Page 60 of The Same Backward as Forward

A pill in my mouth.

Hands tilt my head.

Everything is dark, and Iampain, but my eyes—somehow, they open. And then, there is light.

And then, there isher.

Eyes should be one color, maybe two. Hers are everything. Brown and blue and green and gray—rings of color like rings on a tree, their borders messy and blurring into one another, a line of deep blue around the rim of her iris, a golden-brown starburst around the pupil, and stormy gray and mossy green battling it out in between.

Eyes like that should be illegal. I cannot look away. She presses another pill into my mouth, and my lips brush her fingertips.

I can’t feel my chest, and the parts of my body that Icanfeel are agony, red hot and white. But her eyes are steady.

Her eyes areeverything.

I can breathe.

I don’t know how long I’ve been out. The second I come to, I want the oblivion back.

No. It hurts. I can’t—

Gentle hands touch me, but even that feels like a torturer’s knife. Every brush of air on my skin is like the scorching kiss of a soldering iron.Make it stop.

Her eyes are still everything.

I need you, I think. I need her—whoever she is—to make this stop.

I somehow manage to grab the delicate wrist of the hand that tends me.“Let…”My voice feels like it might tear open my throat. I might as well have swallowed ground glass, and she might as well be a backlit angel, blurring before my eyes with a halo that probably isn’t even real.

“Let…,” I wheeze again.

It takes me longer than it should to realize that she has peeled my fingers from her wrist, that she’s leaning down to hear me. She’s close enough now that I could lift my lips to hers if I could just overcome the pain long enough to move. I think that it might kill me, kissing the girl with the gentle, gentle hands and the everything eyes.

I want it to kill me.

I wantherto.

“Let,” I choke out the word.“Me. Die.”

She leans down farther, and at first, I think that she is going to do it—kiss me, kill me, do me in, make the pain stop. But her lips make their way to my ear instead, and her whisper isn’t gentle at all.

“You don’t get to die, you bastard.”

Chapter 2

Trapped. Stone walls. Stone ceiling. Stone floor. There are no windows. There is no door.

No way out.

No sound.

No air—

I wake up gasping, and pain—excruciating, merciless—knocks me back out. Again and again, consciousness arrives like a backhand to my jaw and leaves like a snake slithering off into the dark. There is no such thing as day or night. It’s all endless, an ouroboros ofnot dyingno matter how much I hurt.

Because I don’tgetto die.

The girl with the everything eyes—the girl whohatesme—sits at an old wooden table. I can’t make out her face, but I can see her hands. They’re moving. She’s folding something.Paper.Folding it again and again.