inDIVISIBLE (27 page)

He listened and walked, his steps slower. “I’m sorry,” he said when I’d finished.

I shrugged the apology away. “I made it. That’s what counts. Besides, it wasn’t too bad.”

He didn’t laugh—didn’t call me a liar, but he did stop beneath a large aspen. The leaves hung stoically, giving us shade as we lowered ourselves to the ground. T leaned against the tree and kicked his feet out in front of him. He coaxed me closer until I sat beside him, the heat he always produced in me
both comforting and disconcerting.

“Rest your head on my lap,” he whispered.

I lay on my side, my head on his thigh—and he stroked my hair with his palm, playing with the ends of my braid. His hands eased down my back in soft circles of comfort and my eyes fell closed before I could think. The sunlight faded away, and I escaped to a world where I sat with muddy children and giggled before soaring through the sky to look for predators.

He woke me when the sun hung on the horizon. I stretched and rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
“I love watching you sleep,” he said.

I yawned. “
Why’d you let me sleep so long?”

“We both needed rest,” he said
. He swallowed, looked off into the hills and back to me. “And I wanted to memorize everything about you while you weren’t watching.”

My cheeks burned
, and I dropped my gaze to the ground. Nobody had ever talked to me like T, but what made it the most appealing was his sincerity. If only we had some time to be truly alone … I listened and heard a squirrel in the brush—a bird in the distance, confirming our solitude. I straddled his legs, sitting on his thighs. I tried to look him in the eye but my gaze kept slipping to his lips. I cleared my throat. “Sometimes when you talk like that, I’m afraid you’re saying goodbye.”

He smoothed a stray hair behind my ear, his fingers resting just below my earlobe and throwing chills down my spine. “I never want to say goodbye to you,” he whispered.

I caught my bottom lip between my teeth and let it slip, slowly, free. “Never?”

His hand moved around to cradle the back of my head, pulling me toward him as he said, “Brynn, I think I may be in love with you.”

My heart pummeled my ribs, and I had no desire to resist that final inch that brought our lips together. Warm and full, our lips molded together, his hands slipping up into my hair and mine wrapping around his neck to keep him close. My fingers rose into his hair as warmth spread all the way to my toes.

I moaned.

T laughed, lips still pressed to mine.

I pulled away for air and buried my face in his shoulder. His arms encircled me and held me to his chest, his heart beatin
g erratically through his thin shirt. My heart swelled, the chills replaced with a warmth so thorough I knew … and I had to let him know. When I could speak again, I lifted my head and met his eyes. I pressed my lips together, considering the best way to say it when it burst from my lips without warning. “I love you, T.”

He kissed me again, a gentle, simple kiss that should probably have been the first—and though it lacked the passion of our first kiss, it carried the emotions we’d both admitted.

I sat back, warmth making me tremble but clarity making the world bright, full of possibilities. I smiled.

T touched my bottom lip, let his finger slide away, his expression
thoughtful but at peace. “I can’t imagine life without you,” he whispered.

I heard the farewell in his voice again but knew I must be imagining it, so I turned it to a positive and stood, pulling him to his feet beside me. “You’ll never have to,” I said, “because I’m going nowhere without you.”

T slipped the backpack over his shoulder and took my hand, the sun gone now but the moon lighting our path with half of its light. “I think we should travel in the dark tonight. They’re going to scour the hills during the day until they find us.”

The chill
brought me back to reality, and I fell into step beside T, his hand tight in mine. I only hoped he could see well enough to recognize the route. “How did things go with you?” I asked.

T marched ahead, limping.

“T?”
              He cleared his throat. “I got off a couple of shots. I don’t think I hit them but I certainly got their attention. They shot back but I hid in the rocks until I found another way out, looped around to the southeast and ended up where you found me.”

“You make it sound like it was nothing,” I said, knowing he hid something critical.

He shrugged.

“Why are you limping, T?”

“They nicked me, once. No big deal.”

“You were shot?” I asked, too loudly. “Where?”

“Left thigh. A graze.”

“We’ve got to look at it, bandage it.”

He took my hand, pulled me beside him. “I already took care of it while you were sleeping.”

“That’s why you wanted to stop?” I asked. “And you weren’t going to tell me?”

“I wanted time with you more than anything else. Bandaging the wound was an afterthought. Besides we were both exhausted. We needed the rest and it’ll be good to travel tonight—put more distance between where we are now and where they think we are.”

“Don’t push it,” I said. “If you need to stop and rest, you better do it.”

T let go of my hand and climbed around a thick tree that balanced on the hillside. He pulled me up behind him and kept walking, not taking my hand again.

CHAPTER 33

We snuggled under the blankets at dawn, slept until the heat overwhelmed us and began walking again. We passed a second checkpoint where we stopped to eat as instructed, the meal a single apple split between the two of us. Each bite slid into my stomach and made it ache worse than before. But I wouldn’t give it up. I needed the nourishment, the liquids from the juices.

Hungry enough to consider pine needles, I licked each finger before drying them on my jeans. “Do you think they’re watching?”

T looked around. “I hope so.”

“How long before they come for us?”

“After we reach the last checkpoint.”

I arched my back and
stretched. “How far is that?”

T stared into the distance, distracted. “We should reach it
by tomorrow night.”

