who leans in trying to get his attention.
“Do you know where you are?” he asks, but Wade ignores him and stays fixed on me.
In a flash, his face goes pale, and he starts to breathe heavily, like he’s afraid.
“How am I seeing you?” Wade asks, his voice weak, but not for lack of strength but because of the emotion it carries.
I glance blankly over at Yori, who stares back with the same confusion.
“How did you come by this place?” he continues.
Wade is trembling, as am I. I don’t know what is going on, but I feel like a stranger is in front of me, or that I am someone entirely different. I look at Wade and don’t know what to say, or what he expects me to. He senses this and grips my arm tightly.
“Zoe, tell me,” he begs, panic in his voice as though he is sensing something coming, some great terror from his past.
I don’t know who Zoe is, or if I even want to know, but I feel like he needs me to be her right now, so I answer.
“Because you saved me.”
“No, I didn’t,” he rejects. “I saw you. Lifeless. What they’d done to you. You’re dead. But then how are you here?”
Yori grabs Wade’s wrist and forces him to let go of me. I immediately stand up and walk away as Yori pointedly asks him about his injuries, not stopping until I reach the pool of water and sit down at its edge. The chilly evening air causes my wet body to shiver as I stare at my reflection below me trying to envision what Wade was seeing when he looked at me. This only sends more shivers down my spine.
A hand presses firmly on my shoulder a few moments later, startling me, but I turn my head relieved to see that it is just Yori, exhausted and in need of rest himself.
“He’ll be fine, just a bad knock on the head. But I’ll need your help carrying him back if we want to reach shelter by dark.”
I study Yori for a second, wanting to ask him if he has any idea what Wade could have been talking about. He waits for me, seeming to anticipate that I need to talk, but I change my mind.
“Okay,” I say instead, getting up and following him to Wade.
Wade spends the next few days sleeping and recovering, though he wakes up every so often groaning and complaining about pains in his head and chest. I feel awful for him, but not in the same way I would have before. Not after witnessing his transformation into, it seemed, a completely different person.
I don’t talk to Yori about it even though I’m sure he could shed some light on things. It’s just, he looks at me like I’m wounded, and I don’t want to be seen that way. I want to be seen like I’m strong, like I belong down here in the plains. From the beginning, Wade has been invincible to me, and seeing him so fragile has created in me the need to be stronger than I’ve been. Like I should be ready to survive on my own.
“Kaela,” Wade calls out from his bed several days later.
With nervousness in my step, I creep into the room Yori has Wade isolated in. Wade’s back is rested up against the wall behind his bed, his eyes on me, but to my relief not in the troubling way they were before. He seems calmer and more straight-faced, the difficult to read person I want him to be.
“I’m having trouble remembering what happened,” he says with a dryness in his voice I am glad to hear.
“Well what do you remember?” I ask.
He looks down and stares at his hands, which are resting on his lap. His thumbs rotate around each other, something I’ve seen him do now and again when he’s giving something serious thought. He then looks back up at me.
“We got Yori’s beast into the canyon. I set off my charge first. Yori’s came second. He was supposed to be there at the same time as me, but he wasn’t. You were up on your perch. I cornered him by the water. Then everything goes blank.”
“That’s because you got knocked upside the head by some falling rocks,” Yori cuts in playfully. “Told you the beast was smart, though it didn’t know quite how to react to the fire-powder. Still, if your princess here hadn’t come down from her plateau and gotten the draeg’s attention off me, we might not have been able to get you out of there alive.”
“Really?” Wade says impressed, nodding at me and briefly flashing a muted smile, one that ushers back into my heart the connection I had started feeling with him before.
Seeing him return to normal makes me wonder if perhaps my insecurities over the past few days weren’t a bit overblown. Now that I have the Wade I know and understand back, maybe it’d be best to just forget the rest of what took place.
“Yori was the one who got him in the water,” I deflect.
Wade looks over toward Yori, but then back down at his hands again. He pauses, and I take a breath, confident that he senses a hole in the story that I don’t want him to fill in.
“There’s something else I’m missing,” Wade responds, his voice softening to a level I was hoping it wouldn’t. “It feels like I talked to someone, but it’s all muddy in my mind. I don’t remember who, it’s just a premonition I guess.”
Yori’s lips part slightly like he’s about to answer, so I cut him off.
“No, you were out the moment we got to you.”
Wade looks up at me again, seeming to politely accept yet not really believe my answer. His eyebrows furrow as he studies me, and I feel like he can see right through me. With all his experience, he probably reads people pretty well, not that I’m a good deceiver to begin with.
To my relief, his gaze slowly relaxes, and he turns toward Yori, who nods in support of my statement.
“I must be mistaken,” Wade says casually like he doesn’t care that we’re so obviously hiding something from him. “We kept our end of the bargain Yori. Now you must keep yours.”
“Yes you did,” Yori replies, his eyes briefly on me before returning to Wade. “I’ve prepared everything, but we don’t go until you’ve healed up properly, at least a few more days.”
Wade surprises me by nodding in agreement with Yori’s insistence that he rest more. Then again, I suppose he couldn’t have survived in the plains this long without some humility. He lies his head down as though he intends to will himself a fast recovery, so Yori walks out of the room, me right behind.
“Kaela,” Wade says softly.
I turn around and look at him, but I don’t know how to return his beckoning so I don’t say anything. Instead, I try to reflect his troubling gaze. But when he doesn’t have anything to say himself, I feel the desire to get away, his suddenly soft eyes reminding me of the way he was in the canyon, the side of him I never wanted to see again.
“You need to sleep,” I say.
With another nod from Wade, I leave the room, intent on never again discussing what happened in that canyon.
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