03:10:46:02
I hear voices in the tunnel behind us. Because of the poor acoustics, I can’t make out what they’re saying—their voices bounce off the water and the closeness of the walls—and I only know they’re far enough that they can’t see us.
If they could, they’d be shooting.
I put my head down and swim. With every pull, I reach out and grab the water and try to push it behind me, kicking double-time and hoping Elijah can just hold on.
The tunnel splits off into different directions, but in front of us is a ladder that leads up into another tunnel, a vertical one, and above that, as long as he’s kept his word, is Barclay.
“Go first,” I say, pulling Elijah from the water. His hands shake as he starts to pull himself up, but his legs are worse. One is messed up from who knows what, and the other is just dead weight from being shot. I slip underneath him, so his body is resting on my shoulders. He grunts in protest, but we’ve got no other options.
I grab the metal bars and start climbing. All Elijah has to do is keep from letting go.
I keep climbing, driving us into darkness toward a little sliver of light at the top of the tunnel, and I pray that Barclay really is up there. Because if he’s not, I don’t know where to go from here.
“I see something,” Elijah says. Then he grunts, and there’s the screech of metal grinding against metal.
Elijah’s weight is pulled off me, and I quickly climb the last few rungs.
“Hurry up or we’re never going to make it out of here before they spot us,” Barclay says.
Elijah has collapsed onto the ground, coughing. “Did we make it?” he says.
“Almost.” I look at Barclay, and I’ve never been so glad to see him.
He pulls me the rest of the way out of the sewer tunnel, and we both grab Elijah.
Barclay has my backpack on his back and he pulls a quantum charger from his pocket. He’s apparently already set the destination, because he presses one button, and I hear it power up.
The portal opens in front of us, and something in my chest lifts as the cool air and the smell of the sea whips around us. Holding Elijah by the arms, I nod at Barclay, and all three of us step through.
03:10:45:38
We end up in a heap on the ground, chests heaving. My body aches, my skin feels raw, like I have a really bad sunburn, and my mouth is so dried out it hurts.
I glance around, but it only takes a second for me to realize we’re in the same abandoned world Barclay took me to on our way here.
Which means we’re safe.
My eyes burn, and warm tears roll down my singed skin.
Once the portal shuts behind us, Barclay grabs me by the shoulders and turns me to face him. “Are you hurt?” he asks, pulling my wet clothes aside to check for blood.
I’ve never been so glad to see his face in my entire life. Those blue eyes, high cheekbones, and strong jaw. He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I want to wrap my arms around him, bury my face in his shoulder, and never let go.
At least, I do for a second, then I remember this is Barclay and this was his plan in the first place, and that helps me get over it.
“Janelle, are you hurt?”
His grasp digs into me, and the pain shoots through my shoulders. I shake my head and try to push him away, but he’s holding on too tight.
“What happened?”
“It’s not my blood,” I say, finally succeeding in getting him off me.
But that reminds me. I look down, and all I can see is blood. A lot of it’s been washed away, but it’s still in my hair and under my fingernails. Even my hands look stained.
“Whose is it?” he says, looking to Elijah.
“A guard,” I say, even though I can’t believe these are my words. “I killed him.”
As I say it, it really sinks in. This past fall, I saw someone die right in front of me, and I thought that was bad enough. But now I’ve killed someone. With my own hands, I shoved a jagged piece of metal into his neck and I felt his blood wash over my hands, soak itself into my skin.
I think about his face, and my stomach heaves. I turn away from Barclay, bend at the waist, and vomit acid and protein bar onto the grass.
“Is she okay?” Elijah asks, as I heave again. “The guard, he f*cking shot me. Did he get her too?”
“She’s okay, just shock,” Barclay says. He rubs a hand on my back and says, “Don’t worry, this always happens the first time, it’s normal.”
I can’t imagine those words have ever made anyone feel better.
And if it couldn’t possibly get any worse, he adds, “It gets easier.”
I have just enough breath to say, “God I hope not,” before I deposit the rest of the acid from my stomach onto the grass.
03:10:37:14
Barclay checks out Elijah’s wounds and gives each of us a change of clothes from my backpack.
Then he crouches next to me. “He’s in bad shape,” Barclay whispers. “I think the bullet was a through-and-through, but I can’t be sure there’s not a fragment of anything in there.”
For a second I just stare at him. I’m not sure what he wants from me.
Barclay must sense that because he adds, “He needs a hospital.”
