“He’s not. He escaped.” Hana, the light, the kitchen—even the bomb ticking quietly underneath us, moving us slowly toward oblivion—suddenly seem far away. As soon as Hana suggests it, I see that it makes sense. Alex was all alone. He would have gone back to familiar territory.
Alex could be here—somewhere in Portland. Close. Maybe there’s hope after all.
If I can only get out of here.
“So?” I push up from the chair. “Are you going to call the regulators, or what?”
Even as I’m talking, I’m planning. I could probably take her down, if it comes to it, but the idea of attacking her makes me uneasy. And she’ll no doubt put up a fight. By the time I get the better of her, the guards will be on top of us.
But if I can get her out of the kitchen for even a few seconds—I’ll put the chair through the window, cut through the garden, try to lose the guards in the trees. The garden probably backs up onto another street; if not, I’ll have to loop around to Essex. It’s a long shot, but it’s a chance.
Hana watches me steadily. The clock above the stove seems to be moving at record speed, and I imagine the timer on the bomb ticking forward as well.
“I want to apologize to you,” she says calmly.
“Oh yeah? For what?” I don’t have time for this. We don’t have time for this. I push away thoughts of what will happen to Hana even if I manage to escape. She’ll be here, in the house . . .
My stomach is clenching and unclenching. I’m worried the bread will come straight back up. I have to stay focused. What happens to Hana isn’t my concern, and it isn’t my fault, either.
“For telling the regulators about 37 Brooks,” she says. “For telling them about you and Alex.”
Just like that, my brain powers down. “What?”
“I told them.” She lets out a tiny exhalation, as though saying the words has given her relief. “I’m sorry. I was jealous.”
I can’t speak. I’m swimming through a fog. “Jealous?” I manage to spit out.
“I—I wanted what you had with Alex. I was confused. I didn’t understand what I was doing.” She shakes her head again.
I have a swinging, seasick feeling. It doesn’t make any sense. Hana—golden girl Hana, my best friend, fearless and reckless. I trusted her. I loved her. “You were my best friend.”
“I know.” Again she looks troubled, as though trying to recall the meaning of the words.
“You had everything.” I can’t stop my voice from rising. The anger is vibrating, ripping through me like a live current. “Perfect life. Perfect grades. Everything.” I gesture to the spotless kitchen, to the sunshine pouring over the marble counters like drizzled butter. “I had nothing. He was my one thing. My only—” The sickness surges up and I take a step forward, clenching my fists, blind with rage. “Why couldn’t you let me have it? Why did you have to take it? Why did you always take everything?”
“I told you I was sorry,” Hana says again mechanically. I could shriek with laughter. I could cry, or tear her eyes out.
Instead I reach out and slap her. The current flows down into my hand, into my arm, before I know what I am doing. The noise is unexpectedly loud, and for a moment I’m sure the guards will burst through the door. But no one comes.
Instantly, Hana’s face begins to redden. But she doesn’t cry out. She doesn’t make a sound.
In the silence, I can hear my own breathing—ragged and desperate. I feel tears pushing at the back of my eyes. I’m ashamed and angry and sick all at once.
Hana turns slowly back to face me. She almost looks sad. “I deserved that,” she says.
Suddenly I am overcome with exhaustion. I am tired of fighting, of hitting and being hit. This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors. It’s the upside-down nature of life. It’s all I can do not to collapse into a chair again.
“I felt terrible afterward,” Hana says in a voice hardly above a whisper. “You should know that. That’s why I helped you escape. I felt”—Hana searches for the right word—“remorse.”
“What about now?” I ask her.
Hana lifts a shoulder. “Now I’m cured,” she says. “It’s different.”
“Different how?” For a split second, I wish—more than anything, more than breathing—that I had stayed here, with her, that I had let the knife fall.
“I feel freer,” she says. Whatever I was expecting her to say, it isn’t this. She must sense that I’m surprised, because she goes on. “Everything’s kind of . . . muffled. Like hearing sounds underwater. I don’t have to feel things for other people so much.” One side of her mouth quirks into a smile. “Maybe, like you said, I never did.”
My head has started to ache. Over. It’s all over. I just want to curl up in a ball and go to sleep. “I didn’t mean that. You did. Feel things, I mean, for other people. You used to.”