The Wanted

“You know me,” I quipped. “Stubborn to the last.”

He chuckled hollowly, and I felt it was the wrong thing to say.

“Always,” he replied.

He turned off the handheld and put it away. We couldn’t do anything tonight. We rocked back and forth, holding each other, the floorboards creaking rhythmically. On the wall, a cross-stitched picture of a house with the words Home Sweet Home sewn underneath it glared at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said to his shirt.

“I’m sorry too.”

The reasons behind the apologies were too long and too numbered.

He gathered me up, my bones sagging in my skin, my energy sapped. I ate for the first time in twenty-four hours just before, and it had stretched my shrunken stomach.

“Sleep,” he ordered, laying me down on the bed and folding the sheets and blanket around me. He stroked my horrible hair from my face, his expression conflicted.

Kiss me.

My eyelids fluttered from pure exhaustion as I tracked him walking slowly around the bed. I felt a moment of peace that I held onto. He was here with me.

I was asleep before he had even crawled into the bed.

Just before dawn, I woke. My heart stuttering in my chest as the events of the last few weeks collided in my head. I closed my eyes, and my fingertips pulsed with twinges of pain. I curled them under into a light fist. The insides of my eyelids were a screen, projecting bursts of blood, instruments glinting on a tray, pins, and shiny black doors.

I drifted off to sleep after my momentary panic only to be woken minutes later. Joseph’s hulking body seized next to me, flinging my hand from his sweat-soaked side. He screamed once, low and strangled, and then his body went slack.

It reminded me that we were not a magic cure for each other. There were things I needed to tell him and words he must have for me. I was scared of those words, but I wouldn’t be able to avoid them.

ROSA

The world wants a piece of me, I know. But until I have my son in my arms, it’s like tugging on a curl of steam.

I’m insubstantial.

Ineffectual.

Three pieces out of four.

The white rays of a cold dawn piercing the thin curtains of the bedroom shed unwelcome light on our situation.

So much confusion. So much to do.

I stretched out and the cold, empty place beside me sent a shot of fear through my body. My hand wavered over the cool sheets and for a second, I thought I was back in the Superiors’ compound, but then I heard Joseph in the lounge, talking to Rosa-May. I padded out of the bedroom, but hung back, resting against the peeling hall, and listened to their conversation.

“So you don’t like toast?” Joseph squatted down with his back to me, hanging his arms over couch. Rosa-May shook her head, gazing at the floor. “What about toast with…” He got up, moving out of my sight to the kitchen cupboards. Jars clunked against each other, boxes scuffed the shelves. “I know. Toast with detergent?”

Rosa-May perched on the back of the dusty pink couch like a monkey ready to jump, her watchful eyes twinkling but her lips set in distrust. She shook her head, her mouth tugging into a very brief smile.

“No. Okay, what about toast with…” He shook a box. “Dried pasta? With drawing pins? Ouch, that’d hurt. Um… sardines?” With each ridiculous suggestion, her face relaxed a little more, her smile growing as she watched him dance around the small kitchen.

She lifted her hand and pointed. “Jam.”

“Jam. Really? Well, it seems a little unorthodox, but jam it is,” Joseph said as I pulled around the corner and met his eyes. His gaze dropped to my bare feet, his fingers flexing at his sides, a jar of strawberry jam in one hand. He seemed to check himself, cracking his neck to one side, and then took a deep breath. Stepping towards me awkwardly, he swept me into his arms and held me close. He breathed in my hair as if he were memorizing me, saving me, like I would disappear. I felt bendy and squeezed of air in his arms, but happy.

The jam jar knocked the back of my skull with a light clunk. I felt Rosa-May’s eyes on us. “Ouch!” I exclaimed, though it didn’t really hurt, and he broke our embrace, leaving me wobbly and rubbery, liable to bend to the ground.

“Sorry if I woke you,” he said, his eyes ru

“You didn’t,” I replied politely. In agony. Rosa-May clambered over the back of the couch and ran to my side, wrapping her arms around my legs like a vice. I bent down and smoothed her hair, feeling a grief-coated lump rising in my throat.

Joseph’s eyes were sadness rounded with distress when he caught my expression.

“What can I do? I don’t know what to do,” he said, expelling the thought desperately, without meaning to.

I wiped my eyes before my sister could see my tears and we both looked up at Joseph, our faces two halves pressed together, two parts of a whole.

His smile was a clash between guilt and love.

“God! She looks so much like you. She’s beautiful.” He kneeled down and tucked his large finger under her chin. “You’re beautiful, Miss Rosa-May.” The ‘Miss’ sent me tumbling towards a dark tu

She narrowed her eyes for a second, like she was sizing him up, and then she barked, “Toast.” Like that, she pulled me back from the edge as we all laughed, truly laughed.

Joseph turned to make breakfast, and we discussed what we needed to do next.

We needed to find Gus and Matthew.

We needed to leave Pau and get Orry.

We stepped from the thin home and into a grey dawn. I tripped and stopped to roll up the long legs of the pants Joseph’s friend Elise had lent me. The shirt she gave me hung over my hands and the boots were two sizes too big, but it was so much better than the torn dress I’d been wearing. Joseph waited, his eyes out over the fuzzy sky, his mouth pulled down.

I knocked his arm to startle him back to the present. “You still asleep or something?”

He dipped his chin to me and forced a smile. “Sorry.”

“No need to be sorry.” I smirked, and he sighed like he’d just expelled a large ghost from his chest. The sigh flapped around me and I pulled my grey jacket tighter around my middle, hoisting Rosa-May onto my hip.

Last night, we’d left everyone to sleep, to rest. This morning’s light showed a world turned upside down. All the Survivors inside the walls, and most of Pau Brazil milling around outside, completely lost.

Matthew appeared from the mist, striding down the dreary street, his face etched in tired lines of worry and held up with purpose. I waved him over.

“Oh good, you’re up. We’re meeting outside to discuss our next move. Joseph, I believe your parents are waiting for you out there too.” His smile was wary.

Joseph tensed at the mention of his parents. Their reunion last night had been joyful but brief with Joseph making excuses and whisking me away before much could be said. I think he was happy to see them, but I also understood his reluctance. We were not the same people who left here two and a half years ago.

Matthew turned, expecting us to follow.

“Where’s Gus?” I asked, ru

“Hunting,” he replied with a hint of amusement in his voice.

We parted the mist and climbed the crest of blown-apart concrete. The view shocked us to a standstill. Thousands of people huddled in small groups, spread out below us like a herd that had lost its alpha.