Sugar & Squall (21 page)

I was furiously sorting through things. The first-aid kit offered some mental respite until I realized it wasn’t really of much use unless you actually knew first-aid. I lifted Logan gently from the rock and laid the blanket over his shoulders.

The torch was small enough to fit in my mouth, so I clamped it between my teeth as I started rummaging through the contents of the kit. I knew help could be hours, maybe days away. Something had to be done about Logan’s wound, and fast.

He lifted himself up. “Bring it over here.”

I took the kit to him, top open. He picked through it, every so often pulling something free and adding it to a growing collection on the opened lid. Satisfied, he looked to me.

“I’ve got to suture the wound.” He was definitely speaking stronger, but his voice was still weak.

Stitching sounded like an awfully primitive and slow solution. “You can’t just burn it like in the movies? You can’t,” I searched for the word, “cauterize it?”

“Cautery is no good for a wound this deep. This isn’t MacGyver, you know.”

“Mac-who?”

“It doesn’t matter. Look, there’s a hemostat there in that white sachet on top. That will control the bleeding. Just pour it onto the wound.”

“Now?”

“Yes.” He was being short with me. He had to be.

I was skeptical. “Jesus, are you sure?”

He locked his hand around my wrist. His eyes searched mine. “I know what I’m doing. Trust me.”

“Okay,” I replied.

I picked up the packet and tore off an edge. Some of the contents were picked up by the wind and whisked away, so I angled myself back to the wind and hovered above the wound.

Logan drew the jumper up and away. The torch shook unsteadily against my teeth, scratching against the enamel. It threw light on and off the wound.

It wasn’t a pretty sight.
The cut was thinner than I’d thought, but it was long. Black, insipid blood oozed from the edges.

“Pour it right onto the wound,” Logan
instructed, “all of it. It’s going to burn, but don’t worry.”

I nodded and began to pour. There was a sizzle where the dust collected with flesh. Logan stiffened. His face balled up as I continued to pour the entire contents of the satchel out.

An acrid, pungent odor rose up and I had to turn away. I threw the packet to the side once it was empty and closed my eyes, pinching my nose together and breathing deeply.

I avoided the wound site altogether when I turned back to him. “What now?” I asked.

“Pass me the saline.”

“The wha–
”

“The clear bottle there. In a few minutes I’ll wash everything clean and start the sutures.”

I didn’t ask him if he knew what he was doing again. His medical knowledge and confidence had actually unnerved me if anything.

I passed the bottle to him. The whites of his eyes shot out at me in moonlit monochrome.

“In the slim packet there’s a needle. I need you to take the lighter there and heat up the tip until I say so.”

I did as he said. I took the needle out carefully knowing that losing it would be dire. As he’d said there was also a regular cigarette-lighter in the kit, which seemed odd. You were hardly going to light up a smoke or set yourself aflame in a situation like this. I thumbed it to life and held the tip of the needle over the flame, my eyes and the torch between my teeth all focused on its end.

The tip started to turn black. Could you burn metal? I wasn’t sure. I looked down to Logan and he nodded, telling me to keep going. “It’s just carbon,” he said.

Eventually, he told me to pull the flame away and pass him the needle. I snuck a glance at the wound and realized he’d cleaned it while I’d been occupied with the needle. It was now little more than a thin red line running down his abdomen, winking gently with every intake of breath. He already had the thread in his hand.

I passed him the needle and he worked away at it for a while before painfully pinching together the wound with his thumb and forefinger. The needle hung there, an inch or two away from the skin.

“If I pass out,” he said. “You have to wake me up. Okay?”

I nodded again. It seemed that was all I could.

I heard Logan’s teeth mash together when the needle went in. It poked out the other side cleanly, thread trailing behind it. A wa
ve of cold ran up from my feet, but I held strong. I watched his face distort with every pass of the needle, and all I could do was weep as he sewed himself back together.

#

He never did pass out.

“All done.” He’d pulled the jumper back over the wound, but he was now pressing a bulge against it I assumed to be part of the blanket.

I scooted closer beside him, lifting his hand up and replacing it with my own. I added downward pressure and he winced, so I backed off slightly.

A few nights ago he’d been the one out here saving me when I’d fallen into the water. He’d saved my life and I’d stabbed him in return. Some girlfriend I was turning out to be.

He seemed at ease. Nonetheless, I began to realize the only reason he looked so peaceful was because all the blood had drained from face. I reached around and held his hand in order to reconnect physically, pass energy between us.

“I’m
fine
,” he said, attempting to placate my worry.

“I know,” I replied, staring into his eyes. “How did you get away from the school?” I knew it was best that he didn’t speak, but I had to know.

He breathed in, filling his lungs. “I found the rifle and fired a shot out of the window. I didn’t know what it would do, but I hoped it would give you a chance, a distraction, anything to buy you a chance to escape. Did it work?”

I recalled the shot when the Eagle and I had fought at the rat’s nest. “It did.” I pressed his hand tighter.

“After that, I started after you. I couldn’t move fast. It took me ages to even get outside, and then I saw you, coming up from the chapel. As you came into range I saw the Eagle had his gun raised, so I fired. I think I got him in the shoulder.”

I remembered the way the Eagle had been thrown back, the thunder.

