You need to choose whether or not you want to survive or you want to live.

“I didn’t want to die, but I knew I couldn’t live,” I breathe brokenly.

Ryan stands beside me silently, his hand clasped around mine, somehow warm despite the cold air.

“Can I show you something I found?” he asks, tugging on my hand.

I nod mutely, reluctant to pull my eyes from the brown earth. I feel like I’m failing her. I won’t go over there, I know that, but it hurts to think I’m abandoning my friend. She’s the first person I’ve lost in years, and while we weren’t that close, it still stings. It’s still an opening of a wound that should have been closed forever a long time ago.

It’s still a strike of flint, an itch in my veins that makes me want to run.

When I realize where Ryan is taking me, I want to dig in my heels. I want to root myself like those carrots out in the garden, buried under the ground and oblivious to the burn of embarrassment that’s building in my gut and on my cheeks. But I don’t back down because he’s right—I’m brave. And stupid. I’m beginning to think the stupid is getting stronger every day. Ryan doesn’t see it that way, though. Stupid to me is what sweet is to him.

When he stops in front of the wall at the back of the building, I cringe. It’s still there. The writing in white rock that I impulsively scrawled on the rough brick. The message I wrote to him in the hopes that it would find him someday. It was a moment of plain, simple honesty that was too big to keep inside at the time. Now standing here next to him, it seems too big to hide. It’s always been too much, this thing with him. It always has been and always will be more than I can manage.

I miss your kiss.

“That’s your handwriting, isn’t it?” he asks softly.

He’s doing me a favor by not looking at me. His eyes are fixed on the wall, his shoulder pressed up against mine.

“Yeah,” I admit weakly.

“You wrote it before you got out?”

“Yep.”

“Why did you write it?”

“Because I couldn’t say it.”

“Because I wasn’t here.”

“No. Because I’m broken.”

I feel him look at me, but I stare straight ahead. My eyes are fixed hard on the ‘m’ in my message. They keep following the lazy roll of it—up and down, up and down. Like waves on the ocean.

“You’re not broken, Joss.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You’re alive.”

I shake my head in silent protest.

“Every day when I saw your writing on the wall, I knew you were still out there. You were telling me you were still alive. Do you know what this message tells me now?”

I feel my chest tighten, my fear of the words I’ve told him not to say rising in my veins so thick they might burst. “No.”

“Even in here, even in prison when they had you trapped, you didn’t give up. You don’t know how to quit. You don’t know how to die. You may have been a ghost for six years, Joss, but you’ve always been alive.”

I close my eyes, a wave of dizziness rushing over me. I’m not surprised when he kisses me softly, lighting me up inside like the sun rising over the river behind him. I’m grateful for it. His arms around me, his lips on mine—it steadies me. It pushes away that dizzy, sick feeling in my head and my heart until I’m standing straight. Firm. Solid.

Until I feel more like me as I’m wrapped up in him than I have in a very long time.

Everything is changing. Everything is different than it ever has been before. I’ve always felt like Ryan was taking something from me, stripping away the layers of shadow and shroud that I’ve covered myself in while trying to hide. To survive. And I let him. I grudgingly let him do it, and now that I’m standing in the sun beside the water with him holding me, seeing me, knowing me more than anyone has in my short, painful life, I feel less afraid and more alive than I ever thought I could.

***

We sleep for most of the day. My schedule is getting all turned around. I’m going nocturnal and I don’t know how much I like it. I prefer the daylight. I like the warmth of the sun on my skin and light in the sky. I like seeing what’s coming. Too many shady things happen in the dark for me to ever trust it completely. I read once that up in Alaska there are weeks in the summer where the sun never sets. I thought that sounded like heaven until I got to the next chapter. Turns out in the winter there are times where the sun never comes out. Hard pass on that noise. Alaska can keep their wonky hours.

Once we get up, Ryan and I join Vin in his office again to talk about where we go from here. Trent is MIA—he was gone before we woke up—but I know he’s somewhere; he wouldn’t leave Ryan on his own, and part of me is pretty convinced he wouldn’t leave me either.

“Who do you have locked up?” I ask Vin.

He eyes me shrewdly. “Who are you looking for?”

“No one. It’s just a question.”

He stares at me, unmoving.

“Fine,” I groan. “Melissa.”

“Why Melissa?”

“I have my reasons.”

“Penance? Forgiveness?”

“No.”

“Yes. She was Caroline’s closest friend. Do you have some things you want to say to her? Or more importantly, do you have some things you want to hear from her?”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Stop that,” I growl.

Vin sits forward in his seat, his arms coming to rest on his desk. “Melissa won’t forgive you and even if she did it wouldn’t help. You don’t feel bad for her. You don’t even feel bad for Caroline. You feel bad for yourself.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.”

“He’s right,” Ryan says quietly.

I stare at him, shocked. “Are you siding with him?”

“He’s right,” he repeats.

“Even your boy knows,” Vin tells me. “And I bet if we brought your buddy Trent in here, he’d agree too. That dude has definitely killed a time or two, but you don’t see him wandering around all sad-faced and begging everyone who will listen for forgiveness.”

“That’s not what I’m doing,” I tell him hotly.

“Not yet. But if you go in there with Melissa, you’ll start. She won’t say it’s okay, because for her it’s not. You killed her friend. You gotta learn to live with that.”

I shake my head in frustration.

“You told Hyperion here because you thought he’d make it all better, didn’t you?”

I want to leave. I want to pull my knife, take my best shot at him, and shut his mouth.

“But he couldn’t do it, could he? What’d he tell you, Kitten? That you’d never get over it?”

“ I killed a woman.”

“ You’ll never get over it.”

Stupid freaking know-it-all pimp!

“You’ve done it, haven’t you, Hyperion?”

There’s a long pause, a silence that fills the room, expands then bursts, leaving it feeling empty and cold.

“Yeah,” Ryan admits roughly.

“We all have. Anyone who really wants to live has done it.”

“Doesn’t mean I’m okay with it,” I mutter.

“No one says you should be.”

“This is pointless,” I snap, sorry I brought it up. “We need to decide where we go from here.”

“I told you, same as I told the people out there: we don’t make a move with your friends until we get our hands on the guy who killed Rebecca.”

“They’ll never hand him over,” Ryan tells him honestly.

Vin spreads his hands. “Then where we go from here is nowhere. Not with the cannibals.”

“You’re being impossible,” I growl. “You know you don’t stand a chance without their help.”

“I also know everyone here won’t work with those people, not in a million years.”

“Not even if they get Bryan,” Ryan agrees.

“Nope. It’s just not going to happen. So I don’t care that they won’t hand him over. In fact, I’m counting on that.”

“Because then it’s their choice that you don’t work together, not yours.”

“We tried to be reasonable,” Vin says in mock sadness.

I begin to the pace the room, unable to hide my frustration. “You’ve already been living on borrowed time here, using the Leaders you captured to put on a show. That can’t last forever. Eventually one of them will get sick of prison and betray you, even if it means dying. Then what will you do? The Colony will be at your door in a heartbeat and your Guard can’t hold them off.”