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“Was Ollie short for Oliver?”
“No. His name was Iolaus. He only told you that if he really liked you, because people had given him shit about it when he was a kid.”
“People are assholes.”
“Yeah.”
Daisy sighs. She’s quiet for so long I think she’s fallen asleep.
“What happened?”
“The day with the helicopter?”
“Yeah.”
There are details I could give her. The whole incident was documented all to hell. Plenty of paperwork. I could give her the sequence of events. The probable equipment failures. The overall outcome. Ollie, dead. Me, alive.
Always alive.
“What happened was that I couldn’t save him.” This is the only part of the story that matters. This is what it comes down to, again and again. “I tried to give him my parachute. I tried to…I tried to make the trade.”
“The trade?” She stretches out next to me, her body curling around mine. Daisyfits. Like nobody else ever has. Like nobody else ever will.
“I’d have traded my life for his. I tried to. I tried everything I could to soften the landing, but I couldn’t.”
“Hercules…” Daisy reaches across my chest and traces the scars underneath my tattoos with a fingertip. “That wasn’t your fault. If somebody’s falling, you can’t—you can’t always save them.”
“Maybe I could have. If I’d been different.”
“Different how?”
“I should’ve died.” I can still feel the wind in my hair. It was surreal, the way the ground rose so slowly, then so fast. We had so much time. Then we didn’t have any. “But I don’t think I can.”
Her hand stills. “You can’t die? Why—how would you know that?”
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been…” Daisy already has nightmares. She doesn’t need the rest of this in her brain, too. “I’ve been hurt. Stabbed. Shot. Crushed. Beat to hell. And it never kills me. I should’ve died with Ollie, but I walked away with a fucked-up shoulder.”
“Your shoulder isn’t nothing.” She traces the scars again. “It hurts you all the time.”
“It doesn’t hurt as much as not being able to make the trade.” It’s late, and I’ve been up for the past few nights. I wouldn’t admit this under normal circumstances.
“But you can’t actually do that.” Daisy’s voice is so soft. “You can’t trade yourself for somebody else.”
“That’s not the only time I’ve tried.”
“It’s not?”
“I tried to trade myself for my mom, too. It didn’t work. She died anyway.”
Her short, sharp breath sounds like a memory coming back. “How did she die?”
“Murdered by one of her clients. He snapped her neck. I told him he could kill me instead, but he didn’t have it in him to do the job. Or…he couldn’t. But he could kill her, so he did.”
She inches over until she’s practically on top of me. “When?”
“When I was thirteen.”
“No,” she whispers. “I’m sorry.”