I nod. Right now, I feel like I might need a hospital too.
“I know a good one,” Barclay says. “It’s a world similar to your home one, where there’s no interverse travel and not a lot of disturbances. We’ll be safe there as long as we don’t stay too long.”
I don’t say anything, and Barclay grabs my shoulders and gives them a shake. My gaze falls on his neck and for some reason, I imagine the mirror sliding into his neck and blood pouring out.
“Look at me,” he says, his grip tight on my shoulders.
I lift my eyes to his.
“Whatever happened, it was not your fault,” he says. “After this is over, you can cry, but right now, I need you to snap out of it.”
It’s not a great pep talk, but it gets me moving. I don’t have to think too hard to remember we’ve only got three and a half days left to take down a trafficking ring and save everyone I care about.
03:10:29:57
The hospital is in a seedy section of town—wherever we are—that Barclay calls Little Beijing. The waiting room is filled with kids with runny noses and coughs, and a guy who has pinkeye.
As we approach the reception desk, the woman behind it blushes, her ivory skin turning bright pink as she sees Barclay and then drops her eyes. She can’t suppress the smile already forming on her lips.
Barclay leans into her, speaking fast in a language I don’t recognize. It might be Chinese or it might be something else entirely. I have no idea.
But it works.
She stands up, gestures to Elijah and me, then escorts the three of us back into an empty room.
A doctor comes in, and the receptionist speaks to him in the same language I can’t understand, then he gestures for Elijah to lie back on the bed. The doctor flicks the extra overhead light on and starts examining his leg.
I try to think about Ben and what it’s going to be like when I see him—how he’ll wrap his arms around me and everything will make just a little more sense.
Only, every time I picture his face, it’s not Ben I’m seeing. All I can see is the guard I killed, his one eye messed up, the jagged piece of mirror sticking out of his neck, and the blood coming like a wave over my hands.
He could have children who love him more than the world. Maybe they quote movies or TV shows to each other and maybe he doesn’t know how to cook or can’t ever seem to remember to lock the front door.
My hands are still stained. His blood, now turning black, is under my fingernails and in my cuticles. Looking at them, I know deep down that it doesn’t matter how many times I wash them. Even when the stains come out, my hands will never be the same.
Someone taps my shoulder and I turn around to the receptionist. She’s offering me a tube of something.
“Anti-burn cream,” Barclay says, coming up next to me. “Try not to use too much. They can only afford to give us one.”
I take it from her.
Elijah groans. I step forward, but his bullet wound is already clean and bandaged. The doctor is working on his bad leg.
The leg is twisted, like it was broken and didn’t heal right.
I feel sick to my stomach. This is the kind of injury that says, “Your life will never be the same.”
Elijah will probably never walk right again. There will always be a hitch in his step. He won’t run as fast and he won’t have the same kind of balance. The leg will have to be rebroken and reset.
But not tonight.
As if he knows what I’m thinking, Elijah gives me a wry smile. “Having regrets?”
“Don’t be stupid,” I say automatically. Because I’m glad we got him out of there.
The doctor says something to me, and though I don’t know what, I can tell he wants me to back away, so I do. I’m not willing or ready to see the damage I’ve done to myself in a mirror, but I open the tube and apply some of the cream to my face while I’m standing there. The cooling effect when it hits my skin makes me sigh, even though it stings a little.
“Here, take this too,” Barclay says as he hands me two pills. I put them in my mouth and struggle to swallow them. It’s hard without water, and when they go down, they leave the nasty taste of medicine in my throat.
“You should sit down,” he adds. “We need to rest.”
I know I should tell him that we don’t have time to rest, that Ben’s family and whoever else they’re holding in the Piston are still there, that we need to get them out. But for some reason, the words don’t come to me. Instead, Barclay and I stand side by side in silence for a long time. Elijah has several open sores on his body, wounds that never healed and have been gathering bacteria and festering for who knows how long. The doctor cleans and disinfects them, bandages or stitches them up. He hooks up an IV with fluids and painkillers, and Elijah passes out, probably his first real rest in weeks.
At some point the receptionist brings in a chair for me, and I sit down.
Barclay puts an arm on my shoulder, and I yawn, leaning on him for support.
Somewhere along the line, I’m tired enough that I fall asleep.
03:02:29:57
I wake up in my clothes, facedown in a pillow. The scratchy sheets are pricking at my skin, and my whole body is stiff and sore all over, like I ran a marathon.
