Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I can’t, Ellie,” Dina said, a doorway apart. The threshold to her home was not open. Dina had built her hearth from ashes, and Ellie was the stubborn soot, dirtying her wooden panels. It was a summer's dawn, and she might have admired Dina’s sunned skin if she didn’t rue forfeiting it. “I’m sorry.”

Ellie had known her hands would not hold her when she returned, but to comprehend their lack was a wound unanticipated. Scars etched her. None were as deep as her gaze. Dina’s eyes bored into her like she was a spoiled fruit, squalid and rotten, ridden with bugs, and their buzz sang madly in her ribs.

“Don’t be,” Ellie admonished. She didn’t dare lean on the frame for fear of decaying it. “I didn’t expect you to take me back, I just… needed to see you. Let you know I’m” — she gesticulated, hands falling at her hips — “here. I can leave now, if you…”

Dina plucked the silence, “I think that’d be best.” Her eyes shone, and she was absolute. There was no windfall for Ellie to pick. “I’ll see you around.”

She swallowed and replied, “Okay.” It was the current that swept her, leaving a curt, thoroughly taken nod and footsteps, the door’s close concrete.

Maria waited across the street, disappointment palpable, and Ellie felt the scold impending. “You know she’s had other things to worry about, right?” It was likely loud enough for Dina to hear.

“Yeah.” She didn't defend, pride gutted. She was craving and mangled, wanting something to return to, and if she was of Dina’s concern, no matter how, that was enough to sate her. It was deprived to expect anything.

Maria appraised her, staying on her missing fingers and weary face. “You should rest. We never cleaned out your place or Joel’s. Almost did.”

“Why not?” Joel was stolen, and she’d accepted it, strumming his ghost from the guitar. She figured they’d have thought her dead, too. She’d been gone for about a year: To Santa Barbara and back, finding herself in new cities, eluding. It was pointless to hold places for ghosts.

“Tommy moved into Joel’s.”

Her words were striking, and she gaped. It was like they strangled her larynx, stifling her silent until she breathed. Her inhale was choking grit, and her reply was none of her thoughts, “You guys split?” It wasn’t her concern, but a way to converse without veering to, He fucking moved in? After pushing me? After ruining me? Who the fuck does he think he is? Her anger subsided, though, to resignation, as she didn’t have enough left to blame. She’d ruined herself, and he was Joel’s brother. He deserved his home more than anyone. Notwithstanding, her anxieties weren’t eased.

“Yes.” She figured Maria was tired of clarifying, so the answer didn’t seem to shake her. “He hasn’t touched your place. I’ve only cleaned it every couple of months.”

“Okay.” Ellie crossed her arms over her chest and cast her stare low. Her sneakers were crumpling, a testament to travel, and her flannel was stained, a testament to blood. Her gloved left hand sat atop her upper arm, bearing its bite and mangled fingers hidden by leather. “Thanks.”

Their quiet was tense. She sensed Maria’s eyes drilling, yet couldn’t meet them. She felt like she was being chided, petulance, and she had enough of that from her conscience. Maria broke it, “You should talk to him.”

The idea cinched her. It went to her squint, the constant dread amplified in her stomach. However, an argument was not coiled. Closure was imperative. Closure was what pushed. Closure was what she’d been chasing. To reject it was to reject progress, the single thing she had to be proud of.

She’d freed her throat. She’d sat the guitar aside. She’d let Dina close the door.

Ginger, she replied, “I know.”

She went the long way to avoid the cemetery. She couldn’t take it.

Ellie figured she should get it over with. She trekked to Joel’s house alone, its place ingrained in her like a song, and the remnants of memorial bouquets withered. His door stood resolute. It was foreign adjacent. Her palm was flat and wired to its wood, unable to beckon a welcome she wouldn’t receive, didn’t deserve. An eternity ago, she would come unannounced, babbling about some Savage Starlight volume she’d found or begging him to let her go to Dina or Jesse’s house. She’d had to ask. She’d been a kid. The memory was so vital it smothered her will to knock.

She would have thought it cosmic that Tommy swung the door to leave, rendering her there, exposed and shocked on his doorstep. But she didn’t believe in fate anymore. He surveyed her like she was an apparition, a haunt. She felt small. He looked at her like she’d seen people discover their loved ones’ corpses.

“Ellie,” he invoked, blinking, “goddamn, we thought you — ”

“I didn’t.” Ellie couldn’t string their eyes. She glanced anywhere but, finally training her gaze on one of Joel’s paintings. It was some kind of forest scene by the door. “I just wanted to let you know I’m here. I’m gonna stay in my old place for a while.”

She knew he had to consider his next words. “Of course.”

He didn’t speak nor did she, and their toeing scathed the line until Ellie turned, stalking off the porch. Her shoulders were weighty.

“Hey, Ellie,” she heard, and it halted her, but she didn’t circle. “I’m sorry.”

Tangible in his strain, she could hold his apology, run her fingertips over its trueness, the courage it took to speak it. Tommy was prideful if not arrogant. That single phrase was never his nature. It’d taken her years to meld it in her rhetoric. To accept it from others. And really, he had nothing to apologize for, as he only spurred what would have happened anyhow. Ellie had been sick, so fucking sick, and it had to run its course before it ebbed.

She wrenched and muttered, “I’m sorry, too.”

They said nothing else. As she retreated to her garage, there was aversion in his closing door, but she didn’t stop until she entered her own. It was unlocked and pliant.

Maria was right. Ellie’s place was exactly as she’d left it, and it bred nostalgia. She remembered that day, vivid and bloody. There had been hope then, birthed by her and Joel’s last conversation, the warmth shared with Dina, and a new dusting of snow. It was pure and clean. It was what she’d needed. But it was torn from her like a limb, phantom pain strong.

She stepped in and inspected it, running her hands over the wall as she trod. She noticed a few small differences the closer she got. Her food was cleaned from the cupboards, and her bed was made despite being unkempt last she saw. Comics previously awry on her coffee table were shelved neatly in order of publishing.

Ellie walked to her makeshift closet, and her clothes were hung and folded. When she smelled a white button-up, it was fresh. The scent of cleaner was utter deja vu, and she tugged her right sleeve to reveal her tattoo. Blearing, the chemical burn was a sweltering pink beneath: A reminder. She shuffled to the window, prospect grim, and pulled the curtains to strip her glove in privacy. It was sewn in a makeshift manner to halt at her pinky and ring’s first knuckles, and her new bite was evident, having healed from its cysts but scarred the left side of her hand, prior lesions denoting a wider expanse than the maim itself.

Her sigh shuddered. Fuck.

Apprehension bubbled under her skin, her pawing through drawers and cupboards trying to remember where she’d placed it until she sifted through the bottles and toiletries in her bathroom. In a cuboidal vial above the sink, pushed back, was sulfuric acid, unopened since she was fourteen. Its appearance was deceiving. If it weren’t for its storage, she’d have taken it for water. Ellie handled it with caution, taking it and a cloth to the kitchen and setting a Teflon bowl on the counter.

She poured the liquid into the dish, enough to sink her scar into. Its sight daunted her. She recalled how the burn had sunk like hot coals in her skin and probed an instant, instinctive scream from her throat, as she’d been naive and hadn’t expected it to hurt. She shoved how Joel had come running to her place down. There was no aid now.

Ellie undid her belt and brought it to her mouth, gnawing the leather, and steeled herself with its pressure on her teeth.

The second she lowered her hand into it, her grunt was guttural as her clenching molars, cinched tight with her eyes. It wasn’t the sting of saltwater where her fingers had severed, but kindling ablaze, its embers embosoming her skin. She raised it and ran cold water over its angry, welding red, and every part of her quivered. When she opened her eyes through tears pooling, she saw its corrosion, sordid and blatant, a stark outline of blistering. “Fuck!” Ellie cursed against the belt. It curdled the cry in her throat.

Her cheeks were wet. She had to bandage it herself. In the bathroom mirror, she caught a glimpse of her pained expression and found that she was acquainted.

The number of porches she’d ascended was wearing her. It didn’t get easier. Cat’s place was a small house like hers, but it was on its own property rather than of a larger home. It was all brick and had an enticing, homely quality, yet an edge in its black roof and door. Pottery bracketed her front deck’s railing with windchimes and paintings set to dry. It appeared she’d never ditched her artistry.

Ellie’s left hand panged under its mending and blue sleeve pulled over. She’d kept it clean, wincing with each application of alcohol and fresh gauze, and given she barely left her house, it was easy to obfuscate. She only ventured for food per Maria’s demand, and even then, it remained majorly uneaten. She made herself consume just enough to survive, not to savor. Her appetite had dissipated since Santa Barbara. She felt like a coma patient, hooked to wires and fluids that kept her breathing but hair thinning, skin ghastly, unconscious. Unliving.

It was better than when she hadn’t eaten at all, and for that, she supposed she was grateful. She’d put a sliver of weight on.

She rapped her right fist on the entrance. An answer would be a miracle, given the time at night, but she was immediately greeted by a canine’s howling. She had to ground herself tight with a mantra, It’s not going to hurt you. But the monologue was unconvincing against the unexpectedness, as she thought she’d known where all the local pets and strays were and skirted accordingly. Alert swelled in her lungs, her clogging throat, and every primal sect of her was screaming to pull her gun, to sprint, to throw it off her scent. Ellie dissed where she was to lean on the doorframe, good hand cradling her perspiring forehead, and when she looked down, she saw panting. It was too far to hear, and fuck, her ears rang, her periphery concaved.

Vaguely, she registered the door opening, and she yearned to hide. She didn’t want to be seen gasping, heart leaking, blood strung cold. Her sweat was a rigid sheen over her face to match. “Shit,” she choked, “sorry, fuck, just — ”

Ellie glanced up and saw a hazy semblance of Cat. She was gaping and interrupted as her arms were smattered by paint, hanging in trepidation at her sides until she mouthed something and reached to palm her shoulder, bent to meet Ellie’s frenzied eyes. That was how they stayed. Cat comforted and Ellie eventually, thankfully regained herself, breathing deeply until she was full.

“There you go,” Cat mumbled. A rasp, her voice was soaked in cigarettes and cadence.

Clarity resolved. Ellie burnished her hand across her face, swiping it across her knee, and braced herself on the doorway. Enough to help her straighten, she huffed. There Cat stood, eyes wide, and her long, dark hair was in a wild bun, stabbed by a pen. Bangs covered her brows. A new tattoo was serpentine over her neck, sprawling her throat and descending to her collar, and a sheer, white tank top permitted Ellie to see the others. Her sleeves, abstract ink spanning below her breasts, a bullhorn trailing from her hip into low jeans.

And holy shit, she’d gotten tall.

Ellie breathed, “What the fuck have you been eating — ”

“Where the fuck have you been?” she quipped. “You just, like, pissed off for two-and-some-change years, came back from the dead, and hibernated for the past week. God, are you okay?” Somewhat awkward, Cat embraced her, thumping her back a couple of times before parting. Her hands splayed on Ellie’s shoulders.

