Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,45

the right choice. Reese’s mouth goes slack as I talk. Dark eyes looking up at me from the bed, wide and incredulous.

“You’re serious,” she says when I finish.

I nod. I haven’t told her about the chocolate, but I can’t see what good it would do. And some part of me wants to keep it for myself. “Yeah,” I say. “And we just tossed it over.” She doesn’t say anything, just stares out the window, fists clenched, and I feel a gnawing in my gut. I can’t have ruined things with us. Not already, not before it’s barely even started. “Are you angry?”

She scoffs. “Of course I’m angry.”

“But I mean with me.”

She looks at me then, and tentatively hooks her fingers through one of my belt loops. How could I have missed it? The warmth in her eyes, just mine and nobody else’s. “You didn’t have much of a choice, did you?”

It shouldn’t, but it makes me feel better.

Outside I can hear Julia making her way down the hallway, stopping at each room for bed check. Reese and I exchange glances, and by the time Julia pokes her head inside our room, we’re side by side on my bunk. Right where we should be, two girls following the rules.

“Three,” Julia says, and then she coughs delicately. “Sorry. Two.”

I stare at the floor after she goes, let my world narrow down to the slivers of dark between each floorboard. Welch will go out to the Harker house in a few hours, and so will we. Picking our way through the woods, breaking the quarantine. Fighting for our lives and Byatt’s too.

I can do this for her. I have to.

Reese’s cold, scaled fingers close around my wrist. The dark deepening around us, and when I turn to her, the aura of her hair is skimming over our skin, the pattern of her braid playing on the ceiling.

“You should get some rest,” she says, so gently I barely recognize her. “You’ll need it out there.”

“I can’t.” Out the window, the moon is rising, and I only have the memory of how it lit the sky last night to mark the hours. I choke back the worry throttling me. “What if we miss it?”

“I’ll stay up.” The mattress shifts as she moves, and she drapes her jacket over my shoulders. “Go on.”

At least if I’m asleep, I can’t worry over what we’re about to do. I let her urge me back, toward the wall, and stretch out on my side, leaving half the bed open for her. They’re narrow, the Raxter bunks, built only for one, but I’ve shared one with Byatt since the first day of the Tox. I’m used to it.

Or I thought I was. Reese lies down next to me, her shoulder pressed to my chest, and it’s nothing like that. Nothing like Byatt, whose body felt almost like my own. I can feel even the slightest spot where I’m touching Reese, can hear every breath she takes like it’s the only sound in the world.

“Okay?” she says.

“Yeah.”

I settle in, tuck my face against her neck. Close my eye, hope I dream about Reese, about this afternoon in the barn.

Instead, it’s Byatt waiting for me, and I take her by the hand, lead her into the woods. There’s no light, but somehow I can see as I stitch her into her shroud.

BYATT

CHAPTER 11

I told a story when I was ten years old.

It was just after summer break. My best friend was a girl named Tracy, whose clothes were always freshly ironed, and when Tracy got back from summer break, she told me she’d met a new friend at camp.

I didn’t go to camp. I didn’t meet a new friend.

So I told Tracy something else. I told her I’d met a girl named Erin, Erin who rode horses and swam all year round. She goes to a different school, I said, and she lives on my street, just a few houses down.

And I wrote letters and told Tracy they were from Erin. And I had my picture taken with my horrible cousin, and I showed Tracy, told her it was Erin. And then one day I told her Erin wasn’t at home anymore. I told her Erin’s mother had said Erin was sick. And the day after that, I dressed in black, and I told Tracy that Erin was dead.

Tracy cried. And she cried to her mother, and she cried to our teacher, who took me to the counselor’s office and