27. Elara
Elara
The trees don’t ask me anything.
That’s the whole appeal. The trail is dirt and roots and dapples of light, and nothing in here wants to know if I’m okay, and I walk until the street sounds give up behind me.
There’s a fork in the trail and my feet pick left like they’ve done it before. I don’t ask. Asking feels like it would break something, and I’m rationing what’s left of me.
I don’t know how long I walk. Long enough that my breathing stops being a problem and starts being just breathing. Long enough that the crying happens and finishes somewhere in there. I don’t know if I have any more tears anyway.
And then the trees open up, and I stop.
A clearing. Wide and round and quiet — real quiet I haven’t heard in forever except in my dreams — and near the middle of it, a big black stone.
I have never been here. I know that.
But it doesn’t feel like the first time.
I’m too tired to argue with a feeling, so I don’t.
I’d probably lose anyway.
I cross the grass and sit down on the stone, and the top of it is worn smooth, like somebody has been sitting on it for years, and I put my face in my hands and the crying comes again before I can stop it. Not pretty crying. The other kind. The kind you only do where nothing can see you but trees.
When it’s over I’m scraped out and light, the way you get after, and the quiet comes in to fill the space.
I can’t sit still in it, so I get up and walk.
Around the edge of the clearing, along the tree line, back.
I’m not going anywhere. I’m just moving, because moving is the only thing today that hasn’t asked anything of me, and my feet keep tracing the same circle like they’re following a line I can’t see.
My thoughts drift, replaying the complete disaster that was this morning because it’s all I can do. I don’t know when I start humming.
I don’t notice until I’m already into it. It’s not a song. It’s a piece of one — a few notes that I keep repeating. I don’t know the rest. I never have… Or maybe I don’t remember. It’s been with me as long as I can remember.
The ground hums back.
I freeze. That’s not—
Ground doesn’t do that. I put my hand on the stone as I pass and the stone is warm, and I decide, very firmly, that stone holds heat from the sun. That’s science.
The sun is barely out.
Don’t care. Science.
“Ella.”
I turn, mid-hum, mid-step.
They’re at the edge of the clearing — Erik in front, the others coming out of the trees behind him — and all four of them have stopped dead, staring at me like I fired a gun.
Erik’s face has no color in it at all.
The humming dies in my throat. “What?”
Nobody answers. I wipe my face with the back of my wrist, which fixes nothing.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I just needed—”
They’re not looking at me right.
Their eyes keep dropping. To my feet. To the ground around my feet. Gunnar says something low to Brock, and Brock doesn’t answer him, and now all four of them are staring at my shoes.
Is it the shoes? They’re normal shoes.
“Ella.” Erik comes forward, slow, both hands where I can see them. “Hey. It’s okay. Let’s go home, yeah?”
And it’s out of my mouth before I know it’s in me.
“No. You left me alone.”
The whole clearing goes silent.
My hand comes up over my mouth, but the words are already out there, standing between us, truer than I have ever been out loud.
He left. He said please, let me do this and he left, and Kyle walked through the hole where my door used to be.
And I would never say anything to anyone because it wasn’t his fault, not really.
But it doesn’t feel that way, and my head and my body do not care that they don’t agree.
My body wins by default because it remembers.
It always remembers, and I have never said that to anyone.
Not to Ashley. Not to Gerald. Not even to Muffin, and I tell Muffin everything now.
I just said it to his face.
Erik looks at me like I just kicked his puppy and I will remember that look for the rest of my life.
“I didn’t mean—” I step back. “I don’t know why I said—”
“Elara.” Brock’s voice, very careful. “Stop moving.”
They’re all coming forward now. Slow. Spread out. Hands loose and low, eyes flicking from me to the ground behind me and back, and I take another step away because everyone I have ever let in is walking toward me like I’m the emergency.
“Elara — STOP—”
My next step doesn’t find the ground.
It finds light.
The world tips. The clearing swings up and away from me — trees, sky, four men breaking into a run with their mouths open, my name in four voices, and one word that isn’t my name at all.
And underneath all of it, low and fast, something orange.
Muffin. Miles from home, flat-out, ears back, cutting past all four of them like they’re furniture. He followed me. He followed me the whole way and I never once—
He doesn’t slow at the light.
He dives.
Then the light takes everything.
I fall up.
I don’t know how else to say it. I fall up, into a sky that was not there a second ago — a night sky in the middle of the afternoon, deep and close and crowded with stars. Too many stars. Stars like somebody spilled them.
Something soft and furious slams into my chest, and my arms close around it before I’ve decided anything, the same way they did the first time.
Somewhere in all that dark, something roars.
It sounds like it’s been waiting.
END OF BOOK ONE