“Screw you.” Aria flopped onto her back. “You don’t know what was going on with me.”
“I know you hurt Navarro. I know you had something so good, and you wrecked it and don’t even care.” Joe wasn’t even sure he believed what he was saying, but he needed to stop groping his own guts and dig into someone else. “And, if that’s not bad enough, you set us up, tried to get us killed.”
“Lower your voice,” Aria hissed. “You do not know what you are talking about. I tried to save you.”
“Bullshit.”
“Oh look, Mr. Perfect knows bad words. Do you really think I would have hurt you on purpose?”
Joe shook his head, brushing off the thought. “I just want to sleep, Aria.”
“Fine. Enjoy the bed I snagged for you by thinking fast when Maribou asked me about our group.”
“You think I care about a bed when Devin’s out there hurting in the cold?”
“I know you don’t, but you’re too big an idiot to see what everyone else does. You” — Aria poked his ribs, hard — “think nothing of sacrificing yourself to take care of the rest of us, and it doesn’t help us. It doesn’t make Devin well, and it doesn’t make Peter stronger. It doesn’t stop Flix’s nightmares. And it doesn’t help me forgive myself.”
Joe deflated, his snappy, mean comeback dying on his lips. “I didn’t know you’d been paying attention.”
Aria turned and faced away from Joe. The cloudy moonlight coming in through the window shone weakly on her frizzy-fried hair. “You needed a good night’s rest.”
Joe thought about it for a few minutes, until she was probably asleep. “Aaron Brady was my father.”
“How long ago?”
“Nine years. He was supposed to go to Minneapolis, then come back for me. Lucky me, I got to be a prostitute instead of a scientist.”
Aria hummed but didn’t try to comfort him. Joe appreciated that. Made him glad he hadn’t told her the worst of it, the beatings and rapes that happened after his father had left.
“By the time we got to Purcell,” Aria said, “I was so sick of Navi and Lili. She’s bossy and he’s, you know, him.”
“Hard.”
“Yeah. Then we pull into this dinky little piece of crap town, with houses like cages, and I was so mad. How many books did we read, you and me? Hundreds.”
“At least.” They’d read everything Joe got his hands on from the half-destroyed local branch of the old library. Love stories and adventures, textbooks, mysteries. Until Devin came along, Aria had been the only person Joe had met who loved reading as much as he did.
“And never, in any of those books, was the heroine some dirt-poor girl who spent her entire adult life helping her daddy in some backwash town, content while a whole amazing world went on just beyond her reach.”
“You wanted more.”
“Damned right I did.”
Joe didn’t have to stretch his imagination to know how that felt. Wasn’t that a big part of the fairytale of his father? That he’d help Joe escape and become who he was meant to be?
“So anyway,” Aria said, “Sanders started coming around, talking to Navi about revolt and reclaiming our heritage. Navi didn’t want any part of it, and that pissed me off, too. I wanted those things Sanders dangled in front of Navi.”
“Then when Navarro wouldn’t join up...”
“I thought it was the best of both worlds. I get what I want; Sanders leaves Navi — and my sisters — alone. I didn’t even imagine what Sanders would make me do for my initiation. I thought it’d be sex or something.”
“Hurting Navarro?” Joe guessed.
“And even that seemed like a blessing. Navi’s way too important to the town to kill, and it hit me in a really scary way that Sanders could have asked me to kill Lili or Sadie. And if I’d backed down, he could’ve killed one of them just to spite me. Hell, I’m shocked he didn’t do something like that to make a point to Navi.”
The night of the bombing, before Joe knew the Sons had kidnapped Devin, he’d been certain Aria’s story was something along those lines. She may have always had her head in the clouds, but she loved her family the same fierce way they loved her. “I’m sorry I assumed the worst.”
Aria laughed, wet and pained. “I gave you every reason to.” She rolled over and laid a hand on Joe’s forearm, her touch lighter than even Peter’s rare, tentative contact. “When I told you to find your friends in the greenhouse, I wasn’t trying to trap you. I had faith in you. I still have faith in you.”
“So why did the Sons turn up at the greenhouse?”
“Your decoy plan worked. We saw my family and those other guys heading out toward the old compound. We were far enough away from them that Sanders believed you were with them, but one of the villagers saw you in the greenhouse, thought you were trying to rob the town of food, and ran to tell Sanders.”
“And you couldn’t think of a diversion?”
“You try getting three or four minutes to think of a reason to deter a guy who’s out for blood. It’s not that easy. I did the best I could. He and I talked about how clever you were to think of a plan that tricked us, and I told him you were just misguided, warped by the way you’d been abused.”
Joe bristled at the implication that his time at Flights of Fantasy had been abuse. He knew Aria had always seen it that way, but he wasn’t about to chalk up five years of his life to being a victim. “Go on.”
“He didn’t know you and Devin were together; I didn’t know you were together.” Her voice grew ragged. “It was something even Sadie didn’t tell me.”
“She was such a great girl.”
“So much more than you even know. She was the best of us, the light. My light. I don’t even know how to keep...” Her voice
