Текст книги "In the Afterlight"

Автор книги: Alexandra Bracken

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

I started to roll my eyes, only to realize he was actually serious. “It’s bologna.”

He sniffed at it, his lip curled in disgust, then rewrapped it in the plastic it’d come in. “I think I’d rather starve.”

“Be my guest.”

“In any case,” Clancy said, ignoring this, “I’m disappointed by your lack of smugness. I would have thought you’d be in here first thing, gloating about being reunited with your little flash drive again. What’s got your mood so sour?”

“I’m looking at him.”

He let out a light laugh. “I overestimated how much you’d be able to figure out in these first few hours. Does the flash drive even work, or was it erased by the EMP? How are those crispy research pages you rescued from the fire? You probably haven’t even found out what they’re doing to Thurmond yet, have you?”

An invisible hand seemed to wrap around my throat, forcing me to lean forward. Thurmond? What was happening at Thurmond that would have him looking so damn gleeful at my blank look?

Don’t say it, I commanded myself, fighting against the panic that spiraled up inside me at that one word. Don’t react.

Clancy tore off a piece of the sandwich’s bread and popped it into his mouth. When I didn’t demand answers, the corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk.

“If you want to know, you’ll have to look and see for yourself.” He tapped his temple—a challenge or an invitation?

“I know you’re angry,” he began, “about the way it all went down in Los Angeles—”

Thurmond, I kept thinking. That word was an infection—exactly as he’d hoped, if I had to guess. He’s been trapped with us for weeks, there’s no way he could have new information—unless it wasn’t new information at all, just a card he’d been holding on to, waiting for the exact right moment to play it.

It took me a few seconds too long to answer. “Angry doesn’t begin to cover it.”

He nodded. “One day, though...one day months or even years from now, maybe you’ll see that destroying that research was a selfless act, not a selfish one.”

“Selfless?” I whirled back toward the glass wall, cutting off my own retreat to the door. “Taking away the chance for kids to survive and never face the change? Robbing them of their only real chance to be reunited with their families and returned home is selfless?”

“Is that what you want? I thought liberating Thurmond in time would take precedence,” Clancy said, inspecting one of the grapes. “Are these organic?”

I spun on my heel, crossing the distance between his cell and the door as quickly as I could without running.

“Ruby—listen to me. The cure is another way to control us, take decisions out of our hands. What happened when you brought the research here? Have they even let you see it? Do you know where it is right now?”

My fingers curled into fists at my side.

“It’s not some magic bandage that’s going to heal all wounds. It’s not going to erase the stigma of what we are in their minds. If there aren’t side effects, they’ll always be waiting, watching, praying that we don’t relapse. Tell me,” he said, drawing his legs up, crossing them on his cot. I watched, silently, as his fingers drummed against his knees. “Does knowing there’s a cure change the way the agents here treat you?”

Silence stretched between us. He smiled. “What they’re trying to do here isn’t about you at all. They may have told you things to get you to come along, to surrender your trust to them, but they won’t see their promises through. Not even Stewart.”

“The only person I have to worry about not trusting is you.”

“Whatever you’re trying to accomplish by being here,” he said in a low voice, “bring all the kids you can to back you up. They’re the ones that’ll follow and trust you, not any of the adults. You’ll be lucky if they ever see you as anything other than a useful weapon.”

“Because it’s so easy to find kids in hiding scattered around the country?”

“I can help you track down the tribes roaming around. You can train them, teach them to defend themselves. We’re heading toward the endgame, and if you don’t find them, they’re going to be collateral damage in the war.”

I gritted my teeth, but he was talking again before I could fire off any retort. “Forget the adults, Ruby. Make sure you’re out in front of the kids. Make them love you, and you’ll have their loyalty forever.”

“Make them love me,” I said, my anger coming back in a surge.

“Not everything at East River was fake,” he said coolly.

But everything that had been important—every memory I had of that place—was tainted by the creeping black touch of his mind. Just the thought of the way he had studied me across the camp fire...the way he’d slid right through every one of my last mental defenses...the way those kids, the Cubbies, had looked at him in total adoration. A shudder ripped down my spine. The room had grown too small and too cold for me to keep standing there and listen to every last trace of bullshit he wanted to spew.

I turned back to the door, unlocking it, and made sure I switched the lights back off. And still, Clancy’s voice floated to me through the darkness. He contaminated the air, made it sound like he was everywhere at once.

