Chapter 21 TESNI
TWENTY-ONE
TESNI
Bee checked in little over an hour ago—and I don’t think I have moved more than an inch in that time.
The constant static of the CB radio disturbed my almost-rest, an in-between place of awake and drifting into an uneasy sleep.
I took the call in the patient room at the end of the corridor, and since the radio has gone silent again, I’ve been a statue, sunken into the corner of the room.
The hard doors of the wardrobe press into my shoulder blade, aching me, but I don’t move. I stare into the darkness swallowing the room.
I am waiting.
Waiting for the static to cut out once again, for Bee’s next call to come through—for the moment she tells me Operation Dip is happening.
We dip out on all the others in the group.
But more than that is the plastic-wrapped scarf in my backpack. Bee’s scarf. Rubbed all over her body, thick with her scent. A decoy I’m meant to smear over the walls of our hideout before I steal Emily along for our escape.
Get ready.
That’s what Bee told me.
I need to be prepared for that next call to come through, that snap order.
So that’s what I should be doing, getting ready.
I should be taking the scarf out of my backpack, I should be packing up everything I need, and convincing Emily to come with me and leave the others behind, because she doesn’t know of the plan.
Too much heart.
That’s what Bee says about her.
I think she’s an NPC.
Just another non player character in the world, a background animation in a game, an extra in someone else’s film. There, but not.
I wondered that about some people in the Before. I saw adverts for TV shows. Dating shows, mostly. And the people on them…
Fucking hell, the people.
I would just look at them, replicas of each other with their fillers and botox and extensions and veneers, the same barber shop for all the ken-doll guys, the same fucking fast-fashion crap, all to look like hideous artificial clones.
But worse were their insides.
Such basic people with basic existences that it had me questioning how we’re all meant to have souls. I looked at those people, watched them on my TV, and doubted that they were really people at all.
Now, the Before is gone.
It’s the blackout.
And in it, Emily is the biggest NPC I’ve ever met.
She’s so… bland.
Vanilla.
It’s not that we have different personalities. It’s that I have one and she doesn’t. Emily is a bland person.
In the Before, there were a thousand more just like her in any given direction. Her hobbies were to watch other people have hobbies while she complained about basic guys.
It's no different now.
Bee has a friendship with Emily.
I do try to talk to her.
We just can’t seem to get past the superficiality of her existence, always going on about the things she misses from the Before, which is limited to social media and a dating show on an island, her leased Audi, and self-care (which I suspect she confuses with botox and getting her nails done).
I just can’t with her.
I can’t pretend there’s enough depth to connect when it comes to Emily.
There are two things we have in common.
A friendship with Bee.
And Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Don’t judge me on that one. It’s good. I mean, it was good. Gone now.
But the difference between me and Emily is that I don’t make TV shows my entire fucking personality.
So now I have to convince Ms Beige to dip out on the rest of our group.
Part of me wonders if I can manage knocking her out and dragging her down the stairwell without pulling a muscle in my back or being noticed by anyone else.
Probably not.
Ugh, this is gonna be a pain in my ass.
The huff that grates through me morphs into something of a groan as I push up from the floor.
I sneak out of the patient room and, soft-footed, creep around the curved desk.
Some snores gravel through the sleeping station.
The light is faint, the softest and dustiest glow from the candle lantern beside Carlos. He snores the loudest.
I spare him a dull look before I reach for my backpack. It’s tucked under a sleeping bag on the rows of plastic-wrapped mattresses.
I don’t risk waking anyone by packing here.
I gather all my things into my arms, then carry them to the roof.
Emily is cowered under the pitched tarp. She took over my watch shift about two hours ago.
I squeeze in beside her. It’s a tight fit, our hips and thighs pressed together.
I start by taking out the plastic bag, the one with the scarf, then pack my bag.
Emily watches me, quiet.
The fatigue lowers her lashes over bloodshot eyes, so I guess she didn’t get much sleep before taking over the shift.
I hand her an energy drink.
She takes it, cold to the touch thanks to the winter chill. “Are we leaving?”
I don’t look at her. I watch my hand shove a folded sweater into the bag, flattening all the packets of noodles and canned foods.
The better I pack it in, the less noise it’ll make if I need to run.
Padding makes all the difference, even if it weighs down the bag and the straps end up pulling on my shoulders, I fit more in, and it rattles less.
“We are.”
Emily sits in that wording for a beat before, out the corner of my eye, her pink face crinkles. “We?”
“Me and you.” I gesture to the energy drink. “You’ll need that. You look tired.”
“I haven’t slept,” she murmurs.
I replace the batteries on the CB for fresh ones, then fasten it to my belt.
Static crinkles from it.
Emily tugs the tag on the drink. It hisses, fizz released, and she brings it to her cold lips. “Just me and you?” she starts between sips. “Not the others?”
I shake my head. “Nope. Just us.”
More seconds, and if there was a clock up here, it would tick, tick, tick against the quiet. Instead, the only sound is the soft zip of my backpack and Emily’s slurps.
The old batteries and packaging are left discarded on the edge of the sleeping bag.
“What about Bee? Is she back yet?” Emily’s frown just digs deeper into her face, an impatience swelling in her. “Are we going to go out and find her?”
I sigh and turn a dull look on her.
Her filler is gone. Lips once plump and full but also chapped and pale from the fever of the black plague. The botox from back then meant there wasn’t a whole lot of movement on her heart-shaped face. Now, it’s like watching paper crinkle in a fist as she considers me.
I remember how she looked back then in quarantine. Not that I was awake for much of it, just at the end.
Like me, she suffered.
Like me, she still does.
