Victoria Schwab - The Unbound

We are both bruised and broken, wincing at the other’s touch even as we pull each other closer. My arms are tight around his waist, and his are tight around my shoulders. And when he presses his lips into the curve of my throat, I can feel his tears on my skin.

“You are an idiot,” I say, even as I guide his face and mouth to mine. I kiss him, not gently, but desperately. Desperately, because he’s worth it—because life is terrifying and short and I don’t know what will happen. All I know is that here and now, I am still alive, and I want to be with Wesley Ayers. Here and now I want to feel his arms wrapped around me. I want to feel his lips on mine. I want to feel his life tangling with mine. Here and now is all we have, and I want to make it worth whatever happens next.

I tighten my grip on Wes enough to make him break off his kiss with a gasp.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, my lips hovering over his.

“I’m not,” he breathes, pulling me closer and kissing me deeper. I’m still afraid of caring—of breaking, of losing—but now there is something else matching the fear stride for stride: want.

“You said you trusted me,” I say.

“You said you were in the science hall. I guess we’re even.” He pulls me back toward him. “What happened tonight, Mac?” he whispers, lips against my jaw.

“I’ll tell you later,” I whisper back.

I can feel him smile tiredly against my cheek. “I’ll hold you to it.” His lips brush mine again, but someone clears her throat, and I force myself to pull away from Wesley’s kiss. Dallas is standing there waiting.

“All right, you two,” she says. “Plenty of time for that. Right now I have to get you back to school.” She’s standing by the desk, and for the first time I notice the smoldering wreckage of the ledger.

“What happened?” I ask.

“The only thing Owen Chris Clarke achieved was an act of vandalism,” says Lisa, gesturing to the book. “He burned it.”

Dallas shakes her head and gestures to the door. The Crew who dragged me is standing there, and I tense when I see him.

“No hard feelings,” he says.

“I’m sure,” I say, Wesley’s hand tangling with mine.

“Just doing my job.” But he smiles when he says it. It’s not a gentle smile, and I’m reminded of the things that filled his noise—the fun of the hunt.

“I’d tell you not to be such an ass, Zachary,” says Dallas, brushing him away from the door, “but it would be a waste of my breath. I don’t know how Felicia tolerates you.” And with that she turns her key, the door opens onto sirens and darkness, and Wesley and I follow Dallas back onto Hyde’s campus.

In the Outer, Wesley’s noise pours through my head, a tangle of want and love, relief and shock and fear. I don’t know what’s singing across my skin, but I don’t pull away. I trust him with it.

Most of the buildings look all right—though the fire ate away a good deal of the ivy—but the field with its streamers and lanterns and booths is a charred black mess.

“Is everyone okay?”

“A few burns here, a few stitches there, but everyone will live.”

My eyes slide from her face to her clothing. The black of her cotton shirt is crusted darker with blood, its stain streaking across her exposed skin. “Everyone except Eric,” I say as she leads us around the scorched scene and toward the front gate. “That’s why you were late.”

She nods grimly. “I tried to get his body into one of the flare-up fires before the emergency vehicles got here. Make it look like an accident.”

“And Sako?” I ask.

Dallas rubs her hands together, and blood flakes off to the ground below. “She took off. I sent Zachary’s partner, Felicia, to find her.”

“I think I broke her nose,” says Wesley.

Dallas gives him a once-over. “It looks like she got in a few good hits.”

“So you’re Crew, too?” I ask as she leads us toward the burned remains of the festival.

“No,” says Dallas. “I’m what you might call a field assessor. It’s my job to make sure everything and everyone ticks and tocks the way they should.”

“And if they don’t?” asks Wes.

She shrugs. “If they belong to the Archive, I turn them in. If they belong to the Outer, I fix them myself.”

“You make alterations,” I say. “Wipe memories.”

“When I have to,” she says. “It’s my job to clean up. I already took care of that cop, Kinney. I’ll have to send Crew in to get the evidence, but at least I carved you out of his head. As far as he knows, the explosions are what knocked him out.”

So many questions are rolling through my mind, but we reach the front gates, which have been pried open. Everyone’s corralled there, and two firemen rush over.

“Where did you three come from?” one demands.

“These two got trapped under one of the booths,” says Dallas, her tone shifting effortlessly to one of authority. “I can’t believe you didn’t find them sooner. Better make sure they’re both okay.”

And before they can ask who she is and what she’s doing there, she turns and ducks under the yellow tape that’s been strung up across the gate and vanishes into the swell of students and teachers and parents that fill the lot. EMTs pull Wes and me apart to check us out, and I slide my ring back on, amazed by how quickly I’ve become accustomed to the world without it.

The EMT looks me over. Most of my injuries I can blame on the booth that apparently collapsed on top of us, but the wire marks on my wrists are harder to explain. I’m lucky that there are too many people who need looking after and not enough people to do it; the EMT listens when I tell him I’ll be okay and lets me go.

But Wesley is either a less convincing liar or he’s in worse shape than I realized, because they insist on taking him to the hospital to be safe. The ambulance goes out of the lot before he can say much more to me than, “Leave the window open.”

I’ve barely ducked under the yellow tape when someone shouts my name, and I look up to see the rest of the Court huddled on the sidewalk, a little singed but otherwise unhurt. There is a stream of where were you s and what happened s and are you hurt s and is Wesley with you s and is he okay s and that was crazy s before they finally settle down enough to let me answer. Even then I only get halfway through before Cash makes a crack about how this will go on his feedback card for sure—and Saf elbows him and says she heard that someone died in there, and how can he be making jokes? Amber comments on traumatic experiences being optimal times for levity, and then I hear my name again, and turn to find my parents pushing through the crowd toward me, and I get out half of “I’m okay” before my mother throws her arms around my neck and starts sobbing.

Dad wraps his arms around us both, and I don’t need to have my ring off to know their minds, to feel their relief tangled with their desperate need to protect the child they have left and their fear that they can’t. I can’t protect them, either. Not from losing me—not every time—but tonight I’m here, and so I hold them tighter and tell them it’s going to be okay.

And for the first time in a very long time, I believe it.

I ’M SITTING ONthe edge of my bed that night in my ruined uniform, the silver horns still snagged in my hair, smelling of smoke and blood and thinking of Owen. I am not afraid of sleeping, though I wish Wesley were here with me. I am not afraid of nightmares, because mine came true and I lived through them.

I get to my feet and begin to peel off my ruined uniform, wincing as my stiff and wounded body protests every movement. I manage to tug my shirt over my head, then shed my skirt, and finally my shoes, unlacing them and tugging them off one at a time. I pull the first one off and set it on the bed beside me. When I pull the second shoe off and turn it over, a square of folded paper falls out onto the floor.