The Wicked We Have Done

7

Stella hugs her knees as she sits next to the fire, mutely staring at the flames as they eat away the wood near our feet. Her arms are scratched and scabbed, face mottled with bruises and two black eyes.

Her slender figure has gotten even scrawnier in the past few days. But she doesn’t eat. Valerie cooks up the best meal we’ve had in this place—two cans of cubed beef, carrots, and caramelized onions. The smell is so good it’s painful. But even with a heaping plate in front of her, Stella gazes at the fire, her once golden curls now a haloed rat’s nest.

“Something fucked her up out there,” Valerie states between mouthfuls of beef.

If it was anything like what I just witnessed, I think I understand.

Jace and Valerie have been so consumed by Stella’s arrival that they aren’t interested in Casey’s absence. Tanner questioned where he was, and I said he was in the tent because he felt sick.

I’m hesitant to relay what really happened. Maybe I don’t want the camp more up in arms than they have to be.

For an hour I wait for Stella to eat. I ask her questions—why she’s so beaten up, where she’s been, what she’s seen. But it’s like she isn’t even comprehending what I say. After her dinner’s become cold, I reheat it in the skillet and bring it to Casey.

He lies on his side in the tent, his rib cage rising and falling. He glares at the nylon wall, even when I hold the stew out to him.

“We could die at any second, you know. Obviously you know. You can spend your last moments feeling sorry for yourself or you can enjoy the wonderful meal that Valerie cooked for all of us.”

“Right, Evalyn. I’m feeling sorry for myself. Fuck off.”

I can tell that kiss did a whole lot for our relationship. “So you’re going to try and convince me you’re not? Good luck with that.”

We’re locked in a staring contest for moments before he says, “I don’t think any of them are broken.”

“What?”

“My ribs. I don’t think any of them are broken.”

“Then quit brooding and eat the damn food I brought you.”

A challenge. He waits for a bit, until I roll my eyes, and then sits up with a wince. I hand him the dish and he eats all of the contents with his fingers, licking them clean.

“I knew you were hungry.”

“Did you tell them?”

“About your dad?”

He flinches.

“No. There’s no use scaring anyone when there isn’t a way to stop these things from happening.”

“Well, thanks for helping me keep my dignity intact.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Killing my dad is nothing to be ashamed of?” I sense his distrust.

“Casey.” I say each syllable of his name slowly, reaching toward the hem of his shirt. His breath hitches as I slide my hand beneath the fabric and rest my palm against his stomach and ridges of risen skin.

“A broken beer bottle,” he tells me. “I was out riding a bike with a friend. Didn’t tell him or my mom where I was going. She sat there and watched with a tissue pressed to her mouth. When he was done with me, she wrapped my stomach in gauze. Told me that I needed to be good, or these things would happen. But being good never stopped anything.”

I swallow nothing. My mouth is so dry. “He deserved worse than what you gave him.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that.” He’s urgent. Scared. “Not while they’re listening.”

“It won’t matter.” I drag my hands down his stomach, feeling his muscles tense at the touch of my fingers. “They know what’s going on in my head already.”

There’s a loud crash outside, metal clanking on metal, and Valerie yells, “The fuck is wrong with you?”

I scramble from Casey and he follows me out of the tent.

Valerie is restacking our pots and dishes. Stella paces back and forth, running her fingers through her tangled mane.

“She’s freaking out,” Jace says quietly from the log she’s seated on.

“We have to go!” Stella screams. “Get your heads out of your asses and pack up! Move! Move! They’re coming!”

She lunges for the stack of pots. Valerie shoves her to the ground.

“Hey!” I yell. “She’s damaged.”

“Obviously,” Valerie snaps, “but that doesn’t give her a right to give us any more grief.”

I glance back at Casey, who’s observing the exchange vacantly.

Jace reaches out in attempt to offer Stella some comfort, but Stella shies away from her hand.

“Then what do you expect us to do?” I ask.

“Send her on her merry way,” Valerie spits when she finishes stacking up the dishes.

“We can’t do that,” Casey says. “Not with what’s out there. Not with what she must have seen.”

Stella scurries over to the dirt patch and sits, picking away at her bleeding hangnails.

