Nova
The Community Hall is packed again.
Same walls, same faces, but it feels different now. Everyone is looking at me and I know what they think they’re here for. Laith is at the front with Brent standing beside him. Linda off to the side. Minerva in her chair, watching me walk up like she already knows something is about to go sideways.
Probably is.
I get up there.
I look at Laith.
Then I turn away from him.
“Before I get to that,” I say.
The room goes quiet.
“My guys and I made a decision,” I breathe. “We’re leaving the Hollow.”
The whispers start immediately. I look for Lena without meaning to and find her in the middle of the crowd. Her face just falls. One of the moms near the back presses her hand to her mouth. Eli’s arm moves around Zoe. I turn back and Brent is looking at the floor.
I open my mouth.
“I know this place has become my—”
I stop because I need a second.
My guys will follow me anywhere. I know that.
I look around the room. At everyone I’ve come to know — the forest shifters, the kids. They’re all…
I shake my head.
I look at Linda.
“I can’t,” I say. “I can’t go.”
She looks surprised. “What do you mean you can’t go?”
“I won’t go without them.”
“You can bring your bonds—”
“No.” I look around the room again. “Everyone. Everyone who lives in the Hollow.”
Dead silence.
Linda looks at me. Then she looks around the room — the kids, Lena, the forest shifters three deep at the back.
She looks back at me.
“Done,” she says.
I can’t stop the smile that comes.
I turn back to the room.
“You don’t have to come,” I say. “You can stay. You can go somewhere else. Whatever you choose.” I stop. “But this is the only way I know how to be free. All of us. Outside a system that spent our whole lives telling us we were the problem.” I find Lena’s eyes. “We’re not the problem.”
“Hell yes!” Someone yells from the back and I laugh. Everyone is talking at once and I can’t make it out and I know I have to—
I turn to Laith.
Brent is beside him. He gives me a soft smile.
He has no idea.
“Let him go,” I say.
Brent goes still.
Laith looks at me. “You’re letting me go? Just like that?”
“Yeah, because me and all of my fellow misfits are leaving.” My hand moves to my mark. “And you get to live with the mess you made.”
His mouth opens.
Closes.
Brent reaches over and pulls him up out of the chair.
Cal takes over and escorts him from the town.
When I turn back, everyone is already moving.
People gathering kids, bags, whatever they can carry. Forest shifters scattering to the perimeter. Brent helping someone with something heavy. Linda at the front with Kyron, pointing ahead.
Minerva is already packed, which shouldn’t surprise me. But I don’t have time to think about that.
Lena is with Max, moving.
My guys and I move to the road.
The crow is flying overhead. It banks, coming down low, right in front of us — almost like a goodbye.
I watch it go.
Locke’s hand finds the back of my neck as we walk.
At the edge of the tree line I stop.
“Just give me a minute,” I say quietly. “I’ll catch up.”
The guys nod and keep moving.
I turn around and look at the Hollow.
Empty now.
The blue door at the end of the road, closed. The Community Hall, quiet. The fence Brent fixed. Zoe’s house next door. The road where everything happened, still and ordinary in the morning light.
Nobody left inside.
Nobody waiting.
Just a town I didn’t know I needed.
I take a breath and try to imprint it into my memory.
I don’t want to forget it.
“You coming, Firefly?”
Beckett catches my hand.
I smile and squeeze once.
“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s go.”
THE END.