Burn (23 page)

Dear Fenn,

Dear Fenn, I just wanted.

Lona set down her pen in frustration. Zinedine was allowed pens again. It was decided that her risk had been greatly reduced with Lona's arrival and the deal that had been struck. The pen didn't make Lona a better writer, though. It didn't make it easier for her to express herself. Fenn wouldn't have had that problem. Fenn would have been able to write down exactly how he felt.

She took the birthday candle out of her pocket where she always kept it – a totem, a wish, a piece of luck – and rolled it between her fingers. The memory of frosting always made her fingers shiny with grease. This time, as the wax passed over her skin, part of it seemed to unroll into a thin strip, over her hand. She was dissolving the memento.

No. No!
The thought made her panic – the last tangible connection she had with Fenn until she got out. If she got out. She tried desperately to clump the wax together again, but it wasn't working.

And wait – when she looked closer, she saw that it wasn't a strip of wax at all, but a strip of paper, thin and soft and almost the same shade of green as the candle, which is why she hadn't noticed it before. It was sopped through with oil, nearly iridescent, but she recognized the paper as a scrap of the wrapping from her birthday present. There were gray marks on it, evenly spaced. Writing. Fenn's. Without allowing herself to hope for what it might be, she held the paper up to the lightbulb of the lamp next to the coffee table. A list, written so small she had to squint.

Lona's birthday. Tasted like:

Sugar

Warmth

Desire

Peace

Home

(Cake)

As gently as she could, she traced the words. He must have written it before he came out and found her on the porch, and they decided the night tasted like cloves. Or maybe after she had already gone to bed. She replayed the evening hungrily, trying to recapture moments she hadn't realized were important at the time. Reading Fenn's birthday list felt like reading a message in a bottle, something that had been written a long time ago and traveled miles to get to her.

Was there something else at the bottom? She held the paper closer to the light, and leaned in so close she could smell the memory of the buttercream. It looked like there were more words, below “cake”. Just a few of them, but they were in Fenn's handwriting and figuring out what they said seemed like the most important thing in the world.

Suddenly she was smelling something besides buttercream. Something charred and blackened, and her fingers were getting hot – and she looked down and Fenn's list was disintegrating. She'd rested it on the open bulb, and now the paper was dissolving in her fingers, disappearing before her eyes. Lona frantically pulled it away and blew on it – but nothing she did helped. Before her eyes Fenn's words vanished.

“What are you doing?”

She hadn't heard him come in. Usually Harm knocked first – an elaborate ruse of politeness, making it seem like she could choose to let him in. Now he was standing just a few feet away.

“Nothing.” She tried to keep the tremor out of her voice, looking down to where the tips of her fingers were black and charred.

“You're not doing nothing. You're doing something, at least.”

“I was writing a letter.” She looked back to the paper still lying on the table, where she'd never managed to complete more than a sentence. “What do you want?”

“Was the letter to Fenn?”

Why did he always ask her about Fenn? To hurt her? Did he bring it up specifically because he knew it was an open wound and he wanted to watch her writhe under the salt? “What did you bring today? A game? Cards?”

He didn't answer. “Harm? What did you want to do today?”

“Where do you think you'll go?” he asked. “When you and Zinedine leave, where do you think you'll go?”

Like so many things he said or did, the question seemed a non-sequitur. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other; the motion made Lona uneasy and she finally figured out why: it was because Harm himself looked uneasy. He usually looked like fluid motion, but now he just looked nervous.

“Back home, I guess,” she said.

“With Fenn and Gamb and Ilyf?”

“With Gamb and Ilyf at least,” she corrected him cautiously. “Or maybe Zinedine will get an apartment.” Lona was still seventeen. Was Zinedine her guardian now? Would they tour a college campus, or have mother–daughter shopping trips? She couldn't picture Zinedine at a mall.

“Where do you think I'll go, when you leave?”

What was he getting at?
“I don't know, Harm. I guess you can go wherever you want. You will have fulfilled your mission, right? They'll probably give you a medal.”

He made a small sound. It sounded like a laugh but there wasn't any mirth in it.

“Do you think I could go with you?”

