Page 189 of Cold-Blooded Creatures

“Those are lots of ifs. I could repeat the list of the ones from our side, but you are familiar with them. So I will not waste my breath on it. Instead, I have a question of my own. How will you fight if you cannot deal with your own nightmares? You,” Gedeon bore into Zion, “lost your composure, slashing the soldiers’ throats without consideringyour ownlife. And you,” his reproach pricked me like a needle burrowing deep, “rashly ran after Malaya. In war, these things are bound to happen multiple times. How do you plan to overcome them?”

“I will bury my nightmares in the depths of my soul where they can choke, for all I care.” I raised my head higher as I whirled around my axis with a leg kick for a thousandth time. “I’ve been through things you will never understand. Not because you didn’t see them, but because you didn’t experience them. Like everyone who grew up in the compounds. So believe me, I can handle myself.”

Gedeon set his mouth in a stiff line. “If you say it’s so easy to deal with what haunts you, then why is it that all you wear are our clothes?”

Although Zion had incinerated allmyclothes, and that with Gedeon’s overprotectiveness had pushed me to run to Damia’s compound, I’d promised them I was theirs and clawed the identical promise out of them. Somehow it made my heart beat stronger. So I wasn’t interested in shopping for a new wardrobe. I relished the smell of leather wafting off Zion’s jacket, and the sweet earthiness drenching Gedeon’s t-shirts. The blend would wrap me in a cocoon I didn’t want to let go of.

I gripped my knife firmer. Power rippled through me at the sensation of holding a weapon capable of taking a life. “BecauseI toss and turn almost every night, waiting for the dawn to come. Because whenever I go outside, everything serves as a constant reminder of the evil that exists. Because the moment I stop going through the motions, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I wear your clothes because feeling you against my skin, from morning to all throughout the night, is what keeps me going. I’m not going to apologize for it.”

“It’s a feeling that will eat you alive,” Zion said quietly. Instincts were carrying him through our dance so elegantly that I wondered if he was following a song I couldn’t hear. “Trust me, I know it because it already did.” His bitter laugh sounded so injured that I lost my balance and stumbled forward, my blade cutting the tension thickening the air and hitting something solid.

A line turned crimson on Gedeon’s left cheek. Blood tainted his fingertips as he withdrew them from the shallow wound. “You have not figured it out, have you?” He chuckled. “I have been on a mission to destroy Ilasall my entire life, and that is what I will do. But when I break down the list of reasons why we are not ready yet, it’s not to put you down. I am hanging on, one day at a time,becauseof you. You offering your lives up for me to take them and all the others at the compound to the death awaiting us at the city instead of the freedom I am striving for, it—” A heavy sigh expanded his chest. “Icarefor you. And I will not let a stupid decision take you from me.”

“Caring? It’s irrelevant, like my life.” I leaped high up and landed with a wet plop in the mud. Specks of dirt flew in all directions, splattering us in their pattern. “We must do it.”

The bleak sky broke. Raindrops fell on us like arrowheads, cold and sharp, punctuating Gedeon’s every point as he shuffled closer to us. “Our storage is depleted. We have used up our reserve of med supplies and now, after this night, I have to choose who gets treated and who does not. You need more?We barely have enough food to get through the rest of winter as it is.” He roughly pushed the soaked hair away from his forehead, but a few strands immediately plastered themselves back. “If that’s not enough, you said there are rumors we are cannibals, for gods’ sake! What war can we talk about when their citizens think we are savages and we have nothing to prove them otherwise?”

Heavy rain drenched me to my last thread, gluing my cotton sweater to my curves, and my wet hair lashed at my cheeks as I pivoted. Despite not knowing where my sweat began and where the fury from the sky washed it away, I lowered into a lunge, my thighs shaking as I swiveled and brushed my knife over the tips of a few grass blades still standing upright.

Finishing our dance, Zion threw his head back. Water flowed down his face, dripped down his chin, and soaked into the earth destroyed by our ruthless choreography. “I know the resource problem. I fucking know it. But she is right, we are running out of time. We have a chance, a solid chance to win, better than any of the years before, but it’s true, death is guaranteed for many of us,” he said as I continued practicing, honing my skills, leveling my mind. “Half of us are going to be dead by the end of the war, if not more.Welikely will be dead. But I’m willing to risk everything for this. I’m willing to risk her. And I’m willing to risk you. If we don’t start a war ourselves, we’ll have to face it on two fronts. Ilasall and our own people. We’re too big to avoid branching out. And those two idiots are starting it.” Zion hid his knife in the sheath secured to his upper arm. “We have to be the first to attack. Otherwise, I don’t think we’ll win by a lucky accident like the last time. Theywillfind a way to annihilate us. And itwillincludeusin the list of casualties. So do you really want to choose death by them and not by us fighting and laying our lives in battle?”

I spun round and around, losing myself in nature’s shower, the heat emanating from my muscles warring with the freezing winter morning storm. The vast space of my clearing freed the last chains locking me up, and I moved and moved and moved, merging into one with the wall of water, just falling, going with the current.

Numb.

“No,” Gedeon finally spoke, his voice as calm as the steady torrent, as distant as the clouds above, as resolute as the unceasing descent of raindrops.

In one motion, I extended my left arm and twisted around?—

Too fast, too fast, too fast?—

My boot slipped in the muddy grass?—

As I lurched forward, my knife struck something soft but firm that halted my steps. I blinked away the downpour clumping my eyelashes, seeking to find the obstruction disrupting my flow.

“I will go to war.” Surprise slowed Gedeon’s words as we both looked down to his stomach. His black shirt’s material matched the handle of my weapon, the steel swallowed up by his body.

In a bout of my clumsiness acting up, I had accidentally pierced his flesh.

I had stabbedhim.

The stream of water beating down on us slithered inside me, flooding my bones and drowning my heart.

“No,” I gasped, a barely audible sound of terror leaving my throat.

“Gedeon,” Zion echoed my whisper.

A fire kindled by ice blazed in my lungs, suffocating me in waves of agony, singing me from the inside out, giving way to the horrific realization of what I’d done.

I swallowed the flames, so severe Iburned, and the handle of my knife lodged deep inside Gedeon’s abdomen slipped from my fingers as I staggered back.

Two sets of eyes, one so dark, as if created out of the rumbling thunder, and one so bright, as if molded out of that blue flash of lightning miles away, watched me take my last breath before my knees gave out and I screamed into the murky sky.