I just never thought that it would be like this. That after all the blood spilled, the boys I’ve kissed, I would feel like a little girl again. Helpless. Abandoned. Shaking and slamming against doors that won’t open, trapped inside my own house while I watch it burn down.
As the smoke fills my throat and my vision darkens, I see flickers of my own life, its extraordinary beauty and its cruelty, the highlights and the excruciating moments I’ve buried in the back of my mind.
Rationed bites of birthday cake, buttercream frosting scraped off with a fork. The flash of camera lights outside a French restaurant in Shanghai. Wiping off mascara specks from my eyelids with a cotton swab. My parents smiling from across the dinner table as I unwrapped the new Tiffany necklace they bought me for Christmas, the blue satin ribbons unspooling in my fingers. Crying on a bathroom floor, the cold of the tiles against my thighs. Laughing together with Alice in our old dorm, cross-legged on the bed while the sunlight puddled through the windows. Ares, trembling under my touch, his eyes dark and unfathomable; kissing him like every second mattered, and it did, like it was the apocalypse, and maybe it is.
And even though I’m gasping for air, the heat pressing in and the room swaying and every strained breath bringing in new, bright gashes of pain, I still keep my hand on the doorknob, my knuckles white. I still want so badly to change the future when it’s already here.
I dream of him before I die.
It’s an incredible dream, more vivid than anything I’ve ever experienced before. He’s running over to me like I always wanted, the angles of his face burning bronze against the flames, and I think, half delirious,God,I’m really going to miss that face.Even when he isn’t smiling, even when he’s looking the other way. How his eyes always seem to change in the light, so I can never entirely pinpoint what shade they are, bitter black or coffee brown or brilliant molten gold; the smooth, firm line of his jaw; the shape of his mouth, which is exactly as soft as it looks.I’m pretty sure I’d made a comment about that once, when I was kissing him. “Nobody’s complimented my lips before,”he’d said, breaking away to laugh breathlessly into my shoulder, and the gesture somehow felt more intimate than when he had his fingers in my mouth. I loved him like that, unspooled and vulnerable and happy, or the closest thing to it. “Good,”I’d told him.“I don’t want other girls complimenting your lips. I don’t want anyone else to know what you feel like.”Or maybe I had only said it inside my head, afraid he’d hear the jealousy clawing up my throat.
The memories are getting jumbled now. Everything’s fuzzy, except the clarity of his arms around me. He’s holding me tight to his chest like I’m his whole world, so careful not to drop me, and I remember the games I’d play as a kid, when the floor was lava and you had to leap from sofa to sofa to avoid it. I was never good at getting from one end of the room to the other—I kept slipping or missing my jumps. But maybe the trick is that you need someone to carry you. Someone who’ll wade through the lava for you, like he is now.
“Chanel,” he whispers, his voice raw from the smoke. His shoulders are shaking, and it’s only when something cold splashes onto my cheek from above that I realize he’s crying. “Chanel, please—”
It’s okay,I try to say, but the words won’t come out. The fire dances in my peripheral vision, charring the wood and melting the walls of my childhood. Something crashes from another room. The tinkling of porcelain. It feels like the universe is shrinking and shrinking until there’s only the two of us lefthere, and maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Maybe I could simply stay in this dream forever with him.
A window shatters to our right, and I glimpse the sky through the cracked glass, the crimson glow of the blood moon. It seems to hang lower in the horizon than usual, so low that it feels like I could reach up and take it for myself, if only I could move my hands....
Then the darkness washes over me, and even the moon disappears.
32
Ares
Ares thought he knew fear.
He had felt it the morning he found his little brother’s bed empty, all those years ago. When he’d first stumbled across the vision in the lake, convinced that he was hallucinating. When the knife had cut through his side, lying on the floor of the Cave, tasting the blood in his mouth. But nothing can compare to the fear thrumming through him as he rushes down the hospital corridor, almost barreling straight into the nurse.
“She hasn’t woken up yet,” the nurse tells him with a sympathetic kind of grimace.
“Can I... can I visit her?” he asks. His voice is so hoarse it barely sounds like his own. He doesn’t know if it’s from the screaming or the smoke.
The nurse’s eyes pass over him. “You should really go get your own wounds treated first—”
“I’m fine,” he says quickly. “I’m used to it. I just... please. Can I see her?”
The nurse hesitates, maybe senses the desperation in him, this wild, animal feeling, maybe can tell that he’s losing his sanity, because she nods, pushes the door open for him.
Chanel lies on the hospital bed, almost motionless except for her slow breathing. He hates how small she looks, how fragile, hates seeing the tubes in her skin, the raw, puckered burn marks that extend along the entire length of her left collarbone. She would hate seeing herself like this too.
“Chanel,” he whispers, crouching down by her side.
He would give up thirty years of his own life for her to sit up and talk to him. Tell him again about her childhood hikes up Lingshan Mountain, where the air tasted like pine and dew and there were butterflies everywhere, and how this one white butterfly landed on her shoulder and wouldn’t leave her. About the first and last time she went camping, far enough away from the city to escape the light pollution and count every single star in the sky, but they headed home early because she couldn’t stand not showering for longer than a day. About late afternoons spent strolling the lanes of Solana, watching the sun skim over the river, and the surprise birthday parties she’s thrown for her friends, with themed outfits and hired videographers and free disposable cameras for everyone to use. About crowded airports and lonely limousines, looming skyscrapers and responsibilities, summer trips to New York and Seoul and Venice.
About anything.
33
Chanel
My senses come to me slowly, in fragments. The cool touch of the pillow. The distant beeping of a machine, shuffling footsteps. An ache, deep in my chest.
I rub my eyes open, and rise gingerly from the bed to take in my surroundings. It takes me a moment to realize I’m in a hospital room, and not an indoor garden.
“Oh my god,” I murmur, picking up the fat bouquet of fresh-plucked roses laid right beside my pillow.
Every surface in the private room is flooded with flowers, their rich fragrance almost entirely covering the smell of antiseptic. Lilacs and daffodils bloom aggressively over my bedside table, some of them bearing signed cards, others tied with satin ribbons. The only colors missing from this vibrant display of well-wishes are yellow and white. If not for this small detail, the absence of mourning colors, I would’ve thought that I’d died.
