He lets me think he is dead, and there is still no explanation.
“Gray won’t remember who shot him,” Pellegrin says. To me, I think. I’m vaguely aware of him affixing Lonan’s sheathed dagger back at my hip. What is going on? “The darts have an amnesiac effect that dulls the details of the immediate before and after surrounding the time at which the consciousness blinks out.” He laughs. The man who just put a hologram on my arm laughs. “We’ve been waiting to take that guy out for a while now.”
His words are a string of licorice, long and sticky and strong. I’m listening. But I watch my father, who is frantic but focused, as he flips through the pages of his field guide. Many of them have dried and look stiff to the touch.
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll hear you on the cameras—that they’ll see what you’ve done?” I ask. “The other, uh, people who work here?”
Pellegrin gestures to the wall of security-feed screens. “Will, do you have a problem with anything I just said?”
Dad doesn’t look up from the book. “Nope.”
“See? Nope. Will’s the only one on duty and he doesn’t care. Non-crisis averted.”
“Only one on duty for now,” Dad says. He turns another page.
“When they ask—and they will ask—you just tell them you found the blow dart on Will’s panels. Tell ’em you shot him in self-defense, and tell ’em we activated you, okay?”
My head spins. “Please slow down. You’re making my head hurt.”
The corner of Dad’s mouth quirks up, but he merely flips another page, and another.
I sort through everything Pellegrin just said. “Did you just say you want me to take the fall for this? They hate me enough already—”
“Found it,” Dad interrupts. “Pell, you’re getting ahead of yourself. Eden, honey, come take a look at this, please.” He looks up and sees me, really looks at me, for the first time. It is like a sunrise, the light in his eyes—like he’s waking from a cold and sleepless night and only just now realizing he’s survived. That I’ve survived.
It is relief.
He is at my side in a heartbeat. I am still strapped into this monstrosity of a chair. “Get her out of here, Pell!”
Pellegrin unclasps the buckles, apologizes. The shackles fall away, and I am free to move, but after everything I’ve been through today I barely have the energy. Dad pulls me up into an awkward embrace, like he wants to hug me but doesn’t know if it’s welcome. Like maybe he’s forgotten how, or maybe we both have.
Or maybe we’ve simply grown scar tissue in the places where we were torn apart, the places we used to fit so well together.
When it ends, he steadies me until I’m firmly planted on a mint-green stool at his island.
“I could also use some food,” I say, “if there is any.”
“Yes, yes!” Dad says. “Of course. Yes.” He shifts aside, pulls at one of the island’s many drawers. Another sound I haven’t heard in far too long: the sound of a refrigerator opening. Or, in this case, a refrigerated drawer. He puts together a plate of pear, Brie, and green grapes—he drizzles it with honey—he cracks some black pepper—he produces a hunk of French bread from another drawer nearby.
It is an aching reminder of everything I’ve lost. All the days at our kitchen island at home, after school with Birch or Emma or both, eating this very snack. I haven’t had Brie in years. I haven’t had any of these luxuries in years, save for the grapes I ate in the cave earlier today. And here, Dad has had access to them the entire time. I am heavy with all the why?
I eat like someone who has never before in her life experienced the sense of taste. Formless, gray slop has a particular talent for refining only one area of the tongue:
Bitterness.
The field guide is open to the page I know and love more than all the rest, the respiratory physiology page. The I’d do anything for you page.
It is a mess of ink now. At least the image of it is burned into my memory. At least I know the story by heart.
“I love this one,” I say. He never shared the field guide with me Before—when they delivered it to me, it was like opening a treasure box filled with my father. A big fat tear plops onto my plate, right on top of some crumbs. I want, so badly, for this page to be true. But I can’t, I just can’t. I can’t deal with the fact that he’s alive. That he’s been alive this whole time.
That this is the way I’m finding out.
It’s better than him being dead. It is.
My bread crumbs will be soggy soon.
“Look closer, sweetheart,” he says. “What do you see?”
I see a page full of dry formulas about respiratory physiology. I see blurred blue ink.
And then I see everything.
It is the jar full of colored pencils that calls my attention to it. A vague glow of light green subtly illuminates one word here, another word there, a third word farther down. And then, where the story about his date with Mom has been blurred away by the water, a fourth word appears, negative-space letters defined by the green glow of the pencil.
RESISTANCE IS OUR LIFE.
“I made a deal with the Wolves,” he says. “What they don’t know is that I’m a sheep in wolves’ clothes. Pell and I both are.”
SIXTY-NINE
RESISTANCE IS OUR LIFE.
My worldview zooms all the way out, until I am a moon rock peering down at earth and everything on it. How is it possible to have a world’s worth of feeling inside me, when I am smaller than a speck that doesn’t even register amid the blues and greens and swirling whites?
“What do you mean you made a deal?! What kind of deal?”
Dad is visibly stunned by my outburst. I’m sure he saw it coming—he let me think he was dead. We were never anything but close, Before. This raw, bleeding love is new territory for us both.
“I put a lot of thought into the way I laid out this book,” he says, careful and steady and even. But there’s effort in his voice. He tries so hard to keep his love and his pain separate, when the simple fact is they’re like the illusion of a M?bius strip. “The story about your mother—did you ever read it? The cat, the amputation? The cabernet?”
“I already said I loved it.”
“I didn’t know if you were just saying that.”
“I loved it, loved it. I have it memorized.” It was all I had left.
He studies me. “Do you remember the last line?” His eyes are soft now, like I remember. It must have taken great effort to put so much hardness into them when Gray first brought me in. Hard eyes are unnatural on him.
“I’d do anything for you,” I recite.
“I’d do anything for you, Eden,” he repeats. “Anything.”
I blink. Something about the context, the two of us here together at the very edge of anything, pulls all the pieces sharply into focus. “You’d pretend you were dead.”
He nods, slowly. We break eye contact, because it is still too much.
“You’d work with the Wolves,” I continue.