“I’m fine, it was just” — she gestured inside — “your dog scared me. I didn’t realize you’d gotten one.” Realization settled at her reply. “How’d you know I was here?”

Cat deadpanned, “Nobody gossips in Jackson, so it was just my psychic abilities.” Her palms fell from either side as she turned, her motherese audible. “Sissy! Come on! Let’s go my room!”

From Ellie’s vantage, she had a preview of the interior. It was more studio than house. Mirrors and canvases were strewn where the threshold began in the living room. It reeked of weed and incense. She almost covered her nose. Cat’s sofa and armchairs circled a long, reclined gurney repurposed for what Ellie could only assume was tattooing, as there was a stool pulled close, but it was empty at the moment. All her cushions were of ragged thread, and the wooden furniture was drenched in doodles, signatures, and taped polaroids.

She caught sight of who could only be Sissy, and she felt ridiculous for losing herself. Ellie guessed she was a basset mutt, her ears drooping and belly swooning lower. She toddled after Cat to the first door in the far hall, and she briefly nudged it for her to waddle in. “There. Don’t worry about her.” She paused. “Are you just gonna stand there or come inside?”

It was the first time she’d been invited since arriving. She didn’t know what to do with it but nodded, mouth dry. “Yeah. Sorry.” Entering, she slipped her right hand into her pocket as her left trailed up, fidgeting with her breast pocket. “I didn’t mean to freak out. I just didn’t expect it.”

“You’re fine,” Cat assured, “I didn’t know you were scared of dogs. Come in here.”

They walked to the kitchen. It was tiny, but that could be accredited to the sheer volume of plants within. Green, curling stems were the windowsill’s curtains, their blossoms jotting blue and red against the night. Other small pots were placed with labels in messy penmanship: Oregano. Mint. Lettuce. The latter’s note was accompanied by a smiley face, and it was definitely not lettuce.

“You grow weed?”

“No,” Cat snorted as she opened her cupboard, “it’s clearly labeled lettuce. Duh. You want tea?” She was setting mugs, bags, and a kettle out.

“Sure.” Ellie rested on a piece of the counter that wasn’t overgrown. She noted Cat’s stained forearms again. “What were you working on?”

“Is that really the small talk you wanna go for?” She filled the kettle and set it on the stove. Cat was always short — ironic since she towered Ellie, which she still hadn’t fully comprehended — and blunt. It was blessed in its clarity and cursed in how it stunned.

Ellie slouched. “Okay, okay, shit, sorry. No small talk.”

“Thanks. I’d rather talk about what happened to your hand.” She approached and took her wrist, leaving the water to boil. “What got two fingers?”

Her body and brow stiffened. “Dog,” she answered, unthinking. It was recent on her tongue.

Cat gave her a look, and she knew that it wouldn’t pass unchecked. “Ellie.” So firm it affixed. “Are you bullshitting me?”

Yes. “Why would I?”

Cat narrowed her eyes. Ellie felt like she was under a ring light, her splits and chasms on full display, and she didn’t release her wrist. “Why’s it bandaged?” That question was phrased harder.

“Chemical burn.” Honest. Truth flowed easier than the preceding reply, a smooth shot. Yet, she didn’t want to linger on the memory. It was like it spliced her skin, ravenous and prying.

“Again?”

“That’s why I’m here, actually.”

“A tat?” She pulled her hand up to evaluate it nearer. “I need to take the bandages off to check how healed it is, but sure.”

Ellie bit her cheek, anticipating the sharp, adhesive peel. “Right. Just be fast.”

Cat was. She undid the fabric, narrating a small noise of secondhand pain when the furious wound revealed itself. “Yikes.”

“That bad?” Ellie hadn’t meant to cause permanent damage. Just enough to conceal. Worry nagged, but she didn’t let it front. “Is it gonna heal?”

“It’s not infected, but it’s gonna take, like, another week at least before I can even stencil.” Cat reached above Ellie for the cabinet overhead, plucking a roll of bandages and patching the damage.

“That sucks.”

Cat hummed. Everyone, particularly Maria, commented that she would make an amazing medic, given her swiftness and attention to detail, but she argued that there wasn’t enough flexibility in medicine to fulfill her. Ellie couldn’t say she’d prefer a doctor who opted for artistic liberties, so she found that call apt. “Does that feel alright?”

Ellie shrugged and laid her palm on her thigh. “Fine. Thanks.”

She felt Cat judge and saw her mouth open, a question undoubtedly nestled, but it was mummed by the kettle’s squeal, so she swore and moved to clip the stove’s heat. “I’m giving you my good tea, so savor it.”

“Thanks,” she repeated. It was like her mouth was on autopilot, slotting itself between a few responses and expressions to get her through the interaction, wit drained. Santa Barbara had broken her bones, desecrated her ground. Raillery was lost on her. Maybe it was the lack of conversation she’d had for months.

As Cat poured into their respective cups, her eye roll was noticed even from behind, and she placed the kettle back with metallic punctuation to her pivot. “Can you please tell me what the fuck is up with you?” Before Ellie could part her lips, she interrupted, “And don’t lie. I wouldn’t be that annoyed with it if you were good at it, but you’re not.”

She blinked, confounded and unspeaking. Time away took knowledge of people, it seemed, as she’d forgotten Cat’s cutting intuition. It returned then. Ellie parsed for anything worth contemplation and asked, unsure, “What do you mean?” But she knew the sentiment. Cat wanted to learn where her banter had gone, if it had disappeared with all humor, all toothy smiles. She wanted to know what she’d had seen to cloud her eyes, glazed with the brandings in her retinas: Clickers strung, corpses mounted on posts, her flutter in Ellie’s strangle.

But if Ellie had answers to give, she would be fixed.

Cat considered and specified, “What happened in Santa Barbara?”

It jabbed. Her eyes drew to the floor, gathering the planks for any assistance, but they gave nothing. They were cracked with age yet sleeker than Ellie, and she envied their solidity, how they could hold. “A lot happened in Santa Barbara.” Not untrue. Not encompassing, either. Nausea burgeoned.

“Your fingers?”

She bit her cheek and nodded, the memory salt and riptide.

“And was it really a dog?”

She sighed and pushed a mulling expression, nose wrinkling. “Obviously not.” She glanced up at Cat. It was like Ellie’s veins had gone black, eyes tarnished, arms crossed. Her nails dug moons into her upper arms, and the absence of two plowing was pointed, gross, like she couldn’t fully find purchase no matter how hard she tried. Palms in sand. She muttered, the firmest she’d been in months, years, “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

Cat looked her up and down, taking her bristling form, and left it to tug the tea bags out. “Alright, I won’t pry. Here.” She handed Ellie a mug filled with deep tawny tea, and when she wafted it, the strength of its scent was enough to level.

“What is this?” She inspected it and took another rich breath. “It’s strong.”

“I figured you wouldn’t want something weak.” Cat nursed her own, nails drumming on the side of it. Her heat tolerance had always been high, resistant to scald. “Just black. Dunno the details, Dina traded it.”

“For what?” Ellie asked, swifter than she could admit. For days, she’d gated herself, docked, from slinking to Dina in the hard nights, the cold nights that had been less with her. She’d bisected, eviscerated herself with inklings, wondering if she’d be taken, rejected, screamed at. Anything would be better than worlds apart.

“A tattoo.”

Ellie was floored. “A tattoo?”

“Why are you acting like I just strapped a bomb to your chest?” Cat took a generous sip, pursing her lips. “Dina’s a big girl, Ellie. She’ll be fine. It was a tiny one, anyways.”

Her curiosity prodded and her nose crimped, laden with pondering, but she didn’t pursue details. Cat was right a vast amount of the time, able to see things so transparently, so clearly, and act in an according manner. Ellie had always been somewhat jealous. She let feelings cloud factuality, and then was no different. She traced her thumb around the rim of her cup, bringing it to sip. It was acrid, bitter as dirt. Her gulp bobbed. “Jesus, you drink this?”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

“That is so bullshit,” she mumbled, “people say that about coffee all the time.” Joel flashed to her, momentary and bleared, and the taste wasn’t so repugnant anymore. Not enough to comment, anyhow. She figured he would have liked it.

“I don’t like coffee. Makes me jittery.”

“So you smoke weed, naturally,” Ellie delivered, flat.

“That depends on what kind of weed. I don’t like sativa that much.” Cat sucked her cheek. “I get paranoid when I smoke it, ‘specially if it’s night.”

Ellie hadn’t smoked in a small eternity, both out of choice and unavailability. Dina had plenty of herb on the farm, but it tended to enunciate what she already had. The teeth in her mouth, the lids on her eyes, the tremble of her hands. The burdens on her back. It towed too much from that winter day. The bunker, drenched in grief instead of nostalgia. The lodge, bloodied. In the lonesome past year, she simply hadn’t encountered it. It was rare already. Certainly not growing uncultivated. It wasn’t as if smoking would be a good idea anyway. “My tolerance is probably shit by now.”

“Well,” — Cat sat her cup aside — “if you wanna try building it again…”

Her grip hardened. “Maybe.”

“I’m not gonna force a pipe down your throat, Ellie.”

She shook her head, sampling some tea to sober herself. “It’s not that I don’t want to, I just dunno how I’d react. If I’d freak out.”

“Let me know.”

Ellie hated when conversations tapered. When she was younger, it’d been easy to pluck dips in talk for herself, able to birth tangents about nothing yet interact meaningfully. She’d liked it. She’d like people who gave time, so sheltered in the quarantine zone that anyone who listened was pedestaled in her fawn years. But she was consumed in gawkiness, months on her own and words useless on her tongue. She drank a sliver more. Knitted her lips, unable to find anything. “I should get going.” She sat her mug. “I’ll draw a design soon.”

“No rush.” Cat tilted her head, regarding her. “You coming to the dance?”

Ellie’s gut sank. No one had bothered to tell her. She wouldn’t have gone anyways, for she wasn’t fond of the crowds, but a notice might have been nice. “Maybe.” She brandished her palms on her jeans as she stood. “What’s your barter for the tat? I’ll get it sometime this week.”

Cat weighed, a low, thinking croon in her throat. “It’s on me.”

“What?” Ellie frowned. “No, tat ink is a nightmare to find — ”

“Actually, I do have a barter,” she cut. Before she could ask, Cat raised a finger. “Shut up. That’s my trade. Shut up.”

Ellie rolled her eyes, a dry, humorless laugh elicited as she strode to the door. “Okay, fine. I’ll see you.”

“Take care of yourself, El.”

When she stepped out, the air was overwhelmingly pure.

It’d been a couple of days with nothing but walls clutching her. Artistry trickled from Santa Barbara’s rushing tide, tethered lunar as current evening. Slowly, tentatively, Ellie had regained her pencil and sketch, her willingness to apply herself through illustration since. Molding from rough sketch to something of form. Her journal had filled itself with Joel across the past year. There was fear in her depiction, driving it. The utter dread at the prospect of voiding his face again. She’d just gotten him back on paper, in mind. To lose him was a nasty, burrowed anxiety.

