Page 61 of Never Lost (The Unchained #3)

Rebekah answered with conviction. She’d thought about this. A lot. After all, she’d had time. “I was only sixteen, Lou. I didn’t know what love was. And neither did he.”

Did you not? “But did you?—”

“What do you want me to say?” Rebekah cut me off.

“I think of it, and of him, every single goddamn day. I’ll never forgive myself for what happened.

I wanted to die for a long time afterward.

I came close to making it happen, and at that school, I wasn’t the only one.

” She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees as if she were speaking directly to the cosmetic dentistry ad plastered above the seat on the other side.

“I still spend a lot of nights lying awake racking my brain for just one thing I could have done differently, one thing that could have saved him and me. But that’s pointless because this isn’t the past anymore.

It’s the present. And we can only take it all—all of our anger, all of our regret, and all of our compassion—and give it to the ones we can help right now. Because they’re the ones who need it.”

I clamped down on my lip, hard, as if a sob might escape if I didn’t. I knew Rebekah was talking about her own story, and she was right, but?—

“Tell you what,” Rebekah said, green eyes suddenly alive again as if the prospect of action were the only thing that could drag her out of the dark depths of memory. “I have an idea.”

“Is there anything you’d like me to call you?

” I asked the teen boy slumped in the upholstered chair in the dusty, repurposed church basement, because one of the first things I’d learned here was that you didn’t ever ask a slave their name.

Too much of a potential trigger. You only gave them the option to use one.

“No, miss.” The typical answer.

When I first saw him, crumpled near the clinic’s back entrance like discarded laundry, I had to gently push back the sleeve of his filthy jacket to see that the arm beneath it ended just below the elbow.

The skin was rough and puckered where the limb had been severed, recent, not fully healed either.

Whoever had patched him up had done it in a hurry, and not in a hospital.

It was amazing they’d even bothered to fix it instead of disposing of him right away.

In other words, he’d been lucky. Or good. Or both.

“Call me Lou. I’m going to touch you now, but this is a safe space and I’m a trained medical volunteer, so there’s nothing to worry about.

Okay?” He nodded, and I gently smoothed back the sandy curls bloodily matted to the gash across his face to get a better look. Now it was my turn to bite my tongue.

After all, stories were some of my favorite things in the world.

But this was a don’t-ask-don’t-tell clinic, where such stories—including mine—went untold.

Like what this boy’s owners were like, or how he’d managed to evade them.

After all, the chips hadn’t come out yet, much as I prayed for the day they would. Much as I prayed for?—

Well. Back to the task at hand: inspecting the slave boy’s wounds.

The whip gash across his cheek and nose looked fresh, as if the overseer had decided to try looking him in the eye for once while doing it.

But more urgent were the untreated burns cratered on his palm and verging on infection, maybe from being forced to pick up scorching tools or chemicals bare-handed. Burns not unlike my own.

Fuck this world.

He flinched but said nothing as I applied a rose-scented salve—the same one Ivy had given me way back when—to the worst of the burns, then bandaged them the right way, mentally cataloging the steps, determined to get a gold star, or at least not fuck up completely.

Rebekah and I had bet each other a pedicure on what I’d become first: a competent medical professional or a competent barista. The verdict was still out.

The slave boy whimpered, clamping down on his lip as if he’d expected to be punished for that small noise.

“Hey, hey,” I said. “Let it out. You can cry here. You can scream. You can tell me to go fuck myself if you want. I don’t care.”

“But the rest got it worse, miss. Lou.” He bit back another whimper.

“The rest?” I froze as it hit me: he wasn’t just any runaway.

I remembered the viral clip I’d seen—shaky footage from someone’s phone on campus, smoke rising thick from the hills behind the mining compound, police with helmets and rifles pushing slaves in chains down the slope like cattle.

The words Terrorist Slave Uprising flashed across the screen in red, followed by a thinkpiece from some sanctimonious columnist in thick glasses entitled "Polls Say People Aren’t Worried About the Pennsylvania Slave Uprising.

Here’s Why They Should Be.” Beside me, Rebekah had muttered something about “media manipulation” and turned away, but I just sat there, my blood cold.

Now I understood why. This boy—burnt, bleeding, mangled—must have been one of the ones they reported escaped. One of three.

The rest hadn’t been so lucky, or so good.

I looked down at his bandaged arm, the stump where a hand should’ve been, and it clicked. When that accident had mangled his arm, the chip had gone with it. It was the only reason he hadn’t been tracked down and dragged back. And ironically, the only reason he now had a chance.

“They said they’ll start with the ringleader, miss—Lou. Garotte him in front of everyone.”

They’re afraid, I thought, but didn’t say it. That was good. Dangerous, but good.

“Ringleader?”

“This guy—this guy who planned the whole thing.” He swallowed thickly.

“He wasn’t much older than me. He could read, though, and knew all kinds of things.

Helped me learn, helped me make quota. Gave up his rations so I could eat, at the start.

And—he saved my life. Took forty lashes for me without blinking.

But—” he swallowed. “Now they're calling him dangerous.”

“Did he have a name?” I asked, not exactly sure why, just knowing it mattered.

“Someone gave him the name Riven.”

I squeezed the roll of bandages tighter.

“His old master, or someone. And we found out. So that's what we called him, even though he told us not to.” He clamped down hard on his lip, the memory apparently too strong to bear.

“It’s okay," I told him again, trying to breathe and focus on the matter at hand. This wasn’t about me, or the way that name dislodged something about Rebekah’s past. "Cry. It doesn’t make you any less brave.”

The kid jerked. “Brave?”

“Yeah.”

When they met mine, his blue eyes were wide. “No one’s ever called me that before.”