I got there there was only blood, and then Nemia said she had killed a man there on the Sage's orders, and Tobias hates Jaden, so it made sense, but it only just came up that the man she killed had brown hair and he didn't look at all like Jaden." I had to catch my breath. My entire body was burning heat and adrenaline.

Wes pressed his hands flat against both walls of the narrow hallway, staring at us. "He's alive."

"He has to be."

"Then why did he disappear?" He sounded panicked, but I thought it was just the fear of us being wrong, of hoping for the best only to find out the worst again.

"I don't know," I admitted. It hurt. Hope and confusion warred in my chest. "Maybe he went underground. He knew someone was following him. Maybe he decided the training yards were too risky and went into hiding. I've been from the Capital to Maenar and back — with a border fort in the middle of that, and Emorial and the Protectorate now. We haven't exactly been easy to find if he wanted to contact us."

"He wouldn't want to contact me," Wes mumbled to the ground. "I left without saying goodbye. I thought that was it, when you said he was gone. That was the last time I saw him, when he told me he was the one who killed my father." He looked up with new determination. "If Jaden is out there, we'll find him. Me and him owe each other a conversation."

His resolve was a relief. I felt jittery and over-energized. Wes and Nemia were two solid weights on either side of me, and I was grateful for their steadiness. "Roman could have a message from him even now. Jaden sent me to see him, it makes sense he'd get in contact with us through him." The idea of having news from Jaden when we got back to Solangia was enough to make me want to leave right now.