She felt alone. Fear wound tight around her tired, sleepless skull.
Until the day a man strode up the long, dusty drive… and knocked on the door of her home.
NINE
Morning comes too soon with pale light sneaking through the curtained window, warming the floorboards, the quilt, and my hands where they lie against Noah’s bare chest—sun on clean, freckled skin, nails no longer packed with dirt. But I sit upright, gasping for air—as if I was drowning.
I dreamed of the ocean, the brutal, savage sea—and I wipe at my face, brushing away the choking memory.
Noah still sleeps, lips stirring with each breath, no worried creases edging his eyes, no tensed jaw—I don’t want to wake him, because I know it won’t last. But his arm stirs, sliding across the quilt as if he’s searching for me in his sleep. As if I am familiar to him now.
Even though I have lied to him.
Even though I keep things buried inside me—the truth Mom always said was ours to bear, and no one else’s.
He is still a moment, looking at me with sleepy emerald eyes, before his gaze flicks to the window, the sun pouring into the room. “It’s late,” he says, sitting upright. The blankets fall away from him, revealing the tattoos woven across his chest, looping over his collarbone and up his neck. Some look like coiled monsters, others justlines of black along his rib bones, and it makes me want to touch him again. Pull him close and press my mouth to his, sink back into the blankets, and forget the world outside.
But a knock comes at the door, a softrap rap rap.Noah jumps up from the floor. And the calm I had felt is torn away.
The thing we fear will find us, it always does.
Noah opens the door a crack, his back pressed against the wall, ready for whoever’s on the other side. But there’s no one. He crouches down and retrieves something from the hallway floor, then closes the door again. In his arms, he holds a stack of our cleaned clothes, and something else.
“What is it?” I ask, rising from the floor.
“She left a canteen of water, and food.” He sets the clothes onto the bed, and unwraps the cloth to reveal four corn cakes and a bundle of dried fruit—apples and pears.
Quickly Noah pulls on his clothes, his boots, and his canvas coat, then walks to the window and looks out at the street. I feel the change in the air before he speaks, before I even see the muscles along his neck tighten. “We need to go.”
I reach for my clothes, yanking my shirt over my head.
We stayed too long. Slept in.Pretending we could be safe for just a few more moments.
“There’s horses on the street, ones I don’t recognize. They weren’t there last night.”
A door slams downstairs, followed by voices rising up the stairwell. Noah’s eyes dart over to me, and we both go still.
They are men’s voices, joined suddenly by Maybelle’s—they’re asking her something, words muffled at first, but then I make it out:They’re asking about two people on the road.They’re asking about us.
“It’s them,” I hiss, and Noah grabs the package of food, tucking it into his coat pocket. I had thought we were safe—I had thought Maybelle wouldn’t turn us in—but I was wrong. She must have sent word during the night that a traitor Theorist and the Astronomer were asleep in her hotel, trusting and foolish and unarmed. She lied, keeping us here long enough for the Theorists to reach her small town.
I hurry to the door and press my ear to the wood, my heart slamming against my ribs.They found us.I hear the shuffling of boots, and I wait to hear Maybelle tell them we’re right at the top of the stairs, pinned inside a room.
“They arrived last night,” she says, voice echoing up the stairwell.
I flash a look to Noah, where he’s still peering out the window. We could escape through the window and down the side of the hotel, but it faces the street, and we’d drop from the roof right onto the porch, where they’d see us.
Still, Noah unlocks the window, tries pushing it up, but it doesn’t even move an inch.
“—but they left,” I hear Maybelle say now, and my eyes cut back to the door. I’m surprised, certain I misheard. “Took off early this morning on horseback. Didn’t even pay for their room,” she adds for good measure, maybe to make her story sound true. Like she’s just as eager to see us apprehended. “Headed south, I think.”
A rising feeling of relief presses against my rib cage, and I let out a shaky breath. She didn’t turn us in. She didn’t send for them after all. They tracked us here, on their own.
She kept her word.
The men speak swiftly, too low to hear, and then there are more footsteps, followed by the sound of the door opening again as they retreat outside.
Noah steps back from the window so he won’t be seen.