I know Casey doesn’t want me to tell anyone about our encounter, but it’s foolish to keep that information away from the brain of the group. So while Jace and Valerie are washing down by the creek, and Casey is asleep, I tell Tanner everything. He’s riveted by my explanation of our attack, fearlessly asking for the morbid details—the emotions I felt when I shoved the knife into Casey’s father’s back, whether or not his blood was warm, how many times Casey stabbed him.

“It doesn’t seem logical that the Compass Room would let you defeat a test through murder.”

“Exactly,” I say. “I was sure we were both dead.”

Tanner’s eyebrows furrow. “Unless there are multiple algorithms that the system is using. Maybe some executions have a very simple pan-out, like Erity’s and Salem’s. But maybe . . . maybe the Compass Room is slowly collecting data on inmates like you and Casey through your thoughts and actions. That would make sense, right? If it was one test, the Compass Room would only need to keep us for a handful of hours instead of an entire month.”

“What kind of data?” I ask.

“Maybe it’s attempting to determine justified violent thoughts verses unjustified violent thoughts. Casey’s father was attacking him, and all you were doing was defending him. Maybe, if the only violent thoughts that you express while you’re in here are those necessary for self-preservation, you’ll end up escaping.”

From across the fire, Stella chuckles, slow, rolling, hoarse. “Little boy. Little boy, you know nothing. All of you, safe in your fort in the woods, with one another.”

She’s lucid. I have an opportunity. “What happened to you, Stella?”

“It comes back. Bury it, burn it, break it into pieces. It always comes back.”

“What does?” Tanner asks.

She clutches the knots in her hair, yanking at them. Fat, ugly tears roll down her cheeks, creating clean streaks through the filth. “He keeps finding me. Over and over and over. And I tell him that it wasn’t me.” Her voice cracks in a sob. “But he doesn’t believe me because he finds me later and blames me again.”

I want to ask her what the hell she’s talking about, but at that moment, Valerie and Jace return from the creek, and Stella ceases her cries, wiping her red, wet cheeks before picking her cuticles once again. Tanner and I exchange glances. We know that it will be futile trying to get anything else out of her.

Bury it, burn it, break it into pieces.

The words race through my mind as I try to sleep.

We’re all curled up in our usual spots, Casey more distant from me tonight. Stella refuses to enter the tent, even though Valerie and Tanner are on guard until midnight.

Bury it, burn it, break it into pieces. It always comes back.

Valerie tries to reason with her, but she isn’t very good at it.

“If you could tell us what’s wrong with you, we’d help,” she says. “But instead you’re going all crazy bitch on us and I really don’t have the energy to decipher you.”

“You don’t need to decipher me,” Stella says, her voice an eerie singsong that’s all the wrong notes strung together. “You and your camp and your nonchalance. Sitting here, eating your food.”

“Yeah? And what do you suggest I do differently, huh?”

“Nothing.” Stella’s voice drops to a dark monotone. “It’s so pathetic how oblivious you are.”

“Oblivious to what?” Tanner asks.

“That this place is patiently waiting to peel back the layers of your skin and claw out your insides.”

“Shut up and go to bed,” Valerie says. “Before I make you.”

Casey breathes in and out, slow and deep, his face scrunched up like he’s dreaming something dreadful.

The day is safe.

Casey teaches Tanner how to cook breakfast over an open fire. The boy can wow us all with the smart words continuously flowing from his mouth, but he can’t perform any practical task to save his life.

“The potatoes are burning!” Tanner howls. The tragedy of the morning. “I ruin everything.”

When Casey laughs, the corners of his eyes crinkle. A sharp, warm burst races to my heart and rattles it around.

In this moment, he’s not thinking about his dad. Progress.

I spend the afternoon with my painting. I’ve been able to work on it every day, but on this occasion, it receives hours of my attention.

I’m shirtless, not wanting to stain my last clean white tee, even though here, fashion really doesn’t matter. But it’s liberating. I wipe my stained fingers on my stomach, red trails lacing with blue and coal.

“I thought this might have been yours,” says a deep voice. I stiffen, looking down at my bra smeared with black and yellow fingerprints, and then back at my tree. It’s almost finished. Almond-shaped leaves decorate the branches in reds and pinks and blues. Their edges glow with the yellow of the clay.

