A hand appeared in his vision.
“You need a lot of saving,” the boy mused.
“I’m fine,” he wheezed, sliding down an inch.
The boy laughed, the sound like tinkling bells. “You look like a bear hugging a tree.”
“Bears are good at climbing,” he grunted, shimmying up.
“Only some. You’re more like a teddy bear than a real bear. Too soft.”
“Are you just going to mock me the whole time?” Teddy asked.
“My hand is still there.”
Teddy swallowed his pride and took it, allowing the boy to help him the rest of the way up into the canopy. He realized the boy had made a makeshift nest up here, using branches to crisscrossthe distance between two sturdy limbs of the tree to make a platform just big enough for two to sit.
“Is this going to break under our weight?” Teddy asked dubiously.
The boy seemed offended. “I’m great at building nests!”
“Are you a bird?”
“What?”
“You said you’re not a human and I’m a bear, so are you a bird, then?”
“Maybe.” Wren shrugged and picked at his dirty fingers. “Better than being a cursebreaker.”
Teddy frowned. He’d never heard anyone say that before. “You don’t like it?”
“Do you?”
Teddy wasn’t prepared for the question to be turned around on him and didn’t have an immediate answer prepared. “Well…it’s what we were born to do. If I didn’t like it then I wouldn’t really like myself.”
“But you didn’t choose it.”
“We were born with the mark.”
“So that means we’re property of Nexus? Stamped and cataloged for them to index?”
Teddy continued to frown. “It’s not like that.”
“Isn’t it? Did they ever ask you what you wanted? If you wanted to be number Twelve? If you wanted to be taken from your family?”
Teddy was disquieted by the questions, uncomfortable with the probing. “This is our family.”
It sounded slightly hollow, like he’d learned it by rote. Did he actually believe that? Or was that just what he had been told?
They sat in silence for a while.
“I like being up here because I can see over the gates,” the boy said, hugging his knees to his chest.
Teddy followed his gaze and saw a beautiful woodland spread out just beyond the walls of Nexus. Sprawling and full of mystery. Something stirred in Teddy’s chest. A rising sense of longing and adventure that might have been there all along, lying dormant. It was as if this boy had yanked back a curtain he hadn’t even been aware was there, and now the world had opened up in a way he couldn’t go back from.
“It’s magnificent.” The boy began to laugh, and Teddy whipped his head back around, brow creasing and face flushing. “Why are you laughing?”
“Who says magnificent with a straight face and actually means it?” the boy teased.