“When you’re ready to be in charge and actually do something, let me know. I’ll be here, waiting.”

And judging by the last look I’d had at his face, that was exactly where he wanted to be.

7

COLE DIDN’T SAY A WORD to me until we were back out in the hall, with several doors between us and the president’s son. Even then, he seemed distracted, pale brows furrowed, arms crossed over his chest.

“Could you hear what he was saying?” I asked.

He nodded. “Through the small grate under the observation window.”

“Before the attack, did you hear any intelligence chatter about Thurmond?” I asked. “Were there any rumors floating around HQ?”

“I was hoping you’d have some idea of what he was talking about,” Cole said as we headed down the hallway. “I’ll look into it.”

I was headed to the large former rec room just to the left of the stairwell for dinner, but he was clearly escaping into Alban’s old office. I caught his wrist as he brushed by me. “When are we going to firm up a plan for the camps?”

“Not tonight,” he said. “We’re still waiting on two more cars, and I want to try making a few calls to old supply contacts. Outfitting this place has to be priority number one. No one is going to believe we can do anything if we can’t even get the kids clean clothes and a few warm meals. I asked some of the Greens to start thinking about how they would stage a camp assault. In the meantime, take a breather. We’ll be working soon enough.”

I returned his wave as he crossed through the doors connecting the hallways, and followed the smell of spaghetti sauce into the rec room. Someone had assembled folding tables and chairs in neat lines, brought in a small radio, and propped it on the scuffed-up pool table the agents had oh-so-graciously left behind. Next to that were two large pots with serving utensils, and a dismally small stack of paper plates.

It had taken me a few hours to notice that the Ranch was reassembling itself into something that seemed kind of...clean. The silent downstairs halls were punctuated by the banging of washers and dryers, which seemed to be going at all hours of the day. I finally saw that the floor tiles were more white than yellow. And when I went to splash some water on my face in the bathroom, there were no drizzles of rust-stained water streaking across my skin. I smelled bleach. Detergent. It was almost...homey.

I passed by two sheets of paper tacked onto the door, stopping to examine them. I recognized the handwriting immediately as Liam’s, but it took me a moment to understand what the charts were, why there were stubs of pencils attached to each one with string. They were sign-up sheets, divided up by chore: laundry, cleaning, organizing, food preparation. Under each of these headers were the names of kids. Everyone had to help, but they could choose their chore. That was Liam’s style.

I spotted Liam, Chubs, Vida, and Zu sitting at their own table, heads bent close together. Vida saw me first and instantly shut up, pulling back and casually picking up her fork again. I finished spooning some pasta onto my plate and moved toward them.

“What’s going on?” I asked, taking the open seat and turning to poke Liam’s side. “I saw the chore charts—you should have told me earlier so I could have signed up for something.”

Liam glanced up from his notebook. When he moved his hand, I saw a string of numbers—equations he seemed to be untangling. “It’s all right. You’re busy with other things.”

Other things that were, unfortunately, not spending time with him alone in the pantry.

“What’s this?” I asked, leaning over to get a better look at what he was doing.

He shot me a rueful smile. “Trying to figure out when, exactly, we’re going to run out of food. I’ve been looking at the nearby towns, and I think I have a few we could hit for supplies where there’s minimum contact with the population.”

“Cole said he’s handling it,” I said.

He snorted.

Something about that rankled me. “It’s too dangerous to leave the Ranch right now. He’ll take care of it.”

Zu turned to study me, her expression troubled. I pointed to her plate of pasta, but she still didn’t touch it.

“We could go out,” Liam pressed. “You, me, Vi. Hell, I’d bet Kylie would come—it’ll be like old times.”

Zu reached across the table, gripping his forearm, holding it down against the table. She kept shaking her head, eyes wide. He wasn’t allowed to go. She wasn’t going to let him leave. And secretly, I was glad she was the one telling him so, because I was right there with her. I wanted him here, where he was tucked safely out of harm’s way.

“I’ve done it a hundred times,” he told her softly. “What’s got you like this?”

She released his arm, shrinking back in a way that was very unlike her. I started to ask her what was wrong, only to be interrupted by a frustrated groan.

“Oh, never mind! I’m not even hungry,” Chubs exploded, shoving his plate away from him. There was more sauce down the front of his shirt than there was left on his plate. It turns out it’s fairly difficult to get a fork full of slippery noodles up to your mouth when you were missing the eye part of hand-eye coordination.

