Chapter 42 Goodbye #2
All I knew was that it took the combined power of Canada, Europe and Russia to stop Haynes’s army, which meant the Defiance had no chance.
This was history repeating itself—an untrained guerrilla militia against the full might of King George III.
It was a fluke the first time. To beat the giant again was impossible.
The world didn’t turn upside down twice in a row.
We were going to lose, which meant Lucas had died in vain.
Adam had a weak smile for me when I finally made it to his room the next morning.
“There she is,” he rasped.
His face had thinned, and he had bandages all over, but he appeared otherwise well.
“How are you?” I asked, settling into a chair beside his bed.
“I’ve had worse,” he said with an exaggerated grimace.
I laughed, but it sounded fake even to me.
“How are you?” he asked, brown eyes going soft. “Hands healing okay?”
I showed him the gauze around both palms. “So far, I think. Still hurts, though.”
“Yeah.” He let out a small cough. “Me too.”
Silence blanketed us, punctuated only by the beep of his monitor.
After a moment, his low voice broke the stillness. “Soph, I heard about Lucas…”
My gaze dropped to the floor.
“I’m sorry, Sophia.”
“He’s gone,” I said and added a few more tears to the millions I’d already shed.
Adam set a hand over mine. “At least he got his final wish. You’re safe now.”
Small consolation. I couldn’t even acknowledge how much I hated being safe when Lucas was past saving. Instead, I changed the subject. “I wanted to thank you. I don’t think either of us would have survived that if you hadn’t shown up.”
He chuckled. “I popped a lung for you. You owe me some KP duty.”
A laughing sob burst from my mouth, but then I was crying in earnest. My head fell to the side of his mattress, and I bawled into his stiff white blankets. “I don’t know how to go on now. Everyone’s dead.”
Another long silence followed until his soft, “I’m not,” fluttered over my ears.
I peeked up at his solemn gaze.
“I know it’s not the same,” he added. “But you got me for life.”
Managing a small smile, I moved to the edge of the bed and gave him a delicate hug, afraid to put any pressure on his shattered chest. “And you have me. We survived the trenches, didn’t we?”
“Maybe the war will end someday and we can go home.”
“Seems impossible,” I muttered as I returned to my chair.
“Canada just won a world war, Sophia. Anything is possible.” He punctuated this with a wink, and a genuine laugh bubbled in my chest.
Before I could explore it, the door to his room opened, and a nurse stepped in. “Time for meds.”
I stood. “I’ll go back to my room. Do you know when they’re going to let you out of here?”
Adam shrugged, but something bleak passed through his eyes. “Come back sometime, will you? It gets boring in here.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise.”
I lost track of the time, but each day, I visited Adam, and my hands hurt less and less.
I stared listlessly while the doctors explained my prognosis.
My hands would heal over the next few weeks so long as I kept my activity light.
My lungs had improved vastly, and eventually, the doctors saw no reason I needed to remain inpatient.
I’d fare better at the refugee base, they said, where I could heal with my own people.
People who understood.
But no one understood this crippling desire to never wake up. How often had I imagined death? It was almost like a fantasy, a recurring dream I wished to slip into.
Unsure how many sunsets had passed since I first woke in this hospital, I finally signed an X on my discharge paperwork.
I dressed in donated clothes, and in a daze, I rose from my bed and settled into the wheelchair they brought.
They gave me a plastic bag of my effects, and I gazed dully down at my bloody dog tags, Lucas’s gold ring, and the note I always kept in my bra.
Grief is like snow…
I was surrounded by snow. Buried in it. I would never climb out from beneath it.
Still, I replaced the ring and stuffed the note against my heart where it belonged.
Inside the building, everything was quiet. The nurses smiled as I rolled past. The security guard at the front entrance waved a friendly goodbye.
Outside the hospital, my mouth slackened at the screaming crowd held back by steel barricades.
They went wild when they laid eyes on me.
Signs waved above them, and for a terrifying moment, I thought they were protesting the refugee presence at the hospital.
We were foreigners using their resources, after all.
Unwanted immigrants. Useless dependents.
But then three familiar words caught my eye, painted in red over a white background.
Until I die.
“What is this?” I asked the nurse transporting me.
He locked my chair before a black, nondescript vehicle. “NAO protesters. They support you, Miss Sophia.”
My gaze darted over some of the other signs.
They chose love. You chose war.
We ship peace.
Team Lucas.
Let love end the war.
#reunitethem
Speechless, I took the nurse’s hand as he helped me into the car. I was only aware my face was wet when the car had cleared the crowd.
“You okay, miss?” the driver asked.
Sniffling, I nodded. My hands ached to hold a person who wasn’t there.
A person who no longer existed.
“It’s just… They don’t realize he’s dead,” I said.
The driver’s sorrowful gaze met mine in the mirror. “I’m sorry, miss.”
We drove for a long time, and finally, we entered a gated compound. A military base of sorts. He pulled onto a street of identical houses, then stopped at a grander one at the very end. When he opened the car door, I hesitated.
The pathway leading to the house’s entrance was straight and even, no cracks in the cement.
The March grass was still brown and crunchy, but no weeds punctured its immaculate surface.
The place was clean and wholesome, inviting me to come inside, to turn my back on all the dirt and grit of my past and start anew.
But I hesitated.
Because I didn’t know if I wanted to.
This was the moment.
It was the moment I had to decide whether I’d let all the tragedy crumble me to pieces or if I’d instead find the strength to go on.
I didn’t want to be strong.
I wanted to disintegrate.
But my touch slid to the gold ring circling my finger, and in my mind, Lucas’s voice appeared.
The part of you that’s me will never die.
If I disintegrated, then his memory would go with me. He’d begged me again and again to protect myself. All he wanted was my safety, and he finally got it. Was I really going to sacrifice it for grief?
Grief was like snow. If I took it in my grasp, it would melt.
I set a foot on the asphalt. Then the second.
One step. Then another.
I stood tall against the gravity pulling me down and put one foot in front of the other all the way down the path. At the entrance of the two-story brick facade, I knocked.
Seconds later, the door swung inward, and, shocked, I stared into the dark eyes and catlike smile of Nia Williams.
“Miss Reeves.” She stepped back to let me in. “I wondered if you’d make it in time.”
Dressed in an ice-white pantsuit that gleamed against her brown skin, she was the very picture of political poise. Beyond her, a number of Defiance soldiers stood armed and ready to attack. She set her arm about my shoulders, guiding me deeper into the house. “I have fantastic news, Sophia.”
“You do?” Confusion stayed my tongue, but I took in the generic, well-appointed home with increasing interest.
We stopped at the entrance to a den, one wall dominated by a large TV, its screen flashing with an all-caps headline.
COMMANDER RICHARD HAYNES, LEADER OF THE NEW AMERICAN ORDER, ASSASSINATED