She started to laugh, until she saw he was serious. “Do you
want
to go with us?”

“What if I want to go with
you
?” His glacier blue eyes were staring at her, melting. Time stuttered as Lona figured out how to respond. “What if I don't have anywhere else to go? Please?”

The “please” left her speechless, off balance. Before, when she first met Harm again and he poured her ice water in his little apartment downstairs, she thought his voice sounded brittle. Maybe brittle was the wrong word. Brittle things, when you broke them, shattered into nothing. But this, behind his words – if you broke what Harm was saying, it would shatter into sadness.

“Lona. Before, when you asked what I meant?”

“What you meant when?” she asked carefully.

“When I said that it was easy to tell you were in love with Fenn.”

She swallowed. “When you said I didn't realize I was in love with him,” she supplied. “When I asked whether you wondered what it was like to love someone and not know it.”

“Yes. That.”

“I remember.”

He took a step closer. The coffee table was between them, but he was skirting it, moving haltingly around the side. “I always admired you.” His face seemed to be tinted just slightly red, as if he were blushing. But Harm wouldn't blush. He might surprise her in a thousand ways. But Harm wouldn't blush. Would he?

“You admired me?”

“You were  …  whole. You weren't broken. It always seemed so easy for you, to find your own path.” She wasn't imagining it. There was the most delicate pink tinge spreading up from Harm's shirt collar, flushing his cheeks.

“None of you were broken,” she told him, but the words sounded hollow even to her. Of course they were broken. She'd said the same thing a hundred times herself. The Strays were all broken, and none of them were more broken than Harm.

“I don't know if I can love anybody, Lona. I don't know if love is  …  in my skill set. But I figured that if I'd ever been in love – even if I didn't know how to identify it, and even if it was only my limited version of it – I thought it would have been with you. That's why I wanted you to come here. I wanted to see you again. And I wanted you to see me, how much better I'm doing. How hard I'm trying.”

She shrank back involuntarily, stumbling against the sofa. Harm in love with her. Harm the sociopath. She still thought of him as the boy who had used his teeth to rip his way to freedom and send himself into an institution.
And to save me
.

“You're joking, right?” She wanted this to be a joke, a prank, a mindgame. She wanted to be able to forget he'd ever said this, and that she'd ever seen his eyes melt into a pool of sadness. “You're practicing your conversational skills.”

He arranged his lovely features into a smile. “Joking. Of course I'm joking.” But then he looked away from her and brushed his palm in front of his eye.

Was he
– she could barely believe it, but it was true. Harm was crying. Standing in the living room he had lured her to as a prisoner, Harm had silent tears streaking down his cheeks, rivulets of water down cold marble. When he realized she was staring at him, he covered his eyes with one hand, and that made him look like a child.

She couldn't stand to see it, this naked emotion, this flayed vulnerability. She took a hesitant step toward him and then another, and then, because she didn't know what else to do, she reached to his hand. He flinched when her fingers brushed against his wrist, as if she'd struck him with a hot iron.
The touching
, she reminded herself. Pathers were raised without touch. They feared it, and no one likely feared it more than Harm. The first time Fenn stroked her hand, she felt exquisite tremors for days. Harm never had that. Harm had probably never been touched at all.

She reached out again, this time even more slowly. With just her index finger, she slowly traced a path down the tendons connecting his wrist to his knuckle, on the hand still covering his eyes. “It's okay, Harm.” She never knew why people did these things, said things were okay when they weren't, but she found herself doing it now, lying to soothe. “It's okay.”

Harm dropped his hand, and his eyes were bloodshot. The blotchiness should have marred his face, but instead it made him look human. Lona remembered hearing a story once about the old master painters – how they would deliberately paint a flaw into each of their works, to prove that they knew they were unworthy, that they had no aspirations to be God. The flaws were what made the paintings beautiful. Harm's tears were his flaw.

“I'm really messed up, aren't I?” His shoulders were jerking up and down.

“I guess we all are. All of us who were in that program.” She moved her hand to his again, and this time he didn't pull away. This time he watched her cover the back of his hand with her palm, sucking in sharp mouthfuls of air, his shoulders heaving.

