My mouth waters at the smell of hot french fries. I open the bag and shove three in my mouth at once. “Why are you here in the middle of the night?”
“It was the only time I could get away. They’re keeping you under lock and key. Top secret. I had to sneak in the back door so the wankers with cameras wouldn’t see me.”
“Is that why no one else has been here?” I ask, my voice wavering on “no one else” in a way that makes it obvious I’m only talking about one person.
Henry doesn’t make eye contact as he runs his fingers over the dusty spines on the bookshelf. “I reckon Theo’s been pretty busy with coronation stuff.”
My stomach sinks. Theo and I said we’d be together until we were rescued, but I didn’t think he’d take it quite so literally. I flop backward on the red couch. “How’d you find the time at”—I check the clock on the wall—“two thirtyA.M.?”
“Tragically, no one needs the spare at the coronation,” Henry says, his head bent over the pages of a thick book with a throneon the cover. His tone makes it sound like a joke, but by this time I know him well enough to realize there’s a fundamental sadness underneath his words. Even after his mom’s death, he’s trying to be the perfect son that she always wanted.
“Why are you really here?”
“I wanted to see how you’re doing. Plus, you know, I have to get checked out, make sure everything looks good after my procedure.”
I sit up straighter. “What procedure?” Brooke and Naomi told me that other than dehydration, Victoria’s hyperglycemia, and Winston’s broken leg, no one else from the crash had serious injuries.
“You didn’t hear?” Henry crosses to the couch and brandishes his inner elbow in front of my face.
“What am I looking at?”
He points to a red dot the size of a pinprick, so I lift the sleeve of my hospital gown and show him my eight inches of sutures. “Again, what am I looking at?”
“The reason you’re alive.” He smirks.
I roll my eyes. “Explain.”
“You needed a blood transfusion, and I was a willing pincushion. Theo was rather annoyed about that.”
I raise my eyebrows in surprise. “Why?”
He gestures between us. “Because we have the same rare AB-negative blood type, and Theo’s O-positive arse was useless.”
“Another competition? Really?” I groan. If not even surviving a plane crash together can get them on the same page, I don’t think anything ever will.
“If by competition you mean my jealousy and his self-loathing, then yes. Both are thriving.” He cracks open the thronebook while I stare at the side of his face in disbelief that he’s the one who’s here, in the middle of the night. I guess somewhere in the cracks of tragedy and his and Theo’s sibling rivalry, we became friends.
I can tell he knows I’m watching him when the dimple makes an appearance. “Is there something else?” he asks, not taking his eyes off the page.
“What are you going to do after the coronation?”
He looks up at me with a grin. “I’m headed back to school in Scotland. I could pull some strings and get you in.”
I slant him an annoyed look. “My life is in Chicago.”
“I don’t know if anyone’s ever told you this, but your life is allowed to be whatever and wherever you want.”
He’s clearly underestimating the number of times American children are told they can do anything they set their minds to. But for some reason “anything” didn’t ever seem like it was meant to be taken literally. In my family, I knew that “anything” was code for getting good grades, going to a good college, and starting a sensible career path. “What if I don’t know what I want?”
“That’s the beauty in being eighteen, darling,” he says with a wink. “You’ve got all the time in the world to figure it out. Starting now.” He looks pointedly around the empty room, and then goes back to reading while I let my mind wander through Northwestern’s campus and down palace halls. Despite Henry’s claim, I feel the pressure of time even more than I did on the island; classes have already started, and the coronation is in four days. Sand is falling so quickly through the hourglass that it reminds me of the days before the comet. Only this time, I know I’ll have to live with the consequences of my actions.
I yawn, and my eyelids start to droop. “I should go back to my room before the nurses send out a search warrant.”
“Want some company? I bet we can find a truly awful infomercial to watch.”
I feel a prickle behind my eyes that makes me worried I’m going to cry again. “You’d do that?”
He’s still staring at the page as he clears his throat. “If you’re anything like me, it’s been hard to sleep since the crash.”
