Page 64 of Hilarina and the Ogre

“Trent.” Hilary didn’t mean to say it. He had to keep silent—to keep Trenton from hurting any worse. But it was the only comfort he had. “Trenton.”

“Let him go.” Trenton was begging now, no longer even angry, entirely desperate. “Please just let him go. You can’t return after this. It’ll all be—”

A sound. It was the sound first. Then the pain came, entirely unfamiliar, the foreign thing inside him. He’d always thought it would feel a little like shitting, only in reverse. To have something up there. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t like that at all. And the shout was Trenton’s. With so little breath, Hilary didn’t think he could have made a sound if he’d wanted to.

“Take it out! Take it out of him—Don’t—DON’T—”

Axel laughed into Trenton’s anguish and shoved the bottle in deeper. “Careful there, Whale. If you distract me, the glass could break, and then we’d really be in a tight spot, wouldn’t we?”

The sounds Trenton was making were like a screaming kind of crying, shattered like his arm was. The boy cursed at Axel, threats of shredded fury. With all his flailing, Trenton managed to fall off the platform they were keeping him on, his vain struggle to get closer even when a rescue was impossible. As if he might take it for him. Or simply have them suffer it together.

Hilary could hear it, Trenton’s breaking. The good parts of him, the steady parts, all of what made the boy what he was, were coming undone by the things he was being forced to watch. And then Hilary couldn’t think about that at all. When the bottle was removed, he never thought it was over—and he was right. The second intrusion was nothing like it, the feeling impossible. There was no way it was going to fit inside him. Cartoonish even to attempt it, the same bat that had broken Trenton’s arm.

Trenton had given up bargaining. He’d given up threatening. It was just the animal sounds now. Broken, terrible, inhuman kinds of sounds. Someone was ill then, the smell of vomit acrid in the air, and Hilary was being wrenched apart, as if a hatchet was coming down on him, relentlessly splitting him at the seams. And it was the whole world. Even Trenton had become amorphous, just another of the sounds around him. The only good thing about the intensity of it—the impossible terror of it, was that he wouldn’t be around for the whole of it. The last thought he had before passing out was wondering just how long it would take until his gut was perforated and he bled to death. But even that wasn’t truly coherent. Mostly, all he could do was feel it as his body shut down the other parts. His other senses. The movement of his limbs. Temperature and pressure both fading. There was only that sensation, relentless and always worsening, an impossible pain. He stopped hearing Trenton, so he missed the deal the boy cut with one of the assailants to tell the police he’d been part of the rescue. To spare the assailant a ruined life and one in prison. Maybe the boy was convinced, or maybe it was just that the bully of a criminal was scared nearly as much as Trenton at a scheme that had gone far darker than he’d ever thought it would go. Either way, someone cut the tape holding Trenton’s hands. Or maybe the boy managed to take the knife from an unresisting hand. The details would never be clear, and Hilary wouldn’t be able to ask. But Trenton did get free. He broke his bonds and got to his feet, and with the ruined arm and the beginning stages of frostbite, he did as he’d promised and killed every last one of the attackers.

He got Axel first. Taking the man before he even realized anyone was coming for him. Silent, his grief subsumed, even his rage subsumed, Trenton focused only on the sharp point of his revenge, too late now to be called a rescue.

That was when Hilary finally lost consciousness, when the thing inside him went slack—that singular moment of lessening pain enough for his body to let go. He didn’t feel Trenton’s hands or hear his voice. Didn’t get to thank him or blame him or do anything at all. He was just gone.

When he woke, it was in the ambulance, and he didn’t know anyone with him.

“Trenton.” It was the first word he attempted, though it wasn’t recognizable. His throat felt like a bloody lump of meat. “The boy—my friend—do you know—?”

“Stay still.” It was the paramedic. Or was it an EMT? He didn’t know the difference. What mattered was that the person holding him threatened to restrain him, and with those words he tasted the gag again and the smell of vomit.

“Trent.” It became sobbing, even though the strain of it was a knife to his raw throat, every small tug a new wave of pain.

His parents were there when the ambulance unloaded, his father’s voice shrill for the first time he’d ever heard it. “That’s my son.” Albert was trying to get at him, to shove the paramedics out of the way. “My boy.”

“Where’s Trenton?” It was his mother’s hand that Hilary grabbed—the closest one. “Find Trenton.”

He didn’t know if she heard him, and he couldn’t tell either if his words were sensible. They did all kinds of things to him. He wasn’t sure what. There was anesthesia and drugs and he wasn’t conscious for most of it, but when he was, he kept trying the same thing. He called for Trenton, and the absence of any answer, of not having the boy rush to his side, was continuously shocking. He didn’t understand a world where Trenton wasn’t with him, wasn’t endlessly indulging, the idiot who fawned over him like a mother hen.

He crawled out of bed the second day, taking the chance while his mother was asleep and his father out to make a call. With his thoughts returning, he remembered his friend’s arm as something to explain the absence. If Trenton was hurt…and yet, even then, it didn’t make sense. Trenton would have been there, no matter what part of him was broken or what kind of terrible thing had been inflicted, he would have been there. Had promised to be.

Still, Trenton’s wounds were good for one thing, at least. Hilary knew it meant the boy would be in the hospital too, so he went looking. Trying, like his friend, to be quiet as he went, to go unnoticed as much as an idiot in a hospital gown, half-crawling and half-limping, could be invisible.

It was a wonder that he found the boy at all. Maybe after so long with his friend, some of that extra-sensory capacity had rubbed off on him, the last uncoiling of the spool of fate that connected them.

Trenton was awake when he came. Was sitting up in his bed, arm bound all the way to the shoulder, an intravenous needle in the other arm, but he didn’t seem to be in pain. He wasn’t screaming at any rate.

Hilary didn’t know if it was relief that he felt. The reality of finding him—of having him there in front of him—was too big for relief. “Trent.”

He went to him. Even Axel couldn’t have stopped him going to him, and then momentum caught him up, keeping him going, moving forward, even as Trenton turned, responding to the sound. Trenton, who wasn’t Trenton, who wasn’t anyone he knew.

“Hello,” the boy said, uncertain, and very young. Younger than any Trenton he had ever met. The boy didn’t flinch from the touch, but neither did he seem to notice it. His eyes were focused, but not the ones he knew. “Do I know you?”

Part two

Trenton

Fifteen Years Later

Chapter Eighteen

Lemon Cake

There had already been several screwups that day. The delivery had forgotten the potatoes, and something had leaked in the freezer—Trenton wasn’t sure what—but it had gotten everywhere, and he didn’t have the time to clean it up. The weekend girl—the high schooler who waited tables—had canceled for an exam, and the other girl was out sick, making him the only one in the restaurant, and it was a Saturday, their busiest day of the week.