Aubree
I t’s an odd sensation, to witness and to feel Minka’s unfiltered rage, but beneath that, her overflowing protection. Her desperation to shield me from the people she deems harmful. Her aching emotions spring between guarding me and guarding her own heart.
Sophia’s stunt has taken a chip she wasn’t expecting to lose today.
She got on a plane and brought her entire family halfway across the country on Sophia’s word alone, only to feel the sting of betrayal so soon after landing.
If the world were made up of colored, pulsing waves, then Minka is both black and bright yellow, each shade fighting for dominance as her thoughts weave from me to Sophia. Defensiveness to disappointment. Protection to punishment.
I always knew she loved me. Even though her words are constantly harsh and her appreciation is rarely voiced out loud, I’ve felt her familial affection since the early days of her new life within Copeland City.
My gift is a blessing, really, because if I depended on verbal approval, I’d be left wanting.
But knowing she loves me, and feeling her turmoil today, is a whole other level of swelling beauty that pulses in my heart. But then again, the pleasure I feel dissipates just as quickly because I feel her pain in every second breath she takes.
“Hey.” Tim walks past Minka and Archer’s silent bed-pod-thing, leaving them to their privacy, though I know he hurts for her, too.
Then he comes to sit beside me. He lowers to the floor of the bus with a groan, pulling the legs of his jeans up to make it easier to bend his knees, then he leans back against the wall and stops only when his shoulder touches mine.
Finally, he turns just his head and grins. So handsome. So perfect.
“I always figured she had a temper. Her cold control had to mean there was more bubbling beneath the surface. But that was something else, huh?”
I tilt my head to the side and rest on his shoulder. “She was protecting me.”
“Mm.” I feel the vibration of his voice. The warm caress of his lips on the top of my head. “She was. Kinda funny how she’s the least able to fight for others, considering her blood thing. But she’s the first through a door anyway.”
“Probably why Archer’s always so stressed.” I bring my hands up and wrap them around his arm, snuggling in to his side and inhaling the scent of his aftershave. “She’s as emotionally stunted as Minka, ya know?”
“Sophia?”
“Mmhm. She wanted to get to me, which is why Minka’s pissed.
But she also wants to spend time with Minka.
” I lower my voice, knowing there are far too many bodies on this bus and not enough privacy for a completely unfiltered conversation.
“She got her feelings hurt, too. Because Minka’s mad at her. ”
Smirking, Jen leans out of her pod and looks between us. “She’ll be extra mad if she finds out you’re talking about her.”
Tim hits her with an unkind stare. “Go back to your room.”
“So it’s true, huh?” She rests on her belly and elbows, supporting her chin in her palm and kicking her feet so they arc through the air with each swing.
Though the windows are tinted all around us, I still catch the sparkle of a toe ring when it passes through a ray of sunlight. “You can read minds, Doctor Emeri?”
“No one can read minds. That’s a fallacy employed by con artists who like to steal a person’s last dollar. It’s a performance at best, and a scam most often.”
“But you?—”
“Never said I read minds. Ever.” We long ago drove out to…
somewhere… a few minutes outside of the small town called Plainview.
Parking a giant bus in a tiny main street is dumb—and illegal—so we had no choice but to relocate.
But since we stopped a while back, and the sun flirts with the horizon, I push to my feet and turn again, taking Tim’s hand in mine.
It’s not like I can lift him, and trying only makes it harder for him to do it himself, but I’m not ready to walk away, and I’m not willing to sit here any longer and have these people gape at me like I belong to a circus of misfits.
So I wait for him to stand and drag his arm over my shoulder. I treat him the way I would treat a scarf; draping myself in his limbs and curling close enough that I can barely tell where I end and he begins.
Exactly how I prefer it.
“Wanna come for a walk outside with me?”
He breathes out a soft laugh, pressing his hand to the side of my face and bringing me closer until his lips touch my temple and his warm breath bathes my skin. “It’s cute how you make it sound like a question and not a demand.”
