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But between us and the barn, on the ground, all around us, lie bodies in random, dark heaps.
“Who are they? Are they—?”Are they dead?I begin to ask, but Marco grabs my head in the palm of his hand and quickly brings it down to his chest.
“Don’t look. Look at me only,” he says abruptly. “Keep your eyes on me.”
I do, but the images of the fallen bodies still manage to get through, out of the corner of my eye. I can’t close my eyes. Right now, it feels that if I do, I’ll fall into the darkness and I won’t stop falling. Ever.
“M…maybe you should call for backup,” I murmur into his chest, and his arms gather me closer into his body.
He curls me into a little ball and crushes me to his ribs, as if he is trying to make me as small and invisible as possible. To protect me. He doesn’t answer me: I already know the answer anyway. We meander through the fallen bodies, the dead bodies—there are so many. So many. All of them are wearing the same clothes: dark, bulky with weapons. Uniforms. They are wearing uniforms.
They are guards. My guards.
Marco tries to say something, but his voice is too hoarse. He clears his throat, and tries again.
“I did call for backup. Three times already,” he says. “I think…” He has to clear his throat again. “It looks like this was it.”
I stop pretending that I’m avoiding to stare at the bodies. I twist in his arms and crane my neck and look at them directly, even though he turns his body to shield my view. But even in the thick darkness, there is no hiding the fact that all the dead men are dressed in guards’ uniforms, and have Asteria’s insignia sewn into their sleeves.
I let out a whimper, feeling the blood drain from my head. Marco swears, pulling me even tighter.
“No fainting now,” he mutters.
“We need to hide,” I say.
“We have been, for two days,” he replies. “That’s all we’ve been doing, we’ve been hiding. We couldn’t go back to school, couldn’t go anywhere. So we went everywhere else, kept moving as much as we could, but… I’m sorry. It looks like our time has run out.”
Is that what we’ve been doing all this time? I thought we were being together, having some kind of normal fun, but is that what…?
Besides, he’s wrong.
Mytime has run out. Not our time. Mine.
“Oh,” I say weakly. My stomach heaves, and I clamp a hand to my mouth, fighting the urge to be sick.
‘Oh’ indeed. All this time, we had been hiding from my killers, and I had thought we had been doing something else. I thought… I don’t know what I thought. I thought I was having a few stolen, normal minutes with a guy I liked, and who maybe, maybe just liked me back a tiny bit. But it turns out that he was paid to babysit me. Not babysit me, protect me. It turns out that he knew they were hunting me all along, and that’s why he didn’t take me back to UVM right away.
That he only took me to secluded locations so that he would hide me from my assassins.
That he was calling for backup the whole time.
That he knew I was living on borrowed time, and that there was no saving me, not really. And that maybe, just maybe, he tried to make it count.
“Who shot at you?” I ask him, and he shudders so abruptly, he almost drops me. We’ve reached the barn, which means no more dead bodies. Or maybe even more dead bodies inside, who knows at this point?
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he bites out, his lips white. “I just need to check this place out before we go in, ok?”
We step inside. The barn smells of wood and wet leaves, but it’s empty. There is light inside, high ceilings and empty space. Marco sets me on my feet, his hand lingering on my back until I stop feeling dizzy and stand up straight on my own.
He turns off the torch’s light, and at once we’re plunged into darkness. There is a milky, pale light streaming from the seams of the barn’s walls, but it’s too weak. Marco walks on with feral, soft movements, covering me with his body as he moves, and proceeds to check every corner of our surroundings, both outside and inside the barn.
Once we’re inside, I breathe a sigh of relief.
“All clear,” Marco pronounces in a few minutes, obviously weak with relief as well.
My body folds in on itself, and I sink gratefully to the floor, relishing the fact that for once, I’m in a dry, quiet place. Surrounded by dead bodies. No, don’t think about that. Survive. Look at what Marco is doing; help him. Stay alert.
Marco has started barricading the door with various logs and boxes he finds around. He works quickly and methodically, as if he’s rehearsed this—he probably has been in a similar situation before. Once the barricade is finished, he runs to the other side of the barn, obscured by darkness, and starts taking something heavy out of the wall, something that makes a ‘clang’ when he places it on the floor by his foot. Then he takes another one. I squint, and get up so I can see more clearly.
