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, fucking 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 dynamite.
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 dynamite, 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 fucking 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 fucking 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!”