When Vida didn’t go in for the kill on that one, I shot a sideways glance in her direction. The whole room vibrated with happy chatter, laughter. Which made Vida’s silence that much more unnerving.

“You shouldn’t have thrown the old lenses away. They weren’t cracked that badly.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Chubs snapped. “Tape them to my face? Walk around holding one up to my eye like a magnifying glass?”

“Wouldn’t that have been better than sulking around and blindly bumping into things?” I asked. He’d gone off earlier and pitched them into a trash can in hopeless frustration. I’d fished them out and brought them back to the sleeping room for when he calmed down and started thinking rationally again. “We can ask Cole about getting glasses added to our supplies list,” I said.

“The lenses are prescription,” Chubs said sharply. “I don’t have the information, even if he could get them made. Reading glasses aren’t strong enough, and they give me a headache when I wear them too long—”

Vida slid something across the table, never once looking up from her plate of pasta. Chubs must have thought it was some kind of utensil, otherwise I have no idea why he didn’t immediately snatch the glasses up.

The frames were about the same size and shape that his old ones had been. The lenses stuck out, not by any means a perfect fit, but close enough. I opened them and slid them onto his face and Chubs practically reared back in surprise, patting them in disbelief.

“Wait—what—this—these are—”

“Don’t lose your shit,” Vida said, casually raking her fork through her spaghetti. “Dolly had an extra pair of reading glasses and helped me switch out the lenses for yours. They look just as stupid as the other ones did, but you can at least see, yeah?”

Chubs and I both stared at her, stunned.

“Vi...” I began.

“What?” Her pitch rose slightly on the word, coming out as a bark. More insecure than angry. “I got tired of being his seeing-eye dog. It made me feel like an ass**le for laughing every time he tripped or walked into something—and I don’t like feeling like an ass**le all the time, okay?”

“It’s so hard to go against our nature—” Chubs started.

“He means thank you,” I said, cutting him off. “That was really thoughtful, Vi.”

“Yeah, well.” God, she was embarrassed. I took another bite to hide my smile. “I didn’t save the starving children of Africa or anything. He breaks this pair, he’s SOL.”

“Wait, what?” Liam’s startled voice broke clean through our conversation. He slid the paper Zu had been scribbling messages on closer to him. “Are you sure? I mean, positive? Why didn’t you tell me before?

Zu reached across the table and took the paper back out of his hands. He was too impatient to let her finish writing the words out and awkwardly leaned across the table, his eyes scanning the words as fast as she could put them down.

I thought you would leave to find them. I’m sorry.

“Oh, man,” he said, dropping a hand on her head. “I wouldn’t have. I won’t. You don’t have to be sorry, I get it. But are you sure? It just seems like such a coincidence—”

He stilled suddenly, looking a little sick to his stomach at whatever she wrote down next. “That sounds like her...But how did it even happen? What were you doing in Arizona?”

Chubs waved a hand in front of his friend’s face. “Care to share?”

“Zu...” Liam pressed a fist to the base of his throat and rubbed it for a moment. “Apparently on the way over to California, Zu crossed paths with my mom....I’ve been trying to figure out where they’ve been in hiding.”

Zu was still pale, watching Liam closely, like she didn’t quite believe him. I sat back, the flicker of concern turning into an all-out flame. Before, we’d always made it a priority to keep the four of us together as a unit. It was rare for us to split off, and even then, no one was really ever left alone. I could understand the rush of feeling that came with being back together, wanting to make up for lost time. But this desperation I saw in her, the way she always seemed to be tracking us, making sure we were still there, made my heart feel like it was tearing itself into pieces.

What had happened to her? Zu wasn’t normally scared or even all that anxious as a person—at least, she hadn’t been. Someone had done this to her, exposed every last nerve. Left her wide open and raw.

“Because they caught heat from Gray’s lapdogs after you broke your stupid ass out of that camp?” Vida asked, with her usual sensitivity.

“Why Arizona?” I asked. “Or, I guess a random choice is a good a choice as any?”

Zu was furiously scribbling something down, looking up only to shoot an exasperated look at us when we crowded over her. Liam put his hands up. “At your leisure, ma’am.”

When she did finish, it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. And judging by how Liam’s face lost the remainder of its color, it wasn’t what he was expecting, either.