I turn to see Casey with his shirt off.

“Why are you naked?”

“Why are you naked?”

“Touché.” I dip my finger in the blue and swipe it on the rock, creating another leave on the coal branch.

“I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“What?” I wipe my hand on my stomach.

“To paint like this.”

I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “I thought you were an expert on my trial.”

“I never said that.”

“One of my paintings was psychological evidence. The prosecuting lawyers were using it to pin me as bat-shit crazy. ‘Fulfilling my own prophecy.’ It was all over the news.”

He shakes his head, crossing his arms over his bare, bruised chest. “I don’t remember. What was it?”

“What was what?”

“The painting? What was so fucked up about it?”

I think for a moment, biting my lip, and then dip my finger in the blue paint. “I will show you.”

“Now?”

“Come here.”

“How are you going to show me now?”

“Just come here and sit down.”

He hesitates, but complies.

“In front of me. Scoot in front of me.” I study his chest when he does so, deciding where I want to start. I’m biased with the scars and bruises that twist his skin. A pang of guilt slices my stomach as I find myself stuck with the fleeting thought that there’s something beautiful about his marred flesh.

I reach out, grazing him right below his left nipple with my paint-covered finger.

He releases a sharp gasp, and then laughs. “Seriously?”

I say with the straightest face, “You mind? I’m working.”

The light in his irises shifts, his expression giving into mischief. “Fine. The lady wants to work, so I’ll let her work.”

“Thank you,” I say flatly, trying to ignore the thrill racing from my gut to my thighs. Something seems wrong with being turned on in the Compass Room. My next move doesn’t really help the matter either. I ask him to lie down.

This time, his complies without even stalling.

I drag across his skin three claws of blue sky. Reaching his scars, I’m desperate to read him like braille.

I don’t know for how long I have him beneath me, but he remains motionless other than the rise and fall of his chest. Only when I drift to the area below his navel does he inhale rapidly.

“You ticklish?”

“No,” he says.

When I trace the skin again, the small of his back arches off the ground.

I don’t want to tell him I’m finished. I want to keep touching his hot, paint-slick skin. Our kiss was a way for me to take his pain away—I’d been convinced of that. We haven’t even spoken of it. I thought it would stay buried until we died, but now he’s before me, covered in my sky and my clouds—a vessel from my past to here, from Meghan to the Compass Room.

She’d want me to have him.

“I’m done.” I wipe my hands across my collarbone.

Slowly he sits up. “It’s a . . . a sky.”

“Yup.” I stand, needing a break from this suffocation. The creek’s only a few yards downhill. Without thinking twice I unbutton my cargo pants and slide out of them.

“What’s so psychologically disturbing about a sky?”

I don’t know what to say. I could explain that Meghan had been painted into the picture too, but I’m not ready to return to her. Not right now.

So instead of speaking, I take off my bra.

My back is to him, but even so, I feel the shift of tension in the air. I step out onto the rocks, careful not to slip until I’ve made it to the pool in the middle of the creek.

He hasn’t said anything. His thoughts must be misplaced for the time being.

I cup my hands beneath the water and lift them, tilting my palms until the icy trickle washes away most of the paint on my chest and stomach, leaving nothing but ghosts of color across my skin. “You better come wash yourself off,” I yell. “If that shit dries, you’ll be multicolored for days.”

As I leave the creek, he enters. I hug my chest, but that doesn’t stop him from staring at me as we pass each other in the water. My heart thumps wildly against my clenched palms.

On the shore, I kneel, facing away from the water and drying myself off with my shirt. I feel his presence when he sits behind me, like the heat of his body is radiating a million times more than it should be.

“You don’t have to be a neck breather to glance at my tits, Casey. All you have to do is ask.”

He scoffs. “Sometimes it’s like you don’t have a filter for your mouth.”

“Fuck you.” I glance at him and smile. He smiles back. It’s bright, until his expression shifts and I know he’s thinking of something darker than my running mouth.

“And even your instincts. It’s like you didn’t think of the fact that your neck could have been broken when you stabbed—when you stabbed my dad.”

I focus on my shirt, untwisting it so I can put it on.

