“How’s he doing?” I tried to twist in my chair, but my stomach prevented much of a movement.
Eryx groaned in reply.
“I can’t tell much yet,” Lala said. “We need to get him stretched out and cleaned off, so we can see the damage.”
None of us were medical experts, but we’d all gained a bit of triage experience after nine months on our own. Especially after I’d been shot during our escape from the Spectacle. But I’d had professional—if secret—medical help, and we had no way to get Eryx to a doctor.
“Do we have any antibiotics left?” Zyanya asked as she took a corner a little too fast. “I can try to find some on the way home.”
“No.” Gallagher’s entire frame was tense. “Let’s just get him home and assess.” Because we’d have to break into a house or a clinic to steal medication, and that was an errand better run by just one or two of us, after we’d done what we could for Eryx at the cabin.
If more cops hadn’t already been on the way, we would have searched the lab for medication before we’d left. As it was, I didn’t realize until we were halfway home that we hadn’t gotten a chance to free any of the other cryptids.
Mirela stared out the heavily tinted van window, her jaw clenched. Her hands were clasped in her lap, twisting so hard that her fingers had gone white.
“Miri?” I asked.
She turned to look at me. A second later, she forced a smile, almost as an afterthought. As if she’d just then remembered that her unguarded expression was like a peek into the dismal future.
Because she knew the truth.
She’d probably known from the moment she saw Eryx, back at the lab. Maybe even longer than that. She could have known this was coming since the moment she first met him, years before.
Grief washed over me, so stunning that at first I couldn’t even process it. Eryx was going to die.
And if Mirela knew that, Rommily probably did, too.
June 1991
Grandma Janice closed the front door behind the last of the mourners and headed into the kitchen to put up the leftovers. Rebecca followed her. “Why don’t you go lie down and let me do that,” she said as she pulled a stack of Tupperware from the cabinet to the right of the stove.
“Thanks, hon, but I’d rather stay busy.”
Rebecca sat at the table in the dining nook, fiddling with the lace hem of her new black dress while she watched her grandmother stack the refrigerator full of casseroles and Jell-O salads as precisely as Grandpa Frank had ever loaded the trunk of his car for the road trips they’d taken, in an effort to give their granddaughter a normal life.
Grandma Janice wasn’t crying. She’d hardly shed a tear since that night in the hospital three days ago when they’d said goodbye to her husband of forty-six years. But Rebecca could see that she was in pain. That much was clear in the glazed look of exhaustion in her eyes. In her refusal to leave anything undone. In the way she kept glancing at Grandpa Frank’s cane, propped in the corner by the back door, where she’d set it the night they’d come home from the hospital.
“Ouch!” Grandma Janice held her finger up to the light, and Rebecca saw a single drop of blood welling from the pad. She had cut herself while she was dicing the leftover tomato slices.
“Grandma, let me do that.” Rebecca stood.
“I’m really fine, hon. Why don’t you get some sleep? Or go out? You’ve hardly left the house all summer.”
She’d hardly left the house because she had no one to go out with and no desire to go out alone. The friends she’d had in high school were really just acquaintances, and since graduation, she’d had no organic reason to see them and—to her own surprise—no real urge to call them.
She’d always felt like a charity case around them, anyway. The girl who survived the reaping. More a symbol—someone it wasn’t okay to exclude—than an actual friend.
In her room, Rebecca flopped down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, listening as her grandmother puttered around in the kitchen. Then she rolled over, and her gaze caught on a stack of unopened envelopes on her dresser.
Letters from her mother.
Rebecca’s dad only wrote once a month, but her mother still wrote a letter to her every Saturday afternoon, and though Becca had spent her freshman year of college on campus, the letters had always come to Grandma Janice’s address.
She’d decided not to give her mom the dormitory address, in part because she wanted to at least pretend to be a normal college student, unscathed by the pain of two—possibly three—murdered siblings and two incarcerated parents. But also because she didn’t want anyone at school to see her getting mail from prison.
According to a special report CNN had aired on the fourth anniversary of the reaping, only six children had escaped the slaughter. All six of them had been out of the home during the murders.
The parents of two of the other older survivors had been acquitted. The other three survivors were still in middle school, and Rebecca doubted they actually remembered their parents.
