I stare at Xenith while he scribbles on some paper in black ink. Our project is to outline the movement of Raven’s Flesh. Each group has a different aspect of history to explore. From life before to destruction to the disease and the Preservation to the Compounds. We have the progression of the disease.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Xenith asks.
“Like what?”
“Like I’m going to break.”
“Your mom just died-”
“It’s been two months. I’m fine.”
“You can talk to me, Xenith. I’m your friend.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I always have been.”
“Neely, everyone you know tells you to stay away from me. Maybe you should. Maybe I’m dangerous.” “Please.” I roll my eyes. By “everyone” he means Thorne, and that’s because they don’t like each other. Though his closeness is odd. I can smell him, mint and musk all rolled together. I’ve never noticed it before.
“So, Raven’s Flesh…” Xenith pulls away. He slaps a picture of the sun on the map we’re making. The sun represents the heat of the fever. “It manifested in humans like a common cold-sniffles, coughs, warm temperatures, fatigue, nausea-and within hours, the skin started to change.”
I write as he speaks, listing each of the symptoms out on the page. “Seems like a horrible thing,” I say. Xenith only huffs. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You don’t think it’s horrible?”
He avoids my question. “Then they found a cure, the Solution.” He picks up a plus-sign picture. “Which changed those with the Raven’s Flesh to become fleshcraving hunters. Book says the whole thing was an unexplainable accident.”
“Xenith-”
He huffs. “Can we just do our project?”
“No,” I say. I reach out my hand to cover his. “What’s going on?”
He pauses, looks at my hand. “Maybe I don’t believe what everyone tells me to believe.”
I jerk my hand away and cross my arms over my chest. “Like I do?”
“Yes, just like that,” he says. He leans into me. “Maybe I care about the truth.”
“This is the truth.”
We stare at each other. For years, I’ve defended Xenith. Partly because I saw how lonely he was, how sad. Even more because of this side of him-this piece that questions everything. It’s only grown since his mom died, like somehow her death rooted him in the certainty that everything else isn’t what it seems.
“Everything okay here?” A Trooper stops by us, staring at the papers spread across the table.
Xenith doesn’t look away from me. “It is. We’re just having a little debate about the best way to do this.” He looks up at the Trooper. “Red or blue paint?”
The Trooper nods and walks away without a response. I take a breath and stare blankly at the project.
“You should be careful what you say. It could get you into trouble.”
“Trouble’s in my blood,” Xenith says.
“What’s going on with you two?” Thorne asks. Xenith nods toward him and leaves me at the gravel corner of the courtyard.
“He’s just a friend, Thorne,” I say. The words taste a little bitter around Thorne. He’ll never get it.
We take a couple steps. “I don’t like the way he looks at you.”
I move to stand in front of Thorne so that he has to look at me. “How’s that?”
“Like he knows your secret,” Thorne says. He frowns. “You haven’t told him about us, have you?”
We start walking again, rocks crunching under our feet. We made a deal that we’d keep our connection a secret. I haven’t broken it yet, and I don’t plan to. “I wouldn’t.”
Thorne nods, and we walk down the road in silence.
DEADLINE: 18D, 13H, 52M
SOMEWHERE IN THE OLD WORLD
WE’RE STILL ON THE ROAD, desert and sun all around us. The sound of Thorne’s laugh drifts back to me. I keep my head down. I don’t want to be the reason he stops.
“No way that happened,” Thorne says, amusement flickering in his voice.
“I swear to you it did. Hung right there on the rope, britches clear down to his neck,” Len says.
His chuckle fills me with warmth and something that’s too close to hope for comfort. I lean up closer to the seat so I can hear it better. It’s the quiet kind that keeps coming softly when you want to stop, but you can’t yet because the memory of it continues to play on.
“Yer awake,” Len says, smiling. Thorne turns to look at me, and his smile fades, taking away whatever hope was forming within me. When did I become the person who makes him frown? Why is he so mad at me? I say hi lamely. Len chuckles at it; Thorne just glances away.
