Even though I’d done it expecting a sound, my vocal cords actually doing their job surprised me. I jumped a little and so did Desty.
She sat up straight and wrapped her arms around her chest.
Game time. I held out my shirt. “I thought if you were cold— I didn’t know if you wanted something to cover up with or—”
Then I saw the nose ring. Tempie.
She took the shirt—slow, like she was in a daze—and pulled it on.
“Can I talk to Desty?” I asked. “Is she in there anymore?”
She stared at me for a second, then she wrinkled her eyebrows.
“I think…I think we are.” She nodded. “Yeah, we’re still one. Like, for good.”
“Can she hear me?”
“We’re one, not deaf.”
I glared down at my boots. “You know, even when I didn’t have a voice, Desty always got what I was trying to say.”
“I can hear you,” she said. “I’m saying I’m not Desty or Tempie anymore. It’s me. We’re me—one person—for good.” She sighed. “This is going to cause a lot of nomenclature problems.”
I snorted. That was Desty.
Her muddy hazel eyes stared off like she was trying to remember something. “When I was with God, He called me a new name. But it was right. Like that had always been my name. The name for both of us at once, I mean. Grace.”
“So, do you want me to call you that?”
“Yeah. I think so.”
“Grace.” I tried to think of something else to talk about so I didn’t have to bring up what I had to bring up next, but nothing came to mind. “My mom said you were…” I nodded at her stomach, not sure I could say the word. “She said you were pregnant.”
Desty—Grace, I mean—looked down at the ground. “You drank off somebody before we had sex that last time, didn’t you?”
I nodded. “Scout. She was there after I killed Jax and…” And every time I’d done something with Scout or any other girl could be chalked up to her being there and me being a sack of shit. “So…the baby, is it…still alive?”
For a long time, Desty stared at the ground, biting her lip.
“Bred in the bone the same, born in the flesh the same.” She swiped her hair out of her eyes, hooked it behind her ear, then looked up at me. It was a move I’d seen Desty make a hundred times, but with hair too short to do any good. “They couldn’t kill it. But it’s not just ours. It’s part Kathan’s, too.”
My fists clenched and psycho-screaming metal roared through my veins. “That fucking— Did he—”
“No, he didn’t touch me…Desty… He didn’t touch Desty. It wouldn’t work like that, anyway. I had to be—I mean, Tempie had to be—pregnant so we could become one, so I convinced Kathan to do it. And when we became one, the fetal cells did, too.”
“So, it’s…what?”
Desty shrugged. “Alive.”
I waited for the pissed-off to drain out of me before I said anything else.
“If you’d known about it before you left, would you have stayed?” I asked.
She shook her head.
That was a kick in the balls, but I nodded. You don’t stay with the asshole who cheated on you and almost killed you.
“I wasn’t that person,” she said. “Not then.”
“I probably wasn’t, either,” I said.
We sat quiet for a while, me staring at her bloody hand in the grass. I really wanted to pick it up, but I didn’t think she would let me.
“So, what now?” Desty asked.
I took a deep, deep breath and let it out. It felt so damn good.
“Well, I’m going to sit here and stare at the sun until my eyes shrivel up in their sockets, and just be glad it doesn’t set my ass on fire anymore.” I looked at her. “Want to stare at it with me?”
After a few seconds, she nodded. “Sure.”
I leaned my elbows on my knees. Desty scooted over next to me, pulled her long legs up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them again.
I tried to be a gentleman about it, but I couldn’t help it. I looked.
She caught me.
My cheeks burned, turning Whitney-red, but I pretended like I didn’t notice that I was alive enough to blush again.
I pointed my nose back up toward the sky. “You look great without pants on.”
“You look good without a shirt on,” she said. “No farmer’s tan or anything.”
I snuck a peek at her. She was smiling.
We just sat there. While the NPs and humans picked through the bodies looking for survivors, while Kathan burned in Hell, and while my family did whatever they were doing up in Heaven, we sat there and watched the sun climb up the east side of the sky.
After a while, Desty reached over and picked up my hand. Her fingers were cold, so I folded them into a ball and held her hand between both of mine to warm it up.
“What’s that?” she asked.
I cocked my eyebrow at her.
“The song you were just humming,” she said.
I thought about it for a minute. When I was finally sure, I said, “Something new.”
Mailing List and Reviews
Thanks for reading Last Battle! Tough Whitney and I have been sharing a brain for the last four years, and trust me, no one is as happy—and as sad—to see him go as me. We’ve both grown up a lot since I first started daydreaming about Halo. Neither one of us is the person we were when we started out, and thank God for that. There’s still plenty of room for improvement, but we’re both in a much better place. Thank you for seeing this through to the end with us.
All this is to say
