Three (Article 5 #3)(20)

Chase exhaled through his teeth.

“Because he knows what it’s like digging food out of Dumpsters,” he said. “And because he was there when the bombs hit Chicago, and when people went crazy and started looting and fighting and things you don’t even want to know.”

I forced my eyes to stay on his. “How do you know I don’t? You never talk about it.”

“I’m more like him than I’m like you,” he said, faster now. “I was stealing cars when you were sitting in high school, do you know that? You think the FBR was the first beating I ever took? Or ever gave?”

“So you’re big and bad, is that it?” The toes of my boots bumped his as I stepped into his shadow. “You don’t scare me, Chase, so stop trying to.”

He made a sound of disgust and took a step back, staggering and then catching his balance at the last moment. We were standing on an embankment, and when he dropped the torch it extinguished in the water below with a hiss. He stared after it into the darkness.

“I shot Harper,” he said. “He almost came with us and I shot him.”

“I was there.” I saw that hole in the soldier’s chest, saw the blood pooling on the floor. “He never would have come.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?” he asked. “You know what I tell myself? That he fired first. That it was self-defense.” He screwed his thumb into his temple as if to dislodge the memory.

“It was self-defense.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said, suddenly quiet. “Everyone else gets it. Jesse got it. My parents. Even Tucker got it.”

The hurt slashed through me. “Everyone else gets what?”

“That it’s me.” He looked as if he’d finally figured out what everyone else had known all along. “I screw up everything.”

I stood in shocked silence, the air between us thick enough to cut.

“You don’t mean that.”

He didn’t say anything. I would have rather him been angry.

I lifted my hands to hold his face, to make him meet my eyes, but he twisted away. My arms fell slack at my sides.

“I’m not scared of you,” I said. “No matter what you say.”

I turned, the tears blurring my vision. It was too dark anyway without the torch, and not more than three steps later I slipped, and slid down the embankment into the streambed, rolling once I hit the bottom.

Cold water needled my sensitive skin. The rocks scraped my knees but my chest landed on something soft. My fingers fanned over thin, soaked material, and as I pushed myself up my elbow grazed a patch of hair.

All the air in the world seemed to disappear.

“Ember!”

I rolled to the side and grasped Chase’s outstretched hand, jolting out of the water, clawing into the mud and roots below the stream’s high bank. The bile rose, sharp and biting in my throat.

“Hey!” Chase sloshed back into the stream and flipped over the body. He crouched, feeling for a pulse, but there was none. I’d already known there wouldn’t be.

“Who…”

“Rat.” Chase stood, swore. “He must have fallen off the bank. Hit his head.”

Without a light he could have tripped over the tree roots and plunged the three feet straight down into the stream. Now his skin was bloated and blue in the starlight, and his eyes were dull and blank and lifeless.

He’d died alone. And as I looked at Chase, I saw fear come to life. He stared at the body, frozen, dark stains of water climbing up his pant legs as he stayed ankle deep in the stream.

He’d lost everyone and everything. And if I let him, he would push me away just so he wouldn’t have to wait to lose me, too.

“We have to move him,” I said. “I’ll help you.”





CHAPTER


6


I SHIVERED by the fire, knees locked to my chest. The humid air had taken a bitter edge, and my wet clothes clung to my skin. Chase nudged my boots closer to the flames with his toe, watching Jack pace back and forth on the opposite side. Thirty feet behind him, in the woods, they’d buried Rat in a shallow grave.

“Sean said I’d find you over here.” Rebecca eased herself down beside me, falling the last six inches with a huff of breath. She placed her braces between us, a solid silver line.

The damp wood crackled. I stared at it, wishing it would stave off the chill inside me.

“Was it awful?” she whispered after a while. “Being the one to find him?”

I glanced her way, noting how she purposefully avoided my gaze. Another kind of cold wormed its way deep in my stomach.

“It was terrible,” I said. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Her small mouth twisted into a frown.

“At least it’s over,” she said quietly.

“For me?” I asked. “Or for him?” I pictured her again, hobbling down the walkway over the murky swamp. If she had fallen in we may not have been able to reach her in time. I had a bad feeling she’d known that when she’d started.

She acted as though she hadn’t heard me, but I knew she had. She picked at the grass, one blade at a time, tearing it into little pieces, and I stared at her, fighting the image of her small body lying motionless in the water as Rat’s had been. Of her hair, silver in the moonlight, fanning around her head.