“Same with Jace when she was hurt. Hell, even Salem. That is your instinct. To help people no matter what risk it is to you. And I’ve been thinking about it ever since the lake, when you wanted to find food for me and Jace because you were so sure that you were going to die here. So tell me, Evalyn, how does someone with that kind of instinct premeditate a mass murder?”

My hands stall, fingers tightening around cotton fabric.

“Because I’m a diagnosed psychopath, Casey, and that’s what psychopaths do.”

“Wrong,” he says brazenly, making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. “If you’ve proven one thing to me it’s that you aren’t egocentric. That is what makes a psychopath so damn predictable.”

A chuckle bubbles from my mouth. “So what? You think I didn’t do it—that I didn’t commit my crime?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re wasting your time, trying to figure me out. I know what you want to do. We’re lonely. I don’t want to die alone and you don’t want to die alone, but the only difference is that you need to paint the best picture of me in your head to be close to me.”

“And you don’t?”

“No. I like you the way you are. The way you really are.” I twist my neck until I can see his face. He’s close enough that I can distinguish the exact colors within his fractured irises. A mosaic of moss green and gold and hazelnut. “If you want someone to snuggle up to for the end of the world, I don’t have to be anything less than an evil human being.”

“Won’t it feel better for me if you aren’t, though?”

I drop my shirt and pivot toward him. Grasping his shoulders, I slide onto his lap.

I attempt to keep a straight face, even with my soaring adrenaline and our lack of clothes. Even though he’s damn near expressionless and I haven’t shocked him as much as I was aiming for.

“You tell me,” I challenge. A handful of inches from him and I can count the freckles on his nose. They make him seem so much younger than I know he is.

His warm, callused hands grab my hips and pull me to him, eyes fevered, and I’m reminded that it’s been almost a year since I’ve been touched—really touched—not the manhandling I received from the prison guards or the abrasive hugs given to me by Mom. There was a time in prison where I thought I’d die, like the infants in orphanages that are never held. My heart would collapse because it knew that the arms around me were only my own.

He is electric, recharging me after months of solitude.

There’s nothing separating us other than our soaked underwear. One of his hands trails up by back, pinning me so my breasts are pressed to his chest. He groans as I grind my hips into his. My fingers lace through his dark hair. “Is this what you want?” I whisper into his ear.

He doesn’t respond right away. One of his hands remains at my back. The other cups my thigh as he tries to bring me even closer to him, like it’s even possible. “How long has it been for you?”

To my own surprise, I laugh. “Since I’ve had sex, or since I’ve been touched in a way that doesn’t remind me I’m the scum of the earth?”

It isn’t funny. He knows it isn’t funny.

I want to kiss him. I need to.

Suddenly he pushes me back onto the grass until I’m beneath him. “Both.”

“The same amount of time. Ten months.”

“Since doomsday.”

“Since doomsday,” I repeat.

He bites his lip. He’s thinking.

I reach up, tracing from the bottom of his rib cage to his navel, where the color has stained his skin.

“How does it feel?” he asks.

“What?”

“You said you haven’t been touched in almost a year, so how does this feel?”

“I—” What do I say? I could say that it reminds me there’s more in life to feel than the hard mattress of a prison bunk at my back all day. Who wants to hear that melodramatic bullshit, though, really?

So instead, I say, “Like our kiss.”

His lips twitch, and his hand slides up the inside of my thigh. “You’re so cold.” He lowers his open mouth to my neck and exhales slowly.

I curse.

“What?” His hand slips higher, thumb tracing the hem of my underwear.

“Don’t stop.”

His teeth graze my jaw. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m— I—” His lips hover over mine. So close. “I want someone for the end of the world.”

The moment I say this, the sky flashes green, like it’s signaling the impending apocalypse. He nudges my chin up with the bridge of his nose.

His tongue glides across my collarbone for one bright moment. Pressure builds in my abdomen and I bite on my lip so hard I taste blood.

I see blood.

Trickling from the eyes of a little girl.

I choke on my scream. Casey notices the girl, scrambling to his knees and pulling me to him.

“I can’t find my mom.” She squeezes her eyes shut, blood trailing down her cheeks and dripping off her chin, catching on the ends of her black hair.

