“I don’t know. Scarier. Colder,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Rogue’s funny. Armen is… steady. And Sting is…” She looks at me. “That dude is hard core.”
I have to laugh at that.
“I get it now,” she says. “Why you stayed. I didn’t before. I thought, well, I don’t know what I thought. That you were stuck, or scared, or that they had some kind of hold on you. But it’s not that.”
“You’re right. It’s not that.”
“You chose this, I’m thinking. Or at least accepted it.”
The words land heavier than they should. Because hearing Mara say it, Mara, who knew me when I was just a girl with a missing father and a stubborn streak and no idea what I was walking into—hearing her sayyou chose thismakes it true in a way my own internal monologue never could.
I chose this. The Rot. The guys. The masks and the danger and the complicated, messy, impossible life I’m living, inside a dead mall in a collapsed town. I chose it.
“Yeah,” I say. “Guess I did.”
We walk the rest of the corridor in silence. It’s not uncomfortable. It’s just the silence of two people who’ve just said something that can’t be taken back. Not because it was wrong but because it was too true to fit neatly into a conversation.
At the door to my room, Mara stops and looks at me. “For what it’s worth, I think you chose well.”
34
VI
I can’t sleep.
Mara’s breathing is slow and even beside me, the deep rhythm of someone who’s no longer afraid to close her eyes. Good. One of us should sleep. I lie still for twenty minutes, staring at the ceiling, listening to the Rot do its nighttime thing—the distant hum of the generator, the creak of infrastructure settling, someone’s cough three rooms over traveling through the ductwork.
My brain won’t shut off. Dad’s papers. The names. The network of officials who were so brazen, they barely bothered hiding what they were doing. The bastards so certain they were untouchable that they left a trail anyone could follow. Except the person who followed was my dad, and they destroyed him for it. Every time I close my eyes, I see his handwriting, the pen pressed hard enough to dent the paper.
I ease out of bed without disturbing Mara, pull on a sweatshirt, and slip out the door. The Rot at night has a different quality. There’s always someone awake. Always someoneworking a late shift or walking around or sitting alone with whatever keeps them up.
The Skylight Room door is ajar. That’s unusual. The guys’ private space is always closed, always locked when unoccupied. An open door means someone’s inside.
Sting.
He’s sitting on the floor beneath the cracked glass ceiling, legs stretched out, back against the wall. Moonlight comes through the broken panes in slivers, cutting across the floor in ragged lines. He’s not reading, not working, not checking anything, or running schedules or doing any of the hundred operational things he considers his.
He’s looking up at the sky. Through the cracks in the skylight, you can see a star or two. That’s pretty much it, though, since the glass is cracked and broken and what’s left is smeared with years of grime and bird poop. But through the broken sections, the sky is there, the distant light that doesn’t care about collapsed towns, dead malls, and being obsessed with clearing your father’s legacy like I am.
Sting, looking at stars. Chalk that up to something I never thought I’d see.
He knows I’m here, but he doesn’t turn or acknowledge me. He just keeps looking up at the skylight.
“Can’t sleep,” I say.
“Join the club.”
I cross the room and sit down beside him. We don’t say anything for a while but it’s comfortable. Sting’s silence is different at night but I don’t push. I don’t ask questions, I just sit and look at the stars through the broken glass and let the silence be what it is.
Sting breaks it. “My mother was a nursing home aide,” he says.
There’s no preamble, and no setup. Just that bit of information arriving out of nowhere, not because someone asked, but because it’s two in the morning and whatever wall that usually holds back Sting’s words is letting them through.
He’s never talked about his life before the Rot. I’ve picked up fragments from Armen and Rogue, from the way certain subjects make him go rigid. But from Sting himself? Nothing. Ever. Until now.
“Rothwell Elder Care,” he says. “On Franklin, near the overpass, the city-subsidized facility. She worked there eleven years, nights, mostly. She cleaned people, changed sheets, administered medication, sat with people when they couldn’t sleep. She was good at it. She loved it.”
He’s talking to the sky more than me, which might be the only reason he’s talking at all.