“Perfect timin’, too. We gotta stop,” Len says. “We’ve got a couple more hours. Get out and stretch them legs.”
Thorne opens his door and jumps down. He doesn’t hold the door open for me. I try to reach him through our connection, but there’s nothing. I just wish he would yell at me and get it over with. I push my way out and stumble when my feet are solidly on the ground. Thorne’s back is to me, but I feel his irritation come through our connection in short snaps of tingling.
“What? What did I do?” I ask. My voice is a little louder than I intend.
He shakes his head at me. “If you have to ask, then nothing. Never mind. You did absolutely nothing.”
“Thorne Bishop!” I yell, stalking after him across the dirt. “What the hell does that mean? Tell me something here.”
He turns back around, and I wish he hadn’t. The look he has is so unfamiliar and cold that it makes me hurt in every cell of my being.
“What did you do?” Thorne says back. He’s yelling without raising his voice, and it’s the same tone Sara used when we were children. It’s worse than screaming. I can handle screaming. I can’t handle pain and disappointment. Not from him. “What happened with Xenith?” he asks.
There’s a lump in my throat that I can’t swallow away, as much as I try.
“I know something happened.” His voice is a little lower than before. More pained. He looks at me, waiting. “Why do you keep calling out his name in your sleep?” he asks, raising his voice.
I blank. “I didn’t know I was.”
“Every time you close your eyes, it’s like he’s here. Last night you called for him, and I came, and you kissed me, Neely. You kissed me thinking I was him, and I felt how much you…” He pauses, looks away from me. He doesn’t have to tell me what he felt last night because I remember it. The curiosity of Xenith when I wasn’t connected to Thorne. How much I wondered what it would be like to kiss someone else. “And earlier in the truck, you cried out his name. You aren’t telling me something, and I want to know what it is. We said no more secrets.”
“There’s nothing to tell you, Thorne.”
He shakes his head. “I saw the book, Neely.”
I shake mine back, confused.
Thorne pulls my pack out of my hand and digs through it until he finds whatever he’s looking for. I wait, annoyed at his insistence that there’s something going on. There’s nothing. But then he pulls out the book. It’s a little torn from the travel and I’d even forgotten that I had it, but there it is. I don’t have to look to know the page he’s opened to. I know that page. I know there’s a quote about courage, and what that means, underlined in blue. I can hear the words again as Xenith reads them aloud, as he adds his own weight to them, his own simple meaning that is anything but simple. Especially when paired with what he’d said.
The other days I am selfish.
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a book that he gave to me before I left. You’re making something out of nothing,” I say. My voice cracks, the confidence in my own words gone. It’s not only him I’m lying to. “Then why do you cry out for him, Neely?” “Because when I cried out for you, he was there. Okay?” I say it harsher than I mean to, but there’s no gentle way to say hard
things. He shouldn’t be here anyway, and if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t ask these questions or be hurt by them. Thorne’s face falls, brows crinkled together, and a blast of heat flows through me from his anger, and then becomes a weight in my stomach. I push through it. “Because I drowned, Thorne, and it haunted me. I may not have really died, but it was real. I had nightmares about it for days, and when I cried out for you, he was there. Not you.”
His face is torn. He wants to comfort me, but he’s angry. That’s what I feel the most-the heat of his anger inside me. He wants to hold me, and he wants to run.
I can see the battle, feel it inside him as strongly as I feel my own. His frustration, the longing to hold me close. It’s overwhelming, trying to balance this, trying to guess which side will win.
“And whose fault is that?”
Anger wins.
Thorne walks away, leaving me standing there. An ache forms in my head and my stomach. It clouds around me and pulls at my nerves. Len looks on as if he didn’t see the whole thing.
