You will kill every good part of him.
“I can do so much now,” I told her, “but you won’t see another hint of it until you let him go. Until you swear you will never chase him down.”
Cate watched me for a moment, a hand pressed to her mouth. I could see the indecision in her face. I had used Martin to show her exactly what I could offer them, and he, apparently, had already proven to them how valuable an Orange could be. These were not, however, the terms she would have chosen.
“All right,” she said, finally. “All right. He can go.”
“How do I know you’ll keep your promise?” I asked.
Cate stood and reached again into her pocket. The silver Calm Control device, the only thing keeping me out of her head, was still warm when she pressed it into my palm. My fingers closed around hers.
“So help me God,” I said slowly, clearly, when Cate looked up at me. “If you go back on your word, I will tear you apart. And I won’t stop, not ever, until I’ve destroyed your life and the lives of every single person in this organization. Believe me, you may not always keep your promises, but I do.”
She nodded at me once, and there was something almost like pride in her eyes.
“Understood,” Cate said, and we did.
They kept Liam in the bedroom at the other end of the hall, in a room painted a soft blue. The kind of color you’d only find in the sky just before sunrise, maybe. It might have been a nursery once. There were clouds painted on the ceiling, and the few pieces of furniture left seemed too small for an average adult.
Liam sat on the tiny bed with his back to me. At first, as I shut the door behind me, I thought he was staring out the window. As I came closer, I saw he was actually fixated on the wrinkled sheet of paper in his hand.
The bed dipped as I crawled across it, wrapping my arms around his chest from behind. I pressed my cheek against his, letting my hands wander until they found his steady heartbeat. He shut his eyes and leaned back.
“What are you looking at?” I whispered.
He handed me the paper wordlessly as I moved to sit beside him. Jack Fields’s letter.
“You were right,” Liam said after a moment. “You were so right. We should have read it. We would have known not to bother.”
It was the dead way he spoke, so flat, so coated with grief, that made me crumple the letter and throw it across the room. He only shook his head, pressing a hand over his eyes.
I fumbled with the inside pocket of his jacket, where I had stashed Chubs’s letter all those days ago. Liam watched me pull it out, and sagged beside me.
“He told me he didn’t write it for them,” I said. “He wrote it for you. He wanted you to read it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Yes, you do. Because when you get out of here, you’ll want something to say when you see him again.”
“Ruby.” Now he sounded angry. His arm dropped from around my shoulders, and he stood up. “Do you really think that if he lives, they’re going to let us see him? Do you think they’re even going to let us stay together? That’s not how these people work. They’re going to control our every move, right down to who we see and what we eat. Trust me, it’ll be some precious piece of luck if we even find out if he’s alive, never mind if they’ve brought him in for training.”
Liam paced the room once, twice, three times, and it felt like an hour had passed before I worked up the nerve to open Chubs’s letter myself.
The room was silent for a long time.
“What?” Liam asked, finally. His voice was laced with fear. “What does it say?”
It was blank. There was nothing written on the sheet of paper aside from Chubs’s parents’ name and their address, and there had never been. Not a single drop of ink.
“I don’t understand…” I said, passing it to him. That couldn’t have been right. Maybe he had lost the original letter, or was carrying the real one? When I looked up again, Liam was crying. One hand destroying the letter in his fist, the other pressed against his eyes. And then I realized I already knew the answer.
Chubs hadn’t written anything because he didn’t think he had to. He thought he was going to be able to tell his parents everything he wanted to say in person. He believed he was going to get home.
Liam’s knees seemed to buckle out from under him as he sat back down on the bed. His forehead came down to rest against my shoulder, and I wrapped both arms around him. He did believe you, I wanted to say. All along, he believed you.
I felt so much older, then. Not sixteen, not sixty, not even a hundred, but a thousand years old. Older, but not brittle. I felt like one of the oak trees that grew along the highway overlooking the Shenandoah Valley, with deep roots and a strong core.
He gets to go, I thought. He gets to go home.
For a long time I did nothing but hold on to him. I wanted to memorize the way his hair curled at the ends, the scar at the edge of his lips. I had never felt time’s sting as sharply as I did then. Why did it only ever seem to freeze or move forward at a barreling speed?
“The crazy thing is, I had all of these plans,” he whispered. “What we were going to do. All the places I was going to take you. I really wanted you to meet Harry.” The window breathed in afternoon light. I felt his hand trail down the length of my arm. “We’ll be okay,” Liam said. “We just can’t let them separate us.”
“They won’t,” I whispered. “I was thinking…I know this is going to sound so corny, but…if there’s one good thing that came out of all this, it was that I got to meet you. I would go through it all again—” Tears pricked my eyes. “I would, as long as it meant I’d met you.”
“You really think that?” Liam sat up and pressed his lips against my hair. “’Cause, frankly, the way I see it, you and me? Inevitable. Let’s say we didn’t get stuck in those god-awful camps—no, just listen. I’m going to tell you the amazing story of us.”
Liam cleared his throat again and turned to fully face me. “So, it’s the summer and you’re in Salem, suffering through another boring, hot July, and working part-time at an ice cream parlor. Naturally, you’re completely oblivious to the fact that all of the boys from your high school who visit daily are more interested in you than the thirty-one flavors. You’re focused on school and all your dozens of clubs, because you want to go to a good college and save the world. And just when you think you’re going to die if you have to take another practice SAT, your dad asks if you want to go visit your grandmother in Virginia Beach.”
“Yeah?” I leaned my forehead against his chest. “What about you?”
“Me?” Liam said, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m in Wilmington, suffering through another boring, hot summer, working one last time in Harry’s repair shop before going off to some fancy university—where, I might add, my roommate will be a stuck-up-know-it-all-with-a-heart-of-gold named Charles Carrington Meriwether IV—but he’s not part of this story, not yet.” His fingers curled around my hip, and I could feel him trembling, even as his voice was steady. “To celebrate, Mom decides to take us up to Virginia Beach for a week. We’re only there for a day when I start catching glimpses of this girl with dark hair walking around town, her nose stuck in a book, earbuds in and blasting music. But no matter how hard I try, I never get to talk to her.
“Then, as our friend Fate would have it, on our very last day at the beach I spot her. You. I’m in the middle of playing a volleyball game with Harry, but it feels like everyone else disappears. You’re walking toward me, big sunglasses on, wearing this light green dress, and I somehow know that it matches your eyes. And then, because, let’s face it, I’m basically an Olympic god when it comes to sports, I manage to volley the ball right into your face.”