Conduit Series: Illustration and an excerpt: Zaya

Zaya Gage. Awry. The Conduit. Illustration by Nicole Deal.

I’m staring. Going from coldly enraged to numb …

Because the gun I expected. It’s a lightweight, untraceable piece I slipped into the room myself ages ago.

But … Zaya Gage — a slightly older version of Zaya, and looking like death warmed over — is sitting on a motel bed in Outcast territory.

Alive.

And glaring fucking daggers at me.

Glaring at me as if she doesn’t know me at all.

As if she’s seriously considering shooting me.

The numbness holding me in place cracks, splintering like a skiff of ice over a dark well of vicious despair.

Her eyes, vibrant and utterly beguiling, are the wrong color.

Bright, soul-fucking-searing violet.

Not the warm, deep purplish-blue I gazed into summer after summer. Not the deadened, darkened purple that stared up into the storm-blackened sky, unseeing. The eyes that still haunt my nightmares, for almost thirteen years now.

My Zaya would be a month away from her thirtieth birthday. This woman, with her slight frame, her dusky pink lips, and her cheekbones and collarbone looking like carved white stone or the age-bleached fucking bones of some prehistoric creature, is too young.

– Awry (conduit 1), Chapter Four, Rath