Page 41

AUTUMN

M ars has me laughing so hard, I have to wipe tears from my eyes. His hands move wildly in the air while he tells some ridiculous story about the first time he tried to siphon gas and ended up with a mouthful of diesel.

“You didn’t,” I gasp, covering my mouth and shaking my head.

“Oh, I did.” He grins and beams with pride, his bare chest gleaming with a light sheen of sweat from his earlier sparring session with Jace.

The old bruises are fading, but a few new ones are making their appearance beneath his ribs and on his side.

“Thought I was gonna breathe fire for a week. I was almost tempted to light a cigarette after. Can you imagine? Would’ve been a human flamethrower. ”

Luna lifts her head from where she’s been dozing at my feet. I lean back and wipe at my eyes again, still laughing, when heat prickles along the back of my neck. That feeling of someone watching. I turn and follow Luna’s gaze.

Jace stands at the edge of the clearing with his eyes locked on me with such intensity, I almost feel like I’m the last thing on earth he sees.

His face is a mess, red and blotchy, and his eyes are puffy and raw.

Not from laughter like mine. This is the face of a man who’s been sobbing.

His bare chest heaves like he’s trying to remember how to breathe.

He clutches his black shirt in one hand where it looks like he’s been dragging it along the ground behind with how filthy it is.

It’s his expression that steals my breath.

He looks like the world was ripped out from under him and he’s desperate to keep from shattering.

I don’t know what happened out there, but my heart cracks at the sight of him.

Despite everything, with his reinforced steel walls and his insistence to keep pushing me away, I want to reach out and comfort him, even though I know he’s only going to push me away again, like he always does.

“Jace?” I rise to my feet, but the word barely leaves my mouth before he’s crossing the space between us in long strides. His shirt slips from his hand and falls to the ground, forgotten.

His mouth crashes into mine in the hard, desperate kiss of a drowning man clawing for air.

For a heartbeat, I freeze. This is Jace.

The man who runs from connection like it’s the flames he fears.

But instinct takes over before thought can catch up.

My hands grip his shoulders as I lean into the storm that is Jace.

His kiss is rough and raw. It’s filled with fear, longing, and need so fierce it trembles through him. And God help me, I want it. I want him. I want to feel anything but this hollow ache where my sister should be. Anything but fear. Anything but loss.

My arms wind tighter around him and my fingers tangle in the hair at the nape of his neck. He crushes me to his chest, and I let him. I’m not pulling away. Not from him. If he needs an anchor, I’ll be one.

By the time he finally pulls back, we’re both breathing hard. His hands shake when they frame my face, his fingers trembling against my skin .

His thumbs trace the curve of my jaw, my cheekbones, and lips, slow and reverent, like he’s trying to memorize every inch.

“You’re alive.” His voice sounds wrecked.

I let out a shaky laugh, trying to lighten whatever darkness has its claws in him. “Of course I’m alive. What kind of greeting is that? Did you hit your head out there?”

“Thought I lost you.” His voice cracks, and fresh tears gather in his eyes. “God, Autumn, I thought…”

My stomach twists, cold creeping up my spine. “Jace, what happened?”

“I found a rotter.” His eyes close tight, and he shakes his head as though dispelling a nightmare, then his whole body shudders. “Purple hair. Gemini tattoo on the left wrist. Those fucking hazel eyes. It looks like you. I thought it was you.”

The world stops.

My blood turns to ice in my veins. The laughter from moments ago feels like it belongs to someone else in another lifetime. My hand moves on its own, reaching for my wrist. I tear the bandage off with shaking fingers to reveal the ink on my skin.

Gemini. Our tattoo.

Purple hair. We both had it, courtesy of a scavenged box of hair die and a dirty rest area bathroom.

Hazel eyes. We shared those, too.

No.

No, no, no.

The math is simple and brutal. It wasn’t me. Which means…

“Summer,” I whisper.

The name barely makes it past my lips before my knees give out. The ground rushes up to meet me, but Mars is there, dropping beside me to catch me before I hit the dirt. I collapse against his chest, and the sobs rip out of me and soak into his skin.

She’s gone. My sister. My Summer. The person I’ve been searching for, the hope I’ve been clinging to, it’s all gone.

“Autumn,” Caspian’s voice calls out with alarm.

“What the fuck, Jace?” Mars growls. His arms tighten around me, but I can’t feel them. I can’t feel anything now.

Luna whines and presses against my side, but it can’t penetrate the tsunami of grief.

Their voices rise around me, but they’re muffled by the ringing in my ears, by the sound of my world crumbling to dust. Everything I’ve done, every risk I’ve taken, every sleepless night spent searching, it was all for nothing. She’s been gone this whole time, and I never even knew.

I scream into Mars’s chest. Raw and broken, the sound tears from somewhere deep inside where I’ve kept all my hope locked away.

His muscles flex beneath me when he adjusts himself to hold me tighter.

One hand moves to cup the back of my head while the other grips my waist like he can keep me from falling apart completely.

But it’s too late. I already am.

Shattered. Splintered. Nothing left but pieces.

I don’t know how long I stay crumpled on the ground, sobbing until my voice is gone and my throat feels like I’ve swallowed broken glass.

Mars’s bare chest is soaked with my tears while he holds me with his arms wrapped around me like he’s trying to hold the pieces of me together.

As much as I want to stay right here and disappear in the warm comfort, I move.

I have to. I need to see her with my own eyes.

