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August 25 - September 2, 2025
“We’re awesome and we haven’t tried to kill you once. What more do you want from us?”
Here was another thing I’d been made to learn all those years ago: the world was never as simple as it wanted you to believe it was. Hard exteriors could hide soft hearts, a chosen family could be more important than a blood one . . . and even the safest of places could be made into a trap.
we’d earned our memories, but we didn’t owe them anything beyond their keeping.
it felt more comfortable to pick up that ratty notebook we shared and carefully choose my words. I could spell out the exact response I wanted, no mistakes. I could choose when I wanted to say something. I could have that much control over my life. The problem was that I kept choosing silence. Over and over again, I let myself fall into the safety of its depths. Painful things could stay buried, never needing to be understood or talked through. The past wouldn’t come back to hurt me if I never spoke of it. The memory of snow and blood and screams couldn’t rise up and bury me in its freezing
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There’s something deep inside you that shifts—awakens, I guess—when, at one point in your life, you come face-to-face with death and narrowly escape it. From that moment on, it’s like an unacknowledged insight is plugged into your mind. It doesn’t ring like an alarm when it picks up on something that’s off. It doesn’t always make your heart pound. Sometimes, there isn’t the time for that. Call it instinct or intuition or whatever word you have for self-preservation, but once it’s there, it never goes away. And when it stirs, you feel it like a layer of static on your skin.
As Vida always said, there are times you have to listen to your gut and tell common courtesy to fuck right off.
place. I was breathing, I was alive—all those times the darkness had tried to catch me, I’d slipped through it. I’d escaped. This wasn’t it for me. I was alive.
“Not safe!” he shouted. “No shit!” I shouted back.
“No flamethrowers?” I said. “What kind of evil organization is this?” “A particularly stupid kind,” he whispered back, “one that was reckless enough to try taking you and foolish enough to underestimate your ability to fight back. I think you gave them the shock of their lives.” It was what I wanted to believe more than anything in that moment: that I was capable of both getting us out of here, and making whoever had taken us regret it. That strand of confidence wove through me. “And that’s too bad. About the flamethrower, I mean. I do know how to use one, you know.” “You say that like it’s
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“I’ve been informed that I have the sense of humor of a rock,” he whispered, “which I’m interpreting as nonexistent and not surprisingly colorful.”
“I want them to know exactly how fucked they are the second we get out of here.”
As Vida always said, the best way through bullshit was to wade in, hold your nose with one hand and a grenade in the other, and cut straight through it.
“You sneaky little bitch,” he said in disbelief. “Call me a bitch again and I’ll show you how hard I bite,” I said.
Eyes of a poet, hands of a killer.
“She’s discouraged and he’s trying to cheer her up. Bolster her courage.” “He’s trying to convince her to hook up with him,” I explained. “He’s basically badgering her.”
“I like my version better.”
“Everything costs a hundred dollars, an arm, and a leg these days.”
“No. I mean, he put up a fight . . .” Priyanka began. “Well, a li’l fight. A cute struggle. It made me giggle.” “You hit your head on a door frame again, didn’t you?”
They’d backed me into a corner, but they didn’t realize I’d already walked them into another one.
it was like seeing sunlight come through a stained-glass window. Each memory had its own color, its own feeling, and together they created something beautiful held together by a dark frame.
“Now, that’s no way to talk to a lady, is it?”
“I’m not going to be dramatic about it.” Then, with one last nod toward me, she added, “But if you so much as scratch her, I’ll redefine that word for you.”
I REALLY HATED TUESDAYS. It was like the world had decided that Mondays were for easing into the week, but Tuesdays—Tuesdays were fair game.
I had no problem with math. I liked it, actually. It was straightforward in a way nothing else seemed to be in life. There was only one right answer, and usually only one right way to reach it. It had none of those uncertainties of writing and reading, where a single word could change the meaning of a sentence. Math was fine.
I set down my pencil, giving her my sweetest smile. The one Vida told me should be illegal.
