Page 84 of The Same Backward as Forward

She objects. “I’m not selfless. You said it yourself—I hide.”

“Not selfless?” I stare at and into her. “You’re here, aren’t you?”She ishere, and no matter what I’ve said, she has not turned away. “I am, even by my own reckoning, a real prick, and yet, you come here, day after day.”

You need to stop, Jackson warns in my mind.

“You avert your eyes.” My voice is quiet. “You look through me when you can. But you’re here.” She will never know what that has meant to me. “You saved me.”

She responds like I slapped her. “Because youwantedto die.”

Back And Forth.I scale walls. She builds them higher, and I scale them again.

“I see you, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward. All of you.”

Her reaction to those words is visible to the point that I can practically feel the incessant pounding of her pulse.She believes me.

“I see you, too.” Hannah’s tone makes me think she would be good at throwing knives. “I see a little boy whoruns. I see a coward who only fights the battles that don’t matter because facing down the ones that do would be too damn hard. Has it ever occurred to you,Harry, that you don’t remember who you are because you don’t want to remember?”

Images hit me, one after another.A stone room. A maze. White marble. A knife. A chamber. A torch.

COMPLICIT.

I eradicate the space between us, my body screaming, pushed nearly to its limit. “Thentell me.”Tell me why you hate me. Tell me all the ways that I am twisted and dark.“Who am I, Hannah?” My ears are ringing. I do not want to know. Ican’tknow, but I push her for an answer anyway—and then, just as she’s about to give it to me, I break.

I beg her not to.

Because she’s right. Iama coward.

Chapter 19

Hannah doesn’t speak to me for three days. I don’t inflict my voice on her, either. No games. No pushing her to engage. Food tastes like ash in my mouth. I eat what little is necessary to survive, and that is all. On day four, Hannah slaps a full plate of food down on the mattress beside me.

Eat.Her command is silent, but it is enough to free my own voice.

“I’ve read enough fairy tales to know that one should be wary of magical beings bearing food.”

Hannah does not seem inclined to speak of fairy tales. “Eat,” she says, “and I’ll play.” It’s a no-frills kind of offer, but I feel it like an electrical current passing through vein after vein, waking me up, making me real. “A game of your choosing,” she continues, “within reason.”

I know better than to think that she misses playing. Ido.

“And you claim that you aren’t selfless.” I pick the plastic fork up from the plate and give the utensil a contemplative twist in my fingers. “That you have no magic. That you aren’t a ray of uncompromising, unbroken light.”

Coward or not, I’m done pretending that Hannah the Same Backward as Forward is anything less than she is.

Soon enough, our deal is struck. I will eat. I will make myselfstrong enough to leave this place and relieve her of my presence. In exchange, she will play.

I choose my next game: “Hangman.” That throws her for a loop, as much as anything can.

“Hangman?”

My lips remember how to smile. “That’s the game. But to make it interesting, there’ll be a wager. I have the sense that my people—whoever they are—are very fond of wagers, risky ones in particular.” Mentioning mypeopleis like pressing on a bruise to see if it still hurts.

My memory stays blessedly quiet, and Hannah bites. “What’s the bet?”

I lay out my terms: three days and unlimited guesses for her to figure out one word. With each guess she makes, attempting to decipher it, I’ll draw her, line by line. And if, after three days, she cannot tell me my word, then she has to tell me about her mother.

Hannah’s lips part. I see the refusing coming and preempt it. “Either that or you can tell me about your lost one.”

“Lost one?” She makes those sound like fighting words.