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“It’s strange,” I say to Day later, as we both curl up on the floor. Outside, the hurricane rages on. In a few hours we’ll need to head out. “It’s strange being here with you. I hardly know you. But . . . sometimes it feels like we’re the same person born into two different worlds.”
He stays quiet for a moment, one hand absently playing with my hair. “I wonder what we would’ve been like if I’d been born into a life more like yours, and you had been born into mine. Would we be just like we are now? Would I be one of the Republic’s top soldiers? And would you be a famous criminal?”
I lift my head off his shoulder and look at him. “I never did ask you about your street name. Why ‘Day’?”
“Each day means a new twenty-four hours. Each day means everything’s possible again. You live in the moment, you die in the moment, you take it all one day at a time.” He looks toward the railway car’s open door, where streaks of dark water blanket the world. “You try to walk in the light.”
I close my eyes and think of Metias, of all my favorite memories and even the ones I’d rather forget, and I picture him bathed in light. In my mind, I turn to him and give him a final farewell. Someday I’ll see him again, and we’ll tell our stories to each other . . . but for now I lock him safely away, in a place where I can draw on his strength. When I open my eyes, Day is watching me. He doesn’t know what I’m thinking, but I know he recognizes the emotion on my face.
We lie there together, watching the lightning and listening to the thunder, and waiting for the beginning of a rainy dawn.