“None of you are messed up like me,” he said through choked sobs. The brittleness had completely shattered; there was only sadness now.

“You don't have to be,” she whispered. “You could come with us. You could come with us right now – we don't have to wait for Zinedine to finish her work.”

“I can't.”

“You can! Harm, it wouldn't be hard for you to come up with a story. You could say you needed to take us somewhere to trigger Zinedine's memories. Or that she needed supplies. Or that – Harm, you could think of a million excuses, and then we could just
drive away
.”

“Do you think I could? Do you think I could start over?” He sounded small and pitiful, the shards left over after a stone had cracked.

Suddenly Harm's face was centimeters away. He smelled like soap and something soft. Baby powder. More innocent than she ever would have imagined. Waves of pity ran through her body. Pity, revulsion, fear and sadness.
He deserved to have one experience that was about the softness of the human experience, not the harshness
, she thought as she felt his face come closer.
He deserves something that feels like the opposite of pain
. And then his lips were on hers.

The door flew open. Lona instinctively jumped away from Harm, but there was no need – Zinedine didn't seem to notice what she had interrupted. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes had a wild, off-kilter look to them, and she was out of breath.

“Zinedine?” Lona moved toward her in case something was wrong. “I thought you said you were going to work through the night. What are you doing back so—”

“I did it,” she interrupted. “I did it all. Today Katie remembered everything.”

“I was in a room. It was in a basement, I think, or at least in the interior of a building, because it had no windows.”

Katie paused to drink from the water Zinedine handed her. Her voice was raspy, it sounded like she'd been awake for days. Again, her shirt was soaking with sweat, and her hand trembled. “There were sixteen other people in the room, and we were debating how to proceed with a mission. Everyone was military or suits – everyone was a man, except me.”

“You weren't a man?” Harm asked.

“I was wearing a skirt and high heels.”

“It was a scene from Secretary of State Ursula Vaughn's time in office,” Zinedine interjected. “Katie even remembered the brooch she was holding that night.”

“Did you see this?” Harm turned to Anders, who was standing behind Zinedine. “Is it true?”

Anders cleared his throat. “We can confirm the brooch memory. I found a picture of that night from an angle that had never been published – it's in her hands, under the table.”

“It was a good luck charm. I knew it had belonged to my mother,” Katie said. “I don't know how I knew that but I knew.”

Harm and Anders's eyes locked from across the room. Finally, almost imperceptibly, Anders nodded his head. It was a benediction. A release. Harm had succeeded. Harm would get his medal after all.

Then Anders laughed, a full baritone chuckle. Lona had never seen him laugh; it was strange to see him happy. He clamped a hand on Zinedine's shoulder, shaking her back and forth in a vigorous congratulation.

Under the vise of his hand, Zinedine looked frailer than Lona had seen her look all week. At first she thought Zinedine was just exhausted, ready to collapse from lack of sleep. But then she saw the expression on Zinedine's face. It was uneasy – a grimace of resignation more than a look of triumph. She looked at Lona and shook her head sadly.

This wasn't a win. Not like Harm and Anders would think it was. Zinedine had managed to do what they asked, but what if what they asked was wrong? She'd given them what they wanted, but at what cost?

At the cost of our freedom
, Lona mentally answered, and she tried to convey that to Zinedine, too, by reassuringly nodding her own head up and down.

The morality was in a gray area, but then, wasn't life in a gray area too? Isn't that part of what she'd been thinking about, with Fenn? That neither one of them had been completely right or completely wrong?
Hadn't she just let Harm kiss her out of pity?

“You saved us, Zinedine,” she said pointedly. “Thank you for doing what you had to do.”

To Lona's left, Harm spoke for the first time since Anders had nodded at him. “I need to go call them.” He looked weakened, too, but in a different way from Zinedine. He looked like a marionette whose strings have finally been cut, who now must learn to walk on its own, with unsupported joints. “I need to go tell them it's over.”

It's over
. Lona wanted to repeat the mantra after every thought. Zinedine did what they asked and it's over.
She would go home and it's over. She would get to see Fenn and it's over.

