"Your eyes. They were slit. Like a lantern behind a door crack." Her voice was calm, but her pulse was visible at her throat, quick. "Whatever you are, whatever's in you, my father's right, you're going to be somebody's weapon. So look at me with them, at least once, so I know I wasn't imagining it."
Slowly, deliberately, the parasites yielded.
The vertical pupils dilated in the dark and drank the lamplight, and the boy looked out through them at the girl, and for one flickering instant, something surfaced. Not the weapon. The boy underneath. The one who had cried for his grandmother on a cabin floor while monsters came through the walls.
Because Elara laughed at that moment, a short helpless laugh at her own daring, and it sounded like someone. Someone from before. A friend from a village with a different name, gone now like everything before the leash.
The flicker died. The flatness returned. He looked away first.
"You weren't imagining it," he said quietly.