Or like I escaped from a prison. The memories from last night rush back. After the hospital we came here and passed out for the night. We’re in a standard cheap motel room—two beds and a coffee maker. Elijah is on the other one. My backpack is on the floor between us, and Barclay is nowhere in sight.
I get up and move into the bathroom. I don’t look as bad as I’d expect.
There’s a nasty—and sore—bump on the back of my head and a ring of bruises around my neck, and most of my skin is red, like a bad sunburn.
I shed my clothes and turn on the shower so the water is cool but not quite freezing, and I stand underneath the faucet with my eyes closed and let the water beat against the top of my head and soak into my skin and hair.
I broke Elijah out of prison. But I also killed a man.
The guilt is so strong it’s suddenly hard to breathe. The overwhelming desire to hug my brother, thank Struz for everything he does for me, let Cecily boss me around—to be home—washes over me like a wave, and it’s like a dam inside me breaks. My eyes sting and my whole body shakes with sobs.
I killed a man. I stabbed him with a sharp piece of glass and watched his life drain away. Getting home can’t come fast enough.
When I get out of the bathroom, Barclay is there, and Elijah is awake. “How are you feeling?” Barclay asks.
I shrug.
He pulls something out of his backpack and hands it to me. When my fingers feel the metal, I know exactly what it is. The HM USP Match—the gun he gave to me when I first got to Prima. I try to shake my head and give it back. The last thing I want right now is a gun—not when all I can think about is the dead guard and how I was responsible for that—but Barclay won’t take it back.
“I need you to have my back,” he says, his voice quiet but firm.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to point the gun at someone, to pull the trigger if I need to.
Barclay steps closer to me, his voice low. “A human-trafficking ring is out there right now, snatching people—including your friend. They’ve bought their way into IA, and we’re the only ones trying to stop them. If you give up now, they win.”
I take a deep breath. I know he’s right. I don’t have time to fall apart or worry about what I’ve done. I think of Cecily and what she must be going through, pulled from our world, jabbed with a syringe, and taken through a portal. Barclay is her only hope of getting home. If something happens to him or even Elijah because I can’t get my shit together, I’ll have more deaths on my head.
Seeing my resolve, Barclay leaves the room. Elijah limps after him, but when he gets to the door, he looks back. “You did what you had to do,” he says.
I don’t exactly believe him, but I nod.
We head to a Seattle’s Best coffee shop. Barclay was right. This world is a lot like mine—or a lot like mine used to be.
“What are we doing here?” Elijah asks as we sit down at a table on the outside patio.
“I’m starving,” Barclay says as the waitress comes over. She speaks a different language, so Barclay orders for all of us. When she’s gone, he adds, “And we need a quiet place to talk.”
Elijah nods and looks at me. “So is Ben meeting us here, or are we meeting him somewhere else?”
I’m so thrown off guard, I feel like I’ve been punched.
“Somewhere else,” Barclay says, and I can’t tell if he’s actually not thrown by the question or if this is another one of those roll-with-it moments where he wants to see what kind of information he can get before revealing his cards.
Either way, I’m not having any of it. “We don’t know where Ben is.” I say the words deliberately, clearly, so there’s no room for any confusion. “That’s why we broke you out.”
“He didn’t send you to get me?” Elijah says, then he looks at Barclay. “You better start f*cking talking.”
Barclay shrugs and leans back in his chair. “We don’t know where Ben is, but we need to find him.”
Elijah doesn’t say anything. “Do you know where he is?” I ask.
“I might have an idea.”
“He’s been convicted of human trafficking, unauthorized interverse travel, and treason,” Barclay says. “The order for his execution has gone through, and IA is going to execute everyone he cares about in three days if we don’t figure out who’s behind the trafficking ring and come up with the proof we need to take them down. So we need to find him.”
“Oh, that’s it?” Elijah laughs and the bitterness makes me shiver. He shakes his head. “We’ve got bigger f*cking problems than that.”
My breath catches in my throat. Breaking out Elijah was supposed to find us more answers, not more problems. We have enough of those.
“About three months ago, IA grabbed both me and Ben and brought us in, threw us in that prison,” Elijah says. I almost interrupt and tell him we know this part. But I bite my lip and let him finish. “A couple guards brought this guy in, Constantine Meridian, or something pansy like that, and he told us he could get us out if we worked for him.”
Constantine Meridian. I picture the guy I saw outside of Derek’s cell. His military-green button-down with blood spattered on the front. His shaved head and the barbed-wire tattoo on his neck.