“It’s good manners.” Grinning, I start forward, passing some of the others who decided to stay in the climate-controlled bus—Felix and Christabelle.
Archer and Minka. Jen remains in her bed, but Corey went outside some time ago, and Spence’s long legs peek into view from the front of the bus, where the chairs are, instead of the beds.
I slow by Minka’s cubby and tap the wall with my finger, just two taps, before I tug the curtain aside and peek in to find the couple who simply…
lie. Meditate, almost. Archer rests on his back, one arm behind his head, while the other hand draws rhythmic patterns against Minka’s shoulder.
While Minka lays with her cheek on his chest, her leg draped over his thighs, and her eyes stare. But don’t see.
She’s hidden, deep within her psyche, while she heals from the arrows she took today.
“We’re heading outside for a bit.” I search her vacant eyes and smile when she comes back to us. When her trance-like state moves aside and her focus softens. Because dammit, she takes comfort in my smile. “Wanna come?”
“Cato’s been outside a while,” Tim rumbles. “He might’ve walked back to town like that Eliza chick was in heat.”
Finally, Minka snorts, her cheeks warming with a beautiful blush. “He hit the ground so friggin’ hard.”
“And he doesn’t even care,” Archer adds. “I’d be hiding away and licking my wounds if a chick slammed me like that. But he only wants more.”
“He’s incorrigible.” I reach across Archer, almost inappropriate in how I invade their personal space, but I lay my thumb over the line digging between Minka’s brows and flatten it out.
“I know you’re really mad at Soph, but I feel obligated to tell you she had good intentions. ” I pause before adding, “ish.”
She scoffs.
“I mean, she was a dick in how she did this, and she totally still wants me to wear the helmet thing. But she cares about you.”
“I thought you couldn’t read minds?” Ellie yanks her curtain open and digs her elbows into Romeo’s chest. “My sister is the most caring person on the planet. She just really sucks at expressing those emotions in a healthy, non-toxic way. The fact you know that kinda proves you read minds, Doctor Emeri.”
“Your habit of intruding on private discussions proves you and Sophia may share that same toxic trait.” I grab her curtain and whip it back into place. Then I turn to Minka and raise a brow. “Come outside before all these Checkmate ears send me insane.”
The loud boom of a gunshot makes me jump, and the echo that pulses in the air makes my heart tremble.
Then Tim whips his arm back and runs, shoving through the bus and slamming the door open, and because I’m still in the way, Archer crushes me against Ellie’s bed framing as he dives from his cubby and follows.
“Shit.” My stomach rebels and my palms sweat, but I leave Minka behind and stalk past Spence, who remains entirely too passive, then through the bus door until I’m greeted, once again, with… dirt and water and a bunch of trees in the distance.
A tumbleweed passes on the pathetic breeze, and when I scan left, I find Cato lying on his belly with his eye resting against the scope of a rifle and Micah and Jay standing over him.
One for protection. The other, for guidance, maybe.
Jay crouches and points into the distance. “You didn’t account for the wind, kid. You see the birds in the sky?”
Cato lifts just his head, glancing straight up.
“See their wings? If you pay attention, you’ll notice the wind they trap beneath them, which is how they turn so quickly.
Learn to read the wind before you squeeze the trigger, because if you’re looking for a thousand-yard shot, it probably means you’re somewhere you really shouldn’t be, which means you get one shot.
Maybe two, if you’re quick enough. But the second will always be messier, because you lost the element of surprise. ”
“He’s teaching him how to shoot?” Minka comes up on my right, folding her arms and stopping only when her shoulder brushes mine.
She wants to hold on to her bad mood, but she still scans the beautiful lakeside area spreading out around us, stopping on Tim and Archer’s backs as they wander closer to the others.
They were the brothers who left.
Now, they’re the brothers who run toward the sound of a gunshot to make sure the others are okay.
“He’s the one who shot Boothe,” Minka murmurs. “And Rory.”
“Mmhm.”
“I suppose if a kid wants to learn, it’s probably best he learn from someone as skilled as Jay.”