Mine and Casey’s breathing rattles in sync. I hold on to him for dear life.

“I can’t find my mom!” she shrieks and takes off with a limp, her jeans torn to shreds, blood seeping from the wounds beneath.

“She’s running toward camp,” Casey says.

I tug on my clothes. “We need to hurry.”

A scream rips through the air. Jace. Once I’m dressed, we race back to camp.

The girl stands between the tent and the newly smoking fire. Tanner’s on his feet, fists balled. His eyes dart between us and the girl. Stella hugs her knees and rocks back and forth in the dirt.

Jace presses herself to a tree, Valerie her shield. “I told you I was sorry.” She clings to Valerie’s shirt. “I’ll give you anything.”

The girl stands so close to the fire that her bloody tears hiss when they splatter inside the ring.

“My life back.”

Her moans build on top of one another until she’s screaming, blood oozing—her cheeks a curtain of sticky crimson.

“Leave,” Valerie commands.

The girl shudders. “I want my mom.” She can’t be older than twelve. Young. Vulnerable. “I want to find my mom.”

“Look for her somewhere else.”

“But—”

“LEAVE,” Valerie growls.

The girl hangs her head, her cross necklace dangling below her chin. “But I’m so alone now.” Dragging her bare, bony feet across the dirt, she turns from our camp, disappearing into the shadow of the forest.

“I’m so alone.”

So alone.

So alone.

Stella cranes her neck toward Jace, flashing a wicked smile “She must be yours, then? She is lovely.”

The girl was the last one to die from the wreck that Jace caused. She was in a coma for three days before her body gave out. Jace had been the one to drag her from the car before the police came. She was drunk off vodka but sobered by the accident.

The girl had cuts beneath her eyes from the shattered glass. They made her look like she was crying blood.

“Why?” Casey prods some of the hot coals in the fire ring with a stick. “Why did she come into camp now?”

Valerie and Jace exchange glances. Jace wrings her hands in front of her. “We were talking about . . . the accident.”

She means her own accident. Her crime.

“I think that scared the shit out of me more than anything else.” Valerie’s hand is still planted on Jace’s back, unmoving, like a ward of protection. “How she suddenly showed up right when . . .”

Jace starts to cry, and Valerie frowns and bows her head.

“I don’t mean to pry or be insensitive,” Tanner says, “but I want to know. Were you talking about the girl?”

Jace nods. Valerie drags her hand in circles over Jace’s back. Touch is the last luxury of comfort that we have here.

“So you were thinking about the girl and she walked into camp?” Tanner attempts to clarify with Jace.

“No,” I interrupt. Casey’s eyes are glazed. I wonder if he’s replaying the moment when the bleeding girl stumbled upon us, like I am. “Casey and I were by the creek and saw her first.”

“Was there anything strange about the way she appeared?”

Other than the fact that she was watching as he lay on top of me half-naked? “No . . . well . . .” I remember the light. “There was a strange flash of green before she appeared. Was that a part of your crime?” I ask Jace.

She sniffs and shakes her head.

“I don’t know.” Tanner rubs his chin in thought. “It’s so unlike the other tests.”

If it was a test at all. I think of Todd, and of Valerie’s sister. But they were images of comfort, not of terror.

Valerie stands, pacing back and forth in front of the campfire. “I’ll take the first watch tonight.”

“Me too,” says Jace.

“You need to rest. Especially—especially after that.”

“But I want to be with you.”

A silent argument rages between them. Finally, Valerie says, “You’ll be with Evalyn.”

Jace rests her head on her knees, tangling her fingers in her hair.

I walk over to her. “Let’s go in the tent, Jace.”

“It isn’t even that dark yet,” she says into her knees. “It isn’t even dark.”

“Come on.” When I help her up, she complies. Inside the tent, we lie down next to each other.

She gazes past the bug netting, to the sky deepening as minutes pass. “Yes. I deserve this.”

Maybe she’s right; maybe we all do. But still, I say, “Don’t think that.”

“It’s okay.” She takes my hand. “I’m ready to die again.”

“You shouldn’t be ready to die until you’re faced with it.” Maybe I should eat my words and not be such a hypocrite. “What about falling in love?”