“The choice was join up or get your shit kicked in. When that didn’t work”—he pauses and looks at me—“it was join up or watch them kick the shit out of people you care about.”
I swallow. I’m not surprised. I saw what Derek looked like and the shape Elijah was in.
“I held fast,” Elijah says. “Me. I told them I didn’t give a shit about anyone including myself.” I know it’s a lie. No matter what he was like in my world, Elijah cared about getting home, he cared about getting back to his family. And he cared about Ben.
But what he says next is even more wrong.
“Ben, f*cking Ben. He said, ‘Sign me up.’”
03:01:11:36
“There’s no way he would do that,” I say, my voice firm.
I’m relieved there’s something I can be sure about. Ben isn’t a bad guy. He would never help them. I look at Barclay to validate what I’m saying, but he just sits there. No disagreements. Worse, there’s no surprise on his face, nothing to suggest he didn’t know this was coming.
I shake my head. “Ben wouldn’t do that,” I say again. I know Ben. I know what he went through—how guilty he felt—when he was in my world. He would never use what he could do to smuggle people—to make people slaves. Not for anything.
Elijah touches my hand.
I look from Elijah to Barclay. “You know he wouldn’t.” I’m practically pleading with him to agree with me. Elijah’s been tortured and locked away in prison for months. He’s delusional. But Barclay is rational. And we’ve talked about Ben. He told me he didn’t believe that Ben was involved—that Ben was just some kind of scapegoat for the dirty IA agents to cover their tracks.
But when Barclay looks down and avoids my eyes, I know.
This is what he expected to hear.
Which means I’m missing a huge piece of the puzzle because I can’t think of anything that would make Ben join a human-trafficking ring. Of all people, Ben knows what it’s like to stumble out of his world and end up somewhere else—somewhere he doesn’t belong. He would never inflict that on anyone else.
I turn away from the table and look around the café. It’s the first time that I notice there’s another Seattle’s Best right across the street. Apparently Seattle’s Best is this universe’s Starbucks. I’m trying to grasp some kind of normalcy, something I can latch on to, something that will tell me that I’m not losing my mind. But everything is wrong.
“Tenner, take a seat,” Barclay says.
I can’t sit down and discuss anything with Barclay. I can’t even look at him because I know he’s lied to me. Again. I know he’s kept this from me, that he brought me here, made me go through hell to break Elijah out, and he knew that Ben had done this. He knew that if we made it this far, I would find out. And he made me find out this way.
I can’t believe I trusted him, that I didn’t see this coming, that I sat on the couch in his mother’s house and listened to him tell me stories about his life and I thought we were friends.
The rage from that idea boils somewhere deep inside me. It burns deep in my chest, because I can’t believe he’s put me in this position—and worse, I can’t believe I was this stupid. I clench my hands into fists to keep them from shaking, and I wrap that anger around myself, because I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want to come through a portal and chase after bad guys. I didn’t want to watch Ben walk out of my life, or find out the best friend I have left was abducted. But I have to do something about it.
“Tenner—”
I turn back to the table, reach out, and slap Barclay across the face. Hard.
A few people at nearby tables gasp. The force blows his face to the side, and Barclay’s skin is already red by the time I pull my hand back. It stings as I sit back down.
He sits paralyzed for a moment, his head to the side, mouth slightly ajar. Whether he’s shocked, ashamed, or actually hurt, I don’t care. He deserved that, and if he didn’t know it before, he knows it now.
I take a deep breath, swallow back the flood of emotions. “You said we’d keep each other in the loop. You promised me that I would know everything I needed to.”
“You didn’t need to know this,” he says as he turns back to face me. “You needed to stay focused.”
“You don’t get to be the judge of what I need,” I say. “Anything that concerns Ben or me or my family, that’s stuff I need to know. Got it?”
Barclay doesn’t answer. He just rubs his jaw.
If he thinks he’s going to get away with not answering, he’s wrong. “I’ve had a pretty rough night. In fact, ever since you started following me around, things have gone to shit. Before I go any further, I want to know everything that both of you know.”
Elijah shrugs. “No f*cking problem here.”
Barclay hesitates. He looks up at me with those big, stupid blue eyes, and I try to ignore the way something in my chest twists at the hurt I see in them. He has no right to feel hurt right now. “I don’t have all the answers,” he says. “I’ve got some suspicions, sure, but I need them confirmed by either Elijah or Ben or maybe someone else. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
It’s a shitty apology—if it even is one. But it doesn’t matter.
