Chapter Fifteen
Cipher
I wake up because the bed feels wrong. Noa is sprawling across me, and he never sleeps on me.
I sit up and slide out of bed, and as I stroll into the main room, I notice Valli’s jacket is gone and so are her boots.
Maybe she and Cave went to get breakfast early.
I pull up the tracking app on my phone and see Cave is in the cornfield, but she is not on the island. Rather, she is moving away from it.
Suddenly I smell a hint of smoke and race to the door to see black smoke filling the sky.
I dart back to the bedroom. “Noa, wake up!”
He goes from lying dead asleep to sitting, his hair sticking up in all directions and confusion in his sleep-filled eyes. “What? Holy shit, what’s on fire?”
He jumps from the bed and slips his feet into his boots. We both run outside after dressing quickly and get on my bike, then I push it as fast as it can go.
The cornfield is on fire, and I stop the bike at the edge as we both jump off.
“CAVE!” Noa screams, already running toward the field. I catch him by the back of the shirt, dragging him to me. “CAVE IS IN THERE! LET GO OF ME!”
“You can’t run into a fire. Cave isn’t an idiot. Let’s do a lap and see if he is watching.”
He goes to run around and check while I grab the pump; the island has water lines that we laid ourselves after a fire a few years ago. Khodi comes to help me, then Ares is next. I use the hose to do what I can, but it’s almost pointless—the corn is burning to the ground.
The alarms finally go off, and everyone on the island rushes out to help.
When the flames are almost under control, that’s when I spot him. Cave stands in the center of the field, watching it all burn down around him.
Noa and I observe him through the dwindling smoke, and my heart breaks seeing him standing there as his safe place goes up in flames. What the hell happened to cause this destruction?
We keep fighting it until it’s all gone; luckily it spread nowhere else.
The pure relief that he is alive hits me.
If the wind had been present, things could have been a lot different.
Nobody moves toward him; the whole island population stands at the edge of the field with hoses and buckets.
Despite many personality clashes, when times are hard, we band together, as we all understand what it’s like to be different.
“I’m going in,” Noa says.
“I’m coming with you.”
Nobody else follows—they wouldn’t dare. It’s known that Cave will allow a handful of us close in times like this, and even then, it’s risky. But he would walk through anything for me, and I owe him the same respect.
We walk slowly toward him. When we are halfway there, his head turns, and his arms come up. He is telling us to stop. We both pause, knowing we need to do this at his pace.
“Okay, big guy,” Noa says in an even, soft tone. “We’ve stopped. We’ll just stand here with you.”
Cave’s wild eyes move between us, but they look void of all emotion.
I have seen him in his bad moments before and helped him through them in any way he needed me.
I take a deep breath, running my eyes over him.
His hands are blistered, one of his sleeves is burned, and there is a trickle of blood rolling down his temple.
“Cave, what happened?”
His mouth opens, but no sound comes out. His hands open and close in frustration. Bells jingle as the Jester waltzes over without a care in the world, though he is at least smart enough to stop at a safe distance.
“She found the basement,” he says.
“What basement?” Noa asks.
The Jester tells us everything. How he and Cave took Rowan to find Steedy, and how they then locked Rowan up because it was the only way to keep him safe and away from Valli.
“She took him off the island,” the Jester finishes. “She said to let her do it, and your man did the only thing he could. He let her go, but he clearly wasn’t happy about it.”
Cave snaps, emitting a sound that is pure sadness.
He charges so fast the Jester has no time to move, so I step in front of him.
I can’t let Cave do something he can’t take back, not to someone who works here.
I get one arm up and say his name, then a hot, radiating pain spreads across my chest. The blow was meant for the Jester, and Cave catches me and sweeps me off my feet, then we both hit the ground.
The air is knocked from my lungs, and I wheeze as Cave scrambles off me. He kneels at my side, pushing his arms under me, and then he pulls me against his chest. His whole body is shaking as he lowers his forehead to mine. “Sorry.”
Placing my hand against his soot-covered face, I murmur, “It’s okay. Everything will be okay.”
“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” he cries over and over again into my hair, rocking us slightly.
“Hey,” Noa says, kneeling beside us. “Big guy, listen to me. I need you to really hear me. I know you’ve got it all wrong.
Valli wouldn’t leave us, not for good. She would have told us all if she wasn’t coming back, at the very least to say goodbye.
I believe she took her brother off the island because that is the person she is.
She has spent years saving him, and it’s all she knows how to do. ”
Cave’s arms tighten around me, and he sucks in a breath. Then his whole body jerks, and his hand comes up to his neck.
Ares steps back from behind him, a syringe in his hand.
“What did you do?!” Noa stands and shoves Ares, who takes a step back with his hands up. “He was calming down!”
“Look at his hands, Noa,” Ares urges.
Turning his gaze back, Noa stares at Cave.
“He has burns on his hands, arms, and possibly in other places. He has to be cleaned and looked over by a medical team. There is no way we can do that unless he is asleep. We had no other choice. I would never hurt him—you should know that.”
“Then we take him to a hospital like a normal—”
“No hospitals,” Ares says, cutting him off.
“They won’t understand him. A nonverbal man his size, dressed as a scarecrow, covered in burns and coming out of sedation in a strange place with strangers holding him down?
He will be sent back, and Nixie has tried to avoid that since he started here.
None of you know his history, not really, not even you two. His files are sealed for a reason.”
We know Cave has a history, but don’t know the full extent. He doesn’t talk, so has never been able to explain, but we all have trauma of some kind. It’s why we ended up here on an island full of misfits.
Cave goes down but fights it the whole time. His arms stay locked around me until they can’t. Noa drops back down beside us and helps me hold him up. He is still conscious when he mutters, “Read.”
Noa leans in. “Read what?”
“File,” he whispers as his eyes fall closed, and then the medical team moves in.
Normally, in a pinch, we just have Banks patch us up. But the full team is here and loading him onto a gurney to move him. I just pray that Noa is right and Valli is coming back—I don’t think Cave will survive if she doesn’t. He is barely holding on to himself right now.