“If it weren’t for Hope, and your dad—” His voice catches. “I’m so, so sorry. I hate this.” His words make tears spring into my eyes. His, too.
He tells me how Hope heard my screaming over the surveillance cameras, how she ran for help, how Gray shot Ava with a blow dart when he saw what was happening on-screen with Pellegrin. Gray couldn’t nullify any of the directives she’d given, though, not without the Aries passcode. When he pinged my father, he discovered him locked in the holding cell where Alexa should have been.
He tells me how my father was never dead, never injured, never even close. So very many lies, spread so very convincingly. When very-much-alive Alexa was heard yelling for help from her holding cell, Ava tricked Dad into retrieving her—then locked him inside as soon as his back was turned. Back in the lab, she altered Alexa all on her own and used her to deceive me through Phoenix. No one can figure out why she waited so long to turn the guys on Pellegrin and me—why she didn’t just take us out before the yacht ever arrived at the island—and we’ll never know for sure. Turns out Ava’s been dealt with was a nice way of saying she’ll never be a problem again, here or otherwise.
He tells me how his own sense-altering levels had been sky high—that Dad had to reset them all, one by one, until he came back to himself. Ava’s efforts were so thorough, he almost didn’t finish in time to save me.
“None of what you did matters to me,” I say. Because it doesn’t. It wasn’t him.
Finally, he accepts this. Doesn’t try to fight me on it. “I’m still sorry for what you went through. You nearly died—you have bruises on your neck, were dehydrated—you were out for more than a day. I hate it, Eden, I hate that I did this to you. You are the only good thing to ever come out of this war, and I almost killed you.” He sinks deeper and deeper inside himself. So this is what it looks like from the other side.
“Hey,” I say. He seems too far away, in every sense that a person can be. “Hey.”
He looks up, blue eyes bright.
“Do you trust me?” I ask.
He does, I can see it. “Since the moment I saw you run into the ocean after Alexa,” he says. “And every minute since.”
“Then trust me when I say I trust you, Lonan,” I say. “We made it through this; we can make it through anything. This isn’t your fault—it wasn’t you.”
There are fewer than three feet separating us, but suddenly, it feels like the entire ocean. I want to be closer, closer than I’ve ever been with anyone—closer, even, than with Birch. It feels almost wrong, with the nightmares of his death always tugging at the edge of my consciousness. But like the new lines on my father’s face, the war has carved itself into me, too. I’m not the same person I was when I knew Birch. In a way, his death was what catapulted me into a place where I’d never be the same Eden again.
Lonan has scars like I do. We’ve been cut and carved, chiseled and broken, torn apart and held together by faith, by hope.
I am falling, sliding over the edge of a slippery hill, finally allowing myself to move on to where I’ve already been for some time now.
I pat the empty space between us. “Want to come closer?”
He is slow, careful. I can tell he wants to be a safe place for me.
“More than anything,” he says.
NINETY-FOUR
DAWN IS JUST beginning to break—the sky is bleeding pink and orange and gold out over the endless, fathomless sea behind us. Ahead of us: pristine white sand, waves breaking against it.
Four people wait to greet us, standing in a row on the beach. I lean as far around the railing as I can for a better look.
Gray.
Alexa, Hope. Hope wears my yellow cardigan and carries a small urn, one I assume is filled with Finnley’s ashes.
Dad.
“Is that—” Lonan asks, joining me at the railing.
“Yes,” I say.
Yes is too small. It is too thin—bright, but not bright enough.
Knowing my father is alive and seeing him alive feel like two entirely different things. I was afraid to believe it, on some level, until I’d seen him with my own eyes. A smile more blinding than sunlight breaks on his face, and I know I’m the one who’s put it there. He sees me.
We become a tangle of limbs and tears once we’ve docked. Dad, me. Alexa, who buries herself in Cass. He runs his hand through her hair, holds her tight. Life back from the dead: it has the power to create a blank slate like nothing else. They remain that way even after everyone else has begun the trek back to the lodge, where we’ll stay until further notice.
There is still so much work to do, my father says to Lonan and to me when we are back in his office. Dr. Marieke will break the bloodlock as soon as he’s settled in Cape Town—Dad’s colleague from New Zealand, another of his trusted three, was one of the primary developers of bloodlock technology, and has created a complex database that will help them sort through and prioritize all the information.
Stéphane Monroe has agreed to let Dr. Marieke lead the Atlas Project for the Allied Forces, and development will begin immediately on eighteen new habitat sites. It won’t be enough to shelter the entire world, not at first, but it should be enough to make a difference in the war.
Things should start to crumble immediately. Dad cut off access to the HoloWolf live feeds—for all of the kingpins, not just Zhornov—as soon as Dr. Marieke set foot onto his helicopter. And the Alliance doesn’t plan to waste any time hijacking Wolfpack propaganda systems, where they’ll offer free habitat housing to the first thousand Wolves to defect.
Best of all, the kingpins will be forever locked out of their own island. Rex is the only yachtsman with the coordinates, and no one will ever buy him for a higher price than my father has: he’s tracked down Rex’s family, and has already begun the process of reuniting them.
There are so many individual pieces, an overwhelming number of details that don’t sound like big things, but my father insists they are. Think of it like grains of sand, he told me. They add up to a lot.
My father has his work cut out for him—we all do—but it will be his work. Ours. What we believe in, and what is right. We’ll unlock the cages when kingpin castles fall, and let all the birds fly, fly, fly.
When the war began, I thought I’d lost everything.
I thought my scars were meant to kill me.
I thought I was without a home, without a family.
Without. Forever, without.
This is the beginning of the end.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS