Chapter 10 #2
“—I asked if they’d consider letting me call you.
To talk to you. To ask you about this.” He pulls back, and covers the motion by brushing a curl behind my ear.
Fake, I remind myself, even as my heart shifts into a higher gear.
“Believe me, Ripley. I didn’t know they were going to be pulling something like that.
I found out right when you did—on that stage. ”
My mind spins, but the earnestness in his voice is like an anchor. And he’s that same boy who told his father that he was the one who broke the tire swing. The same boy who saw right and wrong as clear as black and white. The same boy who
saw me as someone worth looking at twice.
“But Cal—” I start, as footsteps in the hallway make the words dry up in my throat.
Callum’s eyes turn serious, a heavy blue that feels at odds with the way he gently runs his fingers up my arm, leaving a trail
of goose bumps. “We’ll go to New Washington on different flights. They’re making me do another press stop before coming home.
I’ll only be a couple of hours behind you.”
He smiles down at me, his eyes roving over my face like he’s trying to memorize this new version of me. I’m doing the same
to him, and I can tell that he knows that as a smile stretches across his face.
“I know this is so strange, Rip,” he says. “But you’re my best friend. At least we’re not alone in this, right?”
I glance up at him. “Promise?”
Now it’s a grin. “Promise.” His eyes dip down to my mouth. “I can’t believe I have to do this with anyone, but I’m glad it’s
you.”
And maybe it’s just for the camera, but he leans in. I’ll never know if he was going for my lips or my cheek, though, because the door crashes open, and someone barks something about the transport being ready.
We walk out together, and Callum laces his fingers, lips pulling in a bemused smile, as we return to the chaos: security guards,
the flash of cameras, the thunder of engines. I focus on the heat of Callum’s hand against mine, the steadiness of his grip.
When he’s ushered to his hoverplane and me to mine, he holds my arm long, stretching so we bridge the distance between both
vehicles. Maybe I imagine it, but the flashes seem to pick up at that.
But when he leans forward and brushes his lips against my knuckles, the look in his eyes feels like it’s only for me.
The hoverplane we leave in is much nicer than the hovercopter we came in. The first felt military, with a migraine-inducing
roar of blades. In this one, I don’t even have to wear earmuffs. They pipe quiet pop—with personalized lyrics that I recognize
from my DopaMine channel—through a plush velvet interior. In a few hours, I’ve gone from potential prisoner to royalty, and
all because of this ring on my finger.
I know I shouldn’t push it, but I chance it when I see one of the guards holding my bag.
He’s not the same one who took it from me, I’m pretty sure, even though, like all the Hammers, he has a mask over the lower half of his face and tinted glass over his eyes.
He doesn’t say a word as I approach, but redoubles his grip on the strap on my bag.
I hold my hand out and clear my throat. “May I?”
He tilts his head, as though he doesn’t understand.
“My bag?” I ask, irritated.
He makes a show of looking down at the bag as if surprised to find it at the end of his own arm. Seriously?
“Please,” I bite out. I scan him from head to toe. Is this how the Hammers will treat me, now that I’m practically Mrs. The President’s
Son? Before, they had treated me like a threat. Are they going to toy with me now, assume my head is filled with fluff now
that my dress hides the muscles I’ve spent a lifetime building?
After further deliberation, he thrusts the bag out to me. Lightning-fast, I snatch it and sling it over my shoulder, immediate
comfort releasing my shoulders down from my ears at the weight of it.
A flight attendant in bright red greets me with a warm hand towel and cool water, which has a surprising bite to it—at my
expression, she explains that it’s sparkling, although I’d rather describe it as spicy. Not willing to take another sip, I
hold one item in each hand awkwardly as she motions to follow her to the back of the roomy cabin. No one grabs me and forces
me forward. No nightsticks on my back or shackles on my wrists.
The flight attendant ushers me into a private room with a bed, a couch, and a private bathroom. She must see the confusion on my face, because she smiles. “You’ll need to rest up. Lots waiting for you in New Washington!”
I must still look like I’m not catching on, because she grins as she holds her hand out.
“Why don’t I take the towel,” she offers kindly, “and you just relax?”
“In here?” I ask foolishly.
She nods.
“Alone?” I double-check, looking over her shoulder once more to make sure I’m not getting a death glare from a guard.
“Alone,” she answers with a smile.
