An hour passes before they come. I follow a man in a pale blue uniform to a room on a dead-end hall. A quiet corner. Tucked away. My heart sinks.
“We’ve made her comfortable,” he says softly, and I linger on the sympathy in his eyes. They tell me everything.
I enter slowly, not wanting to wake her if she’s resting. Needing a few more seconds to find words.
Only a soft bar of light glows behind her bed. A bag of liquid drips into a thin tube attached to her hand. A monitor tracks the beats of her heart. All the same things I’ve experienced and seen, but this room is different…detached from the rest. Private.
I settle on a chair near the bed. The weeks aged her. Wiry, gray hair left untouched for too long. Thirsty skin and deep color around her eyes. She is thin and worn to nothing. Tears blur my vision, until I can almost imagine she is well again. The way she ought to be.
I touch her cool, soft hand, wrapping it in mine, because maybe that’s all she needs. Maybe no one has tried to warm her. I peek at her face, but she doesn’t stir.
“Norma,” I whisper, then swallow back a lump. “It’s Hannah.”
Her fingers tighten so slightly, I’m not sure if I only wished it. But then her lips part, and words float out on a breath.
“My girl.”
I close my eyes, pressing my forehead to her arm, my heart dislodged and aching. Fingers stroke my hair…shaky, unsteady touches. I sit up, and she’s watching me through half-open eyes.
“How lovely,” she murmurs.
“I’ve missed you,” I say, and she smiles.
“Don’t worry,” she whispers. “We’ve kept her close.”
My eyebrows draw in. “Kept who, Norma?” But she goes on, shutting her eyes as if speaking and looking are too much to accomplish together.
“He’ll be good to her. They’ll help each other heal.”
Her eyes open again, and she holds my gaze like she knows me. Like she meant all the things she said. But it isn’t me she is seeing.
It is my mother.
I cry, because this means I’ve already lost her.
“Thank you,” I say between gulps and sobs. “Thank you for caring for her when we couldn’t. You saved her.”
Tears slip down Norma’s cheeks, pooling in spots on her pillow. “I am the one who was saved. Thank you for letting me love her.”
Her eyes close again, and this time they stay shut. The beeping of the monitor slows but doesn’t stop. Still there. Still breathing. But she is slipping from my grasp, and I’m not ready.
49
Silence wakes me.
It hits me like a jolt, and I jerk upright, searching for the steady rhythm of the monitor. But it’s been turned off.
A hand touches my back.
Words bounce off my ears, not entering, not registering.
Norma looks so peaceful.
50
A clock suspended from the hallway ceiling says 2:00am. Takeshi sent a man to guide me to Cash’s new room. I follow his steps in silence, and he doesn’t try to talk. I’ve lost all sensation. All emotion. Sadness, like dirty valley air, expands through my body.
The new room is on a different floor. From the moment we step into the hall, I sense a change from before. Less critical. Less worry. I feel a flicker of hope.
Cash is asleep when I arrive. He rests on his back with a hand over his chest, only moving when he breathes. The top half of his new bed is inclined, and the bottom half rises midway to support his knees.
I stand in the dark, watching him for a minute. I’ve never seen him sleep before. He was always battling back threats. Standing guard. Protecting. Now he lies almost peacefully.
Almost. His eyebrows are drawn together.
With a soft inhale, he opens his eyes. When his gaze touches me, I shudder. The numbness shatters, and my blood screams with loss.
When does grief fade? Why is it so unrelentingly cruel?
Trembling, I slip off my shoes and climb onto the bed. My head settles on his shoulder, and I lie still, staring at nothing, pressing into the warmth and comfort I find this close to him. Cash wraps his arm around me, tight enough that I feel the tension in his muscles. He may never let me go again.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, pressing a long kiss to my head.
A sob breaks past my lips, and I have to gasp to breathe. I cover my mouth, and my middle caves in, curling my body. I bury my face in his shirt and cry until I fall asleep.
51
The door opens, and so do my eyes. Beside me, Cash sleeps with his head falling the other way, revealing the white feather drawn behind his ear, trailing down his neck. Sunlight filters bright through the window. It must be late in the morning.
A nurse walks softly over, and I extract myself from his arm, lifting a spare blanket that was placed over me sometime in the night. The room is cool compared to the heat he radiates.
Cash stirs.
“Is there a washroom?” I ask the nurse. She smiles and tells me where to go.
I take fresh clothes and spend too long showering. When I return, Cash is gone. Only his crumpled blankets remain on the bed. For the next twenty minutes I sit huddled in a large, purple chair, knees drawn up, wondering how Norma spent her last days. It took too long for them to recover her. Her guards should have contacted someone sooner. An uneasy feeling grows in me. I lay my head on my knees, closing my eyes against a wave of sadness. Tears come, and I squeeze them tighter.
“Hannah.”
His gentle voice draws me out. I raise my head, and when I open my eyes, a few tears slip free.
My lips part, shocked at what I’m seeing. Cash stands at the foot of his bed, leaning into a cane for balance. The room shrinks, pulling in around the concerned look he’s giving me.
