Page 64 of The Same Backward as Forward

One thing about H-A-N-N-A-H: She’s in pain, too.

“Doesn’t it?” I challenge.Everything hurts. Doesn’t it?

“You don’t get to ask me questions.” She practically spits the words.

I don’t get to ask her questions, and I don’t get to die. Hannah might keep her anger under lock and key, but it’s there, and it’s ocean-deep.

One thing about me: I know how to pick locks.

“You build little castles out of sugar packets.” I take aim. “It’s endearing, really. The sugar castles. Do you believe in fairy tales, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward?”

The name suits her. She’sHannahthrough and through, quiet and capable and real.

“I believe in villains,” she tells me, her voice flat, and I chalk that up as one more thing I know about Hannah. And in return, I echo the word back to her—villains—and offer up one last thing that I have just learned about myself.

“It’s funny,” I say, though it’s really not. “I don’t remember a damn thing about myself, but I would drink to that.”

Chapter 4

Stone walls. Stone ceiling. Stone floor. I can’t move. Nausea and panic rise in the back of my throat. My body violently jerks.

I’m going to be sick.

And that voice—that same voice. “You did this to yourself.”

Hannah isn’t here. Sheisn’t here, and without her, there’s no game to play. Without her, existence is like sand in my mouth, but I have to stay conscious. I can’t go back to the stone room. So I focus my ire on the bearded giant sitting at Hannah’s sugar castle table.

“I need a drink.” It’s impressive, really, how arrogant I can sound groaning out words.

Jackson is unimpressed. Under the facial hair, the guy could be thirty or fifty. He gives me a look that says that his tolerance for my bullshit is close to zero, and then he rises. “Far be it from me to lecture anyone about manners.”

He takes his sweet time going to the sink and returns with a cup.

Water.I slap it from his hands. The movement costs me.Lightning tears through a thousand raw nerves in my shoulder, arm, and neck as the metal cup clatters to the floor.

“I need adrink,” I repeat. The pain is unbearable, and his eyes aren’t hers.She isn’t here.

“You need something,” Jackson mutters.

“Youpulled me out.” I say those words like the accusation they are. “That’s what Hannah said.” A mix of emotions rears its head inside of me: pain and fury, despair and desperation. I’m a regular Cerberus of emotion—or a Hydra, all snapping teeth and heads, plural, rearing back. “There was an explosion,” I say, “and my body was thrown from a cliff and into the ocean, andyou pulled me out.”

“There a question in there?” Jackson cocks his brow.

“There’s ascrew you,” I spit. “You should’ve let me drown.”

“Maybe so.”

“I need a drink.”I bookend that statement with expletives, and all that gets me from the older man is another long and knowing look.

“Hannah saved you,” he says, “and she will keep saving you.”

Maybe that’s meant to guilt me into being better than this, but Beardy can take the moral high road and shove it up his ass. AllItake from his words is that Hannah is coming back.

She’s coming back.With a white-knuckle hold on that thought, I turn the puzzle-solving part of my brain to the man who had the poor judgment to save my life. This place is doubtlessly his, and based on the fact that it looks like it was built by hand to withstand a nuclear bomb, I peg him as a conspiracy theorist or a shut-in or both.

Why bring me here and not a hospital? Why risk me dying on your property? On your watch?

Jackson narrows his eyes at me, like he’s reading my mind. “Do me a favor,” he grunts. “Don’t piss on that mattress.”