DEADLINE: 18D, 12H, 7M
SOMEWHERE IN THE DESERT
NEITHER OF US HAVE SPOKEN for the last hour, so the music is back on. Thorne’s still angry with me-angry and frustrated and worried. It’s a tornado of emotions, strong enough to destroy everyone and everything in its path. And it lives inside of us both.
Thorne won’t look at me.
There’s no way this is just about me saying Xenith’s name in my sleep or me kissing him thinking it was Xenith. It’s that I wondered, that I felt whatever curiosity about Xenith I was feeling. I don’t know how to explain that to him. Me wanting out of our branding was always just me, never Thorne, and he won’t understand it. Especially when it comes to Xenith. If this is Thorne’s reaction to only this part of the truth, what will he do when he finds out about the deal I made with Xenith? The trade of my life for Thorne’s? And that I don’t even know exactly what that means. Nausea rises in my stomach.
I’ve made a mess out of this.
“Did I tell you the story of Lulu?” Len asks. He flicks off the music. Neither of us responds. “Lulu was the girl I loved more than anything in the world. I met her before I decided I wanted to start talking. The other kids made fun of me, but Lulu didn’t. She said I had nothing to say, that was all. She was always my friend, even when no one else was.”
Len laughs to himself. “When we were older, I went up to Lulu and asked her out. She had a boyfriend- everyone knew that-so she said no. I asked her out every day for a month. Finally she said to me, ‘Why do you keep asking me out when I keep saying no?’ Do you know what I said to her?”
We’re both still silent. His story isn’t helping much.
“I said to her, ‘I figure now that I can talk, I should say everything I want to say. You can’t leave things unsaid in case you never get the chance to say them. So, Lulu, I think you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met, and you’re kind and smart and everything I’ll ever want. I love you, Lulu Demiss. Won’t you please go out with me?’”
Len stops talking. I wait for him to continue but he doesn’t, and we sit in silence for a few minutes before he reaches for the radio.
“What happened?” I ask.
Len looks back at me in the rearview mirror. He glances to his right at Thorne. “She died. The boyfriend of hers got them both snatched up by the Cleaners.”
The silence returns, thick and tight. I have that lump in my throat that prevents the words from coming out of my mouth like they should. Thorne sighs.
“That’s a sad story, Len,” Thorne says.
Len nods his head. “It is. But she died knowing I loved her-and I lived knowing she knew it. Ever since then, I make sure things don’t get left unsaid. If you’ve got something to say, it’s best to just say it. You never know when it’s all gonna be gone.”
Thorne glances back at me through the side window, and my heart races.
18 MONTHS BEFORE ESCAPE
MY HEART RACES WHEN THORNE calls my name. I turn around with a smile and hold out my hand, and he moves toward me, waves lapping over our feet. I look up. The sky is lit with small, golden flecks shimmering above us. The world is so big, so much more than the Compound. People in the Old World used to go up to the stars, before the end of it. What was it like up there, swimming between stars?
“What are you doing out here?” Thorne asks, coming up behind me.
“It’s like they’re dancing,” I say, pointing to places where a cluster of stars twinkle.
He nods, and I can’t help smiling. We’re both still, staring up at the sky. It’s peaceful, just the two of us with his hand in mine. Everything around us is moving-his heart, my heart, the waves, the wind. Was it only six months ago when we first kissed? It feels like he’s been part of me forever.
Thorne pulls me close, so close that our bodies are touching and electricity practically buzzes between us. He wraps an arm around my waist and starts swaying with me.
“What are you doing?”
“Dancing,” he says. He presses our bodies closer together. We move, slowly, in tune with the waves, and he presses a warm kiss against my forehead. His breath lingers over me as he hums along with the waves and moves us around the beach. For the first time in my life, it’s just me and Thorne. I already can’t imagine it any other way. Here on the beach, the one place where the Elders don’t have eyes, with my head on his chest, I’m complete. He is, too. I can feel it.
