A Single Light

by Tosca Lee

  “What I care about is my little girl being locked underground with a murderer.” Sabine’s voice breaks as she says it, her lips trembling. “We came here to be safe!”

  “Why would I kill my own sister?” I ask, incredulous.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sabine says. “Maybe for a bunch of pig samples worth millions of dollars? People kill their own flesh and blood for far less every day!”

  “I find it hard to believe our government would initiate a manhunt without proof of wrongdoing,” Rudy says, shaking his head.

  Sha’Neal stares at him like lobsters just crawled from his ears.

  “The only thing she’s proven is that she had the samples at one point,” Nelise says. “But she can’t prove she’s not a murderer!”

  “Micah,” Chase says. “Open the locked file dated December fourth. You’ll need my thumbprint.”

  I turn and give him a questioning look—what else can there be?

  Micah scrolls for a minute and then moves to the pen and holds the phone to the chain link. Chase presses his thumb to the button, his expression chiseled in stone.

  I’m trying to think what file he could mean. I didn’t even meet Chase until the morning of the fifth. But when I try to catch his eye he refuses to look at me.

  My stomach twists as Micah reads in silence, his expression grim.

  “What is it?” I ask, my voice shrill. “Chase, what’s in the file?”

  Micah walks over. Turns the phone toward me. Studies me as I glance at it.

  It’s a screenshot of a text conversation.

  —Got a job for you.

  —What, who, how much?

  —Wynter Roth, 22, at the attached address in Naperville. 30k.

  I reread the exchange.

  Job?

  How much?

  “. . . been working as a bounty hunter for nearly a year,” Chase says. “I had a guy who sent me jobs.”

  I turn and stare at him, unable to reconcile the Chase I know with who he’s claiming to be.

  Micah swipes to the next screen.

  It’s a photo of a girl in bright red lipstick. It takes me a moment to recognize her.

  Because she is me.

  It’s the photo Magnus took the second time he made me accompany him from the Enclave—that time to a local bar. I recognize the lipstick he put on me himself in the backseat of the car.

  I can’t breathe. My hands are shaking.

  “I know for a fact she didn’t kill her own sister,” Chase says. “That they parted ways after Jackie delivered the samples to Wynter at the apartment over Julie’s garage, where she was staying.”

  Micah swipes to the next photo—and the next, and the next.

  They’re fuzzy, but I’d recognize the woman in the first one anywhere: Jackie. Knocking at the door of the carriage house apartment.

  Me, answering it.

  Jackie, running down the stairs.

  Me, taking the carrier of samples down to the Lexus in the garage attached to the house.

  My knees buckle, the world tilting beneath me.

  I’ve slept next to this man. I trusted him with Truly . . .

  “I told Wynter I’d come from Ohio. But I’d been living the last eight months in Chicago. Which is how I got there so fast and saw the exchange.”

  “You bastard!” Julie spits. She runs at the pen, slamming her hands against it.

  “Well, uh,” Rudy says awkwardly.

  “I couldn’t do it!” Chase says, as Julie pounds on the chain link over and over again, the rattle echoing through the entire lower level. “I couldn’t take her in. I knew something was off from the beginning. And once I found out she was—”

  “Did you kill my sister?” I say in a terrible voice. “Did you kill Jackie?”

  “No,” Chase says, looking at me at last. His face is pale. “I swear to you. I was on you the whole time. The pictures will prove it. I don’t even know where she went.”

  “You liar!” I shriek.

  The shock of Magnus’s picture has given way to the horror of that night. My sister, sick, at my doorstep, carrying a case of samples. Jackie, saying she loved me before she ran down the street the last time I saw her.

  The sound of her heels on the pavement.

  I slump against the pole as my vision closes in, my ears ringing—and then double over and retch.

  “I said it was too bad Noah wasn’t here to corroborate her story,” I hear Micah say. “But now I think it’s possible that he did.”

  “How?” someone asks.

  “The night of Noah’s last message he said our knowledge of the disease will be the best bargaining chip our country has. I thought it a cryptic statement at the time, given that our only ‘knowledge’ was a rising population of infected. But it makes sense if he knew we in fact had specialized information the public was not aware of.”

  I glance up, dully, as he looks straight at me. “I think she’s telling the truth.”

  At that, Chase releases a long breath and sinks down to his knees.

  • • •

  HE TRIES TO talk to me after.

  I scream at him till my voice gives out.

  DAY 90

  * * *

  I refuse to leave my quarters. Spend all day sleeping or coloring in bed with Truly. Step out only long enough to take one or both of us to the bathroom or to bathe Truly.

  Julie tries to get me to eat. Says I need to get up and move.

  But I am, inside, my thoughts racing a hundred miles a minute as I replay every moment of those first days with Chase in my mind, over and over again.

  The first time I saw him on the highway, head banging to the same song playing on my radio. Did he engineer that, too? The grill that fell out of the truck in front of me and blew out the radiator in Julie’s car. Was that driver working with him? The way he grimaced and then agreed to let me ride with him as though against his better judgment. The night he showed me how to make a proper fist.

