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“What?” I heard her; I just can’t believe I heard her right.
“They’ve been using you as a human garbage disposal.” She makes a frame with her hands and looks at me through it. “Portrait of a teenage assassin.”
I stand up, even though we’re on a train and there’s nowhere for me to go.
“Cassel?” She reaches out for me, and I step back.
There’s a roaring in my ears. I’m grateful. I don’t think I can listen to much more.
“I’m sorry. But you had to suspect—”
I push my way through the heavy doors and onto the platform between the cars. The joining between the two cars swings back and forth beneath my feet. I am standing right above the hooks and chains that connect the train into its snaking shape. Cold air blows back my hair, then hot air from the engine hits my face.
I stand there, hands against the sliding metal, until I start to calm down.
I think I understand why all those workers got rounded up and shot. Why people were so scared of us that they wanted us dead. Even I’m scared of me right now.
We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That’s why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder.
For three whole days I wasn’t a killer. Lila had come back from the dead, and with her, the abatement of my self-loathing. But now the pile of corpses teeters above me, threatening to crash down and suffocate me with guilt.
All my life I wanted my brothers to trust me. To let me in on their secrets. I wanted them, Philip especially, to think of me as a worthy accomplice.
Even after they kicked the crap out of me, my instinct was to try and save them.
Now I just want revenge.
After all, I’m already a murderer. No one really expects a murderer to stop killing. I grip the metal bar on the rolling train, my fingers clenching around it like it’s Philip’s throat. I don’t want to be a monster, but maybe it’s too late to be anything else.
The door swings open and the conductor steps onto the platform and past me. “You can’t ride out here,” he says, looking back.
“Okay,” I say, and he opens the door to the next car, ready to collect more tickets. He doesn’t really care. I could probably stay where I am for a long while before he comes back through again.
I suck in another couple breaths of fetid air and then go back to Lila.
“Very dramatic,” she says when I sit down. “Storming off and all.” Her eyes look bruised around the edges. She’d found a pen somewhere and started doodling in ink on her leg, below the knee.
I feel awful, but I don’t apologize.
“Yeah,” I say, “I’m a dramatic guy. High-strung.”
That makes her smile, but it fades fast. “I hated you, lying in your comfortable bed at your school, caring about grades and girls and not about what you did to me.”
I grit my teeth. “You slept in my bed. You really think it’s that comfortable?”
She laughs, but it sounds more like a sob.
I look out the window. We’re in woods now. “I shouldn’t have said that. You were sleeping in a cage. I’m not a good person, Lila.” I hesitate. “But I did—I do care what I’ve done to you. I thought about you every single day. And I am sorry. I’m grovelingly, pathetically sorry.”
“I don’t want your pity,” she says, but her voice sounds gentler.
“Too bad,” I say.
She gives me a wry lopsided grin and kicks me with my own boot.
“I’d like it if you’d tell me the rest of what happened. How I transformed you. How you got away. I’m not going to freak out anymore. I’ll listen to whatever you want to tell me.”
She nods and goes back to drawing on her leg. Swirls that spiral out from an ink blue center. “Right. So. There you are, pressing me down to the carpet.
