Page 29 of Chaos

8 |Apolitical rut

FRANKIE

“WERE YOU SCARED?”Auden shifts against my chest less than ten minutes later.

I’m not sure how to answer. In the cellar all I thought about was escaping. It didn’t occur to me there were nightmares here, too.

Shasta’sblind?

There’s a foreverness to the word, a world evergray. No shape or color or light. Blind. Like the dark inside my cellar, no sun shards seeping through the cracks. Forever. No hope of escape.

I need to go to her, but I had to see Auden first, reassure him I’m fine. Shane and Beast met us with him at the suite. We’re all in Auden’s bed now, which feels like the heart of our little home.

The sheets are bright white and clean, the duvet fluffy, the pillow softer than clouds. It smells like fresh laundry and home.

Velvet drapes are pulled back to let sunbeams spill across the plush navy carpet and the golden stars studded across it, lighting up the amber walls and gilt starburst mirror. Auden’s favorite flashlight and Mr. Oink-Oink are on the side table, along with a water carafe and a stack of books they’ve clearly been reading without me.

Yorke is on my left, his big, warm body curled around mine. Auden is snuggled in against my right. Shane, his injured hand wrapped in a thin beige bandage, his gaze oddly cagey like he’s waiting for me to shatter, is on the other side of him. Beast is flopped across my feet, gazing dolefully at me, his tail working hard, a whine catching in his throat like he’s desperate to jump on me but can tell I’m about a quarter dead.

Only Auden’s treating me like nothing has changed. His gray-green eyes are bigger and wider than I remember, but just as trusting, his cinnamon-colored lashes fluffier. And so flipping tender, like the finest new roots growing in a garden, so soft and breakable.

It makes me think of what a newborn would be like if we had one here in the bed with us.

Soft.

Defenseless.

Mortal.

I’m not sure I could bear it.

“Frankie?” Auden repeats. “Were you? Were you scared?”

“Oh. Uhh …” There’s a knee-jerk urge to placate, but it doesn’t feel right to lie. Fear is a real thing in our world.

Shane turns his face toward the door, his jaw tightening. He’s been through some shit, too. Pretending it’s not scary helps no one.

“I was. I was scared they might hurt me. And then I was scared they might take me away even farther from you. And I was scared you were worried and sad.” I drop my nose into Auden’s hair and breathe him in. “Were you scared?”

“Shane was,” he says instantly, twisting around to pin me with his gaze, then swiveling toward Shane. I try not to flinch when he comes into striking zone of my cuts and bruises. “Right, Shane? You told me you were.”

“I was scared,” Shane says simply, a swath of his coppery hair coming down to cover his eyes, and I wonder how he feels about what happened in the woods. I pushed him down a hill. I did it to save him, but still, he must have feelings about it. “Real scared.”

“Me too,” Yorke murmurs, the words vibrating from his chest, through my back.

“The important thing is it’s over.” My voice spikes with forced positivity. “We got through it, and we’re going to try even harder never to get separated again.”

“I miss Ruby,” Auden says.

My forced smile dies. “Me too.”

“The food stinks without her. Like so bad, Frankie. You won’t believe it. It always tastes like an accident.” He wriggles back around to lock his focus in on me. “Like someone did it by mistake. And then you eat another bite, and hope maybe you just got confused and it’ll actually taste okay again.”

Shane snorts. “He’s not wrong.”

“Ruby’s body was in the freezer,” Auden adds, blinking at me and nodding fast. “It’s true. It was. They kept her there until they realized you weren’t coming back and we couldn’t keep her there anymore.” He keeps going, too fast for follow-up questions. I can guess anyway. “Hank still does bread. But Pearl told Isha he’s always drunk now. And Len does cheese.So those are still safe, but there’s not enough because the soldiers eat it all. But an army guy named Plumberger makes food that everyone says tastes like poison. That’s what May told Gus. And then Gus asked how she knew. And then she threw a marker at his head. He caught it. They thought I was outside playing, but I saw it. So then they said only adults can throw markers at people’s heads. And Shasta won’t talk to me.”

He really tacked that one on the end there, and my poor heart or soul or whatever it is inside me thrashes around at that, irate and squalling at the injustice of it all.

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