Chapter 60
Atlas
Neither one of them wakes up.
That’s the worst part.
Their hearts keep beating, their chests instinctively taking in air, but their souls remain in stasis and their fates are left undecided.
Staying in the infirmary did no one any favors, so I force myself out by sheer will and spite.
Ambrosia trails behind, pursued closely by Matt, while my feet carry me to unexpected places.
I know they’re following me. They’re not being discreet about it.
There isn’t a bone in my body that gives a damn enough to complain or command them to leave. (So, I don’t. I let them follow.)
And suddenly, we’re in Conin and Ezra’s apartment.
The polished floor is the same, as is the sunken coffee table, the dark gray futon, and the empty shelves.
It’s all the same as it was. Instead, this time, Ambrosia and Matt are in this bubble—this frozen, untouchable remnant of Conin’s and Ezra’s lives.
“Stop looking at it,” Ambrosia says.
The floor, the toilet, and the lip of the bathtub are stained with Ezra’s blood. The stains have congealed over in speckled patches. He’s falling again, the crash rattles the floor and vibrates up my spine. The knife that was resting in his palm when I found him lies complacent near the toilet.
I emit an unrecognizable noise.
It feels like falling, but it’s actually my feet carrying me forward.
Every towel within the nearby vicinity ends up piled on the floor.
I wet them all and start furiously scrubbing at the blood.
Flakes unglue themselves, but there’s still so much, and it spreads along the walls and ceiling until it completely enshrouds my vision.
Crimson, crimson, crimson.
A pair of hands drag me away from the scene and rest me on something soft, like a cloud.
Those same hands shape into a firm body and crawl next to me.
Another figure sidles up at my other side.
He has red hair and dotted freckles, with a dim smile appropriate for the situation.
Matt reaches forward and slips away my glasses, discarding them gently on the nightstand.
He blurs, briefly, before returning to me.
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispers. “I love you, Atlas.”
I love you, too.
Ambrosia embraces me. My shoulder blades pressed against her chest. Her chin rests against my neck, brushing hot air against my skin.
My eyelids well with the accumulated pain from the past day, and they’re threatening to break the dam, but I don’t want to shut down now because I can’t shut down now.
Then Matt places a tender kiss on my forehead, and it’s over for me. The water rams through and spills everywhere. Tears flood the sheets, drip onto my hands, splashing Matt while he strokes my hair. Ambrosia clutches tighter, reassuring me she’s still there.
I wish ma and pa were here. I wish abu was still alive.
In some fucked-up way, this feels like losing him all over again, but worse when Ezra’s and Conin’s lives are on the verge of no return.
Abu's voice breezes in. It’s hard to discern what he says, but it’s unmistakably his voice.
He’s speaking in Spanish, akin to a song, like distant echoes rising.
The longer I attempt to decipher what he’s saying, the more I realize it doesn’t matter. It’s a melody. Abu is singing.
He croons the lullaby he sang to me as a kid, the one he taught ma, who would take his place on busy nights. I can’t tell whether his voice is a figment of my imagination or a call from beyond in the spirit realm, but it’s a wave of reprieve.
“You hear that?” Ambrosia asks. “Abuelito’s singing.”
“I can hear it, too,” Matt agrees. Even through the tears, it’s clear he’s soothed by it.
“You can hear him?”
“Of course. He never really left, Atlas.”
No, I guess he didn’t. I couldn’t feel him anymore when he passed, but there were still traces of his spirit in little fits and bursts—just as stubborn as he was in life.
Abu had a powerful, indelible presence, one that couldn’t easily be wiped from existence.
He’s still here and still watching over me, rooting for the Angelic cause.
I liberate myself with a deep breath. If I search around, Ezra’s tether is still there and pulsating with teeming life.
It’s duller than before, but it remains, and I won’t let go.
The tether beats with Ezra’s heart. It beats with mine.
What tortures me is that I can’t say the same about Conin.
I can’t feel him, his life force, his beating heart.
It’s truly agonizing not having that confirmation.
Matt and Ambrosia never let go. They stay, molding their bodies with mine until we’re one big, amorphous blob. The tears taper away. An emotion resembling calm trickles through me, and my eyelids suddenly feel heavy.
I dream of drowning in my own tears.
Matt’s arm is draped around my chest. His knee bumps into mine, and I can’t help but let a chuckle escape.
He snores softly, like he always does, that same one I’d listen to like a lifeline on the nights we’d spend together.
(My, my, the unrequited crush I had on this boy.
It’s too bad he ended up straight, and I had to respect he and Ambrosia were exclusively a thing.)
“Matt,” I whisper. He rolls away with a grunt and clings to an imaginary blanket.
We fell asleep without climbing into the sheets, so he must be cold.
I slip away, noticing Ambrosia’s absence and the lingering creases like the ones announcing Ezra’s departure the night I found him slumped over the tub.
Panic slams into me. I grab the fuzzy blanket placed at the foot of the bed and draw it over Matt, then proceed out of Conin and Ezra’s room in search of Ambrosia. I realize I was premature with my worries when I find her standing in the kitchen, preparing food at the stove.