Immediately her eyes shift to the open tent flap, to Valerie, who sharpens a knife with a stone by the fire.

“You’re into her.”

She scowls at me. “Am not.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No one should be into anyone here. Why wrap yourself in someone just to lose them?”

The tent shakes. Casey shuffles to the far corner. I swallow the lump forming in my throat. “Because it might be the last time you’re able to do it.”

She blinks, her head falling back.

“You okay?”

“I’m not sure. Nothing feels real anymore.”

“I think that’s all right.”

“Does it feel real to you?”

As my gaze connects with Casey’s, my pulse speeds. “No, but I’m letting that be my drug. I’m letting that drive me for as long as I have left.”

Sadness flickers across his face.

“Don’t leave me tonight,” says Jace. “Neither of you.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” I reach over her and take Casey’s hand. Tanner will stay on guard with Valerie tonight, and even if we invited Stella inside the tent, she’d refuse, so we don’t bother.

“What do you think death will be like?” Jace murmurs.

Casey squeezes my hand. It’s like he knows that my mind reverts to the moment when we were kneeling around the faux corpse of Casey’s father and waiting for death. I was so sure that every breath I took was going to be my last. It was the first time in a while that I thought about what would happen after my heart stopped beating.

Casey is the first to speak. “When the lodge lit on fire, I thought we had already died.”

“I don’t think hell will care about testing us,” Jace says.

“You believe in hell?” he asks her.

She thinks for a long, hard moment. “No. I believe in finding redemption, even after death. Somehow.”

That word again. Redemption.

“Evalyn?” Jace asks.

I don’t have the heart to tell her that my jaded mind can’t wrap around anything other than death being an infinite nothing—suffocating blackness. But I try to imagine for her. I try to play make-believe, like I used to when I thought of joining Meghan. “Death will be like floating on your back in the cleanest water you can think of beneath a hot sun. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to have a broken heart over. No one to lose.”

“Alone?” Jace asks.

“Yes. Alone.”

Casey squeezes my hand even tighter. Jace is right. Cycling through love is like wash, rinse, repeat. Falling for anyone now is as pointless as believing I would have Liam forever.

Nothing is forever except the loneliness.

The soft walls of the tent shake as someone fights to get out.

Everyone’s yelling.

I’m up.

“Valerie!” Jace screams, racing out of the tent.

Casey and I exchange bleary, startled glances before throwing our blankets off. He groans as he stretches his muscles for the first time in hours and I plow past him, crawling out of the exit and onto my feet.

Jace disappears into the woods, sprinting.

“What happened?” I cry at Tanner, whose fingers are clenched in his hair.

“Valerie said she had to pee. She . . . she . . .”

“Spit it out!”

“Was dragged into the woods. Something dragged her into the woods.”

Something?

I take off, Casey right on my heels. His breathing is labored—pained, and I know every step is work for him, but he doesn’t slow. He even speeds up when we catch a glimpse of Jace fighting the brush at her ankles up ahead. Down a hill all of us go, and I nearly stumble over my feet before the ground levels out. Valerie lies on her back in the middle of the clearing, clawing at something around her neck. Jace runs to her, dropping to her knees.

When I’m closer, I make out the object around Valerie. A noose. With Jace’s help, she’s able to untangle herself from it, gasping for air.

I drop to the ground on the other side of her. “What the hell happened?”

Valerie coughs, tears springing to her eyes as she rubs her neck. She chokes out, “It slithered around me, like a snake. Didn’t know what was happening until it was too late.”

Casey runs into the clearing, followed by Tanner. The noose slinks across the ground on its own, like it’s controlled.

“They see everything,” Stella sings from the edge of the clearing. She twirls a piece of hair around her finger. “They take their robot claws and rip apart your skin. I bet you they like it.”

“Shut up,” I snap.

I follow Valerie’s gaze to a baby doll, soft body and porcelain limbs, head chipped and scraped white. Glass pieces scatter the ground.

“Not funny,” Valerie murmurs, and the sky falls dark until there’s nothing left but a gray ghost of light. Mist curls upward, and my attention shifts to the three bodies that weren’t there before—three bodies hanging from nooses, their feet swaying back and forth.

The tree creaks with their weight.

A strangled whimper escapes Jace’s throat.