Because he’s right about one thing. We have a source at this table, someone who can give us concrete information about what the hell has been going on.
I look at Elijah.
He must know what I’m thinking because he says, “What do you want to know?”
“Everything.”
He nods, raises his mug to his lips, drains the last of his tea, and puts the cup back down. Then he tells us everything that’s happened in the last few months. Everything that’s happened since he and Ben portaled back to their world and left me in the canyons behind Park Village with Alex’s body.
And it’s worse than I could have imagined.
03:00:47:36
When Ben, Elijah, and Reid tumbled through the portal and ended up in my world, they were ten years old. They spent every free moment afterward trying to find a way to get back to their world, back to their families. Back to where they belonged.
But when they finally did, seven years had gone by.
And seven years in the wake of a national tragedy, it turns out, is a long time.
They expected to walk back into their world, back into their families, back into the lives they left behind. Only, the world they left behind wasn’t there anymore. In its place was a world much different.
Seven years ago, Elijah’s father, Nathaniel Palma, was the North American prime minister in their world, and when his firstborn son was “abducted” from a birthday party, it became a national tragedy. Every law-enforcement agency in the country was tasked with looking for the missing kids, and nothing was to stand in their way.
Anyone suspected of knowing anything related to the case was brought into custody and questioned, even tortured and imprisoned. Ben’s parents, and Reid’s too, were thrown in jail for being at the birthday party and not having the right information. Ben’s brother was sent to foster care.
The longer the boys were missing, the worse it got. Until people couldn’t stand it. There were protests, talk of revolution.
A little over two years after they went through the portal, Nathaniel Palma was assassinated and a revolution overthrew the government. The leader of the rebellion established himself as a military dictator and is still in power today.
Elijah’s mother remarried a wealthy businessman. Ben’s parents were released from prison, and Derek, Ben’s brother, got out of foster care, but any joy from that was short-lived. Their family wasn’t quite the same.
Two years after the boys went through the portal, Ben’s parents got divorced. His mother threw herself into work, and his father got remarried and started a new family.
Seven years after they went through the portal, when they came back, it was to a very different homecoming than they expected. Half the country seemed to have forgotten about Ben; the other half blamed Elijah for his father’s tyranny and the resulting crumbling of society. While his mother and Ben’s parents and especially his brother were thrilled they were finally back, the world had gone on without them.
They had expected being home to calm the restless feelings inside them, the ones that screamed they didn’t belong in my world. But once they were there and reunited with their families, neither one of them felt like they fit in there, either. The more Elijah thought about it, the more he realized he fit in better on the earth they’d left behind.
My earth.
He realized he could have made a home there. He didn’t have his parents, but he had Ben and Reid. Only now Reid was dead, and Ben was an emotional wreck.
Elijah decided Ben was his real family now, and it would be best for both of them to turn around and go back—back to the universe they’d left behind, back to Eastview and foster care, and everything.
But Ben couldn’t do it yet. Derek was so glad to have him back, and Ben felt guilty—for tripping and falling into the portal, for pulling Elijah with him, for taking too long to get back. He felt like it was his fault that everyone else’s lives became so messed up.
But Elijah couldn’t just sit around with his mother’s new family and feel sorry for himself. So he started focusing on the abilities the hydrochloradneum gave him. He stopped drinking like Ben always told him he should.
Then he started opening portals and traveling through them, to different worlds. Technically he knew the portals were unstable, but to stay under IA radar and avoid Wave Function Collapse, he moved through worlds quickly and efficiently. He didn’t return home after each jump. He portaled in, took notes on what was different from other worlds and what was the same, and then he portaled somewhere else.
Meanwhile Ben’s depression was making him paranoid. He started to suspect people were following him, that they were out to get him.
When Elijah found a deserted world with no signs of people, he went home and took Ben there. They decided it would be a great safe zone, and if they ever ran into any trouble, that’s where they would go to meet up.
But trouble caught up with them too quickly. Eleven weeks ago, a little over a month after they got back, they met to touch base. Elijah was excited about all the worlds he’d visited, but Ben was looking over his shoulder, even more paranoid than he’d been before. He insisted someone had broken into his and Derek’s apartment, that some of his things were missing.