I could survive another day without food, then we’d be taken care of. We’d be fed. “So we’re close.”

T nodded.

“Then why do you look so down?”

He drew his attention back to me, then to the apple stem in his hand. “I wonder what we’re really going to be able to accomplish,” he said. “I mean, we’ll make it to the Freemen, but what then? It’s not as if we can save the world.”

I picked up a rock and threw it into the dirt at my feet. “Why not?”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Why can’t we have an impact?”

“We’re two … against how many?”
              “So? We don’t know how many others there are, how many are willing to step in beside us to do something.”

T leaned back. “We don’t have the supplies they were counting on. So what are we going to do, overthrow the Alliance with our bare hands?”

“No. Technology.”

He shook his head but looked penitent. “Sorry. I’m hungry, tired,
and sore.”

“Me too.”

“So I should just quit being a baby and do something about it?” he asked.

I grinned. “Something like that.”

T cocked his head and flicked his tongue across his lips. “We’re close. Might as well see what the Freemen want to do, right?”

I laughed. “
It’s better than getting killed—and you get to spend more time with me—alone.”

T stood and helped me to my feet. He pulled me close and looked at me, arms around my back, holding me to him.
“I like the idea of being alone with you, maybe too much.”

“Should I be worried?”

He shook his head and grew thoughtful. “Two of us—and you think we can change the world?”

“I know we can.”

He traced my lip with his thumb and I quivered. “Sometimes you make me want to kiss you.”

I caught my lip between my teeth, trying to stop the shaking before I asked, “Then why don’t you?”

His tongue flicked across his parched lips and he whispered, “I don’t want to spoil you.”

I didn’t care about spoiling.
I just wanted to taste him, hold him. He slid his hand to mine and pulled me forward again, traveling nearly ten feet before he dropped my hand and pulled me against his chest. He just held me for several minutes before he leaned back far enough to meet my eyes, then his lips lowered and we kissed—sweet—soft—too short.

He started walking again without a word
, and I knew that the concerns he’d voiced to me were only the few he’d felt safe confiding.
What else, T?
I wanted to ask.
What’s bothering you so badly that you feel you can’t even speak it?

But I didn’t ask him and he didn’t volunteer his thoughts. We just hiked, his fingers intertwined with mine, his arms strong and giving me the strength to keep up even when my legs felt like rubber.

We made it to the third checkpoint and he spun around to face me, his forehead crinkled and voice urgent. “Have you ever had a premonition?” he asked.

“Premonition—as in a feeling about the future?”

He nodded.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

He shoved one hand through his hair. “Do you think they’re a warning, like from God or something, or do you think they’re just our minds playing pranks?”

Tingles raced up the back of my neck. “What are you feeling, T?”

He scratched the back of his neck and stalked away before pacing back. “Nothing … it’s nothing.”

I grabbed his hand and forced him to be still. “You’re scaring me, T. Talk to me.”

He touched my cheek, fingers shaking.

I placed my hand over his, relishing the feel of it on my skin. “T, I love you. Please, know you can confide in me.”

T slipped his hand away. “I have this feeling, Brynn, and it won’t go away.”

My stomach fluttered
, and I wrapped my arms around my middle. “What is it?”

“Something has to be done,” he said, “but I can’t help but think you have to do it on your own.”

Fear shot through my veins, and I grabbed him. “You aren’t going to leave me. You have to come with me.”

“I’m not going to leave you,” he said. “That’s just it … it feels like something else.”

“What else?”

His shoulders slumped and he looked away. “I don’t know,” he lied.

              “T,” I coaxed—but I never got to finish before the helicopter returned. It circled around the river, widening its range in small calculated movements. First it continued in the direction of our fake colony, and T grinned at me as we crouched under the needles of a dying pine.
Not a real grin. His dimple didn’t show.

The helicopter returned several minutes later and began circling again, widening its
search until it nearly reached us and we leaned into the trunk of the tree.

T held a finger to his lips
, and we waited as the rotors loudened and softened, the shadow approaching before disappearing over and over.

My thighs burned but I stayed still and waited.

The helicopter moved away quickly now, back to the river where we’d discarded the tracking devices, across it to the cliff where we’d lost the blankets and finally over the settlement where we’d met Summer. I thought of the children, the families—living there to find their own freedom and my rage burned at the Alliance. Not only had they run those people from their own homes, but they now hunted them from the sky, keeping them in check, in constant fear that one day they’d swoop down and steal it all away.

I moved from under the branches enough to see it hovering
over the valley, making low swoops that I knew must have rattled the tents in that settlement, then it popped up over the hills and came straight for us. The black speck became large enough to distinguish and it stopped, hovered in the sky near the first checkpoint where T and I had reunited. It settled just above the trees, and the door slid open. A silhouetted man stepped onto the skids, dropped a rope and jumped, gliding beyond the trees, no doubt to the ground. A second followed, then a third.

I gripped T’s hand, eyes wide. They had men on the ground again and it would only be a matter of time before they
found our trail and came for us.

“They already know we’re here,” he whispered.

My breath caught, lungs burning. “But we threw them off.”

“For a while,” he said. “I’m actually surprised it took them this long to send someone for us.”

“Now we run?” I asked.