I sit on the bed as the engine rumbles underneath me, pressure under my feet, and suddenly we’re airborne.
She winks as she closes the door. “There are slippers under the bed.”
Orion wasn’t the kind of boy who would tell you how he felt, and I knew that.
It made sense. His whole life, he’d been trained to keep his emotions in check.
But beneath the surface of his emerald-green eyes, I knew emotions flared bright and deep.
Injustice, at the wrong. Drive, to make things better.
And when he looked at me like that, something slippery seemed to answer in me.
Desire, he felt deeply too. And I was starting to realize, I did too.
I’m surprised Spindle hasn’t been wiped, and it’s probably foolish to access it from a presidential aircraft, but right now,
I need to read those words.
This is something that would happen to Saffron, not me. Saffron could navigate these geopolitical waters. She’d be smart and
cunning and charming and find a way to save not just herself, but her relationship and her people.
The aircraft wobbles slightly, and I grab the arm of my seat, letting my fingers dig into the soft leather as I squeeze my
eyes shut.
I need to be more like Saffron now. Which is hard, since I don’t really know who she is. When I stopped writing Written in the Stars with the maturity and shame that came with fourteen, I didn’t kill off Saffron, but I locked her in cryosleep, because that’s
how my life felt in the After. I felt like I was sleepwalking.
But I need to wake up.
For the next two hours, I read the words that I’d written. The ones that, to my surprise, people seem to love.
As much as I thought I remembered, it shocks me how much I’d forgotten. How much Callum had faded into the recesses of my
mind.
I forgot how we shared everything, in that way you do when you’re young and with the same person all the time.
Our parents both worked long hours together.
My mom used to work with an education department, and my dad handled cybersecurity.
Whenever my parents had to stay late, I’d go to the Graveses’.
It takes a village, his mom used to say to mine.
Some weeks, I’d spend more time at his house than my own. There was a place for me at their dinner table.
I flip through the files, remembering the inspiration for each entry, the way his smile had lit me up.
Saffron and Orion stared down a brewing war, knowing something dangerous was happening. Because that’s when we both noticed
that his dad was changing.
Arthur Graves announced he was running for president. That’s when the trees in our neighborhood came down.
None were spared, not even the one in between our houses; the one I loved.
And Callum tried to stop it.
They’ll have to take me down with it. I joined him, and to our credit, we lasted until he fell, cutting his hand open. Seeing all that blood, I didn’t think—I
just jumped down to help him. Eight stitches, but the tree was down before we had even pulled away in the ambulance.
Two months after that, when Callum’s dad was endorsed by the administration, the campaign videos in my DopaMine featured videos of my neighborhood and the “technological advancements.” The empty streets, no longer tree-lined. The jumbo screens erected and cables laid to beam Alba into every home.
Return to the Streamlining. He was elected on a promise to bring us into the next and last phase of the war, but it sounded like he was talking about
the next and last phase of the world.
When the trucks came to move the Graveses to the White House, Callum climbed onto my roof to say goodbye. A thousand things
ran through my mind, but all I could do was hug him. He grabbed my hand, and I looked at the scar on his palm.
Eight stitches.
I knew what Saffron would do. I was too young to think about kisses, but I knew I loved him. I knew he was my person. And
Saffron would have told him.
But as Callum looked at me, his gaze desperately searching mine, all I could find was an I’ll miss you.
Because I wasn’t Saffron.
Saffron was taken to a base in the Quadra system. She was cut off from Orion.
Every letter to Saffron was intercepted. She didn’t know if Orion was alive or dead. But she knew that if he was gone forever,
she’d feel it in her bones, right? She’d know. So he had to be fine.
I wrote down all the adventures we’d had and every adventure we’d never had, as my parents turned into shells of themselves and I adjusted to my beige life in Post Angeles. I needed to recapture some of that color.
And as the years passed, I realized that I couldn’t keep living in a fantasy. Even writing lost its color, so I put Saffron
into cryosleep, freezing her and my memories of Callum.
But I’ve never needed Saffron more than I do now. To my own surprise, I feel my fingers flying across the screen. Even if
it would be far too dangerous to upload it, I can’t help it. I need to write.
Deep in the cryo pod bay, the hiss of the pressure-release cut through the dark.
And as the cloud of icy air cleared, Saffron opened her eyes.