“I have to. But listen,” I say, pulling her up, so she’s sitting on the side of her bed. “Listen to me, OK?” She nods as I shove her boots on her feet and thrust a coat in her hands. “You have to run. And you have to do it alone.”
“No,” she whimpers as quietly as she can. She’s still afraid of being heard at night. She doesn’t realize we’ve already killed everyone but her.
There’s a loud bang from the floor below, and we both go still as the dead and look each other in the eyes.
The seriousness of the situation is written all over my face. She understands now.
I take her hand and pull her up so she’s standing, then hold her coat open. She slips her arms in automatically and pulls it tight around her chest.
“Run,” I say, leading her over to the window and lifting the sash up. It’s cold, windy, and it’s snowing. And if the other Alphas see her footprints, they will hunt her like a rabbit. But the wind is strong enough to cover up her tracks and I think she can get away. “You go that way,” I say, pointing into the woods. The opposite direction to where I know we will be going. “You go that way, Omega, and you never look back. You run until you find someone. And you never, ever tell them about this place. About me or the other Alphas. Or what we did here.”
She starts to cry again. And what did I expect? She’s eight years old.
“You can never talk about this place again or they will kill you.”
I wait for her to acknowledge my order. She should be the one ordering me, but she’s always looked to me for guidance. The administration would’ve figured it out soon. They’d have figured out she’d never be able to control me and had her eliminated.
That’s why I agreed to escape tonight. To save her.
She finally nods, giving in, or giving up, or both. So I lift her up until she can swing her legs over the side of the windowsill, and then I push her and she plops down into a snowdrift.
She looks up at me one more time, the tears on her cheeks already freezing. And she says, “I’ll find you, Alpha. I will. One day I’ll find you.”
Then she turns and instincts kick in. She runs and she never looks back.
I take a deep breath because her words mean more than she knows. They are the words of my killer. My death. My demise. Because that little girl is the only person left in the world who can hurt me.
And I just let her go.
Chapter Twenty-Three - Molly
I do as I’m told. I start running and I never look back. And every time my feet crunch into the deep snow, my long flannel nightgown gets pushed further up my legs. It gets wetter and wetter. And so heavy I feel like I’m dragging a dead weight.
I pump my arms, pleading with my legs to take me under the cover of the trees before someone from school sees me outlined against the stark whiteness of the valley.
I expect to be shot in the back with every passing moment. I expect a yell, telling me to, “Get your ass back here,” and then the sharp crack of a rifle and the scream of a bullet into my spine.
But I gather up all my strength and leap from the deep snow into the scant dusting under the pines. I slip, skid, and fall down on my knees.
The air is rushing in and out of my mouth in long heaves. My chest is burning, my throat is burning. I feel like I might die right here and now. Of fear, or exhaustion, or sadness.
I grab fistfuls of snow because there is nothing else to cling to, and the burning from exposure winds its way from the tips of my fingers to my palms. In a few minutes it will pass my wrists and run up my arms.
I shove my hands into my coat pockets, desperately wishing I had Alpha’s gloves and the heat of his hands to keep me warm.
But I don’t get either of those things from my pocket. My fingertips bump into a slender tube of plastic. A chill of fear runs through me, because I know what this is. Every time Alpha had to use it, he showed it to me first. He said, “I’m not the one hurting you, Omega. This”—he’d hold the syringe up—“this is what hurts you. Not me. They make me do this, Omega. I have to do it. But what happens after?” His face was always calm and his words were always soft. “Tell me,” he’d say.
And I’d say, “You take care of me.”
Every time I said those words he’d smile and say, “That’s right. I have to give you the drug, but I always take care of you after. I will never leave you, Omega. You’re mine and I’m yours. And we take care of each other.”
But he made me leave him, and that’s the same thing as leaving me.
I’d always nod. Because as soon as I was better, after he’d cared for me for days, and sometimes weeks, as I pushed the drug through my blood, I’d have to hurt him too. And they never let me take care of him. They only made me watch him writhe in pain, alone, on the other side of a glass window that he couldn’t see through.
The syringe in my pocket comes with a note. It’s wet from the snow and a little bit smeared. But I rub my wet hands on the inside of my coat, smooth out the piece of paper, and the words form in my head. I hear them in his voice.