That first week, the howls didn’t wake her up like they should. Eugenia was too busy dreaming of hazel eyes, flashes of anger, the feel of a man’s hands on her body. How he tasted.
Every woman on Level 15 knew how he tasted. He knew how they tasted. And she could only guess how many of them he’d been with since she cut and ran.
That was the price of her freedom, after all. Not that she ever imagined she’d earn it so quickly, or so unintentionally.
It was surprising how boring the days were when all she did was hunt and walk. Too much time spent remembering and too little spent thinking.
It was like she carried an infection and something even worse—doubt.
The women always came back, he’d said. But she couldn’t do that, even if she’d caught herself walking toward the boat more than once. Seeing him with the others, the very women she’d driven him to time and time again, would kill her. It would kill her more quickly than Level 9 ever might.
Joan had been right. Eugenia was in love—unsure who she hated more for it, Aaron or herself.
Had Joan not come to her first, after that long, sleepless night on the couch, Eugenia would have fallen at his feet and begged just like he had begged her in dark corners for months. Keep me. Accept me as fucked-up as I am. Love me back, even when I hate you.
He’d outplayed her every move, crumbled her flagging resistance to powder. All the while, she’d tormented him in every way she could imagine. Took from his physical release despite his tricks. Participated when he’d moved inside her. Enthusiastically accepted his caress after a taste of pleasure, knowing after the first time that it would end with him spilling where he should not.
He’d take care of Brooke as long as Brooke might live. He’d take care of all of them. That had to be enough.
He’d also still force women who didn’t want to have babies to reproduce for his vision of humanity’s second chance.
Her best friend. Her arch nemesis.
Maybe she’d really left her beloved textbooks for him, so he wouldn’t forget her. Because seeing them would kill him little by little. He’d hold them; he’d smell her on them. He’d still fuck the other women too hard from behind, and he’d still not be able to look them in the eye as they serviced their captain.
Brooke bore horrific scars, ugly ones everyone could see. Aaron bore the same, with only Eugenia knowing they sat right under his skin.
Just as he knew all about her secret wounds, having inflicted many of them himself.
Yet with each deep cut, she’d had someone to stitch the wound closed. The scar was still there, but tended, softened, even accepted. They only pulled a little when she breathed, could almost be ignored.
Eugenia would survive them. Aaron would survive his.
Neither of them would ever truly live.
It wasn’t the cold or the hunger that birthed her misery in freedom. They wouldn’t kill her, just as her growing fever wouldn’t kill her. It was the loss.
Rain had blessed her passage from the ship with drinkable water. More had been collected in her empty cola bottles. She could pass from the rotting woods into the next nightmare far differently than she’d come to this land.
But the dead wood felt like home. So she built her own hovel out of mud and sticks like all other vagrants breathing air, eating bugs, and surviving on fumes she’d come across over the years. Eugenia’s own cove near the water, far from the ship. Far from the captain’s farmlands.
So she might work through a backlog of buried thought and feeling, yet occasionally wander far enough north in the night to see the ship’s lights at a distance.
She wasn’t alone.
Her beautiful Li Wei, his memory was with her, toasting marshmallows over a campfire she didn’t have. Like he sat at her side on the muddy banks of the massive river that fed a lake that housed a cruise ship that should have never made it so far inland.
The Mississippi wasn’t pretty.
Its inlets stank.
But so did she… in that stupid blue dress.
A dress she was going to keep until the day she died. Because she missed another man more than the ghost at her side. She missed all the ugly moments they shared punctuated by blue cotton.
Because she was sick.
Because she was broken.
Because all the women went back and she never would.
When the dogs finally ate her, she’d be wearing that dress.
Because the fact that Aaron might have been right about everything was too terrible to swallow down.
This, she told Li Wei; she told him everything. Sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, always horrendously honest. How much she missed him and the life they should have had. How angry she was that he left her as if he stood a chance at finding his parents. How much she envied him for loving so hard that he knew she would live without his help, but his Māmā and Bàba would not.
Sometimes, she railed as if the imagined phantom might reply, screaming out hateful things. How could he have left her? Didn’t he love her enough to stay?
Of course he had. He loved her as much as any man had ever loved.
Even as much as Aaron loved her.
And Li Wei would have married her, and they would have been happy. But…
The world died, and men like Aaron lived.
Li Wei was too good; he would have been slaughtered protecting his wife. Aaron would have killed anything and everything that might even approach her.
Like Neil.
“I miss you.” There had been a great deal of honesty in solitude, but that she had never dared mutter aloud.
Her new phantom answered back, “I shouldn’t have done it.”
Fever had grown worse by the day. A diet of bugs and weeds, of raw vermin and the occasional slow bird tended to do that.
Fallen log supporting her weight, Eugenia plopped down and stared as the world’s ugliest river flowed past. “The bigger question is which it you mean. The slavery? The manipulations? Level 9? Fucking Jessica?”
“Jessica.”
What was there to do but shrug then frown. “She’s popular for a reason.”
“I went to her room, traded her one-hundred thousand tickets.”
Impressive when Eugenia thought about it—it even deserved a low whistle. “Wow, that’s a lot more than I was ever offered…”
“I paid her to tell everyone I fucked her all night.” The man took a deep breath, one so unlike the composed captain. “Instead, I got drunk on her balcony and passed out on her floor.”
Standing on shaky legs, Eugenia approached the water’s edge to pick up a flat rock and skip it over the tide. Eight skips before it sank.
“Eugenia. Did you hear what I said?”
How much she’d missed hearing the way Aaron said her name. As if there was no one else in the world but them. As if he really knew her… which he did. “I feel sorry for Jessica. She’s been in love with Maxwell for years. He’s been in love with her. But to hide it from you, they are always with other people.”
“I know.”
A sorry snort, and she started looking for a new rock to skip. “If you knew, both of them would be dead.”
The specter’s voice came nearer. “I know all of it, Eugenia. And I turn a blind eye when I can.”
“That’s… almost sweet.” The real Aaron wasn’t sweet. He was aggressive, relentless, unscrupulous, generous, beautiful, loving, and twisted.