Ellie drew softly. She was hunched over her desk, auburn framing complexion. Her hair, grown to her chin, was knotted in a slight bun, but strands hung matted, thinning, and loose. She couldn’t be asked to brush.

Eraser marks tinged her stationary a smudged gray overcast by the new, rough outline of her left forearm. Hands were difficult. She went to draw long, ovoid shapes to account for them, and her stomach lunged when it hit her that she ought to shorten her pinky and ring. Teething, she dragged the end of her pencil across, halving, and the lead, slicing short lines at the top, closing. The blank expanse of her arm was there, sans the quite real bandage she felt sticking and including her wound, scribbled indefinitely.

She could opt for something geometric and simple, but there was worry that it wouldn’t mesh with her first tattoo. She lacked proper inspiration, combed herself for nature, something to mirror the opposite ferns, and thought of the forest she’d transversed with Joel to get to the museum. She relived the icy onlook she and Dina had shared, her eyes alight with mischief, smugness at how Ellie relished the view. Insistent, Santa Barbara’s shores fenced by palms cleaved her skull.

Deemed fitting, as it was where she’d acquired the premier wound, she made starts of long trunks starting at her forearm, edging into their telling leaves at the side of her hand where the brunt of her scar resided. Her application edged to the right of her arm, filling, but undetermined of what exactly she was trying to fructify. She exerted ambiguity. Hoped it would gift her surety.

It didn’t. Her chest was blighting, frustration sawing her calluses. Her hand did not grow sore from drawing or writing without immense strain anymore, yet she felt it. She pined for something sturdy and there. A guide. A light.

So she drew fireflies.

As dusk canted, lolling itself through stars, Ellie allotted night to refining. She darkened what she had and corrected the spacing to make ample use of her surface. Two trees buckled together, one larger and enveloping, neither baring fruit. They twined from the start of her forearm to her hand, leaves shrouding her burn. Fireflies ascended with. They decreased in scale as they neared her wrist, and one’s sole wing fluttered, peaking, to the back of her hand. Lifelike, there was no semblance of the Fireflies’ token.

They were hers. Her faith, her hope, her lantern. She aspired that if it was on her skin, it would come easier.

Ellie flipped her journal closed and sat her pencil beside, wilting into her chair. Her knee bounced, a raw, restless habit, her wandering peer even more so. It beached on her bathroom door. She had to bathe, she knew, but her body had been too limp, too unwilling to undertake.

She forced herself up and walking, through the threshold, and cool slabs chilled her socks. Contrast, the water she ran eventually flowed scorching, a steady background stream as she undressed. Her clothes piled. Her mirror reflected. She heeded her grated body, ribs sickly, and wondered where her bruises originated. They splotched her arms and thighs, and she chalked it to clumsiness, some fall she forgot. There was less gauze on her hand as it’d healed a margin.

She ceased the tap and submerged in the tub. It was agonizing, battering heat, singing her, yet it enticed, and she sank to her chin. The ends of her hair dampened. It might have been minutes or hours, staring at the porcelain and bidding herself vacant. Sleep dimmed her.

Abby grappled her. They twisted and screamed, bleeding, fighting, sobbing, and wind lapped at what pieces of them weren’t wading. There was neither sand nor boats, shoreline gone, and all they had to stay upright was each other.

Ellie gouged Abby’s arms, clinging, and managed a punch. It broke her nose. Shattered it, cartilage bowing. One of them cried, and it was inseparable, their breathing, flails, and pulses intertwined like a braid. The ocean rose. A wave tossed them under, Ellie punted farther. Water gorged her lungs, coughing wrested, but no oxygen filtered, and her tongue was pungent as her pulling grasp for Abby’s ankle, willing them even, and, a tortuous prolonging, they drifted up and gasped for air. Retched the salt and clawed at skin.

Abby gripped Ellie’s throat, thumb a crushing pin, and cast her beneath, holding. She writhed. Her arms thrashed over the brink, and her vision stippled, and her gasp was a morbid fuse of drowning and strangle, and fuck, no. Her struggle was pleading, and surely, horribly, her body went meek. It was so cold. So surrounding. Dreary and closing, her sight dulled, mind to struggle gone.

Ellie was blaring, but it was soundless bubbling, water crowding her chest and legs kicking until she pushed herself up, palms flat on the porcelain. She sputtered over the side of the tub, swiveling to face, arms resting against its edge and her mouth ajar with gagging. Water spurred from her lungs and stomach as did her morsels of food, vomited and dejected on her tiles. It took minutes for it to wane. The taste was caustic and her bathwater overflowed with it, freezing. At least the mirror did not show her.

She crept, glomming for a towel and dripping, quivering with cold, and sidestepped her mess. Her pruned fingertips grazed her sleek skin as she blotted, eyes averting her reflection; she resembled a sopping vermin, molars chattering, frame scrawny, and she deemed it foul. Towel pooled at her feet, she cloaked her arms over her dried body and slunk away. Her twin-sized bed was creaking springs.

Blanketed, she trembled, and reminded, she reminisced on when her bed had been bigger, shared with another.

Time passed. She did not venture. Ellie was not content alone but preferred not knowing what might happen outside her dwelling, not bearing witness to their whispers and pointing. She estimated it might have been two days buried, and she knew she had to visit Cat soon to share her design. Make sure it’d work. Her burn was salving but certainly not mended enough to tattoo, requiring light bandage and rinsing.

If her art’s potency had welled, returning as torrent, her poetry had never paled. Her weariness strengthened her words, her verse, her spillage. It was lovely stanzas and strung hurt conjoined. She gave her consciousness in bed, sitting against her headboard with knees fetal, journal atop them as she wrote:

Can I shove it? Keep it?
Internalize it
like a spoilt bad pill?

Can I live here? Be here?
Stomach here
like rotten food?

Is this a home? My home?
A home
like sour spilt milk?

So quick to leave Cold fucking feet.

Rotting corpse, sour grapes
Rigor mortis will keep me

Ellie wasn’t confident in her spelling of “rigor mortis”. It’d been ages since she’d read the Savage Starlight volume it was in. She penned a small question mark beside, pinpricking its dot, fickle. It punctuated the knocking at her door. She looked up, eyes owlish, and listened, confirming, until the thumping permeated again.

The cover was closed and sat aside, pencil atop, and her heart trembled a further slew. It accompanied her awkward, reluctant footfalls, hand twisting the knob. Summer heat adhered to her arms, bared by her tank top, and the sun issued dusk, coloring her and Tommy yellow. He stood there. There was stiffness. Then the tightening of his grip on the container he held.

“I brought you some food,” he began. “It’s brisket and potatoes.” And despite his best efforts she could glean, his gaze flicked over her decaying body, and the message was sent. “... You been eatin’?”

Lethargic and lank, answer obvious. Subconsciously, Ellie crossed her arms and hid the upper bone with her palms. “Yeah,” she lied. “I’ve got enough food. You can keep it.” Unbearable for a second longer, she went to close her door and found his foot quickly wedged between it and the frame.

“Goddammit,” he cursed, pained, “Ellie — ”

She hastily released the door and muttered a halfhearted apology. Her mind was taken by her loathing of what was to come. A reprimand or imminent, heavy conversation, she didn’t know, but she’d rather receive the former by that point.

Tommy huffed and regained his balance, jostling his assailed boot. “We gotta talk.”

“Do we?” Ellie didn’t mean to sound so exhausted, but fuck. Being alone with herself had worn her pacification. “What is there to say?” Because she wanted to leave it at their sorries. She wanted to bury it. No more rehashed, relived, heated as their prior spat, Santa Barbara’s coast.

He shrugged, brow furrowing, but not out of anger. She could see that. Perplexion. “I dunno, Ellie, but I don’t… you ain’t been leavin’ at all. I don’t wanna be a stranger. I’m…” It trailed until he finished, “I’m worried. Me and Maria both.”

Months ago, affronted, she would have cried: You made this. But she knew her melancholy was hers alone. “I didn’t mean to make you guys worried.” Truthful, as she detested fretting. Unwarranted attention. “I’m fine, I’m just taking some time alone.”

Tommy sighed and leaned on the doorframe, shoulder pressed and dish remained offered. She didn’t take it. “You don’t gotta hole yourself up, you know. It’s obvious that… you’re still shaken up. I’m still shaken up. Nobody expects you to be good as new.” He mulled something. “You know about the dance?”

Hesitant, Ellie nodded. “Yeah, Cat told me. Why?”

“You should come. Everybody wants to see you.”

She thought, They want to see me to talk about me. How I went “crazy”. How horrible it is that I left Dina as if I don’t already know. So they can gawk at the fact that I actually lost my fingers. Those were a handful of snippets she’d heard in passing, and some hadn’t tried to whisper. All she said was, “I might.”

“There’ll be drinks, if that’s any consolation,” Tommy joked, attempting a smile. “But really, uh… feel free to come. We want you there, and…” He gesticulated vaguely. “I’m here if you ever need anything.” And finally, a bookend, he proposed the food again. “Just take it, El. C’mon. You gotta eat.”

“Alright, alright.” She conceded and accepted. “Goodnight.”

He didn’t stop her, but she heard him mutter, “G’night, El.” It was muffled by her closing door.

Ellie inclined against the flat wood, drooping down its surface like wilt, a wither, and the container was weighty. Her appetite struggled with light food, cold and small-portioned. A hot dinner was undoable. So she moved to her fridge, stubborn, and slid the meal inside, the others Maria had given her glaring. Most had gone spoiled.

“You can still draw,” Cat commented, evaluating her design. She held her journal with a delicate hand, steady as a surgeon, and in the other was a lit cigarette. “Fireflies, huh?” Smoke followed her talk. It seeped, relaxed as she melted in the armchair.

“Not the Fireflies,” Ellie muttered from the couch, “sorta… my own thing.” She traced her fingertips over her scar. There was no gauze, and it had recuperated a nasty pink, bite encrypted. “You think it’s doable?”

“Should be. Your burn healed pretty nice.” She toked and exhaled. “Lucky for you, I’ve got all night. Lay on the gurney.” She snuffed her cigarette in the ashtray and moved, crouching to the gurney’s lower rack. Supplies were stashed there. “I’ll get a stencil and linework going.”

Ellie frowned but complied, the cot a surprising cradle on her back. She tried not to reminisce on how it’d felt when she was fourteen, the doctors pressing an oxygen mask and consoling. The pinch of a syringe. Anesthesia overtaking her. She ran a hand over her face. “You gotta sleep.”

“I’m good, thanks.” Cat stood, clipboard, various papers, and pen in hand, and she sat on the stool beside the cot. “I think I can decide my bedtime.”

“Shut up,” Ellie mumbled. “It’s already late.”

“Really?” Cat said, sarcastic. “I didn’t even realize.” She layered the stencil paper beneath regular parchment, the clipboard supporting, and began broad lines, pressing hard on each penstroke. Ellie admired her memory, able to replicate with ease, and the lack of error in her drafts, so the finished product was all the greater. “You decided on the dance yet? I need a date. Can’t leave me hanging.”