Elijah urged him to think about going back to the universe they’d left behind. Back to me. Ben said he was thinking about it, that despite how much he loved Derek, he just didn’t belong here anymore. Elijah agreed. Not only did he want to go back with Ben, but he thought they could probably bring Derek with them. They’d just need to get their hands on some hydrochloradneum to keep the radiation from frying him.
Ben liked that plan and promised him he’d talk to his brother about it. No matter what, he knew he couldn’t stay where he was.
But IA busted them, took them to Prima, and threw them in prison. Elijah was sure it was because he’d been universe hopping, and as a result, he’d somehow gotten Ben in trouble too.
But it was worse.
Their abilities had been recorded in Barclay and Brandt’s original case report. Two young men who could portal in and out of any world without being tracked by technology were exactly what a human-trafficking ring could use, especially a ring that was currently attracting heat from the IA’s wonder-boy agent, Taylor Barclay.
While Ben and Elijah were in prison, Meridian broke into their apartments and confiscated their belongings. He found the notebook where Elijah kept notes on the different worlds he’d visited. Meridian praised what Elijah could do, the notes he’d taken, and promised him money, power, women—anything he wanted.
For a second, it was tempting—not for the money, power, or women, but for the freedom to go from universe to universe and discover what was out there. That was something Elijah wanted.
But this was slavery, and Elijah knew what it was like to be taken from your family and your world, and he wasn’t about to do that to anyone else. So he refused.
That’s when the threats started. They threatened his life and his body—and they beat and tortured him to prove they could follow through. Still he refused. So they threatened his mother and everyone he cared about.
He bluffed, shrugged, and told them to go ahead.
So they took some of his blood and beat him for good measure, but left him in his cell.
He didn’t see Ben—not since they were first arrested. They were in different cells and weren’t allowed to see or talk to each other, but some nights Elijah could hear Ben scream.
And he heard him scream the last night Ben was there—the night before he agreed to help them. It was when Meridian and IA threatened people they cared about. They threatened to bring in his parents, his brother. And then they did. They brought someone in—beaten and bloody—and told Ben he could watch them die, or he could help.
That’s when he gave in.
02:23:49:27
“And that’s it. I’ve been rotting in that cell, eating sloppy mush and waiting for him to come back and get me out of there.” Elijah cracks his knuckles and looks at Barclay. “So, you gonna call in the cavalry or what? I’m ready to beat some asses.”
“Why did they take your blood?” I ask, ignoring his question. He just got shot; he’s not going to beat anyone’s asses, and there’s no cavalry to call in. We’re it.
“To do tests and shit.” He rolls up a sleeve and shows me the needle marks.
For a minute I don’t get it, then Barclay says, “If you were running a human-trafficking ring between universes, wouldn’t you want to somehow replicate what he and Ben can do?”
A shiver moves through my body. Criminals with the power to move through the universes—go wherever they want—without a quantum charger. They’d be virtually untraceable. And who knows what kind of damage all those unstable portals would do to the multiverse.
“Tell me more about Meridian,” Barclay says.
Elijah describes him—six feet, lanky, sandy-blond hair shaved close to his head, scruffy facial hair, light eyes, barbed-wire tattoo—and Barclay jots down notes, adding a few questions here and there, and I recognize this for what it is—a gentle interrogation. It’s the way you question a victim about their attacker. Quietly, nonthreatening, slowly.
I watch Elijah when he answers. He speaks deliberately. He’s calmer than he was in my world, more thoughtful. He still swears a lot, but it’s more habit than swearing for some kind of effect. I can’t imagine what he’s been through, not just in the prison, but in the months before it. He spent seven years waiting to get home, and when he finally did, he found out it didn’t exist anymore.
And that makes me think of Ben.
As horrible as this is, I find myself wishing it hadn’t been Elijah in that cell, that I hadn’t gone in to break him out. I wish it had been Ben. Because I have a fierce urge to lay my face against his chest and breathe him in until the world makes sense again.
Only I can’t, because I don’t know where he is. At least not yet.
“Why did you think Ben would come back for you?” Barclay asks.
“I couldn’t keep good track of time,” Elijah adds. “I think the bastards only fed us once a day. Four or five days, or maybe a week ago, the guards and Meridian came back into my cell. They wanted to know where Ben would go. Where he would hide.”
“They’d lost him?” I ask. He must have had a plan—he must have agreed to keep his family safe, while at the same time coming up with some kind of plan to get away from them, to get out of it.
Elijah nods. “But it was worse than that—for them, I mean. I got the impression he took someone with him.”