This Shattered World

I lever myself up again in time to see the mouth of the harbor retreating away from us, half lost in the spray of our wake, and the cluster of boats attempting to navigate through the new maze of boulders trapping them.

I glance down, and Flynn’s eyes flick up from mapping our route to meet mine for a split second. We’re out.

We don’t speak. There’s nothing to say anymore, even if we had the strength to shout over the roar of the motor. I look back at him once and see a jumble of white face, red-rimmed eyes, tears mingling with the spray from our bow wave—and look away with a jerk. I don’t try to look at him again.

The sky’s just beginning to shift from ink to charcoal by the time the distant lights of the base rise, mirage-like, from the horizon. Flynn shifts the motor down, its roar muted to a purr. We weave our way through the corridors of water until the bow of the boat slides up onto mud with a sickening lurch. The motor cuts out.

The silence rings in my ears, like afterimages hovering after being dropped into sudden darkness. There are no frogs, no insects on Avon, nothing to color the quiet. I stare at the lights of the far-off base until my vision blurs.

“Where will you go?” I ask in a whisper that splits the silence.

“I don’t know.” His voice is rough. From disuse. From cold. From grief. I can’t tell which. “I’ll find somewhere.”

I reach for my jacket, abandoned in the bottom of the boat, and press it into his hands. He’ll need it more than me, out here with no shelter and no heat. “Molly, the barman. He can get a message to me if you—” My voice tangles and sticks in my throat. If you need me.

He nods, but I’m not sure he really heard me. I can feel shock trying to grab hold of me again, cold fingers sliding up my spine and seizing my muscles. My training didn’t prepare me for this. Nothing prepared me for this.

If it were only me, I could just lie here until the boat rotted through and sank and the muck claimed my bones. But I can’t. I swallow hard, pushing it away with every ounce of strength I have left. Flynn was right—I’m the only one who can get onto our base and try to find out more about what’s happening to Avon.

I force my stiff muscles to move and carry me over the edge of the boat, to land in hip-deep water. I grab the gunwale to steady myself as my knees threaten to buckle in the cold.

“Flynn.” It ought to feel strange to say his name. I avoided it for so long, striving to keep a distance between us. But instead I find I’m absorbed by the way it affects him. He’s less guarded, though the sadness in his eyes doesn’t recede; he looks back at me again, jaw tight.

“Flynn—I want you to know I never would have done that. To your people.” I keep my voice low, too afraid to say these things loudly. It comes out tight, fierce. “I would never. I’d die myself first.”

He watches me in silence while my heart pounds in my chest, painful, too large. When he does speak, his voice is low to match mine. “I know that, Jubilee.” He levers himself up onto his knees so we’re eye to eye. “I know who you are.”

He knows. He knows, I believe that. But he can’t even bring himself to look at me for more than a few seconds.

And I can’t look away. “Don’t give up.” The words are as much for me as for him. “All you need is one true thing to hold on to. Something real in all of this.”

He’s looking at my hands on the gunwale—hands still sticky with blood, too congealed for the water to have rinsed clean. I start to pull back and hide them in the shadows, but he reaches out first, taking one of them gently in his. He scoops water over my skin and starts wiping the crusted, vile mess away.

My arms feel limp and heavy, like a doll’s limbs, like they don’t belong to me anymore. My eyes burn, vision clouding and blurring. All I can feel is Flynn’s touch, rubbing at first one hand, then the other, slowly working the life back into them. Washing away every last trace of the blood claiming me for the Fury.

When he’s done, he halts, looking down at my hand resting in his. The moment stretches long and thin, until it snaps and he lets go, pulling back, his grief-stained face turning away from mine.

My breath catches, responding to an unfamiliar pull in my chest, an ache in my soul. I shouldn’t miss him, but I do; this boy who had every right to pull that trigger, and instead threw himself between me and death. This boy, the only one who believes I’m not what they say I am, what I believed I was: a soldier without a soul, a girl with no heart to break. He’s the only one who’s proved me wrong.

There’s a desperate want somewhere inside me, a longing for his touch, for the quiet he finds in the midst of this chaos, for healing. For him.

But instead I just stand there, the meter of space between us as vast as any canyon. I wish the dawn had come, bringing light enough to see his features as more than shadow. Despite my words, I know he won’t send for me through Molly. I know he won’t come back. In my heart I know I’ll never see him again.

“Good-bye, Flynn Cormac.”

She’s playing with the boy, no longer puzzled by the way her mind has stitched him into her dreams as though he’s always been there. She’s stalking him in the alleyway, her heart jumping gleefully at every noise. When she reaches the garbage incinerator, he jumps out from behind it, shouting, “Pshew, pshew! You’re dead!”

The girl shrieks and obediently falls to the ground.

The green-eyed boy laughs and crouches down to lean over her. “Okay, you be the bad guy this time.”