She groaned, “No, I haven’t decided. I feel like it’d be too awkward. People would stare and shit.”

“They’d stare because you’re basically an extraterrestrial creature. You emerge like a fucking cicada, what, every five millenia?” Cat’s laugh was light as a bell, crackling with rasp and gravel. “Just get it over with. You’re gonna have to eventually. And…” Her teasing lessened to pensive quiet and before Ellie could ask, she was answering the unspoken question. “Maria’s pretty sick of you freeloading. She wants to get you back on patrols.”

“Fuck me.” It left before she could halt it, a kneejerk response. The mere concept was, admittedly, a nightmare. “I mean, I know I need to put in my fair share, yada yada, I don’t mind that, but… I don’t know if I’d even be able to get shit done.”

Cat frowned. “You can take care of yourself. She’ll probably bother you about it tomorrow.”

“Can’t wait.” Ellie closed her eyes. It was far too late to be up, then, if Maria would pester her soon. She required all her energy to deal. “You mind if I crash out?”

“You’re just gonna leave me alone?” Cat lamented, a slight, entertained pout on her lips. “Whatever. Go to bed, I’ll start on you while you’re asleep. Don’t move.”

“Tell that to my unconscious.”

When Ellie woke, it was to the violent alarm of pounding on Cat’s door. Cat was unseen, but the remnants of her work clung to Ellie’s arm: Acute outlining, no shading quite yet, and it was nothing short of prodigal. She recalled a couple of times she’d stirred, particularly when the gun went over the side of her hand where it was short in skin, panging her bones. A thin sheet of plastic was stuck to preserve it. “Fuck.” A drowsy, irked curse as she moved to answer the door, a swarm in her lower back from how she’d slept. Never falling asleep on a gurney again.

They kept knocking, and she heard Sissy yip from the other room. Overwhelmed, she brought her hands up to cover her ears as if that’d help. But expecting her presence made it easier to cope, and it didn’t strain her as tight as prior. Ellie answered and found no shock.

Maria loosened her posture when Ellie came, and no time was squandered. “Get dressed. You’re going out with the morning group.” She eyed her tattoo. “Another one?” Another bite? she should’ve said. Blatant subtext hung within.

“I’m not — ” Ellie scratched her nose, expression pinched. “I don’t have any good clothes on me.” Pointedly, she gestured up and down her tattered, casual attire, and more incisive, she didn’t address the second bullet.

“Borrow some from Cat. I’m waiting. Get out here, c'mon.”

Here, she presumed, was Jackson altogether, but the patrol route was more imminent. “Alright, okay, gimme a sec…” Ellie trekked to Cat’s bedroom, rallying her will, and slipped in.

Sissy perked from the foot of Cat’s bed, her racket quieting and big, doe-eyed rapture tracking Ellie as she walked to the dresser. Cat was dead asleep, snoring and sprawled.

Ellie thanked an unknown that the canine seemed too somnolent to move for her, but her own hands were dexterous in their haste, scouring for proper wear and descending Cat’s drawers. A slight flinch wracked her when she brushed a brassiere, but cheeks flushing, she settled on dark cargo pants and boots to replace her sneakers, finding difficulty in making either fit given Cat’s lengthy legs, so she managed with a belt cinched and laces compact. Fortunately, she hadn’t left without her pistol strapped to her thigh, and her tee was adequate to just wear under a bomber jacket left on the entry’s door-side rack. It chafedly brushed the plastic.

“You ready?” Maria’s impatience was unmistakable.

“Yeah,” Ellie mumbled, “you just came suddenly. I don’t even have my bag.”

“Well, I told Cat to give you a notice. You can share supplies with your partner. Let’s go.”

A protest burgeoned, but Maria was already walking, and she could do nothing less than follow unless she wanted to get chastened. Her stomach knotted. Fearful anticipation of who she’d be paired with. She wondered if Dina did patrols, and fuck, that sent her into taut silence until Maria spoke.

“Party’s tonight. You’re coming.”

“Are you asking or telling me?”

“Did it sound like I was asking?”

Ellie muttered, fiddling with her sleeves, “No.”

“Good.”

They were silent for the remainder until they verged Jackson’s entrance. Horses had already been led by their reins, willful and braying, and Ellie recognized some of the patrolmen readying. They noticed her, too, but said nothing, and Dina wasn’t there. Ellie was unsure if she wasn’t on that shift or had taken a different job. “Who am I paired with?”

She swore she saw a smile ghost Maria’s lips, but it was gone as quickly as it’d come. “Steph!”

From the throng, an unfamiliar girl piqued her head. Girl. Not a woman, probably about thirteen. She was small, and her clothes served to broaden her; it was like she was mopped by her massive button-up and long shotgun strapped to her back. Her long braids were in a tight ponytail and had wooden beading lighter than her dark skin. “What?”

Maria beckoned Steph with her finger.

Eyes rolling, she trudged. “I don’t need someone to show me, I’ve gone out, like, a million times — ”

“Because you snuck out and almost got yourself killed once.” Maria raised a brow. “Remember?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Steph shoved her hands in her pockets and leered at Ellie. “Is this her?”

Maria answered, “In the flesh. Show her the ropes, El, and make sure you’re back on time.” And with a clap to Ellie’s shoulder, she was off.

She was left gaping, borderline offended by the notion. JJ had been an abnormally easy baby to the point of thinking him sick at times, that relaxed, but aside from him, she was awful with kids, and she had no resume for mouthy teenagers aside from having been one. She wasn’t sure if that sanctioned her.

And instead of a greeting, as if the situation couldn’t be worse, Steph asked, “What happened to your hand?”

If I had a nickel. “They got stung by a bunch of wasps.” Indulging those who questioned wasn’t a usual part of her prerogative, but when she did, it was a differing tale each time. “They had pus and got all infected and whatever. I had to chop them off myself.”

“Ew.”

“Yep.” Ellie went for a shotgun by the gate’s receptacle, loading it. “Are you a good shot?”

“Probably better than your four fingers total.”

“... Okay, well,” she grumbled, only minorly insulted, “it’s eight.”

“Basically four.”

Ellie tried not to show her annoyance, electing to ignore her as she got her supplies together. Her lack of a backpack provided little room, so she stored ammunition in her pockets and had to carry her long gun. “You know what trails we’re going on? ‘Cause Maria kinda just thrusted me here.” Thanks.

“Uh,” Steph thought aloud, biting her lip, “something, something, creek trails?”

Ellie went rigid. Absolutely not. That is way too bad a memory lane. But it wasn’t time to voice that. “What horses are we taking?”

“Joan and Coriander.”

“Who names a horse… ? Y’know what? Don’t care.” Ellie shifted her gun under her arm, safety on. “Is Joan the black mare?”

Steph nodded and made her way to mount who Ellie assumed was Coriander, a piebald stallion. Her restlessness showed in her picking at her lip. The skin there was irritated, clearly a bad habit of hers. “Hurry up, I wanna go already.”

“Can’t you see that I’m bursting with excitement to leave?”

“No.”

Ellie shrugged. “Then that sounds like a you problem.” She approached Joan with caution. Meeting a new horse was nerve-wracking. There’d always been a special bond between her and Shimmer, but she didn’t want to dwell on that, instead lowering herself onto the saddle. She accepted Ellie without gripe. “I’ll lead. Don’t go off on your own.”

With that, Ellie surged forward, Steph a begrudging follower.

Steph talked a lot. It was like everything she said fed into another anecdote or opinion she had to share, taking all the time in the world to cover a girl at the group home she hated, or her first infected kill, or the plot of an old superhero movie, which was the current topic. “So they injected this skinny dude with a shitton of serum, and he became this super-soldier-propagandist guy. He’d go on tours, like, everywhere in America during World War II.”

“And you said his name is Captain America?” Ellie asked. Admittedly, it was nice to have mindless white noise while she surveyed for infected. “That’s the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard.”

“It’s a good movie.” She heard Coriander’s footfalls taper, and she checked behind to see Steph dismounting. “And speaking of superheroes…”

“What are you doing?”

Steph didn’t answer, kneeling to the creekside bushes and pawing the dirt, digging what looked like a magazine out. It was too dirtied to decipher the cover, especially from Ellie’s perspective, until she brushed her hand over it. Savage Starlight. A volume she hadn’t found yet, at that.

Steph sighed and rolled it so it could be stored in her bag. “Damn.”

“You like Savage Starlight?” Despite herself, excitement exuded. “I used to collect those like crazy. I don’t think I’ve got that volume. Twelve?”

“Yep,” — she popped the p — “but I’ve already got this one. I need nine and two.”

“I’ve got doubles of nine, if you wanna trade.”

It felt good. That mindless rightness and rapport she’d lost returning. Taking a second to smell the roses, to give something that wasn’t heartache and tear. For just a moment, a scarce moment, Ellie forgot who she was, what she’d done, how inseverable those were from her. It was nice. Just… nice.

So naturally, it couldn’t stay.

Through the creekside shrubbery, high and gurgling, came an infected cry soon traced by its appearance. It was humanoid but decaying, and starts of cordyceps peeked from its limbs. It spotted the pair and charged, nails slashing for anything it could grip.

Ellie didn’t flinch. “Get your gun out,” she directed and flicked the safety off her shotgun to take fatal aim. The bullet hit its neck — around its brain stem, as it fell dead, truly dead — and blood spewed. It spread in the water, a grisly omen of its horde.

Two more emerged from the underbrush. One was forced to a crawl, its legs eaten, and the other’s ankle was mauled, so it limped. The people they’d been had surely gone through hell and back before their turn. Ellie set her jaw and fired at the former. A miss as it crept closer, and she pulled her and Joan back to avoid its incessant teeth. “You gonna shoot or enjoy the show, Steph — ”

“I forgot to load it!” she spat in return, stowing her ammo and taking steps back from the scene as she righted it.

“Oh, and I’m the bad shot?” Ellie gunned her next attempt, and it hit between his infested eyes. He would’ve become a clicker if not for that interference, so one less future problem.

Steph’s shot penetrated the second’s chest, then its skull, and it plummeted to the creek with an unceremonious splash. “There.”

None burst from the thicket thereafter, but bleak, cold, its clacking a short warning, Ellie felt a mangled hand tug her from behind, and she toppled off Joan with a shocked cry, an instinctive struggle. Her shotgun dropped. “Fuck!” It had a grasp on her arm, and she was useless on her back as it clambered atop. She aimed her feet towards its gut, and with all her strength, kicked. It was a forceful propel, not of her strength but will, and it slumped a few feet away.

She reached for her handgun. It wasn’t necessary. Steph shot the side of its head twice, precision knocking it lifeless. Its hand rested where it’d been reaching for Ellie’s ankle, and goddamn, her chest was huffing.

“Am I a bad shot now?” Steph challenged, equally blown. “Where’d it even come from?”

