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I thought I knew the highest level of heartbreak when my mother died. I was shown just how wrong I could be when I lost Grace last year and my heart didn't just hurt, it felt like it cracked right down the middle. The splinters of it cutting me up inside. I was sure that nothing could possibly hurt more than that, or the all-consuming grief that had held me captive for weeks, and then months, after. I'm being proven wrong yet again right now.
My eyes are on the spot where I last saw Keri stand before she turned the corner and disappeared, continuing her walk towards her death. The tears streak my cheeks, and my body trembles as I stand here, feeling the cry, the sob, building in my throat. But all of those feelings pale in comparison to the one in my chest. The pain there makes me sure that this,this,is the worst heartbreak I can ever feel. My heart has broken, cracked, and even splintered, before, but now I feel it crumble to nothing more than dust inside of me. The dust of what used to be my heart is falling, disappearing into nothing more than a memory of this thing that once beat in the center of my chest. Sorrow, grief, anger, and sadness, they all rush through me, but there's a numbness, too. A dangerous numbness that threatens to overtake every other emotion. Threatens to overtake me.
I promised Keri I would leave, that I would make her accepting her own death in exchange for my life worth it. But now, I'm not so sure how to keep my word.
"It'll be okay," one of the women, who arrived at the balcony with the President, tells me.
I blink, just now remembering how I'm not standing here alone. Slowly, too slowly because my head spins dizzily, I turn to look at her. She stares back with such sympathy. I hate it. I hate the hypocrisy of it when she's a part of what is making me feel this way, of what took my sisters from me in the first place.
I narrow my tear-filled eyes at her before asking, "How can you even say that?"
She glances nervously at the President beside her. He gives me the same tight, fake smile he just gave Keri a few minutes ago. Before he sent her to her death. Anger overcomes everything in me as I stare at him. He reminds me so much of my father right now. Just another man using his control to harm my sisters and I.
Just. Another. Man.
"I hope we can trust you to have discretion about all of this, Miss Palmer," the President says.
And just like that, my emotions change once again, fear coming to the forefront this time with Keri's warning filling my mind. She told me not to trust any of them, and to run the moment I felt it was safe. She said that the President would, sooner or later, feel the need to ensure my silence about everything that had happened here today, and the man’s measured words just now only confirm it. He's concerned I'll tell someone that instead of putting Keri and I in prison for running to escape the draft, that she was offered a deal instead, and instructed to smile for the cameras to quell the rumors spreading in our quadrant. I sniffle, wiping my tears as I nod at him.
"I won't say anything," I croak, then clear my throat. "I just want the money."
I don't give a shit about the money they're going to give me for losing Keri, but I'm sure if the President feels like I'm getting something I want from him, he's more likely to believe I'll uphold my end of this sick bargain.
"Of course, of course," he quickly assures me. "It will be in your account before you get home. We’ll give you a few moments alone, and then a car is waiting at the back of the center. That way you can avoid the cameras and we can get you home."
Something twists in my stomach when he says the word home. It makes me instantly ill. It's so strong, I forget about the grief I think will consume me at any moment. It's something in his face, how his eyes are so intensely focused on me as if he's searching for a lie. For any reason to not let me go home. I know manipulative men well enough to know that if he's looking for a lie in me, it's because he's lying about something himself.
"I could just walk home," I offer. "It will give me time to clear my head."
His brows furrow with mock concern. "No, no. It's far too late for a woman to be alone on the streets. Please, I insist you let one of my men see you home. It's the least I can do after all that your sister has done."
Another lie. I hear it. Taste it. Smellit. I need to get out of here.
But how?
I give him a tight smile that resembles his own. "Thank you. I'll be right down."
"Stacy will show you to a room that you can use for as long as you like."
He nods to the woman who foolishly tried to console me earlier, and she waves her hand for me to begin walking. I don't want to follow her. I don't have any faith that I'll even make it into any room, let alone the car, but I don't have a choice. I match her footsteps as we go down the hallway. We reach a room, and she opens the door for me to go in first. I step in and she closes it behind me as I look at the simple couch, table, and TV mounted on the wall. It's like a sterile waiting room for the ones who've just had their loved one sent to death at the hands of a brutal monster. It makes me wonder just how often the President has made this same deal with other women, and how many others have come to this room to mourn. And better yet...if any of those women have left alive, because as I walk over to the window, I find it’s sealed shut. There’s no way out, even if I could convince myself that the jump from this high up wouldn't kill me. I look around for cameras, and when I find no obvious ones, I assume I have some measure of privacy. So, for a moment, just a moment, I let all of my emotions come forth.
A sob bursts from me as my hands curl around the window ledge, holding it so tightly that my fingers ache. I am alone. Utterly alone. My sisters were all I had. Keri was my entire world after they took Grace from us last year. And now, I have no one. No one in this world that I love, and no one in this world that loves me. I am not ready to face a world without them in it. How am I supposed to go on without them, and without a heart?
My tears fall in earnest now, no shock and disbelief left inside me to hold them back. They fall down my cheeks and onto the backs of my hands as I look out the window at a city that no longer feels like home. Not without my sisters here with me, anyway. Is Keri dead already? Has the monster ripped her apart while I stood here crying? Did she give her life below for me to be here, falling apart?
I shut my eyes tightly at the thought. She can't have died for me to break. I hate that her last hours were spent reassuring me when it should have been the other way around. She needed to make sure I would be okay when I should have been the one to tell her that I would be fine and I would go on. My sisters have protected me all my life, from my father, from bullies at school, and even from the assholes at my job. Always protecting me. Now, I need to protect myself. Now, I need to be strong, even if it's the very last thing I feel right now.
I release the window ledge and curl my hands into fists, asking myself what Grace and Keri would be doing right now in my position. They would pull themselves together, at least wait until they got home to cry and scream out their rage. They would make sure they got themselves out of this processing center, away from the danger of the President and the people in here. I need to be like them right now.
I snap my eyes open, and my chest rises and falls with my deep breaths. I wish it fortified me at all. But still, I stand straighter and swallow as I turn and begin walking across the room. The woman's face greets me as soon as I open the door. Stacy smiles, but then it drops like she remembers how I snapped at her earlier.
"I'm ready," I say.
"If you would just follow me, then."
Her heels click against the tiles as we walk down the hallway. I try not to make it obvious that I'm looking at everything as we go along, scared there will be a man waiting in an open doorway to grab me into the room and never let me go. But we make it to the elevators, and she presses the down button before giving me another smile. All I can think of as I hear the elevator shaft rise is if it was an elevator that lowered my sisters into the ground. Or was it a ladder, a rope? Who the hell knows? All I can be sure of is that they were sent down and they will never come back up. Tears well in my eyes and I dig my nails into my palm to stop them from falling.
"Here we are," Stacy states when the elevator doors open.
