Town Car—against my cheek. The gesture was strangely gentle and entirely unexpected.
A blush started in the center of my body and quickly worked its way up to my face as I remembered the kiss in the back of the car. I tried not to think too long or too hard about the taste of his lips or the way his body had covered mine.
“Jason . . .” I swallowed. “About what happened this morning. After the crash.”
He shook his head. “Just leave it.”
“But . . .”
He dropped his hand and gave me a small, forced grin. “If we survive the night, then you can tell me it was a mistake, deal?”
The words were similar to something I had said to Kyle back in the sanatorium, and the memory made things twist inside my chest. “Okay.”
“We’ve got a few hours,” said Jason, trying to cover the awkwardness of the moment. “You should try and get some sleep.”
It was tempting—so tempting—but I was too scared to let my guard down. “Hank really didn’t want me going. I don’t want to give him a chance to leave me behind.”
“I’ll stay up and wake you when things start to happen. I managed to get a couple of hours of sleep when they had me locked in the infirmary.”
Still, I hesitated.
“You can’t run on willpower and snark indefinitely.” Jason shifted farther down the bench, making a little more room. “I promise I’ll wake you up.”
“Even after you went to all that trouble to get me out of the camp?”
“Even after.”
I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but I slid down and curled up on the end of the swing. If I just closed my eyes for a while, maybe it would take the edge off the horrible feeling of heaviness.
After a few minutes, Jason gently tugged my legs onto his lap. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”
I opened my eyes. A lump rose in my throat and I had to swallow past it before I could speak. “I thought you wanted to help Kyle and Serena. And Dex is only in the sanatorium because we got him involved.”
“I do—it’s just . . .” Jason drummed his fingers on my shin as he tried to find the right words. “There’s a difference between breaking out three wolves we know and a few hundred we don’t. What if some of them hurt people after they get out?”
“Pick three hundred regs at random and not all of them are going to be gems,” I said.
“It’s not exactly random if they’re in prison.”
“You can’t compare a camp and a prison.” I shivered and huddled in my sweatshirt. “Most of the people in Thornhill aren’t there because they committed some sort of crime—unless you count not reporting their infection. They were caught in raids. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Like Kyle and Serena,” he said grudgingly as he moved his hand away from my leg.
“Exactly.”
Silence stretched between us and this time it was uncomfortable. The fire was almost out, but neither of us got up to do anything about it.
“Jason?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you so worried about the regs at Thornhill? You were right—if the wolves don’t try to limit causalities, the LSRB and the Trackers will use it against them—but that wasn’t the only reason you said what you did, was it? You said something else back at the camp, once. Something about how working at Thornhill didn’t necessarily make people bad.”
He let out a deep breath. “Some of them are bad—I’d like to kill the ones who hurt Serena—but I think a lot of them have never stopped to wonder whether or not the system they’re part of is wrong.”
“They remind you of yourself,” I said slowly. The tattoo on his neck was just visible in the dying firelight.
Jason nodded.
Neither of us spoke for a long while. Eventually, my eyes started to flutter closed again.
“Jason?” His name came out a near-unintelligible mumble as I fumbled weakly for his hand.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
I tried to say “for choosing us,” but the tide carried me away.
A layer of decaying leaves covered the water in the fountain.
“Gross,” muttered Amy, wrinkling her nose as she stepped up onto the ledge encircling the basin. Her gray high-tops slapped the concrete as she walked around the water.
It was dark—the sky completely devoid of moon and stars—and the only light came from the windows of the sanatorium. “This isn’t right.” I knew this fountain: it was the one from Riverside Square. It should be back in Hemlock, not in the middle of Thornhill.
Amy completed the circle and hopped down. Her shirt—one of Jason’s Italian dress shirts—flapped in the breeze.
“You’re always so stuck on landmarks and geography. Places are more than just GPS coordinates. Sometimes, they overlap.”
She sat on the edge of the fountain. “Like you. You take pieces of Hemlock with you wherever you go, so parts of it exist even inside a place as bad as this.”
“Very deep,” I said.
“I have a lot of free time on my hands. It leads to moments of self-reflection and philosophy. And memory.” She leaned back and stared up at the empty sky. “I finally remembered the story. The one my grandpa told us.”
“Okay. . . .”
“Once upon a time—”
“That’s for fairy tales, not ghost stories,” I pointed out as I sat next to her.
She rolled her eyes. “Fine.
“Seems like a lame obsession.”
“Shut it.”
“Sorry. It’s a brilliant obsession. Please continue.”
Amy mock-glared. “One day, a small girl was run over by a horse and carriage just outside the shop. The doll maker ran out to help, but the girl was dead by the time she reached her. As the woman watched, a puff of air the color of sunset passed through the girl’s lips—the child’s soul carried on her last breath.
“The doll maker began visiting hospitals and gutters, catching the last breaths of dying children in glass bottles and then sewing those bottles into dolls.”
“Let me guess,” I said, “the dolls looked more lifelike.” Now that Amy was telling it, I did sort of remember listening to the story while toasting marshmallows in her grandfather’s fireplace.
She nodded. “But no one would buy them because when they looked into the glass eyes, they swore they heard the echo of screams.” She stretched. “Trapped in a bottle and sewn inside a doll for all eternity? Who wouldn’t be screaming?”
I shivered.
“You do know why I’m really here, don’t you?”
I shook my head. I didn’t. Not anymore.
Amy looked at me sadly, then glanced over her shoulder at the fountain. Something churned the leaves and gave off a sharp, metallic scent. With horror, I realized the liquid in the basin was blood.
I scrambled to my feet, but Amy stayed sitting as though nothing were wrong.
She dipped her finger in the fountain and it came back coated in red. “Things are about to get so interesting.”
