Chapter Thirty-Eight
Kenyon
The night pressed in on me, the sounds so different from our home on the beach. It had me struggling to fall asleep, struggling to relax enough to drift off.
I’d never cared for the beach, much preferring the woods. The openness of the sea had always overwhelmed me. Still, this wasn’t either of those things. Instead, it was desert, just flat and brown and full of spindly bushes that reminded me far too much of the dungeons for my comfort.
The air conditioner inside of the RV hummed softly, keeping us comfortable at least. I could appreciate that, since I doubted sweating like crazy would make the situation any better.
When tossing and turning didn’t resolve anything—and in fact I ended up with Ingram muttering so many times I was pretty sure he’d come down one bunk and smack me if I kept it up—I gave up and rolled out of the bed.
I’d gotten the bottom given my size, plus my lack of physical skills meant it was better for one of the others to climb. No one wanted me toppling down.
I didn’t bother to put my shoes on, instead creeping as quietly as I could move my rather large and unwieldy body. No reason to risk waking Yun—she’d struck me as exhausted lately.
The door creaked softly as I closed it behind me. Grains of sand stuck to the soles of my feet, despite the large section of fake grass set down, like that tricked anyone into thinking this was more homey with the greenery. Due to the sand, however, brown rested between the blades of faded grass.
The lights that hung from the awning spread a glow across the make-shift patio, the same picnic table we’d sat at for most dinners right there.
I stepped beyond, onto the patio, the moon large in the open sky. I had to admit, the lack of light pollution gave for one hell of a view of the darkness above.
The air was dry and dirty, and a part of me felt as though it might have coated my lungs when I breathed it in. All we had to do was get through this damn dungeon, and I could go back to somewhere else, somewhere better.
My senses weren’t as great as Carter or Ingram’s, but they weren’t useless, either, a point proven when movement to the side of the RV caught my attention.
A figure moved there, in the darkness, outside the circle of light spread from the patio. Despite not being combat, instinct proved stronger than skills as I moved.
The idea of someone against the RV—not just anywhere, but hands gripping the window edge that led into the room where Yun slept—infuriated me.
I grabbed the person and twisted them, slamming them against the dirt. They had a small, thin frame—a woman? I’d learned not to worry too much about that when it came to potential espers, because size didn’t mean a damn thing. A female esper could kill me just as fast as a male could.
And I had no intention of fucking around when it came to Yun’s safety.
The new position—flat on their back and with my hand around their throat—put them in enough light for me to make sense of their face.
Yun.
My brain stalled. As much as people made fun of me for it not working at all, the truth was that it usually worked well enough.
That wasn’t the case right now. It seemed to fully shut down, like the view of Yun’s wide, frightened eyes and my hand around her thin throat was enough to derail me.
I couldn’t work out that, couldn’t believe it was true.
Until my all but useless mind stuttered to a rough start yet again and I wondered what the fuck I was doing.
I yanked backward, pulling away from her, hasty and frantic words falling from my lips. An apology? An explanation? I had no idea what they meant, but I still offered them like pointless gifts.
She rolled over and scooted backward in the dirt, putting space between us—space I didn’t reclaim. Instead, I lifted my hands, palms out, trying to slow my own breathing just as much as reassure her.
Funny that I seemed just as thrown as her, like we both needed to sit down and take one big breath.
Until I focused my attention on her fully, ignoring my own hesitations, and realized we were actually nothing alike. While it threw me a bit, the way her heart raced, the rise in blood pressure, all the signs of stress on her body went to show she was in a significantly worse position.
So I pulled myself together, focusing instead on Yun. I crouched, then dropped to my knees. It had seemed to help before when I’d tried to look smaller, so maybe it would this time?
“I’m sorry,” I said, keeping my voice quiet. “I didn’t know it was you. I just saw someone at your window and thought someone was breaking in.”
She lifted her gaze to mine, the dim light making her eyes look almost fully black. Worse, the small bit of light showed off darkness around her throat.
A bruise?
I gulped down a curse, not wanting to frighten her anymore by showing just how that bruise affected me. The last thing I’d ever want was to leave such an ugly mark on a guide—especially this guide.
“Why don’t you try to slow down your breathing, huh?”
She narrowed her eyes, and that spark of anger did me some good, at least. It said she wasn’t in a full blown panic attack. Sure, I’d fucked up, but seeing her crying and shaking would have been really fucking hard to stomach.
“Don’t tell me how to breathe.”
“Sorry,” I said, rubbing a hand against the back of my neck. “I can just tell you’re pretty close to passing out, and I figured you probably didn’t want that to happen.”
She didn’t dare close her eyes, as though she needed to keep an eye on me, but she did try to draw air in and out slowly.
The breathing was stilted, not nearly so smooth as I’d prefer, but better than nothing.
After a long moment, her heart didn’t race quite so fast and her blood pressure had dropped.
Still elevated, but it didn’t seem that she would lose consciousness now.
“I didn’t hurt you,” she said, voice soft.
“What?”
“You had your hand on my throat, but I didn’t use my power against you.”
“Oh.” The stupid response had me recognizing for the first time that she was right.
I’d heard exactly what this guide could do to an esper when she wanted, but I had no desire to see it firsthand.
So why, when I had handled her so roughly, hadn’t she done it to me?
I’d been so focused on her that I’d entirely forgotten her ability to put me flat on my ass. “Maybe you like me?”
The way she tilted her head screamed that wasn’t it, and I was dumber than she thought for suggesting it.
Which…was fair.
“I mean, not that you like me especially, more that maybe you knew I wouldn’t actually hurt you. It’s the difference between if my dog runs up to me barking or a strange dog does. I’m not gonna worry when it’s my dog, but if it’s a random dog, well, I might not trust that it won’t bite me.”