He kept shifting uncomfortably, sliding his feet across the ground as if to look for more solid ground. Liam called it his antsy dancey.
They left. I understood why. I understood the choice. But some part of me would never fully understand how four had become two.
“You always side with Lee,” he said. “No, I don’t,” I insisted. “Sometimes I side with Vida.”
“You never came back, but they never stopped hoping that you would.”
“I’m going to remind you that heroes frequently die, but the morally mediocre people almost always live to see another day. Don’t do anything that’s going to piss me off.”
“Come together,” he said, “leave together.”
“Hello, tiny Psilings!” she said, forcing brightness into her voice. “I’m your new friend Priyanka, and I’m going to show you how to disassemble a drone and steal its useful parts!”
“I don’t want to be your stranger.” I glanced back. “Then don’t be.”
Watercolors couldn’t have begun to capture the sky in that moment, just as it prepared to brighten for dawn. The cruelest truth about life is that it just goes on—the sun rises, gravity keeps your feet on the ground, flowers open their faces to greet the sky. Your world could be dissolving with grief or pain or anger, but the sky would still give you the most breathtaking sunrise of violet warming to shell pink.
For the first time in years, Cruz would hear me go off-script. She’d hear every thought storming through my mind.
I hadn’t just destroyed Ruby and Liam’s dream. Someone was using me to destroy Chubs’s as well, and I was powerless to stop it.
“but right now it feels like we’re the chess piece on the board that’s going to be sacrificed first.”
“You don’t even play chess,” Roman cut in. “True,” Priyanka said, “but I’m fluent in grand analogies.” I shook my head. “It’s just politics.”
“Luck isn’t anthropomorphic,” Roman told her. Priyanka shot him an indignant look. “Everyone knows luck is a lady.” As it turned out, luck might have been a lady, but she was also an absolute bastard.
“Doing what feels like the wrong thing for the right reasons.” Priyanka stared off toward the checkpoint’s distant lights. “Eventually you realize the only way to live is by the rules you set for yourself.”
Lately accountability feels like obediently putting a collar around our own necks and trusting people who hate us not to tighten it. If a system is broken, how do you fix it when you’re trapped inside of it?” “Isn’t it better to try to fix something with potential than to smash it into a thousand pieces and hope whatever comes next is better?” I asked. “I’d rather work within a flawed system to carve out my place than shut myself out by not participating at all.”
“Breaking a bad cycle can sometimes break a system,” Roman said. “But breaking a system will always break the cycle. It’s only a difference in the degree of certainty.”
When they’d both gone on ahead, I turned back once more to see what I’d done. And saluted it with my middle finger.
“You’d like her,” I said, trying to lighten the heavy thoughts raining through my mind. “Well, I take that back. You might be a little overwhelmed. But she’d like you once you showed her the appropriate amount of skill and deference.” “Noted.”
“It’s zero-five-zero-one,” I told her as I slid into the driver’s seat. “No, it’s not,” Priyanka said, then actually tried the numbers. “Yes, it is. Dammit. That wasn’t fun at all. What’s zero-five-zero-one?” “Liam’s birthday.” “Aww. But terrible for personal security.”
She stared at Roman until he looked at her, confused. “You want me to shoot him?” “What? No! That’s less distraction and more murder.”
That hadn’t been Clancy. It hadn’t been the monster that had hurt my friends. But he’d still managed to find my softest parts and sink his teeth into them all the same.
I wasn’t Suzume Kimura, spokesperson for the interim president. I wasn’t Suzume Kimura, daughter of a state assemblyman. I wasn’t Suzume Kimura, leader of the Psion Ring. I was just Zu.
That’s one of the few things rehabilitation camps gave you: the ability to hold in tears on command, and the knowledge of how to cry so no one will hear you.
The backseat was safe that way. You didn’t have to join the conversation. You didn’t have to be seen. But I wanted to be seen. Because when Roman looked at me, he only saw the person I was now. Someone capable, strong, and in control. Not the little girl with her gloves who only had control over her voice.