“I think — ” Ellie cut herself off to breathe. “I think it came from that nearby warehouse. Noise attracted it. Must’ve busted out a window. I figured that place would’ve been cleared by now, but…”

“It clearly wasn’t.”

“Yup.”

Steph looked behind her. “You think there’s more?”

“No.” Ellie holstered her pistol and reached for her shotgun, standing. “They would’ve come running by now. It might’ve been a straggler in earshot.” She scaled Joan and gave her mane a stroke. “C’mon, we’re close to the radio tower. We gotta sign-in and whatnot.”

The building was a haven. Ellie exhaled the second they crossed it, their horses tied outside. “This way.” She led Steph to the familiar form and skimmed its previous pages, shotgun shifted to one hand.

Dina’s penmanship scowled at her. Recent evidence Ellie stumbled upon. She was often a duo of herself and Kate, whom she knew but had spoken to as little as possible, a prim baker’s daughter, but had other partners occasionally. It seemed she hadn’t had much trouble, either, with almost all her right columns marked clear, and that mitigated her ruminating. She ran her fingers over her signature. Bit her cheek. Sucked herself into the pitfall she’d avoided: Thinking of her.

“... You good?” Steph interrupted. She was reading what Ellie had been, and she didn’t hide the evidence quick enough. “You dated Dina, right?”

She flipped to the next blank space and started filling it. “A long time ago.” Ellie + Steph in the first column. “Doesn’t matter.” But it did, or she wouldn’t hurt so gravely. Cleared 4 infected (1 clicker) by the creek in the second, and she sat the pen back. “That’s our dues. Let’s head back.”

Steph leaned against the wall, idle. “I know what happened, y’know. Kinda fucked up.”

Ellie glanced at her. “You’re gonna have to specify.” I’ve done a lot that’s “fucked up”.

“How you ended things with her.”

She didn’t need a reminder, and regardless of the memory’s bruise, sawing her bones and scolding her lashing tongue and fraying her, threads undone, her voice was soft in certainty. “I know.”

Steph had kept prattling to Ellie’s place, and she was reluctant to let her inside. “It’s pretty barren,” Ellie muttered, “don’t expect much.” She entered and shrugged Cat’s jacket, throwing it to some irrelevant corner.

“Don’t expect much?” Steph mocked, and when she stepped in front of Ellie, she was awestruck. “I have to share a room with, like, four girls, so this? My expectations are low anyways. Oh.” She’d spotted her Savage Starlight poster. “Where did you find that?”

“Dunno.” Joel had given it to her, and she didn’t know where he’d discovered it. “My volumes are just over there if you wanna grab one of nine.” Ellie moved to her closet and browsed her clean clothes, gauging what was adequate for the dance. What she’d worn last time was simplistic, but she’d benefit from something that said, I am a normal, functioning member of the population. Don’t mind me. It was close to dusk, so she had to choose wisely and briskly.

So, flannel. Again.

“Can I ask who’s fostering you?” Ellie laid a gray one on her bed and rummaged for jeans that fit her, Cat’s draping loose.

Steph puffed, “Winona.”

Ellie was acquainted, for lack of a better word. She was an elderly woman, mid-seventies and divorced thrice, who struck mean as a snake and had even meaner, inebriant breath. Empty bottles no doubt filled her home. She’d always given Ellie ugliness as she passed her house, and Ellie, young and reckless, didn’t hesitate to fire back, and her chosen method was eggs. Yeah. She and Cat had egged the fuck out of her house. Worth it.

“She still a drunk?”

“Yup.”

Ellie hummed her distaste. “She divorce her latest?”

“Of course.”

Divorced four times, then. “Are her husbands in a revolving door?”

“Practically.” Steph took volume nine off the shelf and swapped it for twelve. A wistful sigh left her. “I can’t wait to get my own place. I’m fucking sick of this town.”

Ellie chuckled, “You’re thirteen, you’re not allowed to be sick of shit.”

“Fifteen,” she corrected, bundling the comic to store, “I’m just short. And wouldn’t you get sick of Winnie if you lived with her?”

She chewed that. “Okay, point made, but I don’t think anything could be worse than Boston QZ.”

“But it still sucks,” Steph complained. She sat at Ellie’s desk chair, pitched forward. “The other girls are always trying to steal my shit, and some of them are literal children, so they’re super annoying. And I know Winnie’s only fostering for the street cred. Like,” — she pushed a posh accent — “oh! You’re such a lovely woman for taking care of these horrid orphans. Bravo.”

She broke. Ellie laughed, mirth brimming, and had to stifle it with a hand over her mouth. It was unfair that teenagers were so simultaneously exasperating and unintentionally hilarious. “Guessing you don’t want me to say sorry for your dead parents?”

“God, no,” she replied, her natural voice recurring. “So awkward. I don’t even really care. I was four when they died.”

Ellie understood. She knew firsthand how painfully discomforting it was to be petted over loss as if that rectified anything. “Yeah.” She swept a hand through her hair and found abundant tangles, enough to make her wince. “You should go. I gotta get ready.” She moved to her bathroom and searched for a brush, pinging one in the medicine cabinet. When she raked it through, starting at the bottom, she cringed but mustered, “Do you know the patrol schedule?”

She peered from the bathroom to see Steph pause, having slung her bag over her shoulder. “Today’s Friday, so… we’re on for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. We only have so little ‘cause technically it’s training and not patrol.”

“Alright, thanks.” Ellie carded the brush. Tried to be fast. She wanted the prickling to be over. “Enjoy your comic. That volume’s good.”

The party was at the town square, and while she traipsed, fiddling with the plastic on her arm, she noticed others on the way. Ellie confined to her emptier side of the street. Her hair hung undone, blocking her periphery, and she should’ve put it up. She didn’t like not being able to wholly observe. But the gravel beneath her feet and buildings upfront were bound to her memory, so she navigated with familiarity. If she didn’t know them like a prayer, she would be able to hear the party before she saw it. String music. Laughter. The general bustle of dancing, getting a little too drunk.

When Ellie rounded the next corner, it was on full, lavish display. A bar had been propped and was littered with people chatting and guffawing at some joke, and beside it, there was an open dance floor. The crowd was thick in movement, entirety, a cohesive oneness and mirth. It was impenetrable, or perhaps it was Ellie’s hesitance that kept her from assimilating. Years passed, she would have slipped in, and though withdrawn, she would’ve felt belonging. It was impossible to feel when she felt glances thrown her way.

She sat at the end of the bar and flagged the bartender, muttering, “Bourbon. Please.”

He gave a confused look. “A shot?”

“Just… bourbon.” Ellie bounced her leg perched on the footrest. Buried half her face in her hand. “Please.”

He gave her two shots like he could tell.

She relished what whiskey gave her, but that didn’t make drinking any easier. Breaks were required between her goes so she could scrunch her face, exhale in disgust, and she slid the glasses away from her when they were drained. People conversed beside her, effectively, thankfully ignoring her presence. Ellie rested her cheek on her hand and elbow on the countertop, quickened her leg’s jump, scanned the room for any sign of Cat. Of course, it was like her to be fashionably late. She didn’t show by the time her tipsiness settled, and since she hadn’t drank in a while, it hit harder than foreseen.

Her eyes beheld the gazebo, cornered near the dance floor. It was furnished with ample seating and an ampler group, all boozing and chatting, exaggerated pantomiming accompanying what looked like storytelling. A punchline hit, because they dissolved into cackles, and god, Ellie heard Dina’s from pure memory, not earshot, filling what she wasn’t close enough to have.

She watched her throw her head back, hair untamed as ever. A wine glass was in her hand. The red almost swished onto her clothes, a blouse tight, top two buttons undone, and the black pants that had always enamored Ellie. All russet and flirtation and dimpling smirks and creek trails and the vague scent of weed and oh, the girl beside her kissed the corner of her mouth, and oh, it lacerated Ellie, bled her dry, that it was Kate, perfect and blonde and gorgeous as ever, clad prettily.

Interminable, her stare was committed to Dina, trying to cherish when those beaming lips had been hers. But Dina made eye contact after her glee passed, they made eye contact, and Ellie shifted her focus. Her heart jumped with frenzy. “Hey, uh,” she called for the bartender, quivering as she stood, “I need a bottle.”

He pulled a pitying face, and she already knew he’d deny her, and before he did so, she burst, everything, all she had, hurt funneled, “Give me a fucking bottle!”

People stared, but he folded, giving it. The bourbon within wavered in her shaking hand. She rushed away whereas others filtered in, and it was like everyone’s looks burned into her breaking, sore skin. She uncorked and swigged, slight drink down her chin, throat on fire with her gag. “Fuck.” Her voice thrummed low with bitterness, and she didn’t need alcohol to spit it.

A familiar voice jolted, “What — Ellie?” Cat stopped in front of her, dress scant and frown concerned, depressing deep marks into her cheeks, her hand on Ellie’s shoulder somehow impelling further. “Why’re you pissed, what happened?”

“I’m not pissed, I’m…” There was no plausible way to word her affliction. “I don’t know. I’m leaving, and I — ” A breath to steel her supplicating. “I need to smoke.”

“Okay,” Cat said immediately, “okay. C’mon, I’ve got some on me.”

She kept a mediating hand on the small of Ellie’s back while they walked, directing her into an alley near the bakery. It was isolated and drab. Their only company was streetlights and the wall they sat against. The bulbs illuminated enough for Ellie to watch Cat pull a tin of herb, a pipe, and a lighter from her pocket, and she made impressive time, packed it quick and compact. “Take it slow.”

They traded, bottle in Cat’s hand and Cat’s paraphernalia in Ellie’s, and she lit and inhaled, unreserved. Her mouth already burned. Might as well take it to her chest. She took the smoke better than the drink, letting it wisp from her lips, windpipe desiccated, but no cough followed.

Cat, a stark contrast to Ellie’s distaste, sipped the bottle like water. “You wanna talk about what happened?”

The question’s stem bloomed in her throat, but its fruits sprouted fetid, infested her like gnawing locusts. Ellie slathered it in another toke, ampler and longer. That exhale slipped to shroud Cat’s face. She hadn’t realized how close she was, watching Ellie’s expression. She felt transparent when she was around Cat, exhibitionistic when she showed anything. Cat knew her too well to not see her. She’d been rogue for so long that being studied like that, so shrewd, made her throat bob.

She forced herself to ask, “Are Kate and Dina together? Don’t…” They exchanged hands again, and Ellie sucked the bottle, its putrid taste flooding her voice. “Don’t spare my feelings. Just tell me.”

Cat didn’t defer. “They are.” She took a long hit, exhaling through her nostrils. “Married, even.”

“... Married?” Ellie laughed bitterly and drank. “Jesus. Alright. Good for her.”

“You can’t act like she’s not allowed to move on, El.” She was too levelheaded for Ellie’s comfort. “You were gone for so long. And yeah, I know you get jealous, but Kate’s a good person. I know you know that.”

