Ava looks half dead. She won’t make it at this rate. Before she can stop herself, Mack walks up to her. “Do you feel safe with me?”
“What?” Ava’s eyebrows draw together. They’re black, like her eyelashes, emphatically framing her dark eyes.
“Could you sleep if I had your back?”
Ava’s face shifts through several subtle emotions. Her smile is weary and wary, but somehow brighter than the fast-approaching dawn. “Yeah, I think I could.”
“Come on.”
Mack leads Ava away from the emptying camp. It’s stupid. She shouldn’t do it. But there are still so many competitors, so what can it hurt? Ava isn’t a miser with kindness. Mack is. Today, though, she can still afford to be generous. Today she will repay Ava with sleep, so they can be even. That’s all. She just wants to be out of Ava’s debt.
After one panic-inducing false turn, Mack finds the right path. They come out of the trees to the midway section.
“Shit!” Ava shouts, grabbing Mack and putting herself between Mack and the threat she sees up ahead. Mack eases out of Ava’s protective grasp and walks forward, tapping the piano player on his plaster head. Interesting that Ava’s first response wasn’t to hide, but to protect Mack from attack. Maybe Mack isn’t the only one who brought more than a duffel bag’s worth of trauma with her into the park.
“Charming,” Ava mutters. She follows Mack to the ducky building. This is good, though. With Ava here, Mack doesn’t have time to think about yarn and baths and sisters. Mack helps boost Ava, then climbs up after. The depression is big enough for them both, but only just.
As the sky changes, they settle in, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. Mack puts her backpack beneath Ava’s head.
“Fair warning,” Mack says. “I will wake you if you snore, and I will also piss my pants if I have to.”
“I’ll do the same. Piss your pants, I mean. Not mine.”
Mack smothers the laugh with her hands. She’s laughed more at Ava’s words the last two days than she has in months, maybe years.
“Did you do that yesterday?” Ava whispers. “You’re hardcore.”
“No, I made it. Peed behind the piano player’s building over there.”
“Can you imagine Rebecca peeing herself to avoid being caught?”
“The one who looks like a toothpaste commercial? Can’t imagine, and don’t want to.”
“Yeah, not really my kink, either.” Ava snorts. “Toothpaste commercial. She really does, doesn’t she.”
The sun is almost up. “Get some sleep,” Mack whispers. “Only silence now.”
Ava shifts so her head rests against Mack’s shoulder. No accident this time. Mack lets out one long sigh, and then the sun is up and day two—already more complicated thanks to her own confusing impulses—begins.
* * *
—
It’s been seven months. That’s all LeGrand can think as he climbs a tree. Anyone watching would be surprised at how adept the soft, doughy-looking, very tall boy—because even at twenty, LeGrand is undeniably still a boy—is at scaling a tree that looks impossible to climb. He’s had a lot of experience, though.
As he tucks himself into the green, he wonders: Is Almera dead? Has she died yet? Because her cough was so bad this time, and it’s been seven months since he was banished. But it could be seven years, and it wouldn’t matter. He’ll never know. And he’ll never be able to help her. Trying to help is what got him here in the first place, and he genuinely does not—cannot—understand what he is doing or why. Nothing in the world makes sense. Everything they taught him about the evils out here is wrong, but nothing feels right, either.
He closes his eyes and pushes his forehead against the rough bark of the tree. Pretends like he is home. Like he accepted that Almera would be saved no matter what, and that it didn’t matter what she went through in her mortal life, because her calling and election was made sure. Like her cough hadn’t gotten so bad this time he could no longer stand to sit next to her, holding her hand, watching her lips turn blue as she gasped for air. Like he got to celebrate her thirteenth birthday last month by blowing bubbles for her and listening to her delighted laugh. Like he climbed this tree for a moment, to get a break, and his mother and his aunts and his dozens of siblings are all there, busy with the washing and baking and sewing. Like when he climbs down, his sister will screech and laugh and he’ll carry her on his back through the compound so she doesn’t have to crawl.