“I love you,” I say.
As soon as the words come out, he freezes. I meant it, but I probably shouldn’t have said it. He drops his arm from my waist. God, he doesn’t feel the same way. I focus my attention on blocking my emotions out as I turn away from him. I shouldn’t have said that. I ruined everything.
“Don’t,” he says, reaching out for my arm. “Don’t block me out, Neely.”
I can’t handle the look of worry in his eyes, but the branding burns under my skin. I shake my head so the tears won’t fall. It takes all my energy to keep my emotions from flowing out to him. He pulls me closer and cups my face in his hands.
“I love you, too, Neely.”
There’s not a jolt through my body, so I know he’s not lying. He does love me, even if we’ve never said it before. I shake my head anyway. “You don’t-you don’t have to say that just because I did.”
Thorne kisses my lips gently, and I feel my worry slip away. “I didn’t. I love you. I think I’ve always loved you. I’m sorry. I was shocked-I always thought I would be the one to say it first.” He smiles at me as a tear falls down my cheek. “I thought I would be the one wallowing in wait.”
“Why?”
“You don’t like to let people in. Even me.”
“You know every part of me, Thorne. I don’t know if I could keep you out, even if I wanted to. I love you,” I say again, braver this time. It’s freeing, more freeing than I imagined.
“I love you,” he says back.
His lips meet mine, more sure, more passionate than I think they ever have been. My heart is pounding, and all of my emotions are flowing into him. All of his are part of me, and I know he’s real and true. That we are real.
Somehow we end up on the ground, and everything is a blur except lips and fingers and goosebumps. The sand seeps under my clothes, into my pores. My heart is racing. His body is on mine, and he can’t be close enough. His fingertips wander across the flesh of my stomach, and I gasp. He pauses, but I kiss him harder.
I don’t need the stars. So many feelings are pounding, pounding, pounding, pulling between us, leaving me restless.
DEADLINE: 18D, 8H, 1M
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
OUR ARRIVAL IN PHOENIX leaves me restless. It’s quiet, abandoned, and dark as far as I can see. But I know this is the place Xenith wanted me to stop. He said I would know it, and I’d know this anywhere.
“You sure you want me to drop you off here? I can take you further, near a camp,” Len says.
I shake my head and look out t
he small backseat window. Len gives a disapproving huff and puts the truck in park, watches us as we maneuver out. It’s a little tricky since my legs are shaky from not moving all day, and Thorne, now that I see him again in the late afternoon light, looks paler than I remember. More tired. Thorne shakes Len’s hand. Complete stillness surrounds us.
“Be careful out here, especially with lights. Don’t want any Snatchers to come for you,” Len says, his eyes locked on mine, too wise for my good. I don’t ask what a Snatcher is. There are some things I don’t need to know anymore. “I hope you make it to wherever it is you’re going.”
He doesn’t wait for us to respond. We both watch the truck until it disappears and leaves us standing in the stillness.
Thorne follows me, and there is no sound, not even of animals or crickets. It seems as if even the stars have decided to hide from us, since there don’t seem to be any in the sky.
A gravel path leads us to a large building with no fences, not anymore. There’s nothing here that should make this place seem like anything, but even in the starless, gloomy night, it’s familiar. I tap into the connection and find Thorne feels the same way- there’s a peacefulness here. The gravel levels out into a large circle. Decayed, dismantled wood rests in various spots on the ground. In the center, the building sits. It’s the largest one here, just like it is at home.
This Compound is exactly the same as ours. I lead us to the center of the circle, just to the right of the building, and look out. Dark blotches of shadow spread around us in the near distance. If I tried, I’d be able to see them as they are in my memory of our Compound- perfect and uniform in shape, size, and spacing. Lined with white fences, exactly fourteen feet from the front door. Four porch steps. Two windows on each wall. Slanted roofs. But here, even in the darkness, I can tell they aren’t perfect.
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