Revenant Slaves Chapter 43: Chapter 42: Zain

Read chapter 43 of Revenant Slaves by Zee on NovelPedia.

Chapter 42: Zain Tayyab tried talking to him. His voice was sharp with worry. He said Zain needed rest. That he was in no condition to move. That if he kept this up, he’d have to sedate him. Zain saw him take an injector out of the white case. The essence threads around his knee loosened, then unwound from his knee completely, only to gather instead around his throat and mouth. Zain felt his jaw move and heard the words as they left his mouth. “Back off,” his mouth said. “I need to get somewhere fast. The rebellion itself may depend on it.” Tayyab recoiled as if struck. Zain wanted to recoil too, but his mouth kept going. “Support me. Take me to where the others are gathered. To Maya and the slave, Ash. Hurry! This is of the utmost importance.” And so Tayyab did. Half-carrying, half-dragging him over the broken ground, he obeyed. Fortunately, Tayyab hadn’t had to drag him very far to find Maya’s group. Ash and Maya were both kneeling beside a small, still form. Another team of rebels surrounded the blonde boy Spark. And beside them lay Miru. Ash held one of her hands. Maya held the other. For a moment, Zain forgot about himself entirely. Ash’s face was wet with tears, and even in his grief, he was trying to suppress the sounds tearing their way out of him. His mouth trembled between a wail and disbelief. Blood ran from his lips where he had bitten them too hard, trying to keep himself silent. Zain felt something twist painfully inside him then. He had respected Ash before. He had admired his stubbornness, his defiance, the ugly, desperate will that kept dragging him forward. But this... This hurt to witness. The slave boy was trying to hold himself together while watching a child die in his hands. Zain’s body pointed toward them. Tayyab brought him over to the point where his body had been pointing. Maya looked up first. Confusion crossed her face, then concern. She mouthed a quiet no. The motion was tiny. Barely there. Like she didn’t even want to say it herself. Even if he wanted to obey Maya, he was powerless here. He couldn’t stop if he wanted to. His mouth ordered Tayyab to put him down beside Ash. Tayyab tried to prop him up, but his body folded uselessly and slumped onto the ground. Only one arm and one foot still obeyed whatever force had taken hold of him. Ash looked at him then. Zain had never seen Ash look like that before. Not in the city, not under Kaeler’s spear, not even while bleeding half to death. This was different. Ash looked lost, and behind the grief and the terror, there was a plea in his one remaining eye so bare that it made something inside Zain ache. He did not need words to understand it. Zain did not want to move, but his body rose anyway. His hand stretched toward Miru’s bruised chest and settled there, and the moment it touched her, an impossible cold spread through him. It was not the ordinary chill of exhaustion. It was the kind of cold that made him feel as though his soul was being hollowed out from within. The few threads he had left began snapping one after another like knots fraying on a rotten rope, and each one that broke sent a sharp, tearing pain through his chest. He forced himself to focus through the agony. There, beneath the pain and the panic, he saw it clearly at last: his essence, refined and bright in a way he had never seen before, slipping into Miru’s broken body. It didn’t reinforce her, didn’t wrap around and support the broken parts. It was healing her. Actually healing her. He saw shattered ribs easing up and away from the child’s lung. He saw his essence gather within the punctured lung itself, helping it open again and hold shape. He saw damaged flesh begin to knit, and then the flow went deeper still, brushing her heart and forcing rhythm back into it. Zain’s thoughts reeled. This went against everything he knew of weaving. Weavers strengthened. Wrapped. Reinforced. They did not simply pour essence into another body and restore it from within. Especially not permanentl