Kyron
I can’t believe she did it.
I’ve been lying here running it back since before Rane opened his mouth and I keep landing in the same place. We were right there. All of us. She looked at us and she — did she even hesitate? Did she even —
Rane’s still talking.
“Would you stop.” I don’t mean for it to come out that loud.
Rane stops mid-sentence. Looks at me.
“Just — stop. Please.”
“Kyron—”
“She left.” I sit up. “Okay? She looked at us and she left. Can we just — can we sit with that for five minutes without running the play-by-play.”
The hall goes quiet. Not the good kind.
“That’s not what happened,” Rane says. Careful. Like he’s approaching something that might bite.
“I was there too.”
“Then you know she didn’t—”
“She chose to walk away. I watched her do it.” The words taste like something I’ll regret, but I don’t care because my chest feels like it’s caving in. “We all watched her do it.”
Brent shifts from the wall. “Son—”
“Don’t.” I look at him. “Don’t do that.”
He closes his mouth.
I get up because I can’t stay sitting for this.
My skin feels wrong. Too tight. The owl is right underneath the surface and has been since I woke up.
I’ve been holding it back through sheer stubbornness because shifting in the middle of the Community Hall seems like the kind of thing that doesn’t help anyone.
I stand at the window instead. The Hollow outside. It looks like a normal morning. People moving, doing whatever they’re doing like nothing happened.
“She was scared,” Rane tries again. “She saw Locke go down and she panicked and—”
“She wasn’t scared.” I turn around. “That’s the thing. She wasn’t scared at all. You said it yourself. She looked at you and she’d already decided. That’s not panic. That’s a choice.”
“A choice to save our lives—”
“A choice to leave.”
“Kyron.” Locke. Low. Warning.
“I’m not wrong.”
“You’re not right either.”
I look at him on the mattress. Still flat on his back. Still staring at the ceiling. The bruise on his neck from the dart has gone purple overnight.
“She had options,” I say. “She always has options. She just didn’t pick us.”
Nobody answers that.
Good. Because I’m tired of people finding ways to make this okay. I’m tired of reframing it into something that makes sense. She was there and then she wasn’t and every version of that story ends the same way — she’s gone and we’re here and she made that happen.
I should have known. I’ve noticed every single thing about her from the first day — the exits, the bread, the way she went still when someone moved too fast — and I missed the most important one. That she’d always find a way to disappear when it counted.
I should have known better.
“Maybe Silas had a point,” I say.
The room goes very still.
Rane’s face falls. “Don’t.”
“I’m just saying—”
“I know what you’re saying and don’t.” He’s on his feet now. “Don’t do that to her. Don’t do that to yourself.”
“Why not? We trusted her. We let her in. We—” My voice cracks. I hate it. “We built something and she walked away from it the first time it got hard.”
“She walked away to save your life.” Rane’s voice has gone tight. “To save all of our lives. To save this whole town full of people she’d known for like five minutes. That’s not — Kyron, that’s not someone who doesn’t care. That’s someone who cares so much she—”
He pulls at his hair and takes a breath.
“She didn’t have a choice,” Rane says. Quieter now. Certain. “You know that. She didn’t have a choice.”
I can’t breathe.
Locke, sitting up on the mattress now. “He’s right.”
Something rips open in my chest.
“She did.” My voice comes out strange. Raw and scratching and I can’t make it stop. “She had a choice and she made it and she didn’t even—”
The shift comes up so fast I can’t catch it.
I don’t try.
The owl comes out of me hard. Bones cracking, spine bending wrong, the ceiling dropping toward me as I grow into the space.
Someone shouts. Something hits the floor.
Wings fill the gap between the mattresses and there’s not enough room in here, there’s not enough room anywhere, and then I’m through the double doors and the cold morning air hits me like a wall.
I climb.
Up. Away. The Hollow dropping below me, small and still and exactly the same as it was yesterday.
I climb until my wings ache. The air is thin and cold and clean and there’s nothing up here except sky. Nothing up here that reminds me of her.
I don’t know if I’ll ever come back down.