  The first time he held my hand.

  The way he was so careful around me that I finally told him to quit treating me like I was fragile.

  I had treasured his response. “There’s a big difference between fragile and exquisite,” he’d said, before excusing himself to sleep across the hall.

  Where I joined him.

  I replay it all in stark, painful detail. Forward, backward. Frame by frame.

  Again and again.

  None of it was real. But it felt like it. Still does when I go back to that moment.

  Of course it does. For as much as I confessed in Penitence to wanting to kiss boys, I’d never had a boyfriend. Never been alone with a man other than Magnus, let alone slept next to one.

  Too naïve to see he was playing me.

  I’d been the perfect target.

  DAY 93

  * * *

  “Wynter,” Julie says when she comes to take Truly for lunch. “You have to eat.”

  I don’t answer. I’m in the middle of a snowy Nebraska road the night Chase pulled over to rescue Buddy. Seeing all over again the way he cradled the shivering puppy inside his jacket, fingers scratching those floppy ears.

  Remembering how I’d sobbed in the car, afraid for my sister—sick, alone, and on the run. The way he’d laid Buddy in my arms as though knowing I needed him.

  I can’t reconcile it. Start the moment over again, more slowly.

  Julie sighs and brushes the hair from my eyes. “If you don’t, you’re going to have to try a new medication. So you need to get up, comb your hair, and come down to the dining hall. Okay?”

  I nod.

  “We’ll be downstairs waiting for you.”

  I nod. Promise to go.

  But obsessing is exhausting and I fall asleep instead.

  • • •

  WHEN I OPEN my eyes, I know something’s changed in the room. It isn’t the light, which is on dim, or the feel of the bed, or my limbs, heavy with sleep on top of it.

  “Truly?” I murmu
r, arm sweeping across the other side of the bed. It’s empty.

  I turn over in a panic.

  And find myself staring up at Chase.

  He lifts his palms the way you do with wild animals, his eyes darting from my face to my stringy hair and dirty T-shirt.

  I scrabble out of bed. “What are you doing here? Get out!”

  He looks different. The beard on his cheeks unkempt. New bags beneath his eyes.

  “Trust me, I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t some last resort,” he says. “Julie and Rima are worried about you. I am, too. And you’re scaring Truly.”

  “Don’t talk to me about trust,” I say. “Don’t say ‘trust me’ to me ever again.”

  “Wynter, please just listen to me,” he says, backing up.

  “Oh, I’ve listened plenty. And trust me when I say there’s nothing more from you I want to hear.”

  But there is.

  I want him to say this was a ploy to protect me from the others. But he can’t, because he has that picture of me in the lipstick taken by Magnus himself. Which means Chase could only have gotten it from whoever hired him on Magnus’s behalf.

  I want him to say he’ll make it right.

  But he can’t.

  In which case I just want this to stop hurting.

  “How was I supposed to tell you?” he says. “You didn’t trust me—or any man, for that matter—from the beginning.”

  “So it’s my fault?” I say, incredulous. “You’re right. It is. I trusted you. And look what a mistake that was.”

  “I got captured trying to get you to Colorado! If that isn’t trustworthy, what is?”

  “How do I know those people weren’t your buddies? That you didn’t do it to say I was long gone and get them off your tail once you’d decided you wanted to be with me and come back looking like a hero?” I say, voice rising. “As part of your plan to live happily ever after in a relationship built on a lie!”

  “You know that’s not true! How many bounty hunters have you ever seen with a helicopter? For God’s sake—it was the National Guard!” He stops, looks around the room. I follow his gaze from the open dresser lined with half-full water glasses to the clothes on the floor, books, and crayons on the bed. The place looks ransacked—a far cry from my knee-jerk tidiness.

  “ ‘Highway to Hell,’ ” I say, unable to help myself. Of all the questions, this one has tormented me the most and is the one that matters least. But I need to break free of the spin cycle happening inside my mind. “Was that real?”

  “What?” he says weirdly, his brows drawn together.

  “You, singing along to the same radio station that I was listening to that day.”

  He knows what I mean. It was the first time we ever locked eyes—when I caught him singing in his car in the next lane. Awkward and endearing. He’d grinned. I’d sped past. A chance encounter, one of millions anyone might have in a lifetime.

  Until I saw him at the truck stop.

  “Yes, that was real!” he says. “One of those crazy things I took as a good sign. And it was. Just not for the purpose I thought. For something better.”

  “Were you working with the guy in the truck? Whose grill took out my radiator?”

  “Come on, Wynter,” he says, sounding tired.

  “You owe me this much!” I say desperately.

  He tilts his head, studying me. “You’re obsessing,” he says with strange revelation. “Wynter, you have to stop.”

  But I can’t stop. Not until I figure it out.

  I just don’t know what “it” is.

  “The guy in the truck,” I repeat. “Were you working with him?”

  “No! How could I have planned that?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I couldn’t!”

  I laugh. “How am I supposed to believe you?” But a part of me really is asking.

