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“It’s just that nowadays people are so quick to boil you down to bare bones of info and upload you into a system, you know? And I think no one can ever really know another person unless you really pay attention.”
“I don’t want to just see someone’s face; I want to know his shadow, too.”
the fear had flamed up fast and true, moving my feet before my brain could catch up. I hadn’t known where I was going or how I was going to get there. I had just run.
couldn’t rely on luck this time. I didn’t have time to feel afraid of what would happen if I were caught. The steady composure I felt made me feel so much stronger than any of the wild, raw emotions I had surrendered to in the gas station. I had something to accomplish and people to protect, and no one—especially not Rob Meadows—was going to keep me from it so long as there was breath in my body.
“You better hope you never find me,” I said, ice edging each word. I didn’t even have to close my eyes to see that girl’s face. I felt her walking beside me, her eyes open, forever fixed on the barrel of the gun and the hand that held it steady. “Because what I’ll do to you will be so much worse than a bullet in the skull.”
I saw now the way that fear fed anxiety and turned it into chaos.
I didn’t want to give him the false hope that these people were anything other than lone candle flames in a sea of never-ending black.
“And people like you are the reason we have middle fingers.”
how it had felt like a dream until we woke up and realized we were trapped in a nightmare.
“You’re different, too,” he said. “It’s all different now.
“The fact of the matter is, I would have done a lot worse. I would have done anything to find you guys. It scares me. I feel like if there’s not someone there to stop me, I’m not sure what I would do.”
That was a feeling I knew well—the sensation of freefalling into a dark pit, not knowing how soon you’ll hit the bottom of it or if there even is one.
I missed him. I missed him, I missed him—oh my God, I missed him so much.
If a heart could break once, it shouldn’t have been able to happen again. But here I was, and here he was, and it was all so much more terrible than I ever could have imagined.
But the bitter reality was solidifying around me, and I could feel the heat rising in my chest, twisting, and twisting, and twisting until it felt like the next breath I released was tinged with fire.
Ruin him. I’d do more than that. I was going to humiliate him, bring him low, leave him an empty shell whose only memory was my face. I would chase him into sleep. I would make him regret the moment he’d decided to keep Liam here and leave him outside to die.
“Later, gator,” he said. “In an hour, sunflower,” I murmured.
No one can reason with another person so furious she can barely see straight. Well. I thought it was pretty productive to getting my way. I let the wind slam the door shut behind me.
You can push someone’s button over and over again to get what you want, but there comes a point when your finger slips and you finally hit the wrong one.
I looked down at Knox, my lip peeling back in disgust as I flooded his thoughts with visions of my own: him struggling out in the freezing snow, him coughing, weak, unable to defend himself as he moved farther west, disappearing forever. I wanted him to experience every bit of disorientation and pain and fever that Liam had. I wanted him swallowed up by the world that created him.
“Being smart doesn’t mean being soft,” I continued. “You can stay or you can go, but just remember—if you run, you run alone. And trust me, it’s a long, lonely road.”
And then, Jude stepped out into the rain. It was both horrible and beautiful to watch—familiar, somehow, to see the roaring electricity he had collected from the hangar hover around him like a blue sun.
I tried to absorb every word, take the words in so deep I’d dream about them when I finally fell asleep.
I hated how stupid I’d been to think that surviving it meant I was somehow special. That I ever thought it was undeniable proof there was something I was supposed to live to do later.
“Sometimes you’re the one speeding along in a panic, doing too much, not paying attention, wrecking things you don’t mean to. And sometimes life just happens to you, and you can’t dodge it. It crashes into you because it wants to see what you’re made of.”
“I don’t always get the world,” he said. “But sometimes it treats me right. That look on your face when you saw me—I tell you, that was something else.”
free. I could end his life with his own hand, a single shot to the heart. The same hand, the same heart, that had shattered so many lives and brought me to this—to this place of pain and excruciating fear.
“Miss Vida,” Liam said, “has anyone ever told you that you are positively the whipped cream on the sundae of life?” She glared at him. “Anyone ever told you your head is shaped like a pencil?”
Every minute had been a waking nightmare. I had lived life second to second, holding my breath, waiting for the inevitable slip that would ruin everything again.
“It’s on you to remember them and what that felt like to come up out of the dark and see what you’d done. Forgive yourself, but don’t forget.”
“Look,” I began, “I get it. You don’t like me, but—” “I don’t like you?” He let out a low, flat laugh. One fell into the next, and it was awful—not at all him. He was half choking on them as he turned around, shaking his head. It almost sounded like a sob, the way his breath burst out of him. “I don’t like you,” he repeated, his face bleak. “I don’t like you?” “Liam—” I started, alarmed. “I can’t—I can’t think about anything or anyone else,” he whispered. A hand drifted up, dragging back through his hair. “I can’t think straight when you’re around. I can’t sleep. It feels like I can’t
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“I feel like…I feel like I’m losing my damn mind, like your face has been carved into my heart, and I don’t remember when, and I don’t understand why, but the scar is there, and I can’t get it to heal. It won’t go. I can’t make it fade. And you won’t even look at me.”
I remembered that tiny bit of warm peace before I had ruined him, throwing his mind into a jumble of desperate confusion. There was so much darkness to it now; the clear, bright corridors of memories had collapsed in on themselves.
“I would have torn this whole damn country apart looking for you,” I
Maybe that was my real punishment for the things I’d done—being trapped in a world where I had to leave them again and again and again until there wasn’t enough left of my heart for it to break.
Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?”
had, that I wouldn’t kill him to protect myself, but I would to save the people I cared about.
It’s not worth it to weigh what you could have done or should have done when there’s no way of changing it. And it’s not worth risking your life over. Nothing is more important or valuable than your life.
“Life isn’t fair,” I said. “It’s taken me a while to get that. It’s always going to disappoint you in some way or another. You’ll make plans, and it’ll push you in another direction. You will love people, and they’ll be taken away no matter how hard you fight to keep them. You’ll try for something and won’t get it. You don’t have to find meaning in it; you don’t have to try to change things. You just have to accept the things that are out of your hands and try to take care of yourself. That’s your job.”
“Give ’em hell, darlin’.” “And for the love of God, bitch, don’t get stabbed this time!” Vida added.
They let themselves burn when so many of us were afraid to be warmed by the fire.
And the last place I would ever leave Jude was alone in the dark.
And I don’t know what was more powerful and gratifying to me—the look of terror that swept across his face, or the exhilaration of knowing I finally had my future back in my own hands.
