UnWholly (Unwind Dystology #2)(91)

Cam has a blanket with him. It’s only as he wraps it around her that she realizes how chilled she has gotten while she slept. Even in this tropical environment, the air can get cool at night.

“I wish you wouldn’t spend so much time alone,” he says. “You don’t have to, you know.”

“When you’ve spent most of your life in a state home, solitude feels like a luxury.”

He kneels beside her. “We have our first interview together next week—they’re flying us to the mainland—has Roberta told you?”

Risa sighs. “I know all about it.”

“We’re supposed to be a couple. . . .”

“So I’ll smile and do my job for the camera. You don’t have to worry.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t see it as a job.”

Rather than looking at him, she looks up to see a sky full of stars—even fuller than the sky over the Graveyard, but there, she rarely had the time or the inclination to look heavenward.

“I know all their names,” Cam offers. “The stars, that is.”

“Don’t be ridiculous; there are billions of stars, you can’t know them all.”

“Hyperbole,” he says. “I guess I’m exaggerating—but I do know all the ones that matter.” Then he begins pointing them out, his voice taking on just the slightest Boston accent as he accesses the living star chart in his head. “That’s Alpha Centauri, which means ‘foot of the centaur.’ It’s one of the closest stars to us. That bright one to the right? That’s Sirius—the brightest star in the sky. . . .”

His voice begins to feel hypnotic to her, and it brings her a hint of the peace she’s been craving. Am I making this more difficult than it has to be? Risa wonders. Should I find a way to adapt?

“That dim one is Spica, which is actually a hundred times brighter than Sirius, but it’s much farther away. . . .”

Risa has to remind herself that her choice to get with Proactive Citizenry’s program was not out of selfishness—so shouldn’t her conscience be appeased? And if not—if her conscience is the only thing dragging her to dark depths, shouldn’t she be able to cut it loose in order to survive?

“That’s Andromeda, which is actually a whole galaxy. . . .”

There is a sense of arrogance to Cam’s bragging, but also an innocence to it, like a little kid wanting to show off what he learned in school that day. But he never learned any of this, did he? The accent with which he now speaks makes it clear that the information was someone else’s that got shoved into his head.

Stop it, Risa! she tells herself. Perhaps it’s time to let the mountain erode, and so to spite the part of herself that would resist, she gets out of her chair and lies on the grass beside him, looking up at the spray of stars.

“Polaris is always easy to find. It’s directly over the North Pole—so if you know where it is, you can always find true north.” Hearing him say that makes her gasp. He turns to look at her. “Aren’t you going to shut me up?”

Risa laughs at that. “I was hoping you’d put me back to sleep.”

“Oh, am I that boring?”

“Only slightly.”

Then he reaches over and gently brushes her arm.

Risa pulls away and sits up. “Don’t! You know I don’t like to be touched.”

“Is it that you don’t like to be touched . . . or that you don’t like to be touched by me?”

She doesn’t answer him. “What’s that one?” she asks, pointing. “The red one?”

“Betelgeuse,” he tells her. Then, after an awkward silence, he says, “What was he like?”

“Who?”

“You know who.”

Risa sighs. “It’s not a place you want to go, Cam.”

“Maybe I do.”

She doesn’t have the strength to fight it, so she lies back down and fixes her eyes on the stars as she speaks. “Impulsive. Brooding. Occasionally self-loathing.”

“Sounds like a real gem.”

“You didn’t let me finish. He’s also clever, loyal, passionate, responsible, and a strong leader, but is too humble to admit all that to himself.”

“Is?”

“Was,” she says, covering. “Sometimes it feels like he’s still here.”

“I think I would have liked to have known him.”

Risa shakes her head. “He’d hate you.”

“Why?”

“Because he was also jealous.”

Silence falls between them again, but this time it’s not awkward at all.

“I’m glad you shared that with me,” Cam says. “There’s something I’d like to share with you, too.”

Risa has no idea what he’s going to say, but she finds she’s actually curious.

“Did you know a kid named Samson when you were back at the state home?” he asks.

She searches her thoughts. “Yes—he was on the harvest camp bus with me.”

“Well, he had a secret crush on you.”

At first it boggles Risa how he would know this, and when the truth dawns on her, a surge of reflexive adrenaline triggers her fight-or-flight response. She gets up, fully prepared to run back to the mansion, or jump off the cliff, or whatever it will take to get away from this revelation, but Cam eclipses her like a moon before one of his precious stars.