“I’m notassuminganything. But if I don’t make it, then at least you’ll survive.” He scoops his shirt off a fallen log and mops his face with it before jerking it over his head. Then he loads his arms with split wood and turns back toward camp.
I fight the urge to trip him as I follow him through the maze of trees. “Is that all I am to you? Some damsel in distress? A rescue mission?”
Jack doesn’t slow his pace. A cool wind whips over the mountain, and I’m filled with a sense of dread.
“If you’re planning to do something reckless and heroic, then you need to stop right now.” He ducks under a low-hanging branch, pretending not to hear me. I reach my mind out in front of him, weaving branches into a barricade, blocking his path. “I don’t need you to save me, Jack! I’m a lot stronger than you think!”
“But I’m not!” He drops the wood at his feet. Cold curls in and out on his breath as he rounds on me. There’s a fear in his eyes I haven’t seen since the last time I hunted him, the same shade of desperation they always took on in the moment before I killed him. “Back at the Observatory, before we even planned to escape, Chronos saw my future in his staff. I died, Fleur! In every possible outcome. Chronos said it himself: There’s only one way this ends. Forme. But maybe not for the rest of you.”
I take a step away from him, determined not to see the future he’s describing. But the truth of it is written in the agony on his face. “No,” I say firmly. “You’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine. Lyon and Gaia will come.”
“And what if they don’t?”
“That’s the old Jack talking. The one who died on that ski slope. The one who got left behind by his mother at school.”
“Exactly!” He steps closer, forcing me to meet his eyes. “Whose future do you think Chronos saw in that staff? Whose choices do you think he’s watching? I’m the bait, Fleur. In order for an ambush to work, Chronos has to believe he already knows the outcome. I have to make the same choices now I would have made then. Chronos knew I would give up my teeth the day I fell in love with you, that I would be willing to die for you. And that hasn’t changed.” He reaches for me. “That willneverchange.”
I shove him back. Why is he so willing to just give up? “I don’t want you to die for me! I want you to fight for me! For us!”
He takes my face in his hands with a fierce intensity. “I will never stop fighting for us, Fleur. But it’s not my teeth that give me strength. It’s you.” His jaw softens, his eyes overcome by a sadness deep enough to ruin me. His thumb brushes my cheek tenderly, as if it’s the last time and he’s committing it to memory. “I get it now, what Lyon’s been trying to show me since the beginning. All along, there was only ever one person in the story who had the power to change the outcome. It was never the lion or the girl’s father. It was thegirl. She only had to choose. To fight for what she wanted. You’re the one who has to be strong. Because your choice will determine the ending. For both of us.” He’s looking at me,throughme, as if he’s trying to make me understand. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to think about a world where Jack doesn’t exist.
I close my eyes and pull him to me. I don’t want to talk about the end. I don’t want to hear any more about Jack’s willingness to die or Chronos’sstupid visions. I don’t want to talk about how I’m strong, how I can survive alone. I back him into a tree, press every part of my body to his, determined to givehimstrength. Determined to remind him why we started down this road. Determined to make him fight forus, not just for me.
Jack kisses me deeply, his mouth rough and cold and hungry. His teeth catch my lips. His fingers dig into my sides, holding me close, his body thrumming with electricity. I kiss him back until I’m dizzy. Until my pulse races and neither of us can breathe. Chest heaving, he rests his forehead against mine.
“Stay with me,” I whisper, taking him with me to the ground, where I feel strong, where we feel safe, where I feel the steadiness of our hearts beating.
JACK
I wake to the smell of burning poplar and wet leaves.
“Wake up.” Amber prods me. “It’s your turn to take watch.”
I blink against the dark. A root’s digging into my back, and there’s a shoe in my side. My arm’s asleep where Fleur shivers, curled in the crook of it. I ease out from under her, careful not to wake her.
Amber unrolls a sleeping bag and drapes half of it over Fleur. She doesn’t ask any questions about why we never made it back to camp or what happened to Fleur’s shoes. Doesn’t make any wisecracks as I search the ground for my shirt and shake the pine needles from it before sliding it inside out over my head.
I pause, giving Fleur one last look before heading back to camp. Her pink hair’s splayed in a tangle of feral waves around her, her brow creased even in her sleep. There’s something fierce about her, a grimdetermination that wasn’t there yesterday.
“Don’t worry. I’ll stay with her,” Amber says quietly. She’s hardly spoken since Woody died. Some of the fire in her eyes has gone out. It’s as if part of her own soul crumbled and blew away with him.
“Are you going to be all right?”
She thinks for a moment. Stares up at the stars through a break in the canopy above us. “Woody and I said our goodbyes a long time ago. This is exactly how he would have wanted to go. Standing up for what he believed in. Protecting the people he loved.”
It hurts, thinking about him. “It was brave, what he did.”
“He was always brave,” Amber says. “It takes more courage to love than to fight.”
“Did Woody teach you that?”
“No,” she says. “You did.”
I don’t know what to say. None of this ever felt like courage. It felt like fear, the mind-numbing terror of knowing exactly what I stood to lose. How much it would hurt. All the ways it would kill me. Seeing Fleur curled around the empty space where I lay with her, I can’t imagine a world without her. It’s the only kind of death I could never come back from.
“Better get to your post, soldier,” Amber says, tossing my shoes at me. She leans back against a fallen log and closes her eyes, a wry grin tugging at her lips. “You’ve been courageous enough for one night. You can be brave again in the morning.”
I pick my way downhill by moonlight. The wind carries the charred smell of the burned-out campfire, and I navigate more by scent thanby sight, circling wide around the zippered tents to avoid startling the others awake.
