Hope burrows her toes into the sand. “It’s so dark out,” she says. “That happened fast.”
If not for the sliver of moon that hangs over the horizon, we’d both be obscured by the night. We should probably head back to the clearing soon—the wind has picked up, and the chill in it chafes. A campfire will help.
“I wish we could spend the night out here near the water,” I say. No part of me wants to be around Alexa right now. Even if she did run from her life in the Wolfpack, she’s part of the reason our world is so toxically fractured. It’s not that I don’t respect her boldness in leaving—I do.
It’s just that wolves are predators, and they’ve conditioned us to fear them.
A conflict in the clearing rips this still moment to shreds: raised voices, harsh tones. Finnley first, then Alexa. Panic. A fire flickers near the base of the big tree—it’s hard to tell if it’s burning within its boundaries, or if the wind has blown the flames out of control.
Hope is already on her feet, halfway back to the clearing. I almost don’t want to help. In all the sleepless nights I spent staring at the ceiling, wishing for Sanctuary, I never factored a former Wolf into the equation. But this is my home now, too—our home. Like it or not, this is all the family I may ever have again.
So I gather my three woven mats and run.
“She’s a Wolf!” Finnley explodes when I arrive. The fire burns neatly within a ring of smooth white stones. “When were you going to tell us, Alexa? Or were you just going to kill us tonight in our sleep? Did you think we’d ignore the gun tucked into your shorts forever?”
Alexa is right up in Finnley’s face, her eyes jagged as black crystals. “If I’d wanted to kill you, you wouldn’t have made it on the boat.”
As much as I’m inclined to hate her for her history, this much is true: she protected me at the boardwalk, when I first emerged. Warned me not to move. She could have fired that pistol, put me out of her misery.
“Maybe you were just using us to get to the island,” Finnley says, not backing down. “Maybe you’d been spying on Eden for months, maybe you believed in Sanctuary all along and needed her to find it.”
Alexa’s jaw tightens. “If you can remember all the way back to yesterday,” she says, through gritted teeth, “I was against the idea of coming here.”
“So if you weren’t running here,” I say, “where, exactly, did you expect to go?”
She turns on me then, and I’m surprised to see tears in her eyes. “How many times do I have to tell you? I was only running away.”
In the same way I knew the truth in her words about not killing us, there’s something in the way her voice catches, and in the way she holds herself, like she’s swallowing a breakdown. It may not be a lie, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t entirely true.
“Wait, what do you mean, ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’” Finnley looks between us, eyes like steel blades. “You knew about this, Eden? And you didn’t say anything?”
“I only just found out—”
“And, what, you thought we’d be okay with you sitting on a secret like that?”
“No, I—”
“Maybe you’re one of them, too,” she says. She rips the mats I’ve woven right out of my arms, twists my wrist up for inspection.
I yank it away. Grit my teeth so only steam comes out, glare hard even as my eyes fill with tears. Traitors. “Do I look like someone,” I say, as evenly as I can manage, jaw still tight, “who would give up her entire life just to stomp the flames out of everyone else’s?”
Hope steps between us. “I don’t think she meant—”
“You don’t think I meant what?” Finnley’s words snap Hope’s mouth shut. “Looks aren’t everything, Eden. Just because you look like you used to be a privileged girl from a five-million- dollar mansion, it doesn’t mean you actually were one.”
I’m stunned that my Before clings to me well enough for her to notice, even after all the Wolves have done to scrub it away. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t surprise me. Ten times out of ten, we oppressed share a history of privilege. Still, not everyone’s privilege was as extreme as mine—much of the middle class landed in barracks along with the rest of us.
“I’m right, aren’t I? Well, aren’t you lucky,” Finnley says. The fire falls out of her voice, finally. Withers like embers as they fade to ash. “At least you had memories of sweet dreams to carry you through your incredibly rough days of feeding silkworms.”
Alexa makes a face behind her back. I bite my tongue.
“Finnley.” Hope’s voice is quiet. No one shuts her down this time. “No one here wants a fight. We’re . . . kind of all we have right now.”
Finnley throws a handful of sticks into the fire; the flames swallow them up in a fit of sparks. “You have no idea,” she says, barely over a whisper, “what it’s like to be forgotten.” Her tears sizzle as they fall, fast and fierce, onto the blisteringly hot rocks. “What it’s like to be overlooked and left behind when all your friends join the Wolfpack and you haven’t even been invited. What it’s like to wish you were one of them, because you deserve to be, because you were never privileged, never rich.” She swallows. “And then to hate yourself for ever having the thought. To hate yourself for ever being friends with the sort of people who had such a taste for other people’s blood.”
Whatever I expected, it wasn’t this. I glance at Alexa, brace myself for an aftershock in response to Finnley’s last comment, but it looks as though her thoughts are a thousand miles away.
“I know what it’s like,” Hope says, staring into the fire. “To hate them, but to love one. To question whether you ever truly knew them, how you could have missed all the broken things when you live one room away.”
Her brother, no doubt.
The fire pops, hisses. War is like this: consuming, ravenous, feeding and feeding until there’s nothing left to take and all that’s left is ash.
“I never had a taste for blood.” Alexa. Still a thousand miles away. “I was just doing what I thought I needed to do in order to survive.”
THIRTEEN
SURVIVAL: It isn’t as easy as air in, air out.
It isn’t as easy as bite, chew, swallow.
It isn’t easy.
Not all Wolves began with a taste for blood; I believe that to be true. Not all Wolves wanted life at the expense of life. Wolves wanted life—but not at the expense of their own lives.
So bloodthirst won. Tooth and claw, the desire to survive at any cost. The softer ones allowed it to happen, lest they get caught up in the dying.
Bite. Chew. Swallow.
Survival is born as much from fear as it is from bravery.
FOURTEEN
WE STEP CAREFULLY around one another. No one has triggered any more emotional land mines, but then, we’ve hardly spoken in two hours.
“I’m taking these.” Finnley grabs both life vests from the storage pile and doesn’t look back.