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This was how you survived in Doubtful. You watched. You learned. And you figured out the rules that would keep you safe.
“Knowledge will keep you safe,”
“I’ve gotta be honest. I don’t think this town is built for normal.”
And it was always better to be on the approaching side of daylight, not the receding.
Her heart gave the strange, uncomfortable shift it sometimes did around him. Like misjudging how many stairs were ahead and having your foot land in thin air. A drop of the stomach, a catch of breath. The slightly giddy, slightly shocked sensations as your body regained its balance.
“Can’t you just bring a packed lunch?” Riya asked. She was already eating her lunch, a smear of sauce on the corner of her lips. Connor’s whole face scrunched up in horror. “It would spend hours sweating in my lunchbox, and then the mustard would soak into the bread and make it damp.”
His fingers curved too far back as he held them up, each joint bending beyond what Abby’s could handle. He’d been diagnosed with EDS when he was twelve. That meant his tendons didn’t hold his bones together the way they should. It left him hyperflexible, but also extra vulnerable to injuries.
It’s human nature. We want to feel that we have control over our destiny, that we wouldn’t ever make the same mistakes that cost someone else everything.
Sometimes the worst things that happen to you come from the smallest decisions. You lean on the accelerator instead of the break. Or you shift your weight on the ladder. Or you leap into the pool headfirst without checking how deep the water is. Tiny, tiny mistakes that would have been inconsequential any other day. But for some reason, the universe’s gears get jammed at that exact second, and your tiny mistake permanently changes the remainder of your life.
It had seemed fantastical. She prided herself on being strongly grounded in logic and realism, and resurrections and monsters were a step too far for her.
They were happy. And she tried her best not to let them see how much she felt like death on the inside.
She thought they might be suffering from the same problem: a mind full of things that were growing increasingly hard to comprehend. A thousand pieces of new information. A thousand instances of doubt. A whole lot of new experiences, and no way to put any of them into words. Not even with the person they cared for most in the world.
But… Sometimes things happened too close together for her to believe there wasn’t a connection.
Stalactites and stalagmites. Formed from dripping water over hundreds of thousands of years. Grown millimeter by millimeter before finally connecting in the center to create a pillar.
It turned out a person could make the correct choice, and still feel strangled by regret.
It was like listening to a bad recording of a voice. A memory of the way words had sounded. A recreation of the phrases the Stitcher had heard screamed again and again through the tunnels.
You never know how you’ll act under pressure until you’re forced to find out.
