“I’m so incredibly sorry,” Tana said. “About what happened. I’m sorry you got hurt.”
“How did you—how did you wind up with them? With Aidan and the other one?” Midnight asked. Her lips looked chapped and bluish under the fluorescent lights.
“There was a party and everyone died,” Tana said. She didn’t expect it to come out quite like that, quite so plain and awful.
Midnight nodded and closed her eyes, as if the scratches stung. “How bad? It wasn’t that thing that was on the news up north—?”
The news? For a moment, Tana was confused. It felt like something too private for the news, but of course that didn’t make sense. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“It was! Oh my god, I saw all the tweets and the pictures someone leaked of the crime scene. You were really there?”
Tana nodded, not sure what else to say. She had no words for it that were big enough.
“Wow,” Midnight said. “And you got away. That’s major.”
“More or less, we got away,” said Tana.
“Hey, do me a favor, okay?” Midnight reached into her pocket with one hand and took out her phone, the face of it scratched from the pavement. “Hold this while I talk. My tripod is in my luggage, but I don’t want to bother getting it. This is the real stuff—the stuff I promised to tell everyone. Just try and hold it steady.”
“Sure,” Tana said, somewhat taken aback. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t taken video of anyone before—of Pauline so she could see how her auditions looked or of friends acting stupid and goofing around—but she’d never filmed anyone who’d just been attacked and was still bleeding.
“And you could say something, too. You should. Everyone wants to know what it’s like to be you right now.”
Tana shook her head quickly; the idea of talking about what had happened brought back every awful image. The staring dead eyes. The whispering voices through the door. Her back slammed against the ground of the gas station with Aidan towering over her. “I don’t know, myself.”
“Later maybe,” said Midnight, handing the phone to Tana. “How do I look?”
Tana had no idea how to answer that. Midnight looked pale and beautiful, streaked and bloodied. “You look fine,” Tana said, as neutrally as possible.
“I guess that’s going to have to do.” Midnight winced as she pulled on the ripped neck of her velvet shirt, exposing her collarbone so Tana could get a good shot of the gouges. They were grisly, wet with blood, and swollen at the edges. “You know how to use this thing?”
Tana touched her fingers to the phone, hitting the small picture of the video on the bottom corner. “I think so. Aren’t you worried your parents are going to see this? Let the cops know where you are. I mean, you’re underage runaways.”
Midnight snorted. “Our parents don’t get what we do online. They’re not smart enough. They’re nothing like us. Trust me, by the time they figure out what happened, we’ll be long gone.”
“Okay,” Tana said, holding up the camera and clicking the button to begin filming. “Ready.”
“Hi,” Midnight said, an odd intensity coming over her as she gazed into the lens. “It’s me, faithful servant of the night, adventurer, poet, and madwoman. And what an adventure I’ve been on! Lots has happened since I posted last. Winter and I made it to the rest stop outside of Coldtown, so we’re just hours from being inside. It’s exactly like what we always believed—when you’re following your deepest, truest, darkest destiny, the universe clears you a path. We met some people who are going to give us a ride. In fact, you might recognize them from the news—but I’ll get to that later. First, I have to tell you about what happened to me.”
Then Winter returned with a bag of medical supplies. Midnight asked Tana to keep the phone recording as Winter bound up her shoulder, spraying the wounds with antiseptic and taping down gauze bandages. She narrated all the while, eyes on the camera, even when it obviously hurt. When that was done, Midnight gulped down some aspirin and said she wanted to edit and upload the video to her blog before she did anything else.