They’re hiding kids in their house—protecting them. She used the name you gave me, Della Goodkind, but I knew it was her because she looks and talks like you. I told her you were safe.

“Oh, God,” Chubs said when I spun the paper his way. “Why am I not surprised? Your whole family fell from the crazy tree and hit every damn branch on the way down.”

Zu knocked her pencil against the end of his nose in reproach before continuing in her big, looping handwriting. It was just for a few minutes, but she was really nice.

Liam was like a starving kid stumbling across someone’s picnic basket. “Did she say anything else? Was Harry there with her? You said she’s been helping kids, but did she ask you if you wanted to stay? Or any of the other girls? Is that what happened to Talon?”

“Which of those questions did you want answered first?” Chubs asked. “Because I think you just crammed ten into two seconds.”

Zu shrank back against her chair. The pencil rolled off the table and into her lap as her eyes drifted down to where her fingers were busy rolling up the hem of her shirt.

“Kylie said Talon didn’t make it to California,” I said carefully. “Did someone hurt him? Did he...?”

“Did the kid croak?” There was a steel-cut edge to Vida’s voice. “Oh, I’m sorry. Am I supposed to act like the rest of them and treat you like you’re a baby? You need me to coat everything in cotton candy? Or can you be a big girl?”

Liam flushed with anger. “Enough—”

“You have no idea what you’re even talking about!” Chubs growled.

“That’s not fair—” I began.

The only one who didn’t seem bothered by it—who didn’t seem to be showing much of any emotion—was Zu. She stared at Vida for a moment, meeting her hard gaze with one of her own. Then she returned to her sheet and began to write quickly again. Both Liam and Chubs were silently fuming in Vida’s direction.

Zu held up the paper again, this time angling it so even Vida could read the words there. We got run down by skip tracers and he died when we crashed. A friend helped me get to California when I got separated from the others.

I let out a soft sigh and closed my eyes, desperately trying not to picture it. God...Talon. No one deserved that.

“Friend?” Chubs pressed. “Another kid?”

She shook her head, but didn’t elaborate.

“An adult? An adult drove you?” Liam ran both hands over his face. “Oh my God, I’m scaring the crap out of myself picturing this. We never should have split up. Never. Never. Oh my God. Weren’t you scared he was going to turn you in?”

Zu was so still, so pale, I wasn’t sure she was breathing. She looked up toward the ceiling, blinking rapidly, like she was trying to fight off rising tears.

“She’s a good judge of character,” I said, putting an arm around her shoulders. Still so small. Little bird bones, made that much sharper by hunger and stress.

“And you came to that conclusion how, exactly?” Chubs asked, pushing his glasses up. “Based on the fact that she let you into the van instead of locking you out?”

“Exactly,” Liam said. “I seem to recall someone trying to vote her out.”

“Yeah!” I said. “Thanks a lot. Trying to dump me off on some random road...”

“Excuse me for trying to look out for the group!” Chubs huffed.

Zu started to write something down, but Vida ripped the paper out of her hands, held it in front of her face, and tore it straight down the middle. “If you want to say something, f**king say it.”

Her chair screeched as she shoved herself back from the table, and swiped her plate from it. I saw the strain of keeping it together in how stiffly she held her neck up and her shoulders back. For one strange second, all I could think about were those old cartoons they used to show on the weekend, the way they’d show a spark burning its way up the fuse of a pile of dy***ite.

I should have known better than to follow her.

“Vi,” I called, and had to jog to catch up to her. She was stalking down the hall, all lean muscles and furious power, down the stairs to the lower level. Where was she even going? “Vida!”

I grabbed her arm, but she threw me off—hard enough that I hit the nearby wall. A burst of pain rocketed through my shoulder, but I didn’t back down. Her top lip had been curled into a snarl, but the second she registered what she’d done, it lost most of its ugliness.

“You’re gonna want to walk away,” she told me, and for the first time I realized she probably didn’t know where she was headed, either. She was just trying to get away from that room. From us.

“Not like this,” I said. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”

Vida turned and started down the hall again, only to spin back on her heels. I had misdiagnosed the situation—badly.

“Jesus Christ, you can’t let anything sit, can you?” she snapped. “You can’t ever just let anyone be to work their shit out. Hilarious, seeing how you can’t even handle your own crap.”

