“Don’t ask ridiculous questions, and I won’t be.”
“It’s just that I want you to find someone. Someone you care about. I don’t like thinking of you alone.” She wrings her hands together like she’s washing them clean. She’d scrub them raw, if she could. She has before. He used to tape oven mitts to her wrists, back when they first came north. He thinks maybe he should start again.
Her knuckles are knotted, cheeks concave. He tries not to notice the subtle little ways she’s changed. The way it feels like time is taking her from him in pieces. As though one day, he’ll wake and find her transformed into a laurel tree, like some sort of Hellenistic nymph. Destroying herself to escape the long arm of Zeus.
“I’m not alone,” he tells her, forcing a smile. “I have you.”
“You never come to see me.”
The pang of guilt in his chest is impossible to ignore. He does his best. “That’s because every time I do, you beat me at chess.”
“Youarea very sore loser,” she says fondly.
“I am.”
“Just like your father.”
The smile slips off his face. She didn’t say it to hurt him. She never does. Deep inside his chest, a familiar red ember of anger ignites. He shuts his eyes and takes a single, steadying breath.
When he opens them again, Viola is still there, hovering on the threshold. He recognizes the slack set of her jaw. The glass of her eyes. She’s caught in a flashback. He knows, from experience, that there’s no reeling her back in, once she’s adrift. It doesn’t stop him trying.
“Mom,” he says.
Her eyes snap to his. She looks clean through him. “You’re doing so well,” she says softly. “You’re being so brave. My little boy blue.”
Sometimes it takes considerable effort to remind himself it’s not his mother he’s upset with. Some days he can’t even stand to look at her face—at the damage he did.
There’s a reason he’s alone. A reason he’s exiled himself to the north.
He can’t afford an attachment. No distractions. No weaknesses.
No small-town girls with defiant eyes and gold-spun hair.
He very nearly kissed Shea Parker tonight, and that would have been a mistake.
Quietly, he tells Viola, “I’ll get someone to walk you back to your room.”
When she’s gone, he sends for Boyce. The younger Mercy Boy appears not long after, skidding into the doorway. He’s tall and gangly, black skin shining from a feed and his hair in twists. Aiken Boyce was one of the earliest recruits, back when Lysander first opened the doors of Mercy Ridge. He’d been eleven years old—too small to pledge—but he’d come north with his older brother.There’s no one left. If I join the watch, there won’t be anyone to look after my kid brother. This way, we stay together.
“What’s up?” Boyce asks. He’s not eleven anymore, but he’s still too young. His arms and legs are growing faster than his brain. He nearly elbows a lamp off the dresser as he ambles into the room, bristling with his usual energy.
“Cy gave you your assignment?” asks Lysander.
“Yeah,” says Boyce, setting the lamp back onto its base. “I have to babysit the watchdog.”
“Sniper,” Lysander corrects him, and Boyce’s eyes go wide.
“Are you bullshitting me?”
“I am not.”
The first glimmer of interest appears in his eyes. “So, he’s deadly?”
“Not as deadly as you,” says Lysander. “He’s staying in the guest rooms. Go down and get him. Tell him I’d like to talk.”
Asher Thorley is slow to arrive. Lysander waits, prying loose the baseball card he keeps in his jacket. Mickey Mantle. 1952. There’s a bit of blood in one corner, so faint it could be mud. A fingerprint, smeared. He fits his thumb against it and feels a careful sort of nothing.
He hears the watchdog well before he appears. It’s impossible not to—Asher Thorley walks like an elephant. He stomps in through the open door at a pace suitable for a death march, his left eye swollen shut. Lysander tucks the card out of sight and waits for him to say something. He does.
