Page 71 of Marked Omega

“Stay here,” I tell her. “I’ll bring some fruit.”

Lily nods sullenly.

I leave her lying there by the edge of the pool and go to our store room. I fill my arms with an assortment of ripe fruits gathered from the garden atop the building. But when I return to the main room, Lily is gone.

“Lily?” I call.

No answer.

Sudden panic pulses in my chest. The fruits scatter and bounce on the mossy floor where I drop them. I follow Lily’s scent outside to the sun-soaked patio, and that’s where I find her.

“Lily!”

She has climbed over the edge of the balcony and is attempting to shimmy down the thick vines that descend to the ground hundreds of feet below. The other Alphas and I often make that climb, but Lily’s little arms don’t have the strength for it.

Seizing her wrists, I yank her up and set her down on the patio beside me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I snarl. “Lily, if you fell…”

She just glares up at me silently, her mouth set with determination and her pretty eyes blazing with silent challenge.

She’s clearly not going to take no for an answer. I can see there’s nothing that will stop her short of chaining her to the wall. She intends to see her friend or die trying.

I know what I must do.

“Fine,” I sigh reluctantly. “I’ll take you. We won’t hide it from Addom and Hasker. We’ll tell them afterward, and we’ll accept whatever punishment they give us.”

CHAPTER 31: LILY

Eva’s grave is marked by a simple cairn of stones in a bright clearing surrounded by dense forests.

I lay down the small bouquet of flowers that I brought with me from the city.

For a few minutes, I just sit there in silence, looking at her grave. I try to think of something to say to her, but it feels strange, like I’m just talking to a pile of rocks. Instead I just remember the good times that we had together as friends.

After a while, I get up, brushing the bits of grass from my legs, and cross the clearing to the edge of the forest where Kadmon is waiting for me in the blue shadows.

He puts his arm around me and holds me close as we walk between the dark tree trunks furred with moss and surrounded by waist high ferns sparkling with dew.

“How do you feel?” he asks quietly.

It takes me a moment to think about that one. I thought I would feel like crying, but I don’t for some reason. In fact, I feel surprisingly good now, as though a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I have fulfilled my duty. I came to the zone to find my friend, and that’s what I have done. Of course I regret that I wasn’t able to find her alive, but her fate had been sealed long before I even found out she was missing.

“Fate.”

Kadmon stops and looks at me quizzically.

“Lily?” he says. “What do you mean?”

I plop down on a fallen tree scalloped with fungus, and Kadmon joins me, patiently waiting for me to gather my thoughts. Somewhere nearby there comes the tock-tock-tock of a woodpecker pecking at a dead tree.

“Fate is so unfair,” I tell him. “Why should it be Eva’s fate to die the way she did while I get to have such a good life with you and Addom and Hasker to take care of me? It just makes me feel…guilty, I guess.”

Kadmon’s hands smooth over my shoulders. He gazes off into the woods as he thinks for a moment.

“Lily, I’m not smart like you are,” he says. “But it seems to me that if Fate is unfair, then you have no reason to feel guilty about it. You didn’t choose for things to turn out the way they did. You only did what you thought was right. You came to the zone to look for your friend. All you can do is accept what Fate deals you. Besides, I never knew your friend, but I’m sure she would want you to be happy.”

I cock my head and look up at his handsome face framed with long, dark hair and set with those deep, midnight blue eyes that look almost black here in the shadows.