I try to hide my panic, but my hand instinctively flies to the dagger at my hip.
“Hooooooly hell, you’re terrified right now, aren’t you?” He looks me in the eye, puts his hand on mine where it hovers over the dagger. Our fingers only lightly touch.
“Do you blame me?” My fingers tighten around the hilt. “Tell me why you’re here. I can handle it.”
I hope I look more convincing than I feel.
His lips part, enough for me to see answers, just waiting for their chance to escape. But he shakes his head. “You have no reason to trust me, I know that. But I can’t, not until I’m sure.”
His non-answers are infuriating. “Sure of what?”
“I could knock you down from here, right this minute—you know that, don’t you?”
“Not. Helping.”
“I’m not going to, Eden. And I’m not leading you somewhere else just so you can die later.” He closes his hand around mine, tightens my grip on the dagger. Pulls it up to his own throat. My hand shakes so badly I nick him: a little trickle of blood slides down with his sweat.
“It is not a safe road ahead of us,” he says. Swallows. “But I am not the danger.” He nods at the dagger. “Do it. Kill me, if it’ll make you feel better.”
He’s willing to hold a dagger at his throat, but not willing to tell me what I want to know: it is checkmate, and he is well aware of it. There are no moves for me that won’t end badly. If I kill him, then what? Cass and Phoenix will be the end of me. And what reason do I have to go that far? I’ve lost track of how many times he could have taken my life by now.
He hasn’t. He’s only given me fire and water and warmth.
I pull the dagger away. Sheathe it before I do something I’ll regret, my hands still trembling.
“Let’s go,” I say.
He’s shaking, too. Deep breaths, Eden. One in, one out.
I keep my head down so nothing but my hair touches the foliage wall, maneuvering carefully to avoid plunging to my death, slicing myself on the jagged rocks, or risking poisonous-moss-like burning by touching the other plants.
Instead of finding ourselves under the bare blue sky, we are even more closed in than before. Two stone walls, overgrown with moss, line a narrow path. Bits of sunlight pierce a canopy of leaves overhead, while underfoot, the black rocks give way to a stone staircase. Compared with the climb we just made, this ranks a zero on the difficulty scale. The others have waited for us.
At the top of the staircase, the leaves thin out above us, and we are truly on top of the world. But it’s short-lived—the tunnel dead-ends at the gaping mouth of a cave.
Phoenix pushes past Finnley and Cass, slings his backpack from his shoulders, and rolls out his muscles. “Lunch if you want it,” he calls, not bothering to look behind him as he disappears under the stony arch and into darkness.
“This is the right place? You’re sure?” Lonan and Cass share a too-long look.
“Would I have dragged you all the way up here if it wasn’t?”
Lonan concedes, biting back whatever words are on the verge of slipping out. “I trust you, Cass—you know I do,” he says, like someone trying to convince himself. “It’s them I don’t trust.”
Them. “Them?”
All eyes shift to me, and just like that, it’s end of discussion. Nothing in Lonan’s them seemed to be referring to me—in fact, it’s almost like they forgot I was standing there at all. Even now, with their eyes boring into me, I can feel it isn’t me they’re talking about. So who, then?
Whether the cave is the right place or not, it’s where we end up, in the shady-cool space that’s practically black-lit and glowing with phosphorescent material. Phoenix sits directly on the floor, unpacking a feast from his bag.
The water, the bread, the cheese, the grapes: they are everything I’ve been missing for way too long, like bite-sized bits of life and memories and happiness that take me back to Before.
That is, until Cass reaches to tear off a hunk of bread, and I see it on his wrist: a phosphorescent wolf. Not a tattoo, but otherwise exactly like Alexa’s in size and shape and placement. The longer I stare at it, the more I see it’s a hologram, not simply a glowing image.
Finnley has one, too.
Lonan and Phoenix do not.
THIRTY-EIGHT
SURELY THEY KNOW, I think, as I chew, chew, chew a too-big bite of stale bread dipped in vinegar. I chew so long, so hard, that my jaw gets tired and I have to wash the bread down with water. Surely there’s something I’m missing—some reason we’re sitting here feasting together like we’re at the Last Supper instead of splitting off from those among us with wolf holograms on their wrists.
But we eat our grapes in peace.
Until.
Phoenix turns his back on Finnley to reach for another water bottle. Ziiiiiip goes the big pocket of his pack—and the little pocket at Finnley’s hip. She pulls out a syringe, exactly like the one Cass used on the vine, and plunges it into the meatiest part of Phoenix’s shoulder. It happens fast, so fast, except for Phoenix as he slumps—that part is painfully slow, and in that second, the cave springs to life.
Lonan pounces, swats the syringe from Finnley’s hands. “Go get it, Eden!” he shouts as it clatters against a far wall. “Sedate her!”
I freeze, torn—I wouldn’t say I definitively trust Lonan or Finnley—but then Cass turns on Lonan. Cass’s eyes are even more serious and intense than usual, with a dash of rabid ferocity thrown in for good measure. Lonan launches all his weight at Cass, who thrashes wildly, syringe in hand. Lonan expertly avoids it, though it comes dangerously close to piercing his neck.
I head for the far wall, for Finnley’s syringe, but she beats me to it. She comes at me with eyes the same breed of wild as Cass’s. Is this really the same girl who escaped with me from the boardwalk, the same girl who helped navigate our boat across the ocean? What happened to her when she went missing?
I barrel into her. We collide, we fly, we slam into the cave floor. She struggles to get out from underneath me, to contort her arm around enough to jab the needle under my skin, but I have her pinned well enough to avoid that. It’s both of my hands against one of hers. Finally, I pry the syringe from her iron grip.
In her shoulder? In her neck, in her thigh?
“It isn’t going to kill her—do it now,” Lonan says. “Anywhere’ll work.”
I aim for her shoulder, like she did with Phoenix; but she hasn’t given up the fight, and it isn’t her shoulder I pierce. A bead of blood surfaces when I pull the needle out, just below her collarbone.
Now the fight is over.
Sweat drips from pieces of my hair that fell from where I tied them this morning. Our ragged breaths—mine and Lonan’s—are the only sound that fill the cave. Cass is slumped and still where Lonan took him down.