I rise from the chair, and I don’t register the steps that lead me to him. I don’t recall the feel of the floor on my bare feet. His soft look guides me over, until I’m in front of him, staring.
“You’re standing,” I whisper. His free hand touches my side, eyes worried.
“I’m standing,” he whispers back, and we both laugh a little. Joy drives through my heart, breaking past all the sadness. Overshadowing my grief. I take a small step back and glance at his legs.
“Can you walk?”
“Carefully,” he says, distracted. He’s too busy studying me.
I touch his waist, worried that standing might be hurting him. My fingers catch on something through his shirt.
“It’s a brace,” he says, lifting the hem enough to show me a glimpse of black course fabric secured by straps around his stomach and back. He touches his shoulder, allowing a gratified smile. “I can leave if I wear this.”
My fingers trail along the path from his shoulder to his back, where the material covers something thicker. Hard. Shoring up his spine. He keeps his gaze on me.
“Are you in pain?”
“A little,” he murmurs. My eyebrows pull in.
“Where will you go?”
It takes him a moment to respond. Apprehension flashes across his face.
“We’ve been offered rooms at the palace. For as long as we need. I’ll go,” he says, “and, if you’d like, you can come…when you’re ready.”
His confidence wavers. Unspoken words drift between us, waiting.
“I’m not mad,” I say gently, and I know by the dip of his head that he understands what I mean. “I’m glad I went. I needed to see things…to say things.”
His jaw tightens. “I put you in danger.”
I grab his hand. “Cash, I’m fine. If you want my forgiveness, you have it.”
I forgive you. I said it to him on the roof weeks ago, the night he showed me the stars. Our time in the valley together feels like years between us. All our experiences push through to the surface, adding weight to this look. This long-stretching pause.
His expression doesn’t lift. He looks at me with such regret, and it hurts to see it. His mouth opens like he wants to say something,
but in the end his shoulders sag.
I press a hand to his heart. Not the first time. Not the last.
“Why can’t you see it?” I whisper. “You’ve done enough.”
Heavy silence lingers.
“I thought I was saving her. Hiding her.” The words fall out broken, defeated. “They were ambushed. All her guards were killed. She spent the last week hiding in a cellar alone.”
His head falls forward, and tears track down his cheeks. “I’m sorry.”
I don’t look away from him, not even when my heart breaks, and I feel it fragmenting, falling in pieces. Piling at my feet. At his. He didn’t mean for this to happen. For any of it. Beneath my palm, his heart is pounding.
“Cash.” He doesn’t look up. Just tightens his lips. I wish I was better at saying things. “You did save her. You saved her from the attack on your house. And she survived long enough to die in a peaceful place.” My throat aches. “Because you saved her, I got to say goodbye. I’ve never—I never get to say goodbye.”
His eyes lift to mine, and it feels like relief. A deep breath.
“Thank you,” I say, dropping my hand, locking my fingers in his. “For everything you’ve done.”
52
“Hannah!”
Emily runs onto the roof as the helicopter lifts to the air again. She shields her eyes, pausing to watch it with me.
“Is that Cash?” she asks, her urgency momentarily forgotten. I hold his gaze until he’s out of sight. When I turn to Emily, her face is lit up with amusement.
“What?”
She exaggerates a shrug. “Nothing. It’s just…kinda sweet. The way he can’t take his eyes off you.”
I blush so deeply I feel it on my ears. She laughs.
We make our way inside, and while we wait for the elevators, Emily can’t stop moving. She bounces on her toes, pressing the down arrow half a dozen times.
I give her a look. “What’s going on?”
She takes my hands in a rush of excitement. “I was going to call you, but then I wanted to make sure before I said anything.”
My pulse quickens. “What’s happened?”
The elevator opens, and Emily drags me in. She presses a button over and over until the doors close.
She clasps her hands over her chest, grinning. “It’s working.”
My heart flips. “I don’t understand.”
“They tried different things. Antibiotics. Antiviral. But whatever the source of the illness was, it wouldn’t respond to anything.”
She takes my shoulders, leaning close. “They increased vitamin and mineral intake.” She laughs like it’s crazy. “That’s it! But you all are so malnourished and deficient, that’s all your bodies needed to be able to fight off the poison!”
I shake my head, eyes wide. “Vitamins and minerals?”
Emily steps back and takes a deep breath. Slowly she explains. “Vitamins are essential nutrients our bodies need to function properly. To fight off illness and maintain balance.”
The elevator opens on the bottom floor, and she continues as we walk, using her hands for emphasis. “In the valley, your diet wasn’t supplying the essential nutrients your body needed. So, when you got sick, it hit hard, didn’t it? People probably died from simple colds gone wrong. They pushed high doses of vitamins through IVs, directly into their blood. We’re already seeing significant improvements. And we’re giving it to everyone. Even those who didn’t show symptoms. In fact, you should get a dose as well.”
We stop in the center of the lobby, and I look out over all the faces. Instead of anxiety and fear, I see relief. Joy. Hope flutters in my heart like wings.
“How many died?” I ask, turning back to Emily. “How many died before they figured it out?”
“None.”
I freeze. “No deaths?”
Her head shakes, eyes twinkling. “No deaths. Not one.”