Holding onto the tiny shred of hope that Jace might be wrong, I push away from Mars and stumble to my feet. I wipe the tears from my face, even though they keep coming. The tears won’t stop. If Summer really is gone, then I don’t think they’ll ever stop.

“Autumn, wait.” Jace’s voice is rough with guilt when he calls after me.

I don’t answer. My legs are already carrying me toward the only thing that matters now. Mars stands and his muscles tense like he wants to follow, but something holds him back. They whisper behind me.

“We can’t just let her…” Mars’s voice trails off.

“What else can we do? What could possibly help right now?” Caspian’s voice sounds even more broken than when he faces his own nightmares.

‘There must be something…” Mars trails off again. He can’t seem to form a full sentence.

“There isn’t. Trust me, there isn’t,” Jace says in defeat.

They follow anyway. Of course they do. They’ve been following me all over this damn place since we first met. I feel them even from a distance, far enough to give me this terrible privacy. Luna pads silently beside them, with her usual energy dampened.

I don’t care. I keep walking.

Through the ruins. Stumbling over debris and upraised roots. My vision blurs with tears, and I trip twice. Mars catches me the first time, but when I scream at him to go, they hang back and watch me scrape my palms on cracked asphalt the second time.

Each step feels like moving through quicksand, but I don’t stop.

The place Jace described isn’t far, but it might as well be on another planet for how long the stumbling walk feels. When I round the corner of a broken down school bus, my knees almost give out again.

She’s pinned against a wall with a long rod through her chest. Her arms twitch and she keeps reaching for nothing. Her head lolls to one side, then the other, in that mindless way rotters do, because that’s what she is now. A rotter. She’s trapped and rotting, but still moving. Still suffering.

Her hair is still streaked with purple, though I can see some of the red still poking through from the color she had died it before.

The purple hair was her idea. I thought it was crazy. Why would anyone take the time to make themselves stand out more in such a dangerous world? But she chose to have fun, to thrive rather than merely survive.

The tattoo on her wrist catches the light. Gemini. Same as mine. The one we got together on our eighteenth birthday, giggling in that sketchy tattoo parlor and promising we’d always be connected no matter what. We came into this world together, and now I have to walk it alone.

My legs give out. I crawl the last few feet on my hands and knees, ignoring the sharp debris cutting into my skin.

I reach out with shaking fingers and push the matted hair from her face.

Even decomposed, it’s like looking into a broken mirror.

One cracked so badly it barely affects anything at all.

“Summer,” I whisper. Her name tastes like ash in my mouth.

I pull out her small music box and open it. The tune starts playing, but she doesn’t react. She’s nothing but a shell. She’s gone.

It’s her. My sister. My twin. My other half. The reason I’ve survived this long, because I always had hope. She was my North Star in this nightmare world, and now she’s…this. This thing wearing her face.

The music box falls to the ground, still playing the tune we’ve sung together for many years. Now it’s a macabre lullaby.

My breath shudders out of me and the tears come harder, blurring everything into a wash of watercolor grief. “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry, Summer. I tried. I tried so hard to find you.” The words struggle to make it past the sob in my throat.

I reach for her hand. It’s cold and stiff.

The flesh is peeling away, but it’s still hers.

Still the same hand that held mine through every nightmare of our childhood.

The same hand I gripped when we met each new foster family.

The hand that squeezed mine when the first emergency broadcasts came through about the virus that was straight out of a horror movie.

The hand that held mine back when we saw our first rotter stumble into the grocery store when the world was ending.

“Summer, I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, that I let them take you. I’m sorry for everything.”

The rotter that used to be Summer snarls and her jaw snaps at me. Those hazel eyes are clouded and empty. There’s no recognition, no spark of the girl who used to braid my hair and share her last piece of chocolate. They’ve become milky eyes filled with hunger and decay.

I squeeze her hand tighter, and only loosen my grip when I hear the bones shift and crack under my grip.

Behind me, someone makes a soft, pained sound.

They want to help. I can feel their need to fix this radiating across the space between us, but they can’t.

No one can bring her back. No one can ever undo this.

“You deserved so much better than this,” I tell her. My free hand reaches for Caspian’s knife still hooked on my belt. The metal is cold against my palm. “You deserved to see the ocean like we planned. To fall in love. To laugh until your stomach hurt. To grow old and gray; not this.”

My legs shake when I raise the knife. My hand trembles so much, I almost drop it.

“I love you,” I whisper. “I’ll always love you. You’ll always be my Summer, no matter what.”

Tears stream down my face when I position the blade .

My whole body shakes. The knife feels ten times heavier than it should, my grip barely strong enough to hold it steady. My breath comes out in short, panicked bursts. But I owe her this. I have to do this. We promised each other.

“And I’ll always keep my promise. I’ll keep living, for the both of us,” I vow right before driving the blade through her eye socket.

The wet sound it makes will haunt me forever. Her body stills in an instant. She’s finally at peace.

I pull the knife free and lean forward to press a kiss to her forehead. She’s cold. She’s been cold for so long. My lips move against her skin when I speak. “Sleep now. No more pain, no more hunger.”

My legs give out and I collapse beside her body with my hand still holding hers. The darkness rushing up to meet me is almost a mercy. I welcome it. Because in the dark, I don’t have to see her face.

There’s a stampede of footsteps running toward me and voices calling my name, but none of them are hers. They’ll never be hers again.

I slip into unconsciousness, still listening to the music box play its final tune.