***
Small islands of snow dot the pavement here and there, but mostly, everything is melted, trickling tiny silver streams across the concrete until they find a place to sink in. The air is brisk, but the sun is beaming proudly down on us, like we have done something to deserve its affection. Oscar and I walk together across the marketplace. He's grinning, chattering. Nothing seems to touch him. Sometimes I think maybe he's not really part of this grim world.
"Look," he says. He has his slingshot, poised perfectly, pouch pulled back and ready to release. His rock goes flying, creating a den in one of the islands of snow. He snuffs air through his nose impatiently. "I was hoping it would explode."
"Too wet," I say, as we go to retrieve his rock. "But good aim."
He grins up at me as he scoops the rock out of the snow. "Bet I can do it again."
I smile and laugh. "I'm not betting against you."
He does do it again. He's been practicing. He hits two, and then three more islands, perfectly. As I watch him skip away to get his rock, I'm feeling the smile start to build inside.
"Hey," comes Jonas' voice from behind me.
I turn to watch his approach, the way he walks, the way his shoulders form a perfect line beneath his hoodie. He stops in front of me, hands in pockets, and says nothing. After a moment, his eyes flicker behind me, to Oscar, who's running back to us.
Oscar wraps his arms around Jonas for a sincere, but very brief hug, before he turns and aims again. "Check this out," he says. He's already running to retrieve his rock.
"Awesome," Jonas says, when Oscar comes skipping back. "You're going to be deadly with that thing. Like... what's that old story?" He glances around before saying it, and his voice is a bit lower. "David and Goliath?"
Oscar just laughs and aims again.
Jonas turns back to me.
We look at each other. I want to say something, but I'm afraid to. I want him to say something, but I'm afraid he'll say what he'd say any other day. Inside, my emotions have whipped themselves into an emulsion of confusion— parts hope, and embarrassment, and longing, and joy, and grief, and anger with myself. I'm over the edge, I think. Grasping at things that aren't there. I should turn my thoughts back. But I don't want to. Even if I'm being stupid, I don't want to.
Oscar's next target is further away. We start strolling to keep up with him. Someone has to talk, and it doesn't seem like it's going to be Jonas, so I manage, in a casual voice, "It almost feels like a normal day."
He glances at me as we walk. "Nothing's normal anymore."
Now I glance at him. "Seems like she's got it in for us."
Puzzlement crosses his face as he squints at me.
"Fate," I say.
A flicker of a smile plays across his lips. "Good ol' Fate."
We follow Oscar's erratic path in silence. After a while, I find myself saying aloud, even though they're really private thoughts, "We're not going to make it much longer. It doesn't matter what we do. Everything is leading toward an ending."
His glance this time is quickly followed by a solid look that sticks to my face, connects through my eyes, and forms a channel between us. His fingers graze my upper arm lightly. Even through the leather of my jacket, his touch raises goose bumps on my skin. "What if it is," he says, but his voice is not filled with the appropriate doom. Instead, there's something urgent, even hopeful in the way he says it.
I open my mouth to answer, but I'm just looking at him, wondering what he's getting at. His fingers close around my arm and pull me to a stop. We stand facing each other in the middle of the marketplace.
"If this is all there is," he says, "then why are we wasting it?"
I blink. His gaze is intense, his body leaning in. His eyes scan and scan my face, like they can pull an answer out of me. Only, I'm not sure what the answer is. Part of me interprets what he's saying, and another part laughs at the interpretation. I'm not right. I can't be right. I simply don't understand. "Uh...?" I say, stupidly. I can feel myself going red.
"Uh..." he says, the corners of his mouth twitching with a suppressed smile. He's making fun of me. I feel my body tense, ready to withdraw, but before I can, he touches my cheek with just his fingertips. No one has ever touched me so carefully, with so much tenderness. His eyes, half-lidded, gaze down into my own. The trace of smile is completely gone. He's all seriousness.