“Now you scream,” Stella says.

“No.” Valerie’s response is immediate. “I’m guilty as sin. My jury knew it. I know it. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I’m going to survive this place.” She stands. “You hear me?”

She speaks to the Compass Room gods like Casey did, convinced someone is listening. Is it hope that molds her desire to contact them, or surrender?

“Stop,” Jace pleads, but Valerie doesn’t. She glares at the three swinging bodies, mismatched shirts and gray flesh. Purple lips. Bulging eye sockets. How will this end? Will they reanimate and drop to the ground, throwing their nooses one by one around Valerie’s neck to strangle her? Will they beat her like Casey’s father did to him?

Will they infect her? Will she explode?

No one says anything. Valerie is stone, challenging them, and then, when unoccupied minutes pass, she says, “I have to pee.”

And then she leaves.

The tree holding the bodies groans. Stella shrieks.

“No!” she wails, marching toward the center of the clearing. “Come back, you stupid bitch!”

I jump up, my fingers clamping around her stick-thin wrist. She yanks away from me. “They don’t end like this! She isn’t supposed to walk away!”

Something inside me snaps. I take her arms and shake her. “Why? Why are you so screwed up?”

She melts, collapsing to the ground and sobbing shamelessly, snot and tears dripping from her chin. “Am I . . . Am I the only one . . . touched? Again and again he comes. . . . H-he can touch me. H-he can make me hurt, and it’s NOT FAIR THAT I’M THE ONLY ONE WHEN I’M NOT EVEN GUILTY. IT’S NOT FAIR THAT SHE CAN WALK AWAY.”

Stella chokes, and wretches, and squirms on the ground. She won’t get up. Not even when we leave to head back to camp, away from the bodies that dangle below the sunless sky. I hold Jace’s hand as we follow Casey, wondering what happened to Valerie.

But she’s fine. She sits and rubs her neck right in the middle of our desecrated camp. Our food has been stolen.

Our tent, our blankets, our bags—shredded.

May 21, Last Year

School

We didn’t realize the brilliant concept we stumbled upon, Meghan and I.

She took the blog to her favorite professor, a man who had an eye for ingenuity. He loved the concept so much—the idea of transforming a beautiful photograph into an art form that both reflected the original work and created a new piece—that he wanted to create an entire gallery based on the concept.

“Next semester we will have the exhibit,” he promised in a meeting with Meghan and me. “The two of you will lead a team through the summer to start setting up partners and getting these projects rolling.”

We held hands the entire time under the table. This project was supposed to be satiating our interests, but it was more than that. It was something academic, something beautiful. A way we could leave a mark on our college. Artists didn’t have a lot to strive for, only the hope that we wouldn’t starve to death and someone would appreciate us.

“Are you up for it?” her professor asked. “I want to make sure you two are dedicated before I start sending e-mails and directing funds to next year’s opening gallery.”

“Yes!” Meghan squealed before I even opened my mouth. “Yes! Of course. We’ll start scheduling meetings as soon as possible, won’t we, Ev?”

“I . . . uhh . . . yeah, of course.” Of course we would. What kind of question was that?

That evening, we had a celebratory dinner with Nick and Liam at a nice New American place. The boys hardly knew each other, which was insane. Technically this dinner was something we should have done a couple months ago, when Meghan and Nick started dating.

The way he was so comfortable necking her at the table made it seem like we did this sort of thing every weekend.

“Nick,” Meghan said with an exasperated sigh when our food came. She acted relaxed the rest of the time we were eating, but when I got up to use the restroom, I saw his hand on the uppermost part of her thigh, beneath the material of her dress.

Maybe, if I liked him more, this kind of thing would have seemed like a sexual quirk he or both of them had—a way to get a rush. But I didn’t like him, which was why I did my best to shoot him glares for the rest of dinner. He wasn’t paying me the slightest bit of attention, though. Instead, he was talking politics with Liam, a conversation I had absolutely no desire to get into. Not to mention, the topic—war—had been beaten to death centuries ago.

“People need the pain of war in order to function.” Nick twirled the pasta on his fork. “Without something so chaotic, we wouldn’t feel emotion at all.”