“I’ll try to work on caring less,” I said. Zach was coming down the hall toward us, his eyes looking everywhere but at the corner we’d drawn ourselves into. I turned my back on him at the same moment Vida did. She waited until his footsteps faded before releasing a harsh breath.

“You know, I really thought you and me—” Her voice choked off. When she laughed, there was a strained quality to it. “Never mind. What do you even care?”

“You just told me I care too much and now I don’t care enough?” I said. “Which is it?”

“Both—neither! Jesus, what does it matter?” she snapped, running her hands back through her short hair. The ends were still bleached, with only the barest hint of blue still clinging to the strands. “I’m happy for you, oh-so-fucking happy for you that you get to have this beautiful reunion with your real friends. You get to stay with these people and shoot the breeze about how great it was when it was just the four of you. You get to have all of your stupid inside jokes. But what I can’t stand—what makes me sick—is how you—”

“Is how I what?” It was a struggle to keep my voice down. “What else? Lay it on me. Come on. Clearly something else is pissing you off if you’re picking fights with a girl who’s clearly been through hell and back. I can’t fix it if you won’t tell me what’s going on!”

The spark finally hit the pile of dy***ite, but the explosion wasn’t what I was expecting. Vida’s expression shattered, and she ripped air into her lungs with short, jagged breaths. “You just replaced him—in your head, you just traded Jude for that little girl, like he was nothing, like we were nothing to you! I get it, okay? But don’t—don’t pretend to act like you give a shit when you clearly don’t!”

She was crying, really crying, and I was so stunned by it that I just stood there. She spun away from me, anger and humiliation coming off her in waves, backing herself farther into the corner.

You just replaced him.

Like we were nothing to you.

Was that really what she thought? A deep, echoing pain ripped through me. That I’d never...that I’d never cared about them? That I wasn’t committed? I was cold to them in the beginning, I know I was, but it had only been to protect myself. Letting people in, dropping the walls from around your heart—I couldn’t risk being vulnerable like that in the League, not when I needed to survive.

It had seemed crucial to learn to bury every feeling, good or bad, at Thurmond—to fold every wild emotion back before it got away from me and someone wearing black noticed. There, if you were still, you were mostly invisible; if you couldn’t be provoked and punished, you were left alone. I’d fallen right back into that strategy at the League, functioning from moment to moment, Op to Op, lesson to lesson, numbing every stray feeling to avoid exploding with how unfair it all was, how terrifying, and how crushing. So no one, even for a second, would question my loyalty to their cause. For a long time, it had been the only way I had of protecting myself from the world and everyone in it.

But Jude...Jude had burrowed right in, either oblivious to what I was doing, or trying in spite of it.

Did she blame me for all of this? If she had been Leader, would any of this have ever happened? Would we all...I closed my eyes, trying to black out the images that stormed in my mind. Jude on the ground. Jude suffocating on his own blood. Jude’s broken back, twisted legs. The look in his eyes, like he was begging me to help him—to kill him and end the suffering.

That damn nightmare. Chubs told me again and again that it would have been instantaneous...that his...why was it so hard to say the word “death”? He’d died, not passed away. Jude hadn’t passed anywhere. He hadn’t slipped away. He’d died. His life was over. There would never be another word from him; he’d come to an end the way all stories eventually did. He wasn’t in a better place. He wasn’t with me. Jude was buried with all of his hopes under cement and dirt and ash.

“God,” Vida raged, her voice raw, “even now, you can’t even f**king deny it, can you? Just leave me alone—go away before I—”

“You think I don’t know that it was my fault? That if I had kept him close...if I hadn’t let him come at all...” I told her quietly. “I imagine how it was for him, how in the end, he must have suffocated under all that weight. I wonder how much pain he must have been in, and if Chubs is lying to my face every time he swears it would have been too quick for him to feel anything. My mind keeps circling back to it, over and over. He must have been so scared—it was so dark down there, wasn’t it? And he just fell behind. Do you think he realized it? That he was waiting for us to come back and...” I knew I was babbling, but I couldn’t stop myself. “...he shouldn’t have been out at all...he was only fifteen, he was only fifteen...”

Vida backed against the wall, sliding down it, openly sobbing, both hands pressed to her face. “It was my fault, why don’t you f**king see that? I was in the back, you weren’t even close to him! I should have heard him, I should have made him walk in front of me, but I was so damn scared I wasn’t thinking at all!”

