Ocean's Echo (The Resolution Universe)

by Everina Maxwell

Every other thought drained out of his head—they were dull anyway; with a sudden jolt, he recognized them as things he’d thought thousands of times before. How boring to have the same thoughts about how you were a stain on the universe for the thousandth time. He was tired of it. Tennal was sick of being sick of himself.

“You could have tried. Surit would have tried. Zin, with all her lawyer stuff, is trying right now.” But Surit and Zin weren’t the kind of personalities that made it into power, were they? To be in power, you needed to be a weasel.

He noticed, as if for the first time, the trees that crept along the outer walls were heavy with rose-pink blossoms—a triumphant shout of color, a jubilant scent in the air. People crossed the paths below. Flyers hovered low against the warm Exana sky. Tennal didn’t know what had changed that he couldn’t stop noticing things, but he drank in each movement, each touch of the breeze on his skin, each facet of light like the morning had turned him into a mirror, reflecting everything. He told himself it was just a reaction to being back on the planet. He told himself it couldn’t last, and that was true, but for once the thought didn’t hurt. There would be bad times again. There would be times so dull and gray that he would claw at the walls of his own head to get out of them. But they would end—he had proof they would end—and it would be in the same way as this, with a raging blaze of color, with a defiant breath of air, with the restless spurring of his body onward into the city and the day.

On this quiet afternoon, under this patchwork of shade, on this flawed, fractious planet where he was born, Tennal’s own head finally felt like home.