Page 48 of Blade

Everything she’d fantasized about first kisses and falling in love was buried in the pile of rubble that her world had become, along with the road map to making the Olympics one day, neither of which had accounted for boys in black vans and men who smelled of car fresheners.

And there was nothing to do but dig through it all and see what was left to save.

Chapter Eighteen

Ana

Now

My mind is reeling with the question as Kayla sits back in her chair.

“What happened before I got there?”

It doesn’t seem possible that anything could have impacted her life more than the night in the field. I can still feel Indy’s hand on my neck, then grabbing my arm as we watched Kayla being dragged out of the woods.

“You started to train there the winter after Indy arrived, right? After Nationals?” Kayla asks, her eyes looking to the window and the storm outside.

I nod. “Yes. The year Indy got fifth.”

“I remember meeting you that first time. You were with your mother. Jo and I were in the hallway.”

I feel a swell of emotions as I think back to that day. When the world was light. Not even a shadow, except the one I chose to ignore. How tired my mother had grown. The sudden urge to send me away. The scarves she once wore around her neck now tied over thinning hair.

“Indy came a few months before you—at the start of that season,” Kayla says.

My heart aches as I remember the moment when I first saw her.

“She was hiding in the room, texting Bobby Stark.”

Kayla turns her gaze back from the window.

“Dawn was brutal to all of us in her own way. But there was something about Indy. We all thought it was because of her mother, Patrice—that she harbored resentment over her life-altering loss when they were rivals. And I still think that was true. But Indy didn’t help her cause.”

I meet her eyes. Now I’m the one who’s curious.

“But Indy did everything Dawn told her,” I recall. “She had that bruise—from falling on the triple Axel.” The bruise that took my breath away the first time I saw it. The night we went to the field.

Kayla lifts a shoulder. Tilts her head. “Yeah, well. Indy made that choice. That’s how I always saw it. But it’s not about that. Things happened—and not just to Indy but to all of us.”

“Okay,” I tell her, trying to be patient, though my mind is screaming for this piece of information, the same way it used to when I was with them. The Orphans. How I craved knowledge about everything in my new world. About them most of all. It felt imperative to my survival.

Kayla continues. “Indy arrived at the end of the summer—right before school started. Jo and I had been in our room for sixteen, seventeen months maybe.”

I think back again to their stories. How Jolene had come because her parents were traveling. She called them Mr. M. and Mrs. M., like they were characters in a sitcom. They’d given her a choice—The Palace or boarding school. She came here because she still wanted to skate. And Kayla—she got a scholarship from a nonprofit organization. They sponsored underserved girls in sports.

“We knew we didn’t have what it took to make it,” she says. “But we loved to skate.” Now a pause and a slight smile. “Do you remember that feeling? When you just loved it for what it was? Before it became about winning?”

I stare at her, wondering if I do. It’s hard to love something that set your life on fire.

“I fucking loved it.” Kayla smiles broadly. “The speed, and the power ...” Now she holds her hand in front of her, making the shape of a blade.

“That one edge, carving into the ice, holding your entire body in any position you wanted—anything. It was a kind of ...” She thinks now about how to describe it. “Freedom,” she says finally.

For a brief moment, we stay there, remembering that part, before she continues.

“She was there for maybe three weeks before the tears started.”

“Because she missed her coach back home—Bobby,” I say, picturing Indy on her bed the day I arrived, crying into her phone.