She clutched the bottle’s neck like a lifeline, jostling the sepia liquid inside as her brow pinched, her gaze slimming. The high always hit her eyelids first. “That’s why I hate it. I’m never…” Ellie leaned her head against the wall. “I’m never gonna be like that. I’m never gonna have my shit together to that level, and it makes me think, you know, if Dina is dating someone like Kate after me, did she always want someone like her?” She bit her lip. “Or did I burn her?”

Cat listened and nodded where needed, and when Ellie stopped, she toked, reflective. “You know what’s funny?”

There was nothing droll within her. “Do tell.”

“We’re smoking right behind Kate’s parents’ bakery.”

She stood corrected, and jaw lax, she dwindled into loud, jaded chortling, knees pulled to her chest and bourbon dappling her flannel. She laughed, laughed, harder than she had in years, undiluted irony coaxing. “Cat!” she crowed.

“Ellie,” Cat tittered in return.

Ellie felt the bakery cradle her back, supporting her with stringent concrete, and she leaned further. She took a breath uninvaded by her amusement. “That’s so… holy shit, we’re assholes.”

“Maybe a bit.”

“Yeah, a bit,” she snorted. “Can I have another hit?” Their hands switched and Ellie puffed, but it was ashen. Her brow wrinkled. “That bowl’s done.”

Cat took it and vacated the remnants onto the ground, slipped it and its lighter into her pocket, and fuck, she glanced at Ellie with red scleras. “Hey.” A breathy murmur.

It resounded. The high was brewing.

“Hey,” Ellie echoed.

Cat drank generously, running her thumb over the bottle’s ridges, and she didn’t flinch whatsoever. “How are you? Really.”

“Just ‘cause I’m high doesn’t mean you’re gonna get that out of me.” But a smile pushed her lips. “I’m bad if that’s what you wanna know.”

“I can tell. I’m not stupid.”

Ellie hummed, kept her eyes on Cat’s, flitted them to her talking mouth. The buzz was lazy, good, even if she knew it was just her brain’s chemicals getting toyed. But the meddling opened her, ribs aside and beating heart displayed, because she said, shattered smile foregone, “I don’t wanna feel like this anymore.”

“I know, El.”

She sighed and wet her lips. “Of course you do.”

It wasn’t clear who tipped first, but Ellie felt Cat’s arm slink her frame before their lips met, bourbon shared, eyes blissfully closed, and she breathed, melted into her embrace. She stopped thinking. She just kept her lips, her hands on the body in front of her, cupped her face. Desperate, Ellie broadened her mouth to slip tongue, and she reciprocated. Her mouth was damp. Each tilt, aided by intoxication, was fierce on her.

She’d forgotten how to kiss, soles walked raw and fight ruinous, but she knew how to chase.

The faint clink of the bottle being set perforated, and Cat pulled first, face mellow. “I can help you forget.” Ellie felt her fingertips trail to her pants, unbuttoning. “Just for a sec. I’ll help. Okay?”

She panted, “Okay.”

She needed it so badly. Cat gave it.

Ellie sagged against the wall, breath hot, and spent, she tugged her pants back up. “Jesus, Cat.”

“Good?” Smug, foxy in her eyes.

“No,” Ellie joked, mumbling, “it was awful.”

Cat teased, “Oh? You got any tips so I can improve?

“Take me somewhere nicer than an alley next time.” She ground her teeth, the tenderness hitting her. “My back hurts.”

“Fair. Very fair.” She leaned her cheek on the wall to stare at Ellie. “How long do you think we’ve been out here?”

Ellie shook her head. “We’re high, you think we can fucking tell?” She gazed at the adjacent wall, some other building on the next street faced from the bakery, and sighed all her vice.

Her lip trembled. Just briefly.

“I’m so fucking tired, Cat.”

Cat rested her head on Ellie’s shoulder. “Me too.”

She’d slept at Cat’s and took the long way home to visit him.

Ellie was stiff, sitting by Joel’s grave with her knees bunched. The cemetery was empty at that early hour but for ghosts, and she fit better there than with townspeople. Her emaciation was not easily swallowed by the living. She said nothing for long, flexible minutes. Masochistic, staring at his stone, his name etched. Someone had left fresh roses.

“I thought I’d let you go,” she started, quiet, “but I guess that’s not really… a straight line, huh? Or whatever Dina says. Grief isn’t linear. All that.” She drummed her fingers on her calves where they held her legs close, chin crowning. There was a gross absence of two’s thrum. “I’m sorry.”

She squeezed her eyes shut.

“I know you don’t want me to be like this, if there’s still even a… you. I don’t know if you’re watching me or gone. Resting for good. Maybe you resting would be best. You wouldn’t…” Have to see this. “Yeah, I just. You know. Fuck.” Ellie brushed her palm across her face. “I think I have to leave.”

Jackson wasn’t hers anymore. She was different.

“And I” — she swallowed, eyes heavy and watering — “I wanted to say bye in person. I didn’t… I don’t know when I’m leaving, but…”

Ellie’s forehead settled on her knees, canting her face downward. Like a child, untried and scared, she sobbed, “I miss you.”

Chapter Text

Ellie dedicated the day to recuperating. After visiting the cemetery, her chest’s pang quelled, goodbyes given, but everything else was pure hurt. She sprawled in her bed and stared at the ceiling for what could’ve been hours. Time’s only marker was the sun through her window and the gradual ebb of her hangover. When she regained herself, hand clutched to her forehead, it was afternoon dotted by knocking. She’d never not be sick of that noise.

She contemplated pretending she was dead, but that was foiled by the sheer incessantness of her guest, hungry.

Dina made her voice known, calling, “Ellie! I know you’re in there, I asked Cat!”

She groaned below her breath. She gave no reply as she trailed to her bathroom, straightening herself in the mirror before answering the door. “What.” There wasn’t an intent to sound that short, but Ellie supposed her turmoil hooked it.

Dina hadn’t expected it either. It was evident in her furrowed, thick brow yet wide eyes, mouth thin in exasperation. “Nice to see you, too.”

“Dina,” Ellie said, firm, “if this is about last night, I know. Whatever you’re about to say, I know.”

“Do you?” She was bristling by then. “Let me get a word in. I don’t want you to…” She quieted and mulled in that way of hers, tried to find words. “I don’t want to be villainized for finding someone.” Pointed, she motioned up and down her. “You found someone, didn’t you?”

Ellie blanched. “What?”

“Cat.” Dina leaned on her doorframe, arms crossed. “I saw you guys walk out together, and it’s fine. It just — ”

“Cat and I aren’t dating,” Ellie cleared. Her hands were desperate, searching for the right gesture to drive it. “We’ve just been hanging out a lot since she started on my tattoo.”

Dina nestled her arms tighter and glanced away. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Ellie went to close her door, but Dina shifted herself between, pressing opposite her push. “Fuck, can we have a conversation?”

She slipped inside, there, in her house that wasn’t a home, a specter, and she felt her chest jerk, unsure, unwilling to broach. “I just feel like you made it abundantly clear that you don’t want to be around me, Dina.”

“I don’t, but you also don’t need to sprint at the sight of me, okay?” she retorted. “I’m not gonna chase you out as some kind of punishment. I’m… I’m angry, Ellie, and hurt. But I don’t want you to feel — ”

“Like a stranger?” Ellie cut. “Like a rumor?” She stepped closer, and it was like her heart jumped her throat, shattered words on the ground. Thousands of shards beneath her soles. Crackling. “I know that it’s okay for you to find someone else. That’s not wrong. You deserve someone good, I just…” She breathed her debris. Leered down at it, slicing her. “I hate that it couldn’t have been me.”

She watched Dina. Big eyes shining, wedding band twisted in her fingers, hair shrouding her face, and Ellie loathed her acquaintance with that aspect. How Dina showed her ailing, her ache. How she cried. What an expanse she was, so much to love yet so much to wound. She recalled the end of their relationship and how it’d grown to more bad than good, concern than benefit. Ellie had been in hospice, and Dina had clutched.

Dina murmured, “Me too.”

So Ellie let herself think on what could’ve been, felt its residuals slip through her fingers. She broke like a guitar string, voice shuttered high. There was an inability to play her chords. To handle what Dina slung. “Don’t do that,” Ellie whispered, shaking her head. “Don’t do that, Dina.”

“Do what?”

Don’t make me think there’s a chance. She regarded her. “Can you go?”

Dina bit her lip and surveyed Ellie, searched her, and finally backed away. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m fine.” Ellie held the door.

She hesitated and gave her that look. Fuck that look. The pitying, dark irises and doleful words withheld, able to deliver more in quiet. It destroyed Ellie. Calamity. “Okay.”

That time, it was Dina who walked.

“How about… NYC?” Cat suggested. She was sat by the gurney, coloring her tattoo in dark neutrals, shading it deep. The second Ellie had said she wanted to leave, Cat was a travel brochure tossing states and cities. “Or Georgia?”

“No clue.” She grit her teeth. She’d been shading the side of her hand for an eternity. “NYC sounds like a nightmare. Its QZ got toppled fucking ages ago, so I can only imagine how many infected are there. And Georgia’s… I don’t know what’s going on in Georgia.”

Cat thought. “I think Atlanta QZ is going strong. Don’t quote me.”

“Huh.” Ellie brought her free hand to brush her face, rub her temple. It was a sorry attempt to get her gears churning. “I just have no fucking clue where would even… like, where could I have a future? Do I just wing it? And how do I tell Maria?”

“That last one’s easy.” She swiped her cloth over the tattoo to rid excess. “You don’t.”

“I almost feel like she’d track me down if I didn’t say anything.”

She read Ellie, mouth set tight. “How old are you?”

“... Twenty-one.” She hated that she had to reach for that information.

“And you’re scared of Maria?”

“You aren’t?”

“No, because I wouldn’t tell her about this at all. Don’t be slow, El. C’mon.” Cat grinned, toothsome. “Okay… I hear Mexico’s lovely this time of year.”

Ellie raised her brows.

It was a pretty idea. She’d never been and had hardly seen images of the country, all on postcards or projected in classes. She knew it was, in all likelihood, overrun by infected like the States, but when she was younger, she’d liked to envision it as a haven. A daydream, safe.

“Ellie,” Cat said, peering up, “that was a joke. Wipe that look off your face.”

She met Cat’s miffed expression. “No.”

Somehow, she kept her hand steady as she refocused and spoke, “The Cordyceps started in Central America, like, right under Mexico. It’s probably a fucking battle zone if all the people aren’t already infected — ”

“But what if they’re not?” Ellie shot. “What if they’re fine in comparison to us? It’s not like we’re doing peachy, either, and it’s not even that far.” From Jackson to the Mexican border, there was Utah and Arizona for certain, maybe verging to Colorado or New Mexico if routes were blocked. She thanked her time inspecting maps. “I’ve definitely gone farther.”

“You’re being…” Cat chuckled, breaking her words. “I’m just glad to see you like this again. Even if you’re an idiot.”

She frowned. “Like what?”

“Excited. Idealistic. Stupid.”

