“Lysander!” There’s pounding at her back. “Open up!”
They step away from the door just as Conall Sullivan bursts through it. He’s gangly and thin, his head a mess of ginger curls, his pale skin freckled with remnants of a former life lived in sunlight. He takes silent note of their proximity in the dark—no signs of a feed to mark what they’d been doing.
“Sullivan,” says Lys, suddenly sober. “You’re not where you’re supposed to be.”
“It’s Nkosi,” says Sullivan. “He and the others caught someone breaking into the Parker house.”
At the news, everything in Shea shuts up tight.Mom, she thinks, going cold. Her vision tunnels, ears ringing. She shouldn’t have left her mother there alone. She shouldn’t have thought she could get away with it, straddling the thin line between night and day. Lys’s voice swims toward her in the narrow channel of her panic.
“Where is he now?”
“He has the suspect in custody,” says Sullivan. “He and Cyrus are out there with a small recon crew. The watchdog is with them. They’re waiting for your orders.”
Lys is already shrugging on his jacket. “I’ll deal with it myself.”
“Lys, wait.” Shea moves with him as he presses past her. “Wait, I want to come.”
He doesn’t slow. “Absolutely not.”
“It’smyhouse.” She tails after him, undeterred. “I’m coming.”
His response is reflex-quick. A half step, and then she’s pinned beneath him, her jaw cupped in the hard cradle of his palm and her cheek pressed flat against the wall. Bracing himself, he leans in until his mouth is at her ear. Every part of him is cool and controlled, save his heart. It slams against her chest, thrashing like a wildebeest at the bars of its cage.
Sometimes she thinks that when it finally gets free it’ll tear her apart.
“Keep pushing me like that where anyone can see,” he hisses into her ear. “You’ll get both of us destroyed.”
He’s gone before she can ask him what he means, the door to his bedroom slamming shut in his wake.
Here is a memory: summer, two years prior. The Thorley house in late August, rosy milkweed growing in tangles along the front walk. Shea remembers lying on her belly in the grass, her textbook open, unread pages ruffling in the wind. She’d spent the better part of the afternoon chewing on the metal end of her pencil—watching Asher as he helped his father haul wood.
Beside her sat Poppy, humming a cheery, tuneless hum and weaving loose dogwood blooms into her braid. She wasn’t reading, either. She was watching Camellia diligently transcribe a section of notes. The weather was perfect—the trees in bloom and the sky a bold, blistering blue. The exact sort of day that was meant for daydreaming. Only Camellia seemed intent on studying.
Out by the fence, Asher stacked firewood into the shed. There was a smudge of dirt under his eye, the first hint of a sunburn on the bridge of his nose. The hickeys on his throat had nearly faded. Every so often, he’d cast a furtive glance in Shea’s direction. She’d avert her gaze, her heart in her mouth—pretend to be engrossed in her reading. After about an hour of this, Camellia shut her book with a slam.
“He’s not even doing anything interesting.”
Shea dropped her pencil, startled. “Who?”
“Asher. If you stare at him any harder, your eyes will fall out.”
“I’m not staring at him.”
“Well, you’re definitely not staring at your book,” said Camellia as Poppy hummed a little louder. “If you don’t pay attention, you’re going to fail Mrs. Lennox’s test tomorrow.”
“Poppy’s not studying, either,” Shea pointed out.
“Poppy doesn’t need to study. She has top marks in all our classes.”
Shea rolled from her stomach to her back, throwing her arms wide in the grass. “I don’t see what the point is. I already know I’m not going to Humboldt.”
Only the top-performing students were sent on scholarship to the last surviving college—Humboldt University, down in Boston proper. They returned home with medical and engineering degrees, just enough practical knowledge to treat a cold and set a broken arm. Enough understanding of infrastructure to keep Little Hill up and running. The rest joined the watch—to serve at whatever wooded garrison needed bodies—or else stayed home and married young, popped out the next generation of soldiers and scientists.
Shea would do none of these things.
Her hearing made it so she couldn’t keep up academically, and the watch didn’t take anyone with a preexisting condition. Furthermore, she was a Parker, and no one wanted anything to do with the Highbush boy’s wild daughter. She was doomed, it seemed, to a life between the cracks.
She’d made her peace with it. Mostly. There were some days the fear of the unknown gripped her. Some days, she worried that she’d be labeled useless and disappeared—shipped off to the stone halls of Gridley’s Sanatorium to be forgotten. On those days, she sat by the forest and willed it to entice her—to make her a promise she couldn’t resist. On those days, she thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, to give herself over to the Gravewood’s dark embrace.
