I feel like I’m going to throw up, and I don’t want to do it in front of Graylin. He’s dealing with enough right now; he doesn’t need to worry any more on my behalf.
“Be right back,” I choke out, and dash away, instinct carrying me the way we came, toward the inn. I hear Graylin hiss out my name behind me, but I don’t stop. It’s like my body has a mind of its own and has determined to steer me back to the safe familiarity of the inn, away from blood and dirt and shovels and blue fur.
The lighted squares of Havenfall’s windows come into view through the trees—the delegates on the upper floors are asleep, but the first floor lights are always lit—and relief fills my chest, even though I know it’s not really safe, not when the Solarian door is open. I’m exhausted and scared and angry and sad, and all I want to do is fall into bed. I can figure out what to do next in the morning—
Then something moves in the shadows of the garden.
I freeze, feet skidding to a halt, my breath vanishing in my lungs so I can’t even shout for Graylin. I’m in the middle of the lawn, halfway between the trees and the inn, totally exposed if another soul-hungry Solarian has slipped free of its world—
But then the creature in the garden moves again and I see it’s not a Solarian, but a person, stone still on the little footpath between the rosebushes. Blond hair, leather jacket, big eyes. Taya. The girl who almost hit me with her motorcycle.
“Maddie?” she calls softly, voice rising just above the frogs and the crickets. “Are you okay?”
I’m still frozen. Before I can tell her to stay back, tell her anything at all, she’s out of the garden, crossing the lawn toward me.
I want to shrink away from the moonlight, conscious of the blood and the dirt on my clothes, but there’s nowhere to go. I cross my arms over my chest, aware that I’m still in my now-ragged party finery. “What are you doing out here?” I ask.
Her brow furrows. “I couldn’t sleep. I thought I’d take a walk. What about you?”
“Same,” I say, not knowing what else to say, even though that excuse doesn’t hold water considering my clothes.
One of Taya’s eyebrows arches. “Sure, okay.” She looks me up and down, her confused face breaking into a smile, then looks around me with an exaggerated motion. “So are these woods the hot make-out spot, then? Should I expect more company here?”
“What? No!” My voice comes out too loud, confused and angry, before I realize that is the most logical explanation for me being outside like this. But that just makes me think of Brekken and brings all the feelings of fear and betrayal rushing back. I step back from Taya and take a deep breath, trying to gather myself.
She eyes me warily. “Hey, no judgment,” she says. “It’s your life. There’s a lot of pretty people here, even if there is something weird about this place.”
My stomach drops. Of course, Taya got here late. Willow probably hasn’t had a chance to give her the rundown on Havenfall and the Adjacent Realms. It’s not only the Solarian I need to keep secret from her, it’s everything.
“There are a lot of pretty people here,” I agree, trying to keep it light. “But keep the making out inside, okay? At least at night. There’s been … Some people have seen a mountain lion around.”
One corner of Taya’s mouth crooks upward. I can’t tell if she believes me or not. “If you say so,” she says slowly. “Not that it matters, anyway. I have a rule—no girls for me this summer, not until I figure out some life stuff.”
“Oh?” I blink, forgetting for a second about haylofts and Solarians and shadows. “What does one have to do with the other?”
She flashes a smile, teeth white in the dark. “I have important things to do. And girls are so distracting, don’t you think?”
“Everyone is distracting,” I say, thinking of Brekken, then belatedly realize how that sounds. Even if it’s pretty much true.
Taya laughs, and a laugh bubbles up out of me, an alien feeling after all the crying I’ve been doing tonight. I wonder what important things she has to do. I realize I’ve uncrossed my arms, they’re hanging loose at my sides, and I hurriedly cross them again, hoping she hasn’t seen the blood. At least it’s blue, not red.
Remembering the blood, the stickiness and grime on my skin, the momentary lift in my mood deflates and dread seeps back in. How can I even think about laughing at a time like this? Graylin is still in the trees, probably waiting by the graveside for me to come back. Suddenly I feel small and ashamed, like I did at Nate’s funeral when the pastor started talking about innocent lambs brought back to the fold and I laughed out loud, because Nate would have been horrified to be compared to something so boring. How everyone looked at me, aghast and pitying.
“Do me a favor?” I say to Taya. “Go in for the night. Save your walks for the daytime until we have this … mountain lion situation sorted out.”
Her smile fades. She shrugs and turns around, then looks back over her shoulder. “Aren’t you coming in too?”
I shift from foot to foot. “In a second. Go on. I’m right behind you.”
She knows I’m lying. I can tell. The guardedness comes back into her face. She nods once, her eyes narrowing, then looks away and strides back toward the inn doors.
I watch her go for a few moments, then turn back toward the trees. Exhaustion is closing in on me, making my limbs heavy and making it hard to focus on anything but one foot in front of the other, the next step. Clean up. Lock the doors. I can’t think any further ahead than that before things get vague and overwhelming.
Fix this.
8
In movies, there’s that thing when the main character wakes up the night after a disaster, and they have a moment of peace and not-remembering before everything crashes back in.
Not for me. Even before the events of last night come back to me, everything feels wrong, like a heavy, sticky gray gauze muffling everything. I woke up to my chirping phone alarm with a scream in my throat the shape of my brother’s name. I’m frozen, my limbs pinned to my side and my jaw wired shut by some invisible force. Seconds crawl past, the alarm blaring louder and louder until it matches the scream in my head, until finally something breaks and I can grab my phone and hit snooze.
I drag myself out of bed, blood and grave-dirt still clinging to my skin.
When I finally stumbled back into my room just before dawn, I was too exhausted to do anything but strip off my filthy clothes and fall into bed. Now I regret it. Some of the Solarian blood has gotten on me, and it dries black and sticky, like tar. It clots my hair, stains my pillowcase.
I spend too long in the shower—not even caring about the ice-cold water; I want to scrub every trace of last night from my body. I must have only slept for a couple of hours. Exhaustion still weighs down my sore limbs and makes my head fuzzy. But I’m weirdly glad for it. It makes it easy to think simple thoughts.
After everything happened, after I first moved in with Dad and I couldn’t eat or sleep or do anything at all for the crushing grief, Dad had a motto. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I didn’t understand it at first, but it sank in a little every day, when Dad would coach me through the simplest tasks, cheer when I managed to do the littlest things—eat half a bowl of mac and cheese, brush my hair. I started thinking of the grief, the memories, as a huge shadowy elephant that stalked me through the day and sat on my chest at night. Whenever Dad said that, one bite at a time, I snapped my teeth at the imaginary elephant, imagining that I had fangs that could tear through smoke and shadow.