“How can I be idealistic if we don’t actually know what’s going on down there? I’m… considering all outcomes.”

Cat moved the gun from the side of her hand to her forearm, and Ellie repressed a relieved exhale. “And if the outcome isn’t good?”

“Then that wouldn’t surprise me,” she joked drily, “given my track record.”

She snorted and Ellie saw her realize something. Its whir quieting, she pulled the gun from her skin and rubbed it with her gloved hand. “The earliest you can leave is in a week. I’m almost out of ink, so I have to go find more before I can finish. There’s your time to think on it.”

“It’s all I’ve been thinking about.”

Ellie let Cat wrap the tattoo. The palms’ shading was done thoroughly, from its leaves to distending trunks, but the fireflies were almost all left an outline, so there was no way to rush if she wanted her tat to be presentable. She sat upright, slouched and eyeing it. It probed her memory; maybe it was the fireflies lighting the back of her mind. Smile sadly curled, she muttered, “Dina thought we were an item.”

Cat cackled. It took ages to dwindle. “Like, dating? Girlfriend-girlfriend?”

“That’s what she made it seem like, yeah.” Ellie’s gaze slanted at her. “What, is the thought of dating me so awful?”

“Been there, done that.”

“Says the one who pounced on me before we were even together,” she scoffed, yet her lips showed no contempt.

“... And jerked you off behind — ”

Ellie broke, “I’m stopping you there.”

“It’s true!” Cat defended, a dramatic, thespian hand to her collar. “You were like — ”

That time, her interruption was not pacifist but rather a punch to Cat’s shoulder, mindful of her tattoo’s sheathing. “Never bring that up again.”

Cat gave her faux puzzlement. “Bring what up again?” She left her stool to crouch, stowing her supplies in the rack below, and an impish grin flitted her. “No clue what you’re talking about.”

“Me either,” Ellie played along. However, her face flattened to true pondering. “You think Mexico would be… possible?”

“For the average person? No. It’d be too hard to get there and find a settlement. For you? Fifty-fifty.”

“So you think I’m above average?”

Cat rolled her eyes as she stood. “I think you’re stubborn.” She drew her pocketed tin and the chewing tobacco within to hook in her mouth, sucking thoughtfully. “You should honestly be dead by now.”

The gurney was puncturing. “You don’t even know.”

On Monday, the patrol route was docile, its only threat being Steph’s talk. Ellie wondered if she had a rapid, randomized system to select a new topic every time her rambling needled, never leaving a second of pure silence. Ellie interjected with assorted hums and questions but counted the days until Cat got ink within. Her bag was heavy on her back as she led. She’d gotten to pack that morning.

“... so I pulled her nose ring out,” Steph finished the story, swelling with victory. “You can’t say she didn’t deserve it.”

“I never said that.” Ellie hadn’t said much at all. “She sounds like a bitch. Who steals someone’s soap?”

“Stinky bitches.”

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded her sympathy, voice humorously level. “Stinky bitches will do that.”

Ellie heard Coriander’s trotting quicken until she saw Steph beside her, pouting. “I’m bored.”

“It’s good that you’re bored, considering the alternative.” Their last patrol flashed at the back of her skull. “This route is almost always clean, anyways, since it’s so close to town. Maria probably gave it to us ‘cause it’s easy.”

“To you because it’s easy.”

“Uh” — she feigned offense — “we’re a unit.”

“You wish.” Steph observed her, and it felt horribly surgical, prodding her insides. “I don’t know, like, anything about you.”

Because her presentation was carefully selected scraps, propped and glued to stay whole. Together. To front function until she was alone and could crumble. A kid didn’t need to see her failings. No one did. “Maybe if you talked less, I’d give some more.” Ellie shrugged. “We haven’t been around each other that much. Doesn’t matter.”

“I’m gonna be stuck with you,” she countered.

“Not for long.”

Steph squinted in her periphery. “Are you dying or something?”

“I think I have a few years left in me before I stroke out.” She stroked her fingertips over Joan’s reins, the smooth, fitted leather gravitating. “I’m leaving Jackson.”

“Oh.” A breath, aftertaste of something doleful. For once, she sounded like a child, sullen and sulking and inflicted.

Ellie faced her, quizzical. “Oh?”

“Nothing.” Like clockwork, Steph averted her eyes.

“... You never have nothing to say.”

“Because I usually have something important.”

Ellie worried her cheek, laving her tongue over its assailed skin. “Okay. Your call.” She loathed people combing her mind, trying to get something out of it, so she figured she should leave Steph be until she spoke again.

It took five minutes. They were drowned in green, overgrown canopies filtering patches of sunlight, distant insects singing. Joan and Coriander’s steps were slow. They both seemed to prefer a leisurely pace at that point, spying the details of nature’s locket. Steph lanced, “Where are you going?”

A deliberative hum. She had a mental list of destinations. “Mexico’s at the top of my list, but… I don’t really care where. I just wanna get far.”

“Mexico’s nice.”

Ellie weighed her. “You’ve been?”

“Yeah. I’m from New Mexico originally, right by its border. Most of my settlement went there after a big horde went through.”

She cocked her head, chewing that answer. It might be viable after all. “Was it safe?”

“Safe as anywhere else, at least right before I left. The buildings and stuff are pretty compared to the States.” Steph looked wistful. “I was at the Ciudad Juárez settlement. Dunno if it’s still going.”

Please still be going. Preferably, she wanted somewhere farther down, but she poured all her hope, her faith into it, a flare nonetheless. A manifestation. “Why’d you leave?”

That wisteria went stony. She recognized something void in her irises, that something that Santa Barbara did to herself. “‘Cause a bunch of fucked up infected were moving in from the south. Just rumors. But I wanted to be safe.”

Ellie had seen enough fucked up infected for a lifetime, so that didn’t dissuade her. Given Steph’s look, she didn’t pry. Instead, after a few thinking moments, she offered something lighter, “Do people speak Spanish there?”

“... Duh.”

She figured she deserved that stoniness for such a trivial question. “Do you know Spanish?”

“Some.” With the changing subject, Ellie watched her relax, shoulders loosening in steering hands and tone of less vitriol. “I forgot a lot. Most people there speak Spanish and some English.”

“Well, my knowledge of Spanish ends at hola, so I could use some tips.”

Steph made a noise of vexedness. “Stop.”

Ellie considered that. “No.” A beat passed. “Isn’t no in Spanish just no — ?”

She groaned again, and reprieved for a solitary, thin second, Ellie laughed.

After the patrol, bones tired and ears having listened, Ellie collapsed into her bed like a marionette off strings. Her hips were sore from the saddle. There’d been no infected on their route, but leaving her place was exhausting by its own right. She kept her face in her pillow, took her muffled breaths, and eventually patted her nightstand for her journal’s spine. It socketed in her hand like a traveler hitting home. A clatter hit the floor, however.

She set the journal on her mattress and craned to see what had fallen. The pencil glared at her, askew on concrete and out of reach; her lazy fingertips couldn’t close the berth, and she was begrudging in her crouch to it. The wood nudged as did something to her foot behind the hanging, ruffled bedspread and below her mattress. She tensed.

It was an object, evident in its lack of movement, and she laid on her hurting side to look underneath, hand holding the sheet up. There were the things she’d always kept beneath her bed: An ash tray — she realized, seeing it then, that beneath her bed wasn’t an apt hiding place, and chastised her teenage self —, old journals strapped, her previous backpack and all its charms, alongside miscellaneous junk. An unfamiliar tote was centered.

It was purple and lidded, and when Ellie pulled it, she grunted in exertion. Its contents were hefty and shifted within. She sat cross-legged. Traced the edge, her fingers to the clasps, leaned away in case there was something grotesque within. Her inspection was apprehensive as she opened.

She swore she smelled sawdust and woodsmoke and gunpowder and Joel, and his belongings were there, folded clothes, loose trinkets, or smaller, stacked boxes, and it struck her that the possessions within were theirs, and she felt her own pine and blood and smell of paint, and fuck, shared, together, memories splayed like a gallery.

Drifting, cautious, her fingertips wandered the top layer of items. DVDs and VHS tapes they’d watched together, the former in a laminated booklet and the latter stacked neatly. Clothes were folded. Ones Joel had let her borrow for patrol, oversized and swathing. As she took them out, schisming their sleeves, she noted that they were ironed, wrinkles scarce, and Joel had never ironed his own. She sat them on her mattress, DVDs and tapes following. Their lack exposed the next.

Of course, she thought, and plucked a clear bag of guitar picks. She ran her fingers over their triangular, curved shapes, but did not reach within. She wondered if his touch lingered on them and if hers would smother it. His music, his craftsmanship that so clearly carved their wooden mass, tellable even if his initial weren’t etched into most. Apart from one. An E called her at the forefront of the bag, its lettering more delicate than the others’ with darker, earthier wood, yet it rammed her that it sat unreceived. Joel hadn’t let her use picks when she was learning the ropes, and when she became skilled, they weren’t speaking. He must have kept it for her. Waited for her.

There were CDs and cassettes and vinyls, all their favorites. Fleetwood Mac and The Beatles and Pink Floyd, Dolly Parton and Chet Baker and Pearl Jam, abundant. She recalled chords and lyrics. Melodies sung. She removed them and the picks. A small, leather-bound photo album peered at her from the bottom. She picked it and dusted her hand over its cover, undoing its clasp and fluttering it open. Sarah met her eye. Baby Sarah, an infant with a big head, tufts of blonde hair, and pink swaddling. She saw Joel’s arm beneath, holding her, and it was there for many pictures supporting. Some were taken by someone else, others were at an ameteur angle taken by Joel. But Sarah eventually grew to hold things and took her own photos. Some rather embarrassing ones of Joel. Him eating or dozing in his recliner. Ellie spotted her clumsy thumb in the corner of some.

That thumb’s nail turned pink, manicured and pretty, and Sarah got older. Soccer championship, guitar in her lap. Fifth grade graduation, her, Tommy, and Joel out hunting. Her first sleepover, shoving popcorn into her mouth while they watched a movie, and a bookend, dread following, the last. Her and Joel eating his birthday cake. Toffee, his favorite. And there were no more pictures of Sarah. Between that and the next, years passed, it was blank until Ellie saw herself.

It was a dumb picture. She was fourteen striking a stupid pose in front of vandalized speed limit sign, numbers too faded and cloaked by graffiti to read. Both middle fingers were up with a mischievous, bright smile. She’d made Joel take it. The ones that followed were of his own volition. Her writing in her journal, knees to her chest, penning erratically. A badly aimed, shaky photo of them and Callus. And, when they’d reached Jackson one of her in front of their new place. As Sarah did, she aged, and backdrops conveyed time. Ones with Dina and Jesse, her holding a frog she’d caught with a toothy grin, and another taken in front of the museum, capturing her balancing on the T-rex’s tail.

She slipped that one out and kept it.

