I stared at him. “You crossed over to the other side—you risked your life—just to prove a point?”
“Not to prove a point,” he said. “To prove you wrong.” He smiled, bigger this time. His hair smelled like smoke from the fire. “You seem like you might be worth it.”
Then he kissed me. He leaned over and just touched his lips to mine with Blue held between us like a secret, and I knew then that I would not be so alone anymore.
“How did you—?” Lena is breathless, white in the face. Shock, maybe. Her palms are cut up, and there’s blood on her jacket. “Where did you—?”
“Later,” I say. My cheek is stinging. Got a face full of glass when Lena decided to break through the observation deck, but it’s nothing a pair of tweezers can’t fix. I’m lucky the glass missed my eyes.
Julian, up close, looks different than he does in all the DFA literature. Younger, and kind of sad and overeager, like a puppy begging for attention—even a swift kick.
Luckily, he asks no questions, just falls in behind me, walking quickly, saying nothing. He must be used to obeying. If it wasn’t for Lena, if she hadn’t switched up the rules, the needle would be in his arm by now, and he’d be dead. It would have been better for us, and for the movement.
No point in thinking about that now. Lena took a stand, and so I took a stand with her.
That’s what you do for family. Anything.
We go out the emergency exit to the fire escape, which leads down into the little courtyard I scouted earlier. So far, so good. Lena’s breathing fast and hard behind me, but my breath is easy, even, and slow.
This is my favorite part of the story: the escape.
Tack is waiting with the van on Twenty-Fourth Street, just like he said he would be. I open the cargo door and shut Lena and Julian inside.
“Got ’em?” Tack asks when I climb into the passenger seat.
“Would I be here if I hadn’t?” I answer.
He frowns. “You’re bleeding.”
I flip down the mirror and take a look: a few uneven cuts on my cheek and neck, beaded with blood. “Just a scratch,” I say, blotting the blood with the sleeve of my sweatshirt.
“Let’s roll, then,” Tack says, and sighs.
He guns the engine and pulls out into the street, gray and blurry with old rain. I keep my sleeve pressed to the side of my face to stanch the bleeding. We make it all the way to the West Side Highway before Tack speaks again.
“It’s a risk, taking him back with us,” he says in a low voice. “Julian Fineman. Shit. A big risk.”
“I’ll take responsibility.” I turn my face to the window. I can see the ghost-outlines of my reflection, feel the hum of cold air through the glass.
“She’s important to you, isn’t she? Lena, I mean.” Tack’s voice stays quiet.
“She’s important to the movement,” I answer, and see the ghost-girl speak too, her teeth flashing, superimposed over passing images of the city.
Tack doesn’t say anything for a second. Then I feel his hand on my knee. “I would have done it for you, too,” he says, even quieter. “If you’d been taken. I would have gone back. I would have risked it.”
I turn to look at him. “You already did come back for me,” I say. I remember that first kiss, and Blue’s warmth between us, and Tack’s lips, dry as bone, soft as shadow. I still can’t say her name, but I think he knows what I’m thinking. “You came back for us.”
Recently I’ve been having the fantasy more and more: the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars—sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.
And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to live—like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.
We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.
We have four kids. Maybe five. The first one is a girl, stupid beautiful, and we call her Blue.
“Where the hell were you?” Pike’s in my face as soon as we make it back to the warehouse.
I don’t like Pike. He’s moody and mean and he thinks he can boss me—and everyone else—around.
I put a hand on his chest, easing him backward. “Get out of my airspace.”
“I asked you a question.”