CHAPTER 2
I'm back in the silo watching myself—fifteen-year-old me—when she appears.
Eleanor Ashby stands beside me in the silo. Not the withered corpse they buried, but Eleanor at thirty-eight, her prime. The Eleanor who photographed me for years. The Eleanor who owned everything, including parts of me nobody else ever touched.
"Hello, Legion," she says, her voice exactly as I remember it—all honey and broken glass.
I don't answer. Can't. My mouth is sand-dry, and my heart hammers against the smooth skin where my brand should be, but isn't. I touch my chest, feel nothing. No proof I ever belonged to anyone.
Eleanor doesn't seem to notice or care about my silence. Her eyes—Savannah's eyes but colder, sharper—follow my younger self as he and Savannah, still excited every time they meet up, even though it's daily that summer, look into each other's eyes.
"Watch," she says, nodding toward the teenagers. "Moments come and go. You're gonna miss it."
Thirteen-year-old Savannah is wearing a blue dress that makes her eyes look electric and her skin glow golden. My younger self can't stop looking at her.
"I remember this day," I say to no one. Savannah and I stand three feet apart, just lookin' at each other. Neither of us able to speak.
"This moment," Eleanor whispers, almost reverent. "This is when everything changed."
My younger self extends his hand. His fingers are callused from barn work, nails broken and dirty. Savannah looks at his hand for a long moment before placing hers in it.
Their fingers intertwine.
I remember the feeling—her skin impossibly soft against mine, her pulse fluttering against my wrist like she was scared.
I remember thinking her hand was so small, wondering how something so delicate could make me feel like I was drowning and breathing all at once.
"You knew, didn't you?" Eleanor asks. "Even then."
The teenagers stare at each other. Not smiling. Not speaking. Just lookin’. Recognizing something in each other that nobody else ever saw.
"Knew what?" I finally manage to ask, though my voice sounds wrong.
"That she was meant for more than you."
God, she's such a bitch.
But she's also right. I did know. Savannah knew it too. We never talked about it, but we understood it sat between us, unavoidable. As futures typically are.
She was an Ashby. I was a Kane. Her life stretched out before her, golden and certain. Mine was a question mark, a dark road leading nowhere worth going.
But that day, holding her hand for the first time, I made a silent promise. Not that I would love her forever—though Iwould. Not that I would wait for her—though I did. The promise was deeper and impossible.
That I would become someone worthy of standing beside her, not just holding her hand in secret.
Fifteen-year-old me squeezes Savannah's fingers gently. She squeezes back.
"It wasn't love," I tell Eleanor, though I'm not sure why I'm explaining myself to a ghost, or a hallucination, or whatever the fuck she is. "Not yet."
"No," Eleanor agrees. "It was a pledge."
The word strikes me as exactly right. A pledge. A commitment more binding than a promise, more sacred than a vow.
"You pledged yourself to her knowing you would fail," Eleanor says.
I watch my younger self lead Savannah to the blanket. They sit side by side, shoulders touching, hands still linked. They don't speak much. They don't need to.
"I never failed her," I say, the words burning my throat.