“Good morning,” she says. “I let you guys sleep in. Matt wouldn’t admit it, but the stress was getting to him. This is the most he’s slept all week.”
Lured in as if by some magnetic pull, my gaze falls to the bathroom where every speck of blood has been wiped clean. No evidence remains that Ezra harmed himself. The room is bereft of any knife and stripped of the towels I mottled with Ezra’s blood.
Ambrosia’s silent, the only noise coming from the food she tosses around in the pan. She feigns ignorance as she casts tiny looks my way.
“What?” she questions.
“Thank you,” I mumble in reply. “You didn’t have to.”
She lets out a grunt of breath through her nose and silences the stovetop. She ambles over to me. I brace for her touch and wince when it never comes. Ambrosia remains at arm’s length, her posture rigid as she studies me up and down. Her stoic mask breaks into melancholy.
“Can I hug you?”
“Yes. Please.”
Her arms wrap around mine, and we’re chest to chest, so close that I can feel her pulsing heart. It’s fast, scurrying like a mouse. She’s trembling. She shudders, and the noise that escapes her mouth sounds like a suppressed choke.
My best friend doesn’t cry. She’s strong, unlike me. She’s a force to be reckoned with, a leader when people need her, but she’s undeniably crying. There’s a breaking point for everyone, and Ambrosia has crossed the threshold.
Her sobs are torturing and frail, a result of a lifetime of unfair treatment and living. Her nails dig in, then let go, as she cycles through grasping my shirt. It flashes me back to the day we were waiting for the results that would later diagnose her with autism.
“I knew it,” she said.
“You know nothing’s wrong with you, right?”
She smiled weakly and tugged at a blue dread.
“I know. It’s a relief . . . having an answer for what this is.”
Her fingers raked in, then receded. I knew all about wanting answers.
“Can I tell you something about me?” I asked.
She nodded and laced her fingers through mine. I gripped hers tightly and held it against my chest, right where she could feel my heart.
“I’m queer,” I said.
“I fucking knew it!” She guffawed.
My mouth was torn between scolding her and smiling giddily. Of course, she wouldn’t care.
“And you know what?” she said.
“What?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, either.”
Ambrosia clenches the fabric. She cycles through a few more tics before resting her chin in the crook of my neck.
“Sorry,” she sighs.
“For what?”
“You’re hurting, and I sprung this on you.”
“Shut up. It’s fine. What’s troubling you?”
“This,” she replies immediately. “I shouldn’t have made him come. It wasn’t fair. I knew better, and I knew the risks of bringing someone without special abilities. And now he’s . . .”
Dying, though neither of us says it.
“It’s not your fault. You know that, right?” I say.
“You weren’t there,” she replies.
“Sure, but I know Conin wanted to be a guard. You were taking a chance on him, and not one of you could’ve known it was a trap. These are . . . unpredictable, scary times we live in. There’s only so much we can do.”
She laughs weakly.
“Well, look at that. Augurys did impart some wisdom on you.”
I remove myself from the embrace and slap her on the arm.
“Shut up! I was trying to help,” I scoff.
She grins. For a moment, it seems off, when I haven’t seen a smile on her in so long. I capture this moment in my head, this brief still in the movie that’s our lives, and commit it to memory. Happiness is so few and far between, it’s nice to see it pop up amongst the gloom.
“It did help,” she says. “Thank you.”
We stand there in silence, neither of us ready to move, waiting for life to resume.
“Do you think Ezra will forgive me?” Ambrosia questions unexpectedly.
“I don’t know,” I answer, because it’s true. There’s a lot about Ezra that remains a mystery. It’s sort of . . . disheartening to think about. “I think . . . he’s angry with himself. He feels responsible for Conin, for dragging him into this. He lost it in all the chaos and took it out on you.
“I think when he . . . harmed himself, he woke up. He couldn’t justify pinning the blame on you anymore.”
Ambrosia’s stare is calculating, brows furrowed in question. She opens her mouth and then quickly clamps it, starting to chew her lips. I allow her to go through her process, but my patience is wearing thin.
“You appear to know him well,” she whispers.
(About that . . .)
“You love him, don’t you?”
(Ah, that’s a loaded question.) Maybe not love. Maybe more so that I’m falling for him.
“Yeah,” I say, because it’s true in some sense. “And Conin.”
Her brows rise further to the sky. She ceases the assault on her lips, going slack-jawed.
“Do they know this?”
“Ezra does, but I haven’t figured out how to tell Conin yet.”
She waits for more. I’m preparing for her judgment, telling me this isn’t a good idea and that I’ll have to back out while I can, or for her to never say anything to me again.
“We kissed.”
“Did he kiss back?”
“Yeah.”
Ambrosia reclaims her position and hugs me. “When Ezra wakes up, you figure this out, okay?”
Not if. When.
“Okay,” I say, exhausted.
“What’d I miss?” Matt asks with a beautifully chaotic bedhead. Ambrosia groans.