“Look at you, softening up to the enemy,” I tease. “Proud of you.”
“I never considered them the enemy. Not even when Felix and Archer insisted I should. But I’m mad that Soph lied.”
“I know.”
“And I’m mad that her lie was in the pursuit of harming you.”
“Not harming,” I clarify. “Using me, maybe. Studying me. Academics study things they don’t understand all the time. The problem is, Soph was sneaky about it.”
“She’s really, really sorry.” Jen pops up on my left and beams. She knows she’s annoying, which is kinda apt, I suppose, since Minka thinks the same of Jen’s father.
“Soph never learned the difference between parasocial relationships and the normal, real kind. Worse, she doesn’t quite know how to manage friendships, so even when she has a chance to turn one-sided situations into a mutual back-and-forth thing, she’s known to mess it up because she’s not entirely friendly or… ya know… normal.”
“She catches you talking about her,” Ellie comes around to stand in front of us, digging her hands into her pockets and angling forward, “she’s gonna para-set-some-shit-on-fire.
She’s weird because she spent her formative years living with the guilt of my death, thinking that it was somehow her fault.
Which is obviously an undesirable way to live.
By the time she got me back, the damage had been done.
She’s still learning who she is in this new existence where I’m around. ”
“So really,” Jen quips. “You’re all just a bunch of trauma trolls who wouldn’t know normal if it was a bread roll, and it smacked you in the face.”
“Us?” Minka counters dryly. “Yourself included?”
“Me? No, I’m completely normal and fine. I grew up in a healthy home with attentive parents. My father remains extremely active in my life, loves me without condition, and left me with absolutely no weird daddy issues. Unlike the rest of you.”
“Sure, but your daddy is Aubree’s daddy issue,” she counters with a giggle. “Aubree calls him daddy, but not in that parental kind of way.”
“Ew!” Jen shoves forward, gagging and heaving. “You have the hots for my dad? What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Your dad is hot.” I thrill in the way she pokes a finger in her mouth and pretends to puke. “Don’t come at me, little miss I-lead-a-healthy-normal-life. You mix back-alley drugs and build warheads for your emotionally stunted parasocial boss, and you sure as hell don’t tell your daddy about it.”
“Stop saying daddy like that, you freak!” She folds at the hips, laughing and retching. “I didn’t come out here to be abused like this! I was trying to band-aid relationships between a couple of toxic-turds, and this is what I get?”
“We don’t mind being labeled toxic.” Minka shrugs. “Just don’t waltz around in your house built of glass while we’re holding rocks.”
Cato lets off another round, the boom rocking through the air, though I swear, I’m the only person who jumps.
“See?” Jay claps Cato’s back. “You hit it. Good job. Now look past it and see the next one. Eleven hundred yards.” He waits patiently while Cato presses his eye to the scope and searches. “You got it?”
“Yeah.” He wriggles on the dirt to find a new comfortable position, plumes of dust lifting into the air while his already-muscular shoulders bulge with adrenaline. “I found it.”
“Take your shot when you’re ready. But remember your distance. It means the wind matters even more than it did on the last one. What are you gonna do?”
“We’re teaching him how to shoot now?” Christabelle waddles out of the bus in an outfit not the same as earlier.
While she traveled, she looked office-perfect, if not a little uncomfortable.
Now, she wears denim shorts, but without the button done up, and a shirt that dwarfs her frame, which means it can only belong to Felix.
She massages the side of her belly, gritting her teeth, because I know the baby kicks.
But her gaze, silver, almost the same as the gun Felix keeps strapped to his hip, watches over her baby-Malone.
The last baby, before the one in her belly makes its grand entrance.
“Can we put a basketball in his hands, please? Not a gun.”
“He already knows how to shoot,” Micah answers, glancing back this way. “He’s known since he was old enough to hold a fork.”
“Anyone can shoot,” Jay grumbles. “Not everyone can hit a mark from a thousand feet away. Pull the trigger, kid. I’m getting hungry.”