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The cabin might be crawling with killers, which is not ideal, but, and hear me out here: it’s warm in there.
And out here, I am freezing. He is too, I can feel him shiver violently against me, and I don’t know how long he can keep on going like this. Not even God knows where we are right now. They won’t even find our bodies. No, stop thinking like that. Survive. Fight.
So I do fight, mostly to keep my eyes open and my breathing even.
Marco walks for about fifteen minutes more, carrying me through the woods, sure-footed and steady-paced, in spite of the exhaustion, and I snuggle against his chest, the cold making me sleepy and half-conscious.
Suddenly, he stops short. For a second, I think he stumbled in the darkness, but then I see what’s happened. He stumbled all right, but it wasn’t against a root or a fallen tree.
He stumbled against a body.
He almost drops me in his shock, but then immediately his arms tighten around me so hard I lose my breath. But not before I glance down and see what he’s seeing: There are bodies strewn about all over the forest floor. The trees are thinning out now, and there is a clearing ahead. The rain is getting weaker, little lines against the yellow light of Marco’s torch, and I can clearly see a huge barn looming against the black sky.
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?
