Page 114 of The Ashes of Summer

Smaller. Older. Half the exterior lights are dead, so whole stretches of the parking lot sit drowned in dark as Adelaide tears into it far too fast. The SUV fishtails on the turn and a man crossing near the entrance throws himself backward out of the way.

"Fucking move!" Adelaide screams out the window.

I stare at her, because Adelaide doesn't swear. Not once, in all the years I've known her—not when she broke her wrist falling off my porch railing at sixteen, not at her own mother's funeral. And here she is, white-knuckled over a stranger's steering wheel, snarling at a man in a parking lot like she'd run him down without slowing. That's what tonight has done to all of us. It's reached inside the people I love and pulled out things I've never seen before.

She doesn't even register it as she slams us into park, crooked across two spaces.

Another car screeches in beside us at almost the same second, and a woman in dark scrubs is out of it before her engine's off—hair loose and wild, face frantic, genuinely shaken. Two nurses come out through the emergency doors behind her, pushing a gurney. Private logos on their chests, different from any I've seen. The kind of place that doesn't have its name on the road.

"Room's ready," one of them says.

The woman nods once. Then her eyes land on Jacob, and the panic hits her face all at once, and I watch it happen the way you watch a glass tip off a counter—too slow to stop, too fast to look away from.

"Oh my God." The back door flies open and cold night air pours in over us. "Jacob."

Her voice cracks around his name as she reaches for him, and he grunts low in his throat as the movement jars his shoulder, and under the flat white lot lights I finally see how bad it is. The whole left side of his shirt is soaked through, black more than red now, gone stiff and shining. I've had my hands pressed to it for what feels like hours and somehow I hadn't let myself see the size of it until this second.

"I need you on the gurney," she says.

"No." Even gray and half-conscious, he finds the breath to argue. "I'm walking."

"You were shot."

"Still. Got. Legs," he hisses as he pulls himself to a seated position.

One of the nurses mutters, “Jesus Christ.”

I would laugh if I had anything left to laugh with, because of course he does this. Of course. Bleeding out in a parking lot in the middle of the night and still too stubborn to be carried the length of a corridor.

But instead of arguing with her, he turns his back on the woman entirely—on the gurney, on the nurses, on all of it—and looks at me.

"You okay?"

And that's what undoes me. Not the wound. Not the blood. That he can barely hold his own head up and the first thing he needs to know is whether I'm all right.

I nod too fast. "I'm fine."

It's a lie. It's an enormous, obvious lie. My wrists are raw and weeping where the rope was, my broken fingers won't close right, my throat feels like it's been torn out and stuffed back in wrong, and underneath all of it, somewhere I still can't turn and look at directly, there's the deep spreading ache of what they did in that room. But none of it matters. I've made a small, fierce religion out of it not mattering. Every ounce of me that's still working is pointed at him.

They get him upright, and I go straight to his uninjured side, and his weight tips into me on instinct the moment I'm there—like his body reaches for me before his mind can. Like he needs the contact as badly as I do. And I do. God, I do. Touching him is the only thing tonight that has felt like proof I survived.

The woman notices. Something flickers across her face and is gone before I can name it.

Jacob drops his forehead to mine to catch his breath, and for one second the parking lot narrows to just that—his skin against mine, both of us breathing, alive. Then his eyes narrow. His hand lifts, weak and shaking, to my face.

"What's that?"

"What?"

His thumb brushes across my cheekbone, feather-light, and pain flares white and sudden—and I realize I never even felt it happen. Somewhere on that mountain something struck me hard enough to mark me and I have no memory of it at all. My body has been keeping a list I stopped reading days ago.

His whole face changes. Goes dark and still.

Then his eyes drop. To my wrists. To the weeping sores and the deep purple bands and the places where the skin gave.

And I feel him go rigid beside me, feel the change move through his whole body like something cold poured down his spine, and I know exactly what he's seeing. He's reading them like a report. Each mark a sentence. Building the whole story off my skin.

"You need checking too."