That occasional rush of inflammation and sandpaper spiralling down our chests. Inhalers help, so we both carry some in our bags. But it’s best up here, the chill of the air seeping into our mouths, soothing the ache inside.
I take extra care to suck in the cold all the way to the pits of my lungs.
“Bee thinks we might be in trouble,” I tell her. “One of the warriors saw her, recognised her.”
Emily’s lashes flutter for a beat—then her face slackens.
This is news to her, more than it was to me.
Emily has been kept on the outs with some of this information. She doesn’t know what Bee is. A kinta. A halfling born a human.
Even I struggle with that sometimes, my comprehension not quite able to grasp it.
But Emily doesn’t know any of that.
So I’m not unprepared when she asks, “How did one of them recognise her? From where? How?”
“It doesn’t matter. It only matters that he did. Bee worries he’s going to go after her, and she made it clear that’s not a good thing.”
She blinks at me, stupid. “Why would… What?”
“We need to leave the hospital,” I say firm. “We need to leave the others behind. Bee will contact us when it’s time—and we’ll sneak out to meet her. But we can’t be here when that dark fae tracks her scent to this hospital. Do you understand?”
Her scent isn’t in the hospital yet—but I’ll make sure the walls reek of her before we leave.
Emily just stares at me for too long.
It’s a lot.
I know, because I lived this moment.
To be fair, Bee did dump a lot more information on me than what I unload onto Emily. Bee was gentler about it, kinder, even. Maybe I should’ve softened it a bit.
Emily takes a while.
Much of that time, she frowns at me, studies me, shakes her head, looks for a bloody patch on my skull that has rendered me mad. Finally, she turns her cheek to me and looks out into the darkness.
The blackout is broken. Splintered.
There is fresh fire blazing far in the distance.
That’s the unit Bee was tracking.
We don’t need to be worried about them. They’re far from here, and the fire won’t leave the boundaries of their area.
How?
Don’t ask me.
I just understand their fire to be… different. Magical somehow, like it can’t stray too far from its source or something.
“If we leave the others behind…” Emily’s starting to process things, work through the tangled thoughts that stupefied her mind, “and there is a warrior that comes here to look for Bee… then what you’re saying is we leave everyone here for the warrior to find?”
I don’t answer that.
“We leave them behind?” she presses.
I bite down on the insides of my cheek.
Her voice hitches, “We don’t even warn them… we just leave them here?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“You can’t be serious, Tess. What the fuck are you talking about?”
I turn a blank look on her.
Her eyes are full, brimmed with outrage, her mouth twisted into a snarl of disgust—and it’s all aimed at me.
“We know these people. Carlos is Bee’s—”
“What?” I challenge. “He’s her what? Boyfriend?” I scoff, a bitter grin lazy on my mouth. “No, he’s a fucking decoy. He wears her scent.”
Emily’s twisted face starts to soften, features slackening into something like shock.
“Just like Micheal wears mine,” I say.
She blinks.
Just like Bee has a pair of my gloves wrapped in a plastic bag and crammed into her backpack.
We made sure to have solutions to every potential problem—and that included diversion tactics. You never know if a stray will pick up one of our scents and follow.
But I don’t add that to the info-dump I just unloaded on Emily.
She’s realising enough without it.
The understanding hollows her out.
But I see through her.
Emily is too full of false morals.
I remember a month ago, when she was fucking Jace before he died, and he definitely had a girlfriend in the group at that time when they were sneaking off together—a girlfriend he’d had since the Before, which somehow feels worse.
I remember a month before that, a stampede came crashing down the road of a rural town we were passing through, and Emily was caught in my flashlight—caught shoving Maddi out of her way so she could steal her shield.
Emily literally grabbed Maddi, dragged her out of the truck, and threw her into the path of the stampede, where she was crushed and mangled and killed.
But when the stampede passed, Emily was safe and sound in the truck—acting shocked.
I see you, Emily. And now you’re worried about using people, sacrificing them?
Spare me.
“Bee wants this?” she asks, and now it’s suspicion that hardens her face and drags her narrowed gaze all over me. “Or you do?”
My smile comes with a shoulder-jerking scoff.
There she goes, seeing a difference between me and Bee that doesn’t exist. She thinks I am the cutthroat one, because I don’t dip myself in sugar.
Bee is poison, and I love that about her.
Sweet, sugary poison. She is belladonna.
Me, I’m more of a bitter poison that comes with labels and exclamation points.
I’m cyanide.
“Wake the fuck up, Em.” I scoff and watch the blaze alight the darkness in the distance.
“The people who have survived this long aren’t good people.
We have survived because we’re willing to do terrible, horrible things.
The kind are weak in the dark.” I turn my bitter smile on her.
“And so the dark crushes them… like Maddi was crushed, remember?”
Emily’s jaw tightens—and for a long moment, she just stares at me, trying to work out if I know what she did, or I only suspect it.
After a long moment, she tugs the sleeping bag tighter around her shoulders. Her breath mists at her face, words unspoken, lost in the chill.
“If you don’t want to come, I won’t force you,” I tell her. “I’ll leave on my own and find Bee. You can stay and warn the others. That’s up to you.”
The breath she exhales sags her shoulders, and she turns her blotchy cheek to me. “When do we leave?”
All false morals and values.
“Bee said she’ll give me the signal. We wait for that to come through.
” I consider her for a moment, the redness of her eyes, the weight of her lashes still lingering.
“I’ll stay here with you, keep watch. But you should get some sleep if you can, then finish the rest of that drink.
I don’t know how long we’ll be walking in the snow. ”
Emily gives a faint nod before she lies down.
And for all her moral quandaries, she finds sleep pretty fucking fast—and her gentle snores are quick to rise.
Shocking.