I flexed my arm, wincing. “Not bad enough to die from.”
He grunted, the sound a soft rumble. “You’re such a liar.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.” My voice was too thin to sound like anythingbut defeat.
He dragged a hand over his face, and I watched the lines it left in the grime, the way the muscles bunched in his jaw.
He looked up, finally, eyes catching on mine with a ferocity that made me want to crawl out of my own skin. “You always were,” he said, something almost gentle in the words. “You lied to everyone. But you never lied to me. Maybe you tried, but I could always see through it.”
I almost laughed. “That’s because you never believed anything I said. Or even cared. I didn’t feel the need to try to put on a mask.”
He leaned forward, elbows on knees, eyes fixed on me. “I believed you,” he said. “You just never knew what you wanted.”
The words sliced. I thought of all the things I’d ever wanted. My sister alive, my mother sober, my own skin to fit better, the violence to stop.
Now, all I wanted was a can of beans, a handful of water, and this moment to last longer than the next disaster.
“We should keep moving,” he said, already up. “If we stay in one place too long, predators will start circling.”
I stood, the ache in my shoulder now a dull, needy throb, and followed. The sun was sinking, the sky bruised purple.
We walked in silence, the rhythm of our steps a counterpoint to the howl of the wind. Each mile hollowed out something deeper in me, and the hunger for Caiden—for the gravity of him—grew as relentless as thirst.
My head felt floaty, half-anchored, as if I were walking at the bottom of a glass tank. The pain in my arm was now a background whisper, less urgent than the quiet that had settled over us.
I tripped on a rock and caught myself, palms scraping open, and then just stood there for a second, blood seeping into the cracks of my hand.
Caiden looked back, sighed, and circled to me. “You’re gonna bleed out if you don’t start paying attention,” he said, but there was no bite in it, just a dull annoyance that felt almost reassuring.
“I can make it,” I insisted, even as the sky kept tilting and my knees went rubbery.
He made an irritated noise and dropped the backpack to the ground, kneeling to rummage through it. “Sit,” he ordered, and I obeyed.
He yanked open the first aid kit, found a strip of gauze, and without preamble took my wrist in his hands. His touch was rough, impatient, but careful in the way he pressed the pad to my palm and then wrapped the gauze around and around, tying it off so tight my fingers tingled.
“You don’t have to treat me like I’m glass,” I muttered, hating the way my voice trembled.
He snorted, but his hands stayed on me a beat longer than they needed to.
“I’m not treating you like glass,” he said, voice gruff. “Glass doesn’t bite back.”
“You wish,” I said, but the words had no venom, just a tired kind of gratitude.
He rolled the bandage up to my elbow, inspecting his work, then let my arm fall. “You lost a lot of blood, Amelia. You can’t go much further like this.”
“I’m fine.”
I was not fine. I could feel the fever crawling up my spine, eating holes in my concentration, making the world go swimmy at the edges.
But to admit it aloud would have felt like a betrayal. Of him, of myself, of the way we’d managed to stay alive this long.
He was close, crouched so his face was even with mine, the dirt smudged into the lines under his eyes. “If you pass out, I’ll just drag you,” he said. “But it’ll slow us down.”
I thought about this image: Caiden with his hands under my armpits, hauling my limp body up a ridge or through a dry creekbed, grumbling the entire way.
He would do it, too, and not even for me, but because he’d sworn never to let anyone die on his watch, not unless he’d promised to kill them first.
“Deal,” I said, and tried to get up again. The world tilted, but less this time.