Liam stiffened. He was a total pacifist at heart, and I knew there was no way he would let Nick’s proposal of chaos slide. I kicked him so he’d drop it.

He didn’t. “Of course there would be emotion. There would just be less grief.”

Meghan released a tiny gasp, and I wondered what Nick was doing to her under the table.

“There’d be no way to understand happiness or safety in a peaceful world,” said Nick.

I knew that statement was ludicrous. Just because a world had no war didn’t mean that bad or sad things wouldn’t happen. There would still be accidents. People would still die of illness. There would be room for peace with plenty of things left to mourn.

But I didn’t argue, because arguing philosophy with someone who obviously knew what they believed in was completely pointless. “Drop it,” I murmured to Liam.

A waitress walked alongside the table carrying a tray full of martinis.

Nick continued. “People have been trying to understand the purpose of chaos forever. Not just violence, but everything—mathematics, physics, climate change, the neurons in the brain, divine fucking intervention.”

Meghan squirmed in her seat and glanced toward the restrooms.

“I know what chaos theory is,” Liam said.

“Then you’ll agree with the logic that it existing within almost everything proves that it’s necessary.”

The waitress tripped near Nick, martinis sliding off the tray and hitting the stone floor with a horrible crash.

Meghan stood and tugged down her skirt.

“Holy shit!” cried Liam, and bounced out of his chair to help the waitress. Several others were getting up from their tables as well.

But Nick wasn’t. He remained in his seat, his attention trained on me.

I knew he’d tripped her. Liam said nothing about it on the car ride home, and since he would have been the one to see it happen, I didn’t bring it up.

On my phone, I searched Nick. I’d done this before, when Meghan first started dating him (that’s what friends do), and this search pulled the same results. Nothing. No news reports, no online profiles, no blogs—at least, not relating to the Nick Malloy I knew. I’d hoped that I missed an article that graphically described his arrest for some insane crime so I could show it to Meghan, but there wasn’t. He had zero online presence. I didn’t even know that was possible.

Liam decided to stay at his place that night, so when the boys dropped the both of us off and we were home, I had to ask, “How’s the sex with him?”

Immediately, she put up her shield. Her back straightened, and she plastered on that sly smile, the one she used when she wanted to blow something off. “Why are you asking?”

I wanted to say, Because he had his hand up your skirt all of dinner, but I refrained. “Because he’s sticking around and it’s my job to pester you about sex.”

We sat across from each other on the patio. She reached for the pipe on the corner table and started to dig in her purse. I had hit a nerve—I don’t know how, but that smirk and her sudden needing to smoke a bowl within a span of twenty seconds was a sure sign.

“What’s up, Meghan?”

She exhaled in relief when she found her baggie. Opening it and packing her pipe, she said, “It’s nothing.”

“Oh, don’t you even think about screwing with me.”

“He’s kinky, you know? Not like quirky kinky. But like the real deal.” She lit up, and I waited for her to exhale. “The first time, he tied me up.”

“He what? Okay . . . okay. But he asked first, right? It was consensual?”

“He didn’t ask. But, I mean, you gotta try everything once, right?” She lit up again.

“Was it consensual?”

“God, Ev. He didn’t rape me, if that’s what you’re asking. What’s your deal, anyway?”

“What do you mean, what is my deal? He was possessive of you tonight and I’m making sure you’re okay with it.”

“You think I wouldn’t know if I felt okay with it or not? I’m fine. I don’t sit here and ask you if yours and Liam’s sex is consensual.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’re supposed to trust me, Ev. Trust that I make the right decisions for myself. Jesus.”

This wasn’t going how I had planned. “I’m sorry, Meghan. He’s new and I’m only skeptical because I love you so much. You know that.”

“Yeah.” She set her pipe down and stood. “I’m tired. I’m going to head to bed.” She paused when she was halfway inside. “By the way, tell Liam to try and avoid conversations with Nick that have the slightest chance of leading to chaos theory. He’s obsessed with it. And it’s annoying.”

I should have grown a clue then. I should have realized that gut feeling doesn’t screw around when dealing with someone you care so much about.

But at the time, I was hoping she was right. I was hoping to God she was right. But she wasn’t, because Nick knew the truth.

The world is saturated in chaos.