“You did.”
“I thought maybe I dreamed it.”
“I didn’t even know youwerea ranger,” she says. “All this time, I thought you were standing on the top of a watchtower somewhere, bored out of your mind.”
His smile is half-hearted. “You don’t rack up a kill count like mine standing watch.”
Suddenly, she understands. “You were hunting.”
“I was, yes.” She’s never seen him look so uneasy. “The other day you said you didn’t believe I missed my first shot. You were right. I didn’t. I hit it, dead center. I hit it the next time, too. And every time after that. You remember how my dad was—he used to drag me out before school, show me how to load a rifle without making any sound. It’s hard to hunt over a scrape when you can’t get close to the trees. You learn to drop a buck at two hundred, three hundred yards. Let it wander out, wounded. Hitting a static target was nothing. Easy. I was a few weeks in when I got tapped for the field program.”
“Because you’re a good shot,” says Shea. “Not because of me.”
He grits his jaw, exhaling through his nose. She can feel him skirting the edges of the truth, taking the long way around. “My mom wrote me a letter. She asked me not to do it. She wanted me to serve my four years on the watch and get out. You’re right—you don’t see a lot of action up in a tower. But the rangers have boots on the ground. They’re out there hunting hollows.”
She frowns. “Hollows?”
“It’s what we call people who don’t survive the Turning. There’s nothing left in them but Rot. You learn how to spot them pretty quick. They’ve got this look in their eyes, you know?”
She does know. She knows all too well. She thinks of sitting on the cellar steps and begging her mom to look at her. Toseeher. To remember the daughter who needed her, still. Every single plea was met with that same empty stare, as if Ivy Parker had gone into the Gravewood and had her insides scooped out.
Her next breath is a wet hiccup. She hadn’t even realized she’d begun to cry. Embarassed, she swipes at her cheeks with the sleeves of her flannel, but it’s too late. Asher has already seen. He looks quietly stricken, as if he knows just what she’s thinking.
Clearing her throat, she asks, “What does any of this have to do with me?”
His shoulder lifts in a shrug. “High risk, high reward. The watch is four years of active duty. Fieldwork gets you out in two. I’d have been home by the time you graduated.”
There is no word for the feeling in Shea’s chest. No adjective to describe the way it rends her open.
“If you survived it.”
“I would have survived it.” His smile is rueful. “I made you a promise. And I’m a good shot.”
“Oh.” She spent all that time thinking he’d gone back on his word—that he’d left home and forgotten her, the way everyone else had. She’d hoarded her unsent letters, looking for her own way out. In the end, he wasn’t the one who broke the promise. She was. “Asher—”
“We both did what we had to do,” he says, before she can apologize. “And we’ve ended up exactly where we need to be.”
And there it is again, pulsing between them—that everything and nothing feeling.This.
“Here?” she asks. “In an abandoned church in Virginia?”
“Sure,” he says, though they both know that isn’t what he meant. “It’s not so bad. Although there was a spider in my boot when I got up this morning.”
“They come inside when it rains.”
He shudders. “Eugh.”
“You know,” she says, “for a trained assassin, you’re kind of a baby about bugs.”
This time, the smile he flicks her way is genuine.
This time, she can almost pretend everything is exactly how it used to be.
•••
She spends the rest of the morning outside. Alone, and grateful for it for once. The air feels like wet wool. The grass is rimed in ice. It crunches underfoot as she follows a buried footpath out to the insular courtyard. It’s a tiny, gated cemetery, the headstones worn flat. At the graveyard’s center stands a stony angel, her arms outstretched, her sightless eyes weeping black mildew.
It’s as good of a target as any. Shea practices nocking the stake before taking aim, her fingers stiff with cold. Summoning all the confidence she can muster, she lets the palisade fly. It veers left, into the trees. Frustrated, she loads another. She thinks about Asher, hitting the mark every time. Doing what he had to do to come home to her. This time, the stake glances off the tip of a wing.
