It’s this that motivates me to move. The longer I’m frozen here, the longer he has to hold the line. He will not drain himself of strength on my account, not if I can help it. I swallow my fear, take another sideways step. Dust and pebbles crumble from the ledge, but it is stronger than it looks. Stronger than it feels. Like me.
When I’m close, Alexa breaks away from the pile and reaches for me. We grab wrists as I step firmly onto the rock platform where the bridge is attached, my palm locked directly on top of her wolf tattoo. It feels like skin, is my surprising first thought, and of course it does. It feels like normal skin and not like something that’s been charred, scarred beyond recognition. I always imagined it as a burn that never dies.
Lonan scales the wall like he was born doing it. He makes it across in little more than a minute, with no hint of fear or pain anywhere on him.
We’ve all learned to hide these things well, I guess.
And we’re all as strong as we have to be, when it comes down to it.
FORTY-SEVEN
SMOKE AND FLAME and embers and ashes: these are not always so obvious, not always welcomed with the fanfare of piercing alarm bells. Fire slips in when you least expect it, in my experience. It slips in with silence.
The worst fires take root and never leave.
Smoke: The futile longing for a place I’ll never see again. Dusty hardwood floors. Blades of backyard grass poking up between my toes. Our aquarium full of fish.
Flame: What if I’d stepped in front of Birch? What if I’d pushed him out of the way—would it have mattered? Changed anything? Would he be here now, wondering the same thing about me? Maybe we’d be here together.
Embers: The ring. The book. The vial. The cracks in my closure, where hope and fear grow up like tangled weeds. Hope, that maybe I’m wrong and my father is alive—fear, that maybe I’m wrong and he’s alive. Everything that would mean.
Ashes: My ability to trust, and everyone I ever trusted.
Survival is more than merely getting out in time.
Survival is fighting, every single day, to climb out of the ruins and into the unknown, come what may.
We’re all as strong as we have to be.
FORTY-EIGHT
WE STAND ON the rock platform that juts out from the cliff wall. “You’ll be fine,” Lonan says. I’m still a bit shaky from crossing the ledge. “There are five people in front of you, and I’ll be right behind.”
The bridge stretches out from our platform, a net of cocoon-white fibers so high in the trees it’d be a butterfly’s Mount Kilimanjaro. It’s obviously man-made, woven and wide and just sturdy enough, an entire network of pathways connecting tree to tree. No ropes here after all.
Phoenix, Cass, and Finnley are practically to the far side already, where the bridge is secured to a platform of wooden planks that ring around a thick tree. The network of bridges continues from there. Alexa and Hope are significantly far behind them, barely halfway across. Phoenix and Cass make it look easy—Finnley, too: it’s like they’re running on clouds with winged shoes.
Hope and Alexa aren’t so deft. They are so slow, so painfully careful, knuckles white and gripping the fibers. The longer they stay in one place, the more they sink, sink, sink. They sink so low I fear the fibers will give out and they’ll fall to the ground, only to be showered—in their instantaneous deaths—by a snowstorm of cocoon-bridge remnants.
It seems the proper strategy is to simply go fast.
“It doesn’t make sense for all of them to go before us,” I say, now that they’re far enough out of earshot for me to challenge Lonan. He made this call without anyone else’s—without my—input, just like he did with the ledge. The silent eye daggers I shot him weren’t enough to get him to abort. “What if there’s another trigger? What if one of them cuts the bridge while we’re on it? We’d never survive the fall.” The fishing-line dagger shifting in the tree was an accident, I’m almost certain, but now that I’ve had a little time to process it, paranoia has grown roots.
“That’s why I put Phoenix at the front,” Lonan says. “He can handle them.”
This makes me laugh. “Didn’t handle them too well back there in the cave.” It doesn’t sound as lighthearted once the words are out of my head. I guess I didn’t really mean for them to be lighthearted.
Lonan bristles. “He’s prepared now.”
“So are we.”
It is a staring contest, neither of us backing down.
“Look,” I say, the first to break. “I’m not disagreeing with you because it’s fun—this could be our life or our death.”
“Good, we’re on the same page.” He is all pirate-ship captain right now, all bravado and I-know-better-than-you. But then he softens, probably because of the look on my face, and sighs. “I want us at the back so we can keep an eye on them. They could just as easily slash the bridge from behind us, right?”
He has a point. One I don’t acknowledge just yet.
“Phoenix is strong, Eden. Have a little faith.”
I see in his eyes: it isn’t Phoenix he’s asking me to trust.
It surprises me how raw it feels to lose this, a wisdom battle. “Fine, fine. You win this one.” Not like we have a choice who goes first now, anyway. The others are already at the far side of this first bridge, waiting for us on the platform. “Sorry,” I say. “It’s been just me looking out for myself for so long . . .”
“I get it.”
He does. It’s been the same for him, for just as long. Longer, if we’re getting technical about who was orphaned first.
We really should get going, but I have more questions, so many questions, and we seem to have this unspoken understanding to only talk-talk when we end up in pockets away from the others. As confident as he sounded about drawing out our enemy, back when we were on top of the world, he’s been noticeably quiet around Cass and Finnley.
“So, this lab you’re hoping to find—it’s, uh, in the trees?” I ask. “That would certainly explain why we haven’t encountered a single soul, other than you guys, since we set foot here. Also why the temple was deserted.”
“Wait—you found a temple?” He looks genuinely surprised at this, like it’s the first time he’s ever heard about it. Guess their map didn’t spell out everything.
Heat rises in my cheeks. “A deserted one, yeah—”
“And you waited this long to mention it?”
“You shot down my Sanctuary theories, and haven’t seemed all that interested in hearing about what we’ve already found.” Touché, his face says. “And it was deserted, like I said, and not the most pleasant. It didn’t sound like the lab you’re looking for.”
“Still, you could have mentioned it.”
I shrug. “I’m not the one with the map.” Or the upper hand, I add silently.
“Lo!” Phoenix yells, but it’s muted from the distance. “Everything okay over there?”
“Coming,” Lonan fires back. And then, just to me: “No more keeping important intel from each other, okay?” He pinches the bridge of his nose, like he’s trying to pluck the perfect words from his brain. “And I’ll try to be better about asking your thoughts on things.”