“Are you okay?” she asked Zinedine, when Harm had left the room to make his call and when Anders was using his own phone to call a taxi for Katie. The rest of the basement was silent. Lona didn't know what time it was, but she knew it was late. Katie had been the only volunteer in the building.

“I'm tired, Lona.” Zinedine rubbed her face with her hands. “I'm just so tired.”

“Do you want to lie down for a minute?”

“No. God no. Let's go. Let's go right now.” She wrapped an arm around Lona, leaning on her for support. “Anywhere you want to.”

Lona put her arm around Zinedine's waist. They had the same stance, she noticed. They both turned their right feet out, just a little, cocking their left hips. She tilted her head down to her mother's shoulder.

Harm reentered the room a few minutes later, but instead of stopping to talk to Lona or Zinedine, he started directly for Anders.

“Harm, wait.” He turned to her but didn't seem to want to make eye contact. Was he embarrassed, about before? There'd been no time to say anything to him since the kiss in the apartment – everything had happened fast. Maybe he assumed their conversation was void now – that she'd only invited him to leave with her because she was trying to escape. “Harm.”

“I need to talk to Anders,” he said.

“Wait.” She grabbed his sleeve, and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Harm. Upstairs—”

He shook her off. “I need to talk to Anders,” he said again.

She watched as he bowed his red curls in close to Anders, and the doctor nodded solemnly – once, twice, four times. It was probably just official business, bureaucracy, nothing to worry about. But she couldn't help notice that Anders's eyes kept sneaking over to Zinedine.

“Zinedine,” Anders called loudly. “Would you come with me for a second?” Zinedine raised her eyebrows and looked uncertainly to Lona. “It's nothing,” Anders assured her. “We just want to make sure we understand all of your methods, before you leave. It won't take long. And, of course, we'll figure out how to keep in touch, for follow-up questions later.”

Zinedine squeezed her hand reassuringly before following Anders to the back room. This was normal, of course. Harm had said they could leave right away, but Katie had only woken up thirty minutes ago. Of course there would be things to go over. If Lona craned her neck, she could see her mother and the doctor talking. Her mother was pointing at something; Anders was nodding, there wasn't any reason to be suspicious.

“Lona?” Harm was standing beside her, closer than she'd realized.

“Congratulations, Harm.”

“Thank you.” Was that a smile or a wince?

“Upstairs—” she started again.

“We don't need to talk about it. You said I could leave with you so I would help you escape. But now Zinedine has solved the problem.”

“You could still leave with us, Harm. As soon as Zinedine is finished, we could all—”

“We don't need to talk about it,” he said again. He looked as tired as Zinedine. More, even. “Let's just sit down. Can we? And talk for a minute about normal things.”

“Sure.” She didn't know what else to say. Had Harm's feelings really changed so much in half an hour? Why was he behaving so differently from how he had in the apartment?

He led her back into the break room, sitting down across from her at one of the shellacked tables. The last time they'd sat here, he'd put something in her apple-flavored soda. Today he didn't offer her anything to drink, folding his hands on top of the fake wood. Normal things. He'd said he wanted to talk about normal things.

“Are you and Anders going to go out and celebra—” she started to ask. He raised one hand and shook his head. No. That wasn't the kind of thing he wanted to talk about.

“What do you want to be when you grow up, Lona?”

“You mean after college?” She adjusted her brain for this radical topic shift. “I don't know. I hadn't really thought about it. I like math. What about you?”

He shook his head again; he didn't want to talk about himself. “Do you think you'll study math in college? And have tests, or work on projects?”

“I guess so.” He seemed to be looking over her shoulder, at something behind her. She suddenly realized that she'd chosen the wrong seat. From where Harm was sitting, he had a direct line of vision to Anders and Zinedine. From where she was sitting, she could only see Harm. “What are they talking about back there? Are they almost done?”

“Do you think you'll make a lot of new friends there?” he asked. “Do you, Lona? And maybe you'll all go to each other's houses over breaks?”

“Harm, just come with us and pick your own college. Study whatever you want. I'm going to go check on Zinedine; I want to know if she needs anything.”

“Don't.”

She looked down and saw that he'd clamped his hand over hers, with more strength than she would have expected. “I wish I could go with you. It turns out they don't let you leave.”