We are even free to choose the wrong thing.
I won’t be able to go back to sleep right away. I need air. I ease out from under the tangle of sleeping bags and blankets and fumble in the dark for the tent flap. I wriggle out of the tent on my stomach, trying not to make too much noise. Behind me, Dani kicks in her sleep and mutters something unintelligible.
The night is cool. The sky is clear and cloudless. The moon looks closer than usual, and it paints everything with a silvery glow, like a fine layering of snow. I stand for a moment, relishing the feeling of stillness and quiet: the peaks of the tents touched with moonlight; the low-hanging branches, just barely budding with new leaves; the occasional hooting of an owl in the distance.
In one of the tents, Julian is sleeping.
And in another: Alex.
I move away from the tents. I head down toward the gully, past the remains of the campfire, which by now is nothing more than charred bits of blackened wood and a few smoking embers. The air still smells, faintly, like scorched metal and beans.
I’m not sure where I’m going, and it’s stupid to wander from camp—Raven has warned me a million times against it. At night, the Wilds belong to the animals, and it’s easy to get turned around, lost among the growth, the slalom of trees. But I have an itch in my blood, and the night is so clear, I have no trouble navigating.
I hop down into the dried-out riverbed, which is covered in a layer of rocks and leaves and, occasionally, a relic from the old life: a dented metal soda can, a plastic bag, a child’s shoe. I walk south for a few hundred feet, where I’m prevented from going farther by an enormous, felled oak. Its trunk is so wide that, horizontal, it nearly reaches my chest. A vast network of roots arch up toward the sky like a dark pinwheel spray of water from a fountain.
There’s a rustling behind me. I whip around. A shadow shifts, turns solid, and for a second my heart stops—I’m not protected; I have no weapons, nothing to fend off a hungry animal. Then the shadow emerges into the open and takes the shape of a boy.
In the moonlight, it’s impossible to tell that his hair is the exact color of leaves in the autumn: golden brown, and shot through with red.
“Oh,” Alex says. “It’s you.” These are the first words he has spoken to me in more than three days.
There are a thousand things I want to say to him.
Please understand. Please forgive me.
I prayed every day for you to be alive, until the hope became painful.
Don’t hate me.
I still love you.
But all that comes out is: “I couldn’t sleep.”
Alex must remember that I was always troubled by nightmares. We talked about it a lot during our summer together in Portland. Last summer—less than a year ago. It’s impossible to imagine the vast distance I’ve covered since that time, the landscape that has formed between us.
“I couldn’t sleep either,” Alex says simply.
Just this, the simple statement, and the fact that he is speaking to me at all, loosens something inside me. I want to hold him, to kiss him the way I used to.
“I thought you were dead,” I say. “It almost killed me.”
“Did it?” His voice is neutral. “You made a pretty fast recovery.”
“No. You don’t understand.” My throat is tight; I feel as though I’m being strangled. “I couldn’t keep hoping, and then waking up every day and finding out it wasn’t true, and you were still gone. I—I wasn’t strong enough.”
He is quiet for a second. It’s too dark to see his expression: He is standing in shadow again, but I can sense that he is staring at me.
Finally he says, “When they took me to the Crypts, I thought they were going to kill me. They didn’t even bother. They just left me to die. They threw me in a cell and locked the door.”
“Alex.” The strangled feeling has moved from my throat to my chest, and without realizing it, I have begun to cry. I move toward him. I want to run my hands through his hair and kiss his forehead and each of his eyelids and take away the memory of what he has seen. But he steps backward, out of reach.
“I didn’t die. I don’t know how. I should have. I’d lost plenty of blood. They were just as surprised as I was. After that it became a kind of game—to see how much I could stand. To see how much they could do to me before I’d—”
He breaks off abruptly. I can’t hear any more; don’t want to know, don’t want it to be true, can’t stand to think of what they did to him there. I take another step forward and reach for his chest and shoulders in the dark. This time, he doesn’t push me away. But he doesn’t embrace me either. He stands there, cold, still, like a statue.