“I went to fire again, but you were running towards him. It was too dangerous… But you did kill him?”

I
realized then what I had done. “Yes.”

“
What happened down there, at the chapel?”

“I shot him in the cave, but he was
wearing a bulletproof vest.”

Logan nodded, as if he’d been expecting it all along.

“But what about the explosion?” I continued. “Why would he want to just blow up the school like that?”

Logan shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, honestly. I’m just glad you weren’t in there when it went up. I’m glad
I
wasn’t in there.”

I changed the subject. “I still can’t believe Dad sent you here to look out for me. You’re really not Secret Service?”

“I am, but I’m not, not officially at least. I guess you could say I’m in a special branch.”

“What, the babysitters’ club?”

Logan laughed, gently. “Not quite. He wanted me to stay out of the way, you know, your father. He wanted me to be completely undercover, act like a regular student. He said you needed ‘controlled freedom’. His words, not mine.”

I put a face to the anger, the face of my father, for dragging Logan out here only to have me cut him up, for this whole life-scarring episode. But then I realized how things would have turned out if he hadn’t, if I’d never met Logan, which only complicated my feelings.

“I’m sorry,” Logan said.

“No,” I replied. “It’s fine. So Logan’s your real name?”

“Yes.”

“Y
ou’re older than me?”

“Just a little.”

“I didn’t know they let teenagers into the Secret Service.”

“They don’t, but it wouldn’t be the Secret Service without secrets, would it?”

I recalled now where I’d seen him before, in the background, that gala, in Spain, across the road, at the front of my old school, watching…

“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?”

He laughed. “I’ve been assigned to you since your father became president. That’s how I know you. I mean, I don’t know you, but yes, I’ve watched you from a distance, studied your files.”

“I have files?”

He rolled his eyes. “
A lot
of files.”

“Oh.”

He laughed again. “I probably sound like a stalker, but it was you,
you
were different. I know it’s against protocol, and I’ll probably get a real good ass-kicking if anyone ever finds out, but it just happened. I fell in love with you.”

“When you said you were here because you became too involved with a girl, were you talking about me?”

He nodded. “I asked for this assignment. Begged for it. Anything to be near you.”

A tear rolled off my eyelid. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were sooner?”

He breathed in again, steadying himself. “I didn’t have any reason to. I thought this would blow over, so I kept cover. I was caught between my job, my duty, and you. That’s why I was cold at first, and I’m sorry about that.”

He laid his head back. “When I was in the cave, that night, by myself, I wished everyone would just disappear and it would be you and I, alone. I guess I got my wish.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I know, but I took it as fate, a sign we were meant to be together. I ran with it an
d eventually it became too much. I was too deep into the lie.”

“That’s why you rejected me, last night on the roof.”

“Yes.”

“Is it true what you said then, about seeing me at the beach that night, with Xavier?”

He dipped his head, which I took as a yes.

“I think the others might have seen you, thought you were a ghost.”

“I just might be yet.”

I pulled closer. “That’s not funny.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just–” He trailed off.

“How’d you even know where I was that night?”

Logan pulled back his sleeve. He pressed a button on the side of his watch and it lit up neon green. I’d never noticed it before.

“It’s so I can track you. The actual
tracker itself is in the pendant on your necklace.”

“
Mom’s necklace? The one Dad gave me when he got into office?”

I reached down to the
pendant on my chest.

He nodded again. “
You never take it off. It’s how I knew you were out of the dorm, how I followed you down to the beach. I saw you and that guy and couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to invade your privacy.”

“I really wish you had.”

“No,” he reaffirmed. “It wasn’t fair of me to deprive you of your life, so I left. I know this whole island inside-out. I’d researched it for three weeks solid before we even arrived. I knew about the cave, so I went there, away from it all.”

He sighed. “I should have protected you. I should have stopped him.”

“It’s okay,” I said, trying to comfort him. “You couldn’t have known.”

I looked at his watch, the screen. There was a digital compass, a needle pointing in my direction, ‘3.5FT’ beside it. Real James Bond stuff.

“That’s how you knew which direction the Eagle had taken me. That’s how you found me out there.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think the kidnapping was connected to me?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. No one knew who you were except the principal and I. You just happened to be here. Bad luck. That’s all it is.”

Story of my life.

I could see he was mentally preparing himself up before he went on.
“If you don’t want to be with me, I’ll understand.”

This put me on the back foot, pissed me off even.

“No. I
want
to be with you.”

I felt a small pang of anger he’d lied to me when I thought we’d drawn so close. But the truth just seemed so abstract, and in a way I liked that, being bound together by circumstance and secrets.

“We’re in it together,” I said, concentrating more on keeping him calm than arguing out fine details. “Before you I was drowning, but the last few days you’ve saved my life, in more ways than one. I can’t live without you. I won’t.”

We sat there together for a while. Plenty of questions came, but I tried to pick out something easy, casual.

“When’s your birthday?” I asked.

“You’re
still
trying to work out how old I am?”

“Well, what did you put down on your application?”

“I said I was seventeen.”

“But you’re in your teens, though?”

“Of course,” he laughed.

I was still shell-shocked, sorting my way through this information dump. My head was stuffed with so many revelations, surprises and secrets that one more and ‘poof’, I’d disappear.