“Like what?” Chubs pressed.
Oh God, I couldn’t even talk about it. I physically could not speak. Not about the hundreds of mind games I watched them play on the PSFs. Nothing about the memory of having to scrub the floors of the Mess Hall after an Orange told a PSF to walk in and open fire on every other soldier he saw there. My stomach turned violently, and I could taste it, the metallic bitterness of blood. Smell it. I remembered how it felt to scrape it out from where it was packed painfully under my nails.
Chubs opened his mouth, but Liam held up a hand to shut him up.
“I just knew I needed to protect myself.”
And, truthfully, because I was scared of the Oranges, too. There was something wrong with them. With us. It was the constant chatter, the flood of everyone else’s feelings and thoughts, I think. Eventually you learned how to block some of it out, to build up a thin wall between your mind and others’, but not before everyone else’s poisonous thoughts were in there, staining your own. Some spent so long outside of their own heads that they couldn’t function right when they finally had to return their own.
“So now you see,” I said, finally, “what a mistake it was to let me stay.”
Zu was shaking her head, looking distraught at the suggestion. Chubs rubbed at his eyes, hiding his expression. Only Liam was willing to look me straight in the eye. And there was no disgust, or fear, or any of the thousand other ugly emotions he was entitled to; only understanding.
“Try to imagine where we’d be without you, darlin’,” he said, quietly, “and then maybe you’ll see just how lucky we got.”
TWENTY
THAT NIGHT, WE SLEPT IN THE VAN, each sprawled out on a seat. I let Zu have the rear seat, and stayed up front next to Liam. I felt uneasy in the silence, and sleep didn’t come easy, even when I called to it.
Sometime around five in morning, just as I was about to give into the fuzz covering my brain, I felt someone run a light finger down the back of my neck. I rolled over onto my other side, and Liam was there, half-awake.
“You were muttering to yourself,” he whispered. “You okay?”
I propped myself up on an elbow, wiping the sleep away from my eyes. The rain had condensed on the windows, covering the cracked windshield like a filmy overlay of lace. Every time a fat raindrop dislodged itself and went streaking down the glass, it was like a tear in the fabric.
Looking out into the forest was like searching someone’s dreams, disorienting and unsettling, but inside the van, everything was sharp. The lines of the reclining seats, the dashboard knobs—I could even read the tiny printed brand name on the buttons of Liam’s shirt.
In that light, I could see every bruise and cut on his face, some just beginning to heal, and others that had long-since scarred. But what held my attention wasn’t the bruise on his cheek—the same one I had given him a few days and lifetimes before—but the way his hair was standing almost straight up, curling around his ears and against his neck. The storm had turned its color to a darker shade of honey, but it didn’t lose any of its softness. It didn’t make me want to reach out and touch it any less.
“What?” he whispered. “What are you smiling about?”
My fingers brushed against his hair, trying to smooth it down. I realized what I was doing a full minute after Liam had closed his eyes and leaned into my touch. Embarrassment flared up in my chest, but he grabbed my hand before I could pull back and tucked it under his chin.
“Nope,” he whispered, when I tried to tug it away. “Mine now.”
Dangerous. This is dangerous. The warning was fleeting, banished to the back corners of my mind, where it wouldn’t interrupt how good it felt to touch him—how right.
“I’m going to need it back eventually,” I said, letting him run it along the stubble on his chin.
“Too bad.”
“…crackers…” a voice breathed out behind us, “yessss…”
Both of us turned, watching as Chubs twisted around in his seat and settled back down, still fast asleep.
I pressed a hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. Liam rolled his eyes, smiling.
“He dreams about food,” he said. “A lot.”
“At least they’re good dreams.”
“Yeah,” Liam agreed. “I guess he’s lucky.” I looked back at Chubs’s curled up form and, for the first time, realized just how cold it was without the heat from Betty’s vent.
Liam let his head slide down to rest against his other arm, threading his fingers through mine. He seemed to be studying the shape they made, the way my thumb appeared to rest naturally on top of his.
“If you wanted to,” he began, “could you see what he was dreaming about?”
I nodded. “But those things are private.”
“But you’ve done it before?”
“Not intentionally.”
“To me?”
“To the girls in my cabin at camp,” I said. “To Zu that night in the motel. I’ve been in your head—once. Just not in your dreams.”
“Two days ago,” he said, putting it together. “At the rest stop.”
It was instinct to pull back, to let go before I felt him let go first, but he didn’t allow me.
“Don’t,” he said. “I’m not mad.”
He brought our hands down against his forehead, not looking at me when he asked, “Does it make it worse? To be touching someone, I mean. Is it harder to control?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted. I didn’t know how to explain it, because I had never wanted to. “Sometimes, when I’m tired or upset, I’ll pick up on someone’s thoughts or a memory they’re thinking about, but I can avoid being pulled in if I don’t touch the person. Touching them when my head is like that…it’s an automatic connection.”
“I thought so.” Liam sighed, closing his eyes again. “You know, when we first met, you used to go out of your way to avoid touching us. I kept wondering if it was something you had been trained to do at your camp, because every time one of us would try to touch you or talk to you, you’d jump like we had shocked you.”
“I didn’t want to hurt any of you,” I whispered.
His eyes flashed open again, somehow brighter than before. He nodded to our linked fingers. “Is this okay?”