“No—Vi, no.” I crouched down in front of her. “It was so loud down there—”

This wasn’t her fault at all. I felt a fierce surge of protectiveness go through me at the thought of anyone else walking by and seeing her so vulnerable. Later, when she pulled herself back together, it would make her mortification about this that much worse. I rearranged myself as I sat down, trying to block the view of her from anyone coming down the hall. When I reached out to her, she didn’t stop me.

“You and Cate, you won’t even say his name,” she said, “I want to talk about him, but you keep trying to box him up and put him away.”

“I know you think I don’t care.” My chest felt unbearably tight. “It’s just...if I don’t hold these things in, I feel like I’ll dissolve. But you, all of you...the only thing I’ve ever wanted was to keep us all together and safe, and I can’t ever manage to do that.”

“Them, you mean.” Vida hugged her knees to her chest. “I get it. They’re your people.”

“And you’re not?” I asked. “There’s no ranking of who I care about most. I couldn’t do it even if I tried.”

“Well if the building was on fire, who would you save first?”

“Vida!”

She rolled her eyes, wiping her face. “Oh, calm down, boo. I was just kidding. Obviously it wouldn’t be me. I can take care of my own damn business.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t know who I’d try to save first, but if I had to pick someone to back me up on the rescue, there wouldn’t be any question.”

She shrugged and after a while said quietly, “The thought of going back into that room makes me...I know this is going to make me sound like I’m on crack, but I keep walking into rooms and I keep looking for him like he’s going to be there. It’s like a punch to the goddamn throat when I catch myself.”

“I do that, too,” I said. “I keep waiting for him to come around each corner.”

“It is a stupid, f**king awful place I’m in,” she said, “to be jealous of that little girl and you and all of them, that you get to all be together when it’s never going to be that way again for us. You can’t even look at Nico—God, Ruby, what’s it going to take for you to stop punishing him? When do you start listening to his apologies?”

“When I have a chance of believing them.”

She gave me a hard look. “Jude was his only friend. Nothing you could do to him is worse than what he’s doing to himself. Cate’s not going to be able to pull him back from this again. This is worse than when they first brought him into HQ, after he got out of that research program where they did all of that shitty experimenting on him.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I left you to tell Cate alone...”

“No,” she said, holding up a finger, “be sorry that you’ve been too chickenshit to really talk to her about it. I don’t understand—I don’t get why everyone I care about is in f**king pieces and none of you will even try to help each other because it hurts too much to face it head-on. Jude would never have let this happen. He wouldn’t have. He was the best of us.”

It was amazing, you know, how Jude had pinned us all down, how deeply he had read into who we were and what we wanted. There were people in the world whose purpose seemed to be to serve as points of connection. They opened us up to each other, and to ourselves. What was it that he had told me? That he didn’t want to just know someone’s face, but their shadow, too?

“He was.” There would never be another person like him. There was the loss I felt, and the loss that the rest of the world would never realize. Both sat like stones on top of my chest.

“I’m not good at huggy shit,” Vida warned. “But if you want to talk like this again...I’m there. Okay?”

“Okay.” And I don’t know why that moment about did me in, when every moment before had been just as gutting. I leaned my shoulder and head against the wall. Maybe because I knew how proud of us he would have been for coming this far, and saying this much.

“Talk to Nico, please,” Vida said. “Don’t make me beg. Don’t treat him like he’s not even goddamn human.”

“I think I hate him,” I whispered.

“He made a mistake. We all did.”

I leaned back on my hands, fingers curling against the cold tile.

“Did they mess with her?” Vida asked suddenly, holding out an arm to stop me. While she didn’t whisper the question, the fact she wasn’t asking directly in front of Zu seemed to indicate some newfound sensitivity. “Scramble some eggs up here or something?”

Or not.

“No,” I said quietly, watching as Liam settled in next to her, running a hand over her hair. “She doesn’t want to talk, so we don’t make her. It’s her decision.”

Vida nodded, absorbing this. “Must have seen some shit then. Some real bad shit.”

“Stop pushing her on it, okay? She’s had every other choice taken away from her. She at least gets to choose what she wants to say, and when she says it.”

I turned at the sound of soft footsteps padding up behind us. Zu hung back, her hands tucked into her pockets until Vida waved her toward us. She waited until Zu was looking at her before saying, “My bad, Z. I shouldn’t have gone bitch on you. We cool?”