“It was a way to unite everyone, Kali. To give you better odds of winning this war.” If she required me to repeat everything allover again, I held no qualms about it. Anything to get her to stay. “I understand that the majority won’t see it this way. They will believe me to be the first person to ever walk out of Ilasall’s cells. But this belief will also strengthen their resolve to storm the city. It’s the fact that their leader did not break while in the city’s claws, that he returned to them.” I clenched my fists to channel my desperation somewhere. “Only everyone will think ‘them’ means all of our people, when it actually means just two.”
Emotions warred across her angular face. Wrinkles deepened and disappeared. Like the colors bleeding into the sky, the orange fighting purple, she went through her own internal battle.
Yet, she slumped back down. Silent, she rubbed the spot below her collarbone, where a lone bird had been inked, a copy of the silhouettes dotting my back, the multitude of sky-soaring animals a symbol of the deaths I carried on my shoulders.
Although her tattoo had turned out to be the opposite—a mark of my life, not my doom.
“What do you wish to do after the war?” I asked in a plea of sorts, the change in topic jarring enough for her to snap out of her ire.
She zipped up her jacket, the sound as quick as someone’s last heartbeat. “If we survive, you mean.”
“Either way.” Straightening my legs, I leaned on my hands. The blanket cushioned the assault the few rocks had launched on my palms. Dawn fully encompassed the horizon, drawing back the reds shading the feather-like clouds and birthing the yellows, the hues bright enough to rouse the compound from its nightly rest.
“I once read that people traveled before. That they went to places they’d never seen before. That’s what I want. To go back to the beach, to the sea, and not bedrugged.” She gave me a pointed look. “I also want to reach the ocean, to see if it’sdifferent from the sea. If the water there is cold like in the pictures I’ve seen. I want to…just go and see what’s out there. And I want to do it with you,” she whispered. “And Shadow. I won’t leave her behind.”
“We can take Shadow. She could live in the backseat of our car,” I mused.
Shock colored her words as she asked, “What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “We can do all you want. Travel. Swim in the ocean. Sleep on the shore.”
She toyed with her jacket zipper. “You would do that for me?”
“We like taking care of you,” Zion piped up, stretching his arms above his head. “And I enjoy seeing you smile. So yeah, we would.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Incredulity leaked out of her murmur. “He’s acting weird.”
He was relaxed. For the first time in three decades, he seemed at peace. Content. If it was not the sun gracing us with the first blow of a day’s warmth, it was the serenity reflected in his calm expression.
“What about you?” Kali nudged me with an elbow. “What do you want to do after all”—she gestured at nothing and everything simultaneously—“this?”
“Not think.” The answer shot out of me like a raindrop falling and striking the ground with such fury it left a crater. “I’m so tired of thinking. Planning. Preparing. Re-planning. Again and again. Solving the endless issues. Overcoming the challenges Ilasall throws at us.” I savored the spring heat caressing my face. “I want?—”
“To fuck it all out?” Zion proposed.
Kali huffed, “Now that sounds like him.”
“That too.” Especially with Zion on the receiving end. I dreamed of having him fall apart underneath me. For his limbs to give out. But not yet. Only when the anticipation hadoverloaded him to the point where he teetered on the verge of combustion. “But also, to just exist, I suppose.”
She tilted her head. “You want tranquility.”
“Something like that.” What I truly yearned for was a life filled with their voices. Stinky morning breaths. Excitement at a cup of coffee. Zion’s taunting. Kali’s blushes. Our own house. A yard.
Re-tying her left boot’s laces, she asked Zion, “What’s your dream?” But before he could respond, she begged, “And please don’t tell me it’s our blood.”
He scoffed. “That’s not a dream. It’s reality. I already have yours, and I will get Gedeon’s soon too. It’s inevitable.”
She punched his shoulder. “That’s not what I asked.”
For a while, he studied the fluffs of cotton floating in the bright blue sky, so lost in his own little bubble I began to ponder if he had heard her.
“Sleep in,” he said. “Not have to wake up early every day.”
“You usually sleep for far longer than me,” I pointed out.
He shrugged. “I like breakfast. I want us to havelatemornings together instead of rushing through them. I want to make waffles and not check the clock to see if I have to run off. I want to roll around in bed and have both of you naked with me. And I want… I want to go to the sea too.”
He had fallen in love with the large body of water time and time again over the years. Not a summer would pass without him trekking there at least once a week. Well, until his sister’s demise had slapped him in the face.