Five seconds pass just gaping. Processing.
A weight lifts from my chest, and I didn’t know I was being crushed until it was gone. I think of the Councilman’s grin, his confidence in the plan they’d laid to destroy us.
“They lost—”
I sense eyes on me. I glance left and find a woman staring, watching with awe. I smile at her, and she nods shyly, turning back to her path.
“They love you,” Emily murmurs. My gaze drops to the floor.
“The feeling is mutual.” My heart swells, unable to contain all the things I’m feeling.
Emily smiles. “Shall we go see a certain little boy in need of mothering?”
We follow the sidewalk across the lawn, past children playing in the grass and grown-ups resting on benches. A separate wing of the sick ward has been transformed into a place of recovery. Children play quietly on blankets, while others watch colorful images on a screen. They are still tired, still dark-eyed and sunken. But I don’t see pain or distress.
Off to the side, a woman sits with three toddlers on a rug, cheering as they press shapes into holes on a plastic block. Ben is one of them. I break into a grin.
“I checked on Ben a couple times while you were gone,” Emily says. “He responded to the vitamin infusions very well.”
As I approach the blanket, the woman looks up. I recognize her as the nurse who was caring for Ben the evening I left. She leans toward Ben and whispers something. Only when I get closer do I understand what she’s saying.
Mama
My chest squeezes. Am I allowed to take that name? Is it wrong to steal another woman’s title so soon? Such a sacred role? This woman doesn’t know the details of our relationship. Perhaps she misunderstood.
I lower to my knees beside Ben, attracting his gaze. His face lights up, and he drops the shape in his hand so he can reach for me. I lift him onto my lap and kiss his soft hair. If I think too long, I can still recall the moment his father fell, still hear the screams echoing off the high, brick buildings. A shiver runs through me, remembering the cold, wet wind and the fear of not knowing where we were running.
“Look at you,” I murmur. “You’re getting so big.”
“It’s good to see a family reconnected,” the nurse says. “So many of these children have no parents left to find them.”
I feel Emily’s knowing gaze, but I don’t acknowledge it.
“What will happen to them?” I ask.
The nurse sighs, looking out across the room. “In time, we hope they’ll be adopted into good families.”
Ben crawls from my lap, reaching again for the toys. I lie on my belly and laugh when he rubs his hand over my hair, pushing strands into my face.
I wonder what life might have been like for me if orphaned children in the valley had been allowed new families. The thought stirs up memories of Norma and Albert, caring for me in the last minutes before curfew each night. They filled in the gaps where my life was lacking, giving me the last of their strength before bed.
That was enough, I think.
Even with all the sleepless nights aching for my parents. The hours replaying their deaths on an endless cycle. Long walks to work under the threat of death. Dead Outcasts and begging, yellowed eyes.
I wouldn’t trade my pain for anything. This path I’ve walked has been my making, and if I’d not suffered through it, the things I cherish now may never have come to me.
SPRING
53
In the South, they bury their dead, placing the bodies in cushion-lined boxes and lowering them beneath the earth. A stone is placed for remembering. I slide my fingers along the grooves of her name.
Norma. That is all I knew. Only Norma.
Beneath her name, they allowed one line, one string of words to best summarize who she was. I asked Cash what he wanted, but he gifted the decision to me.
It was too difficult to choose one line to fully express what she’d done. How do I gather all the moments…all the minutes she spent saving me from despair and hate? All the tears she shed, knowing she couldn’t stop my pain, couldn’t reach
in far enough to remove it? Her love had limits, and I know that hurt.
I sit on the fresh, green grass, smoothing my palm over the words.
Thank you.
Other graves are more eloquent, with well thought-out expressions of love. To anyone else, perhaps my choice falls short. But I read the words, and my heart warms. My mind replays countless memories. And in all of them, she is saving me.
The cemetery is attached to a large park, with a lake at the center and walking paths lined with flowers. I find my way to where several of our group learn to fish. Sunlight sparkles over the rippling blue water, and a warm breeze rustles low hanging branches.
Aspen lifts a rope holding three fish. Water drips down her bare arm.
“I will never starve again,” she says proudly.
I sit next to her, slipping off my shoes. The cool water sends chills up my legs. “As long as you enjoy eating fish.”
Aspen considers my words, staring past me a second. Then she shrugs.
“There’s always a grocery store.”
Our grins grow until we both laugh, still baffled by the idea of shopping for food. For choosing what we eat…and how much.
She returns to fishing, and I lie back, staring up at the wide sky. A new sensation expands like a slow-filling balloon, spreading until I have to breathe some of it out to ease off the intensity. I lose myself in the depth of the sky, in the endless blue stretched above me. Boundless possibilities. No limits.
I think of my father. Though he never saw it, he always believed it was there.
“I still think about it sometimes,” Aspen says quietly. I roll my head on the grass to see her but catch the sun’s rays instead. “How I let Jace convince me.”
Her fingers roam over the cut on her neck. The reminder she will live with forever.
“It was a confusing time,” I say, touching her arm to make her stop picking at the scar. The old Councilman’s words creep into my thoughts.
Some wounds never heal. Never stop bleeding.
The Slave Series Page 57