Not far away, I hear Oscar laughing as he hits his latest target. Jonas and I look sideways, watching him run for his rock. Jonas drops his hand. We turn and start walking again, throwing fleeting glances at each other as we go. My face is still flushed, hot against the morning chill, but it feels good, like the smooth burn of whiskey. My head is drunk and spinning, too. We walk on like this, watching Oscar, sometimes laughing at his glee. We share the morning's joy without words. With just eye contact, and smiles, and something else, intangible, that flows in rushing currents between us.
We're at the edge of the market when Jonas says, very softly, "There's something I have to tell you."
There's a weightiness in his voice that makes me look at him, half-startled. He glances at Oscar, then pulls me to a stop. We're at the corner of an intersection, not far from a Sentry's post, but it doesn't seem to bother Jonas, and I'm too curious to worry about it. We stand against the side wall of a building, facing each other, our opposite shoulders leaning into the wall. My eyes move over his face, but I find no answers there. Only a look that I've never seen on him before, at once serious and vulnerable and hesitant.
I can't quite bring myself to ask the question, but I see he's working up to the answer, anyway. My heart races, afraid of what he'll say. My mind, trying to keep up with my heart, runs through all sorts of scenarios of things gone wrong. Things that could send this moment crashing down on me like a collapsing building.
He smiles, just a little. Enough to soothe me. I take a deep breath, and wait for him to speak.
"She doesn't have it in for us," he says, quietly, like he's telling me a secret.
My eyes dart back and forth across his face.
"Fate," he whispers. His smile is soft, tentative, and warm as can be. While I'm still puzzling over his words, he draws his hood up over his face. I shiver. He moves closer, both of us turning so that I'm more against the wall than he is. He places his palms against the brick on either side of me, leaning close. "Lily," he says softly. "It's your name. Lily."
My whole body reacts to the sound of it— electric shivers through my spine, the tightening of my stomach and ribcage, the sense that my brain and heart have had the ground yanked from under them and they're falling. The flower peddlers are long gone, but I'm hearing their song, feeling that mix of too-intense emotions, and knowing, now, that it has nothing to do with death, or flowers, or anything but me. I remember Jonas humming that tune, and everything intensifies to the point of dizziness. Trembling, wide-eyed, I stare up at him, wanting to ask him a million questions. But he already knows I want to ask them. In that secret world we have created between us, he does his best to answer them. He raises his hands to his mouth, pulls down his lower lip, and waits.
The 'L's are inked backward, but the other letters are symmetrical, and require no reversing. "YLIL". Lily.
My world changes faster than my brain can keep up with. There are so many things to make sense of, and they all come at me randomly, in glimpses. It may take me years to truly process it all. Jonas has this name printed on his lip, and it seems to belong to me. I have one on mine. Jason. Jason, Jonas. Jonas, Jason. I stare and stare at him. He's looking at me with barely restrained hope, and suddenly I remember the feeling of losing him. How real it was. Because it was real. Tears start to well up in my eyes, but then, he leans in, and our noses touch, and we're breathing each other's breath. I am in the eye of the storm. Everything has gone calm, and haunting, and quiet.
"Aw, seriously?" It's Oscar's voice, suita
bly scandalized.
We pull away from each other quickly, though not entirely.
"Can't you do that later?" Oscar says, and takes another shot at a pile of snow, and runs away.
Jonas and I, watching him go, giggle like children. His face, close to me, is pink from the cold and laughter, his eyes slits, his cheeks smooth mounds at the end of a broad smile. I've never seen anything so beautiful. I glance at the intersection, at Oscar, who is digging in the snow. A young boy rushes by and bumps into a woman who is carrying recyclables in a basket. They spill and scatter in the street. Oscar abandons his rock and rushes to help pick her items up.
"He's doing OK," Jonas says, echoing my thoughts. Joy is beaming inside me. For as bad as the world has gotten, Jonas is right. Maybe Fate doesn't have it in for us after all.