  “I’m telling you the truth! It was a job. Nothing else—until I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take you in. Because I knew what you were doing was right and I wanted to help you. More than that. I wanted to be around you. I wanted to be with you. Because I—”

  “You should have told me!”

  It’s a demand, and a plea. For him to somehow, magically, undo it.

  “How?” he shouts. “You would have never let me help you!”

  “Get out.”

  “And then when I found you again in Iowa—”

  “Get out!” I grab the lamp off the stand and throw it at him.

  He ducks. The lamp crashes against the wall.

  “I’m sorry, Wynter,” he says, and lets himself out.

  • • •

  I GET UP and move, trying to outpace the tendrils of my own mind. Knowing at some point I have to think about the future.

  Of all the things Chase said, one stuck the most:

  You’re scaring Truly.

  Late that afternoon, I wash my hair and get dressed. Walk down to the infirmary, where Rima rises from her desk at my arrival.

  “I want the medication,” I say.

  DAY 123

  * * *

  I look away as we pass in the stairwell, even as I feel Chase stop and turn behind me, as though wanting to say something.

  I keep moving, heels echoing on the metal grate.

  “You should come train,” he says. “Open Day is less than two months away.”

  I stop, shake my head with a brittle little laugh. “So what? You figure you’ve got two months to make everything right?”

  “No,” he says, moving onto the landing below me. “I know I can’t. You’re right, I blew it. Seeing you like that . . . I’m glad you seem to be doing better. You should come train unless it’ll trigger you. For Truly’s sake. And after Open Day I promise you’ll never have to see me again.”

  The words feel like a sucker punch.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say and hurry upstairs.

  Open Day. It’s all anyone can talk about now, including Julie, who’s been fretting about our plans. Obviously Wyoming is off the table—a thing I hated explaining to Truly and swore I would never forgive Chase for, though Lauren took it the hardest. And we don’t dare return to Chicago. Not yet, anyway.

  “We can’t stay here. Even if no one aboveground recognizes you, I don’t trust anyone down here,” Julie said last week.

  It’s something I’ve been pondering for a month, running through every scenario I can come up with in my head. Always landing on the same solution.

  “We’ll ask Noah to help us get set up someplace else,” I said.

  He’s done so much for us already I hate to ask for more. But what other choice do we have?

  “What if something did happen?” Julie said, finally broaching the topic last night. “To Noah, I mean.”

  “Noah’s a survivalist. Besides. Who’s going to take out an armed compound?” I said. Because the thought of anything happening to Noah could only mean Magnus was right about good disappearing from the world.

  • • •

  AT DINNER THE others speculate that the grid has to be back up by now. It’s been four months. Ivy and a few others have begun taking their cell phones to the atrium, though they’ve never had luck finding a signal.

  “The frequency’s too high to reach us down here,” Irwin says. “Too much concrete, too much ground.”

  “For all we know, the country’s running again, the last of the sick are dying off, and everyone else has their vaccine already,” Nelise says loudly. “By the time we get out we could be two months behind everyone else.”

  “You say it like we’re in prison,” Sabine snaps. “We’re the lucky ones. Remember?”

  “It’s too early for vaccines,” Micah says. “Especially with the disease making foreign inroads from any city with an international airport. Or American tourists. If everything we’ve heard is true, they’ll need millions of vaccinations—not to mention the manpower to organize distribution and aid workers to set up vaccination sites.”

  Eithe
r way, Nelise is right about one thing: without communication from above, they’re all in stasis. Unable to plan whether to stay here as long as the ranch can support them, or head home. Unable to know when or how to resume their lives.

  What’s left of them, anyway.

  As for me, it’s all reinvention from here as I prepare to protect my makeshift family.

  The only people I have left.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT I return to the gym to train with Chase and the others.

  DAY 170

  * * *

  “Wynter.”

  I glance up from the table in the library where I’m surrounded by seven children and Lauren, who feels less like a child and more like a somber young adult to me these days. It’s just after lunch and I’m beginning to rethink my assertion about the importance of keeping routine these last two weeks, as all they want to talk about is Open Day.

  Sha’Neal pauses on the spiral staircase, out of breath. And I know by the look on her face that something’s wrong.

  I get up, not missing the glance she flicks toward Lauren and back to me.

  “Keep working,” I say, hurrying after her.

  I follow her to the dining hall, where the spiral staircase ends, and across the room to the closed stairwell as she yanks open the door. The minute it shuts behind us, she spins toward me.

  “It’s Julie. She slipped in the kitchen carrying a rack of cutlery. Stabbed herself in the side.”

  And then I’m running down the stairs past the living quarters and gym.

  I burst into the infirmary level, with its curtained-off rooms, the locked cabinets of medical supplies. The middle workstation is empty, a plate of food abandoned on the desk.

  Movement from the corner of my eye: Delaney and Chase easing a form onto a padded table in an examination bay as Rima grabs a pair of latex gloves.

  I hurry toward them, catch my breath at the sight of the blood smeared on Julie’s pants and what I can see of her arm.

  She gasps as her head touches the table. Curses—loudly.

  Then I see the folded towel Delaney’s holding against Julie’s side.