She said nothing at first, staring back at me as though working that idea through her head.
It was a time when I wished I had Shear’s ability, that I could peek inside her head and see what she thought about it.
I wanted to understand her, and I knew damn well she wasn’t intending to go exposing those secret parts of her mind.
I gave her the time to consider it, though I doubted she’d quite accept it.
Sure enough, she frowned. “I don’t think that’s it. I have no reason to think you wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Have I done it yet?”
“Everyone is innocent—until they aren’t.
” She paused, her shoulders slumping. “Don’t misunderstand me, please.
I know that you—all of you—have taken good care of me.
I am appreciative of that. I know that I could have had things much worse, and that’s because of you all that I don’t.
I just don’t want you thinking that means I’m going to forget everything I’ve experienced, everything I’ve learned. ”
“Can’t you learn different things, though?”
She laughed, the sound quiet and full of pain. “No, I can’t. Those lessons came at too high a price for me to ever risk having to learn them again. I suffered far too much for me to toss it all away and just hope things are different, hope you’re all different.”
Her words stilled me, made me think about what Shear had said before. Clearly, she had a past that wasn’t good, one we didn’t know about, one we could only guess about, and the whole not knowing thing was getting to me.
“What happened?” I found myself asking even if I knew damn well she wouldn’t actually answer me. She held that secret so tight that nothing could pry it from her fingers, and even if we had our guesses, we didn’t really know.
She didn’t respond with an insult or a quick shut down—progress?—but instead stared down at her own hands as though she couldn’t see them, like she stared at something else instead. Was it her past? Whatever horrors she’d gone through, was that where her mind took her?
“I’m not gonna judge you,” I pressed when I wasn’t sure she even really heard me anymore. “No matter what else is true, we’re working together, right? That makes us a team, so I want to be able to help you, to understand you. I want to know what it is that’s made you feel this way.”
She shook her head, the motion soft and slow.
“Why? What does that change? You knowing why I don’t trust espers doesn’t change that I don’t trust you.
If I let you poke around in my past, how does that make anything better?
Last I checked, the great Reject Squad had plenty of their own past you all don’t go around talking about, but you want me to do it? ”
Did she think that was a good game to play? Too bad for her that I wasn’t nearly so sensitive. “You want to know? You think that I care about telling you? I figured you already knew—everyone else does.”
“They know the story, but the story isn’t ever the truth.”
“The truth is pretty simple. We were in The Pitt when it last opened, and we made a choice. We were told to do one thing, and we didn’t follow those orders.
Was it the right choice?” I shrugged. “I don’t know, but I know it’s the choice we could live with.
It was the only choice I could make and still look at myself in the mirror.
So we did that, and we lost everything because of it. ”
She listened to my words, not pulling away, not stopping me or calling me out on the vagueness of it.
I could have given her more details, but that felt like making an excuse, like trying to pretty up the truth of what happened.
At the end of the day, whether or not our choice was the moral one or the right one or anything else, we’d betrayed the Guild and done as we pleased.
That was the reality, and I saw no good reason to dress it up, to paint ourselves as anything but the fuckups we were.
In the quiet that followed, I thought she wouldn’t respond.
Or maybe she’d tell me that I was an idiot for thinking that this was a tit-for-tat sort of deal.
That was fair, as she hadn’t agreed to some deal there.
I couldn’t really offer and expect her to just do as I wanted because I’d shared some.
“I don’t want to go back to there,” she said, her voice so quiet I had to strain to make out the words.
“Do you know why I was sneaking out? Because I had another nightmare, another time when I had to go back there and relive it all again. The absolute last thing I want to do right now is talk about it. I want a break, to get to be free from it for at least a little while. I don’t want to feel like that same person, to be trapped all over again.
” Her voice rose as she spoke, the words stronger at the end, the frustration clear enough that I didn’t need to be a mentalist to hear it.
And I understood that better than I wanted to admit. There were times after everything that had happened in The Pitt when I wanted nothing more than a day off, then to not hear about it on the news, not get spat on by others, to just forget about it.
“You have nightmares that often?”
She nodded, then tucked her hair back behind her ear so it didn’t fall into her face.
“Every damn night I have them. It’s like there’s no way to escape it.
And then I’m here, surrounded by espers, and the Guild needs so much, and they keep wanting to know how I can guide the way I do, and it’s just all too much.
It feels like everyone is taking a piece of me, yanking them away until I have nothing left.
So, I’m sorry, maybe it isn’t fair, but I just don’t want to go back to that hell for a moment longer than I have to. ”
“I get it. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to push.” And, worse, I really did feel bad about it. My curiosity was hardly sated, of course, but the last thing I’d wanted was to cause her more pain.
Which, to be fair, was exactly what I’d done. On purpose or not, I’d managed to throw her on the ground by her throat, terrify her, then ask her to talk about one of the most painful things she likely had ever experienced. My intent wasn’t that important when I looked at what had come from it.
She shook her head, appearing suddenly smaller and far more tired than she had before. “It’s not your fault. I know I got my nickname for a fair reason, and as much as I hate it, it fits. I shouldn’t have been sneaking out, anyway.”
“Want to take a walk? I can make sure you’re safe if you want to clear your head.”
She got to her feet, brushing the sand that had clung to her. “No, that’s okay. I think I’ll just go lie down.” She headed toward the door, not giving me nearly as large a margin as I would have expected, before pausing. “And thank you.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask what the thank you was for—and it probably didn’t really matter—before she disappeared back into the RV, leaving me out front on my own.
Which had me leaning back, wondering just how I’d screwed this up that badly.
And also had me thinking about how I could make it up to her…