During the reign of The Reestablishment, the idea of clothing as personal style became obsolete; only the ultrarich had access to private clothiers; everyone else was given equable, government-issue garbage.
I grew up wearing government-issue garbage.
Under the guise of starting over, The Reestablishment planned to burn every vestige of the past. That was the big lie: the promise of a fresh start to solve our problems. Delete language; delete culture; delete identity. They were going to rewrite history; reshape the future; reestablish world order.
Or: incinerate humanity as we knew it.
Adam doesn’t like to think about the past; he finds it too stressful. Old things give him anxiety. But I can lose hours in antiques shops and museums; that kind of time travel gives me a strange hope. It reminds me that no matter the era, human fingerprints have always been both beautiful and bloody. And no matter how dark it gets, we somehow go on forever trying to light a path.
We were lucky enough to be able to recover a lot after the revolution—books, art, music. Old computers and cameras and cars. Watches. Cassette players.
But the first time I walked into a vintage clothing store I fell face-first in love.
“Shit,” I mutter, inspecting the bloodied tear at my thigh. I hold a hand to my slowly healing side wound as I hobble forward, wiping my red-slicked fingers along the ruined denim. Vintage, selvage Japanese denim.
“You’re going to pay for this,” I shout at her retreating back. “These jeans cost me months of my life.”
Surprise, surprise: she doesn’t care.
I peer up at the sky, holding out my sticky hands to catch rainwater as golden light fractures through ominous clouds. We’ve got less than half an hour before the sun sets altogether, and I’m willing to bet good money that Rosabelle was waiting for nightfall to set some major plan in motion. I pick up speed as the pain in my leg and torso abates by degrees, pushing harder than is advisable, really, to close the distance between us. There’s a sudden, blinding flash of lightning, and in the flare I spot Rosabelle darting around the side of the airplane hangar.
I chase after her, wincing, only to find she’s stopped moving. She’s standing in front of an electrical panel, her hands working too fast to promise anything but bad news. I mutter another expletive under my breath before glancing over my shoulder. If I can hear people coming, she can definitely hear people coming.
Thunder cracks overhead.
“This is a waste of time,” I call out as I hobble forward. “You can’t just steal a plane. Trust me, I would know—thesecurity measures are more complicated than they—”
She glances at me, her eyes wild, then bolts out of sight as a roaring mechanical whirr fills the sky with manufactured sound.
Shock comes for me like a whip.
I rush around to the front of the building, watching in horror as the enormous, hydraulic door lifts open to reveal the outline of a jet currently undergoing maintenance, streaks of fading sunlight pinwheeling through its depths. The pincers holding the plane in place slowly exhale, releasing the steel body from a death grip, and suddenly my head is overheating. Rosabelle has not only disarmed the security system, she’s somehow overridden every safety protocol.
This isn’t funny anymore.
My heart races violently as I begin to fathom the shape of her plan. She’s really going to try to fly an unserviced aircraft out of here. In the middle of a lightning storm.
I watch her disappear inside the cavernous hangar, her fucking cat tail twitching, and only then do I realize the depth of my mistake. I really thought we were just playing a half-hearted game of hide-and-seek out here. I thought we both knew how this was going to end. I thought it was pretty obvious she’d never be able to escape.
Wrong on all counts.
I see now why she chose this hangar: it’s the one closest to the runway, with the least interference. The working jets parked in the apron would need to be slowly navigated through taxiways before reaching the runway’s entry point,which would cost her too much time.
She’s taking a gamble.
She must’ve known this was a maintenance hangar, but she’s decided she’d have a better shot at takeoff with an unobstructed, slightly defective plane. If she moves quickly enough, she could maneuver this jet immediately onto the tarmac and take off with little impediment.
Just minutes ago I would’ve laughed off this idea as impossible. Now I’m full of dread.
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that I’m in way over my head with this girl. I don’t actually know anything about her. I have no idea what she’s truly capable of. I still don’t know how she once managed to literally drop dead before coming violently back to life thirty minutes later. And now I’m worried I might really have to kill her—or at least level her an injury severe enough to stop her.
Shit. This is bad.
This is really, really bad.
If she escapes, Warner is going tomurderme.
And then, as if I’ve conjured him with the thought, I hear his voice—growing louder with distant footsteps—like something out of a nightmare.
