“Do you really want sand . . . um . . . everywhere?” Hope’s question—in the context of a discussion about how we’ll have to wash our clothes sometimes, underwear included, and how we’ll want mats to sit on while they’re drying—is all it takes.
“Fine. Fine.” Alexa stands, dusts herself off. “Let’s go.”
Though we can’t quite see the sun from here, a hundred variations of pink and orange blaze in the sky. “Meet back before dark?” I ask.
Finnley nods and sets off with Hope into the trees. I’m secretly glad our task doesn’t require going fully into the jungle just yet. Alexa and I should be able to find everything we need just by walking its outer edge.
Narrow-leafed plants, perfect for weaving, wave in the breeze like fans for cooling summer-steamed kings. We pluck as many leaves as we can and tie them into a bundle with the sleeves of my yellow cardigan. I won’t be wearing it again anytime soon in this heat.
“Out with it,” Alexa says, with a firm yank on a handful of leaves. “You’re acting weird.”
I try to summon the directness she’s somehow perfected over her lifetime. The trouble is, I don’t know which question to start with. I settle, finally, on this: “Tell me how you did it.” I sever a thick bunch of leaves with the knife, and the bare stalk springs away.
“Do we have enough leaves to start weaving?” she asks.
We do, but I don’t say so. I shift my weight and hope silence will draw the truth out of her.
She tears five leaves from a ravaged plant, one at a time, and stuffs them into my cardigan bundle. When I still don’t speak, she rolls her eyes. “How did I do what, exactly? How did I make the bombs? Or how did I keep them a secret from the Wolfpack officers?” Her words are a wild flood rising between us, and my ability to talk back is swept out to sea.
“Or,” she continues, teeth tight and words terse, “how did I do it alone? Or how can I live with myself with so much blood on my hands?”
Her eyes are glassy with tears that don’t slip out. I’m tempted to feel guilty for pressing her too hard until I remember she was the one to spill her secrets in the first place. And that secrets aren’t the only thing she’s spilled.
“Put the knife away,” she says.
I follow her gaze to my hand, where my knuckles have gone white around the Leatherman’s handle. I hadn’t even realized I was gripping it so tightly. I hadn’t realized I was still gripping it at all.
Carefully, I fold the knife and tuck it into my pants pocket, where it settles snugly beside the vial of my father.
“I told you before, when we first met, I wasn’t running to something—I was only running away. And that was the truth.”
In one smooth motion, she slips the prong of her watch’s clasp out of the leather band. Unlike most people, she wears it backward, with the face to the inside. She lets it fall to the sand without a second look, and holds her hand up as if to wave.
Her wrist is porcelain pale except for a small tattoo, just below her palm: a wolf’s face.
The wolf’s face.
TWELVE
“YOU WERE ONE of them?”
Her face, all sun and shadows, shifts with the breeze. The sharpness in it puts me immediately on guard—I can’t look at her without seeing everyone the Wolfpack has taken from me.
“Don’t look at me like that.” She rips another handful of leaves from the nearest plant.
I look away, out to sea. Everything I want to say, to ask, is tangled in a knot at the pit of my stomach.
She thrusts the leaves into my cardigan, so forceful and sudden the entire bundle falls to the sand. “This was a mistake,” she mutters, and stalks back to the clearing that will be our home.
I don’t protest.
I bend to gather the fallen leaves and see the clasp of her watch glinting in the sunlight. She shouldn’t have been so careless—does she not realize she’ll be forced to spill her secrets without it? I could call after her, but I don’t. The others have a right to know. I’m not about to tell them, not about to make things that easy for her—she deserves to look them in the eye when they find out. See their rage. Their pain.
I go out to the beach, plant myself where the tide pulls at my toes. It’s been years since I’ve had the freedom to sit this close to the water, thanks to the Wolves—thanks to Alexa. Bittersweet memories pull at me with every wave: my tiny family, just Dad and me for so many years, at the pier. Moonlit campfires with Birch, marshmallows burned to blisters and blackness. Seashells, starfish, sandcastles. The flock of gulls that stole our picnic bread.
All the things I took for granted.
A crisp breeze blows in, raising every hair on my arm. I turn out the leaves from my cardigan and slip into its well-loved sleeves. It will do well enough for now, while the sun is still out. I hope the foliage in our clearing will provide a better barrier when it’s time to sleep.
I work the leaves into a mat, weaving them over and under in a pattern that puts my mind at ease. By the time I’ve woven three petite mats, the sky is the sunless gray of dusk and my fingertips are raw. My pile of leaves has drastically diminished—there won’t be enough for a fourth mat.
A pair of bare feet appears beside me: Hope’s. “Mind if I sit?”
“Good luck,” I say, brushing away what remains of my leaf pile. “The beach gets pretty crowded this time of year.”
“Tourists.” She sinks to the sand and stretches out her long sun-kissed legs. She shakes her head. “Did you ever think you’d miss tourists, of all things?”
“I never thought I’d miss a lot of things.”
I never expected to lose so many things.
“My older sister always complained that tourists were the worst,” she says. “She waited tables at a seafood restaurant out at the Santa Monica Pier.”
“Did your sister come to Texas with you?” After Zero, people were shipped to gulags all over the country, mostly along vulnerable coastlines, to break up as many long-standing relationships as possible. I was one of the few who stayed put. One grandparent on each side, a couple of stray uncles—other than Dad, I have no idea where the rest of my family ended up. If they’re even alive.
When she doesn’t answer, I turn my eyes from the ocean for the first time since she sat down. She curls her knees into herself, wraps her arms around them. Rests her chin. “I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
I don’t recall ever meeting anyone who did get to say goodbye. “I didn’t, either,” I say. “Not to my mom, and not to my grandparents.” Mom’s been gone a lot longer than the war, though.
“No siblings?”
“Only child.” Birch was practically family, and if we’d made it to our twenties together, he probably would’ve become my actual family.
“Sometimes I think it must be better that way,” she says. “Easier, I mean. Not necessarily better.”
Though I haven’t lost siblings, I know exactly what she means. I’ve thought it myself, hundreds of times: when pieces of your heart are ripped away, it’s easy to wish you’d never known what a whole heart felt like in the first place. But no one can deny a whole heart beats better than a broken one.