Page 25 of Chaos

“Yes.”

I flinch off memories I can’t touch right now. “I can’t go back there.”

“You won’t.” He studies me with acute intensity, like he’s still cataloging scrapes and bruises for a later reckoning. Like my body is his and he only loaned it out to me, and now he’s checking to make sure I didn’t damage it beyond repair.

It comes back then.

The sound of guns.

Scraggle’s voice from the steps. Words that used to be innocuous that suddenly aren’t.Yet. Bucket. Soap.

The ricochet as I tugged on his boot.

The sound of the gun coming down on his face.

“Scraggle is … dead?”

“The guy at the bottom of the stairs? Not yet.”

“Ben?”

“They’re both in custody.”

That has me trying groggily to sit up. “Renata said he has to die. That he can’t live. And she said the pigeons couldn’t leave. We can’t let them go.”

“Okay,” he says softly, pressing me back into the chaise.

“No. You need to tell them. You need to make sure they do it.”

His eyes tighten with concern, like I know he’s thinking it can wait, but he gives in. “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

While he jogs to the doors, and speaks to whoever is waiting on the other side, my sluggish brain fixates on the fact that the hot heaven clouds are actually steam, and the golden light is shining through Palladian windows. “We’re in the bathhouse,” I say as soon as he’s back, needing confirmation. “At Thornewood.

“Yes.” He sits back down on the chaise beside me, all the tactical gear attached to his body whooshing, boots squeaking on the ground. “Sheila gave you antibiotics, told me to clean you up. She’s with Wendell now, but she’ll come back in a bit to check on you. You’re safe.”

Safe.

I look around, half expecting everything to shift slowly back to bricks with crumbled mortar, concrete and a low, dusty ceiling. But the room is unchanged. Blue and white tiles and a coffered ceiling, and the soft smell of sulfur and soap. The painting of the first president of the once United States in its place, crossing the Potomac River, the hot pink graffitied rubber chicken dangling from one hand, his chin haughtily high.

It’s me who changed.

An IV’s in my too-thin arm, held in place with surgical tape in a patch of skin they must have cleaned with alcohol or something, because it’s a shiny, pale splotch in the midst of dingy skin. My filthy, ripped shirt is gone. I’m draped in a clean towel. My hand is sitting in a bucket of warm water. That’s what Yorke was glaring so angrily at when I woke up—the blisters and the cuts and the torn-off fingernails.

“It was me,” I say. “I did that.”

He grunts out a rejection of my statement.

“They didn’t torture me, if that’s why your face looks like that.” I want his face to stop looking like that. I want it to look like it did before this happened, but if anything, he looks angrier as he returns his focus to the cloth and my hand and the bowl of water it’s resting in.

“Auden?” I murmur.

“He’s waiting for when you’re ready to see him.”

“Was he scared?”

“He handled the last month better than I did.”

“I smell,” I whisper, my voice breaking.

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