He’s angry.
* * *
—
“So, what’s the plan?” Brandon asks as they huddle inside the musty interior of the Lovers’ Hideaway. It’s a lightless void, impossible to navigate far past the entrance. When it’s closer to dawn, then they’ll be able to see well enough to pick a place. But Mack already doesn’t like it. Too exposed. Too many people. Too many ways to be found.
“We set up a base camp here.” Ava sits on the floor, easing her bad leg out in front of herself. Mack can’t see the grimace, but she can sense its outlines in the way Ava moves and the way she speaks. “No more going back to the other one, not for anything. Treat Jaden and the other Ava like enemies, because if this is a game, they are, and if it’s not, they still are.” She pauses, and her normally strong voice gets tentative. “Am I crazy?” she whispers. “There’s something wrong here, right? Because I know I have shit—acres of shit—in my head, but…” She trails off.
Mack hovers near the gaping entrance, looking out into the night. Who is she to tell someone whether or not they’re crazy?
And who is she to say whether what’s going on here is more wrong than anything else? She knew she was being preyed on from the moment she stepped into that office at the shelter. She knew, and she came anyway, and now all she can do is all she has done:
Keep hiding.
“Mack, don’t you dare,” Ava hisses. Mack pauses, her feet on the warped, uneven threshold between the rotting wooden planks of the tunnel of love and the path back outside into anonymity, where the only thing she has to hide and protect is the only thing she trusts herself to.
“We are sticking together,” Ava says, her words as much an anchor as her hand in Mack’s had been.
LeGrand drops his pack on the floor next to Ava. “Gonna climb a tree,” he says, in the same tone someone might say, Gonna run to the store for milk. LeGrand, somehow, is handling this better than any of them. That, or he knows what Mack knows—something was always wrong here—and isn’t surprised by a potential detour into violence and death. Business as usual. “I won’t go far.”
Ava nods. “Good. Better vantage point. Whistle if you see anyone coming.”
“Can’t whistle.”
“No one ever taught you to whistle?” Ava sounds sad about it.
LeGrand makes a clicking noise with his tongue. It carries well in the night air. “Good enough,” Ava says, allowing him to leave. Ava stares down at her hand, her fingers curled around the shape of a phantom gun. “Brandon, look for weapons.”
“Weapons?” Brandon says the word as though someone has fingers around his throat.
“Anything sharp that can function as a knife. Chunks of concrete we can hold easily in our hands. Metal bars.”
“Professor Plum in the tunnel of love with a lead pipe,” Mack whispers. A memory, drowned with the gurgling of lungs trying to breathe while choking on their own blood, arrives fully formed in Mack’s mind, as though it were waiting to be invited.
Her mother laughs. Mack had lost that laugh, had it cut out of her as surely as if the knife had found her own throat. Mack glares, but her mother makes faces at her until she relents and rolls her eyes at her sister’s outrageous cheating. Maddie always cheated. At least Mack got to be her favorite piece this time, Miss Scarlet. Even though the pieces are featureless, uniform plastic, Miss Scarlet is the most beautiful on the box, so she and her sister always fight over it. There’s a bowl of popcorn, and a game that means nothing, and her mother’s laughter.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. She doesn’t remember who won, if anyone. She doesn’t remember what they did before, or after. She doesn’t know where her dad was in the memory. But her mother’s laugh. Mack’s terrified to replay it, terrified to wear it out, wear it thin, though she wants to wrap it around herself like a blanket.
Her entire life has been after. But there was a before, wasn’t there? Is she living in another before right now, or will she forever be stuck in an infinite after?
* * *
—
“But we don’t really think we need weapons. Do we?” Brandon’s life has been quietly, consistently sad, never blown apart or cut into by violence. The idea that reality—his reality, this reality—could take a sharp detour into terror and blood and death is so foreign to him that he cannot understand it.
It’s a language Mack and Ava both speak. Which makes Ava wonder if they’re interpreting it wrong, looking for meaning where there is none. Maybe something here—even though it’s nothing like her time in Afghanistan—has triggered PTSD, has turned on the part of her brain that is still back there, still in the desert, still lying on the ground with her leg crushed and her heart destroyed. This could all be a game. Ava can’t say for sure. If it is, if it isn’t, she has to play for keeps.