He turns his green eyes back to me, and the smile, like the world, falls away. He leans closer to me, and our noses touch again. The air from his mouth is like pure oxygen. I want to breathe more of it. I want to breathe him in. His smooth, warm lips ease over mine, and I'm reeling, lost in every sensation. The pressure. The slow slipping of our mouths together. His palms sliding over my waist to the small of my back. Shrieking. "Thief! Thief! Thief!" We pull away from each other, eyes widening.
Oscar, with a piece of cardboard in his hand, looks up at the woman with dawning horror. The Sentry's mirrored black visage glints in the sun as it pivots toward him. I scream his name, lunging from too far away.
Jonas catches me in his arms. I twist and claw my way free. I have to get to Oscar. Every movement feels like pushing through water. Reaching for him. I’m so slow, and the Sentry is so fast. It will take him from me. Take everything. I move forward. Jonas’ arms around my waist hold me back.
“Oscar!” I shriek, but it comes out a sob. Tears gush from my eyes. My fingernails tear into Jonas’ arms, but he won’t release me.
Oscar's eyes dart toward me. He doesn't try to run. He knows. His face is grey with terror, but he finds my gaze. His little mouth forms the words silently. I love you.
I sob the words back. My heart screams them. A thousand times. As if expressing the truth and depth of the emotion could somehow make this stop. As if the Sentry would see that it simply cannot take him. It cannot leave us, who have so little, with nothing.
My soul is tearing to shreds trying to go with him. But I can’t go with him. I can’t protect him. He will be lost, and alone, and he will not remember how I loved him so much.
The Sentry looms over him, the bringer of suffering. Defiler of the innocent. Thief of joy. There is no malice in its blank face. Only apathy. Below it, Oscar’s brown eyes are still locked with mine.
"Let go!” My voice is hoarse, shredded. My feet slide on fragments of concrete. “Please. Please. Please!” Jonas does not let go.
It strikes. Its metal claw closes over Oscar’s face and jerks him upward. His body goes limp, hanging. It turns, and moves away. Oscar’s little legs and feet dangle limply from under the monster's arm. Every step carries him further out of my life. Every step is a divide that can never be crossed.
I’m hanging over Jonas’ arms, reaching for the little boy who has slipped beyond my grasp. I can’t see the world through my tears. Instead, I see Oscar’s face. The first time he smiled at me— how it melted me. How it made me want to be part of this family. All the silly, toothy grins. His face scrunched up, concentrating on his slingshot. The whispered secrets. Buckets. Our hands, clasped together. I love you.
Jonas’ reigns me in, pulling me close to him. “No, Eden,” he whispers, holding on to me fiercely. “He’s gone.”
I blink the tears away to find him. My Oscar. But Jonas is right. He’s gone.
“Oscar!” His name pours out of my heart, my lungs. I can’t see him. “Bring him back, you soulless piece of crap!” I shriek. People in the street move away from us. “Bring him back or I’ll—”
Jonas’ hand muffles the rest of my words. “Shhh,” he insists, squeezing me to him. “You can’t. They’ll take you, too.”
I don’t care. I shake my head to free my mouth of his hand.
“It’s too late,” he says. “I’m sorry. He’s gone.”
No.
No, I want to say, but the words are gone, too. There is only a noise building inside me. A noise unlike any noise I have ever made before. It comes up my throat, growing, feeding itself. Every cry or scream or shriek I have ever made before pales in comparison. This noise is its own thing. Raw grief unleashed.
I fall backward into Jonas’ arms. He half catches me, lowering us to the ground. He holds onto me desperately, whispering my name, rocking me, trying, somehow, to comfort me. But there is no comfort. Oscar is gone.
There will never be comfort.
I sit in the dirt, my head thrown back to the sky. My wail runs down the streets of the Outpost, searching for a boy who has already been erased.