Her growth spurt hit like a freight train, and she started to look less like a kid and more like herself. Pictures became few and far between, reserved for holidays, and she watched the tension bubble between them. They got farther, awkward space wedging. Her smile dimmed to wariness. And suddenly, the pictures stopped entirely, snipped by one of her at the last Christmas party they’d spent together. It was a while before their confrontation. She’d stopped letting him take photos of her long before then. Something about it being embarrassing, but she knew it was burrowed resentment.

Ellie wanted to slap herself. Everything in the tote drove, You can’t leave. Not when she had so much there. But maybe if she dragged her body, her ghost would follow.

The diner was bustling with people returned from patrols, and the bar hosted its share of pints and bottles. It was primarily men chattering about the events of the day, sipping on beer. The place’s yellow fixtures casted their conversation but not Ellie; she slipped behind people, skulking in their shadows until she got to her favorite booth — cornered, curved into the wall — and sat, sinking. She hadn’t eaten in a couple of days. Her appetite was too incisive to disregard, and she had to have something before patrol the next day. All she had to get through was Wednesday and Friday, and she prayed that Cat would have ink by then.

Bouncing, her foot rested on the floor, legs spread. It was how she sat for as long as she could remember. When she was thirteen, military instructors chastised her for it, though due to its lack of space left or inherent masculinity, she couldn’t tell. She kept it. Her knee jumped while she anticipated being waited on. It took a few minutes for someone to approach her table. She wasn’t a waitress.

“You’re leaving?” Maria asked, cross as the irked arms over her chest. Perhaps it was the lighting, but Ellie noticed harsh dark circles, crescents.

She stared. Practically a child with her hand in the cookie jar. If she was silent for long enough, she hoped Maria would get fed up and leave.

She didn’t. Her eye only got sharper over those seconds.

“Yeah,” Ellie conceded. “Who told you?” Uneasy, she straightened, leg quickening, and she was surprised the floor didn’t chasm beneath her foot.

“Steph.” Maria slid into the seat across from hers. “She said you told her while you were on patrol yesterday.”

That’s the last time I tell a child anything ever. She sighed and averted her glance, analyzing the abruptly interesting window, and its blankness was more benevolent that Maria’s expectation. “Are you here to chew me out?”

“I’m here to tell you that running won’t help.” Fingertips clasped, she thudded her hands on the table to enunciate. “Let me ask you a very fair question: When you were gone after Santa Barbara avoiding Jackson, did you feel better?”

No. “Nothing really makes me feel better. There’s just, like.” She pinched her sleeve. “Low and lower.”

“Then what’s making you want to leave? You’ve hardly even been back, you don’t know — ”

“I do.” Pained and despondent, voice crackling. “I’ve never actually left, I always knew I’d either come back or die. Here was my end goal, and when I got back, it didn’t… it’s not coming easy. I think Jackson, just… I think I need to be with myself. I have to leave it behind for good if I wanna move on.” Ellie stood, slipping herself out of the booth. Her appetite dulled. “I don’t wanna live with it anymore.” The closed doors. The pitying glances. The obligation, the hoping that maybe one day, one day it’d come naturally. Cat was all she’d miss and all that would miss her. “I know it’s pathetic, and you want me to try harder, but I gotta go.”

She saw Maria’s eyes widen for a millisecond, testament to her sheer feeling that she couldn’t display. She’d always been the one to lean on, and if Ellie couldn’t coexist with her years gone by, Maria surely couldn’t with her conflicting show. Stoicism and brief, wet eyes. Tough love and mercy. “Ellie.”

“I’m sorry.” She walked away. How her back turned was familiar.

When Ellie walked to the gates the following morning, she did so with a faint intent to scold a teenage girl, which felt… odd, given she’d spent her entire teen years getting reprimand. But she knew she hadn’t done anything wrong, really. She’d never told her not to say anything, and even then, she was fifteen. Fifteen year olds were morons. Evidence: Steph was already getting chided by Maria by the time Ellie arrived. She slowed her walk to eavesdrop until noticed. A positive of being so frail was that if she tried very hard, she could sidle unseen.

Ellie caught the end of a sentence. “... not leaving until you’re grown,” Maria said, final. “I know your situation isn’t ideal, but it’s safer this way.”

“Why keep me here if I don’t wanna be here?” Steph argued. Her arms crossed tight, denoting her exasperation. “If there was a good reason? Fine. Whatever. But to” — air quotes — “keep me safe isn’t… I hacked it on my own for a long time. And it’s not like I’d even be alone.”

“You won’t, because you’re not going. And if I have anything to do with it, Ellie isn’t, either.”

That was all she could take silently without her nosiness getting the best, and she strode to where they were talking near the horses with a flat, deadpan expression, forced from her twinged panic. Maria could stop her if she wanted to. “I’m going.”

Steph startled, “Jesus, why would you sneak up like that — ”

At the same time, Maria ricocheted, “No, you’re not. You’re gonna get yourself killed.”

“That’d be better than trying to make something work that isn’t.” Hopeless, Ellie’s hands fell to her sides, and she had no inkling on what to do with them. “Look. I tried. I let everyone know that I’m okay. And not dead. So what’s the fucking point?” Her agitation prickled goosebumps. “I’m done.” She looked to Steph. “And I’m not fucking babysitting, so if you think you’re coming with me, the answer’s no.”

There were times when Ellie said things, and she witnessed the receiver’s face fracture. I don’t need your fucking help, and she watched everything Joel had sever. Well, you’re a burden now, aren’t you? and she swore Dina’s pupils had blown with it, salt in the wound. You made him a part of this, and knife held to a child’s throat, arms feeling unlike her own, she watched Abby surrender. It was venomous. It was insidious. And time and time again, her own face faltered beneath it. The remorse. The guilt, brow bunched and memory replaying, stuck on loop. And time and time again, she walked away from it without resolution, their face the catapult. Steph was a kid who didn’t know any better. A kid hurt by her and one who knew how to spit just as well as she.

“Fuck you, then,” she finally said, shouldering past Ellie into town.

She stood, unable to say anything, but Maria was not lost for words. “Really, Ellie? Really?”

Uncertainty scraped her lip, teeth raking. It couldn’t stay hidden, for her hands shook as she reached for Joan’s reins. “I’ll patrol myself.” Before Maria could grasp her, she urged Joan forward and left, her gallop hard on the threshold’s dirt.

Ellie held the photo she’d kept to the real thing and found that no picture could do the T-rex justice. It stood, fatal and moss-ridden, maw ajar, and the sight ate her whole, embedding nostalgia with its jaw. Though she’d grown taller, she was no match. Sunset gilded it menacingly. It hit the water, too. She was soaked, clothes and backpack sopping, and she’d had to tether Joan a fair while back. It’d taken ages to get there, various wrong turns taken in lieu of her aching memory, but she’d made it. Technically, she wasn’t supposed to go out that far alone, but technically, she was about to not be a citizen of Jackson, so the rules were lenient.

She trudged the shallow water, the frigidity of it eliciting a wince. Ellie didn’t try to scale the thing, but the temptation was there, shoved down with her folding and pocketing of the photo, her step over its tail as she passed.

The museum was sturdy aside from typical weathering. Its entrance welcomed her with less protest than Jackson. She pulled her hair back with the elastic on her wrist, bun makeshift and low with stray locks, but it was enough to clear her periphery, to exhibit the fossils she came upon. Skeletal, behemoth. Oftentimes, people at military training had mused about life just before Cordyceps. Ellie did, too, but went further back when that time bored her. She’d been so vivid. Imagining prehistoric times, space travel, the Victorian era, all corsets and parasols and… erotic ankles, or whatever. It had enamored her.

Now, she woke up every morning and thought, Just get through tomorrow.

She slipped past Jurassic, shoved the barrier between the fossils and space segment down, and went in like a trace. Helmets bleared at her, natural light ricocheting off them. The ring of planets hung limp. Ellie wondered if the actual ones had stopped just as Earth did, trapped in its doomsday, if life had evolved on them. If that life was better off than theirs. They wouldn’t be hard to beat. She lagged her fingers over the lever but didn’t pull it, content to leave their solar system lulled. The capsule was somehow stiller.

When she approached, she longed for the accompanying, heavier footfalls at her side, but they didn’t come, and when she popped it open, there were two seats for one. She slid within, collapsing lackadaisically into the left seat, and like a memory, done from pure want, Ellie grabbed the joystick and jostled it.

“Pew.” Bitter and dry and nothing sacred anymore, she laughed at her absurdity and sagged into the shuttle, retrieving the photo. The control panel was forlorn by her moth-eaten hands. She stared at the picture for boundless minutes. She recalled her naivete and excitement, the shudder of the capsule she’d conjured with the tape given, and knew she should have savored that magic while it lasted.

She put the helmet she’d left on. All it did was condensate her breath and fog her vision.

Poignant as guitar strings, she knew where she had to leave Joel: With his smile, not a battered skull and stricken eyes and gravestone. Ellie sat the photo on the dashboard.

She rode back overnight. The trails came easy that time, and she arrived in Jackson quickly. Fortunately, Maria wasn’t at the gates to receive her, but she did catch some worried ogling from those on nightwatch, though they didn’t say anything. She took Joan to the stables and walked to Cat’s. Her knock was more familiar than prior.

It took a few minutes for Cat to answer. “It’s four in the morning.”

Ellie sized her up. She didn’t look groggy, and her clothes were messy, but that was her usual haphazard state. “You were awake anyways, weren’t you?”

“Maybe.” Cat broadened the door to let her in. “What do you want?”

A sobering blink. She mumbled, “What do I want?” Dissective, she ran that question over but found no answer, so she shrugged as she entered. “Company.” Ellie sat her backpack by the door and shed her jacket, leaving her in a button-up and jeans. The fabric had dried.

“... Okay.” Cat closed the threshold behind her and spotted her bag, and she saw her skepticism rivet. “Where were you?”

“Nowhere important.” She tugged her hair down and slipped the rubber hand onto her wrist. “Why are you up?’

“Sorting stuff.” She crossed the room to the gurney and crouched, and Ellie’s gaze followed, so she noticed the strewn supplies on the floor. “And yes, I got some ink early, but I’m not tattooing you until you tell me where you were.”

“Wow.” Ellie slumped into the couch. Its springs were keen, and she grimaced her discomfort. “It’s actually not a big deal.”

“Then why are you avoiding telling me?” Cat pulled her tattoo gun out and filled it.

She sighed and brushed her hair out of her face, thumbing her temples and creasing her eyes closed. “I swung by the museum. The one with the dinosaurs. That’s it.” She sent her a narrow peer. “Satisfied?”

She looked like she’d been caught trespassing, not made content. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry.”

“... You did.”

“I did, but I didn’t know you were somewhere that personal.” Cat jostled the device. “I’ll shut up now. Get over here. I can’t sleep anyways.”

She rose, but mustered from the racket, Sissy waddled into the living room, tail wagging and eyes aimed up, puce and kind, yet Ellie wired all the same, all her tendons and ligaments constricted. Her mouth withered.

“El. She’s harmless.” She patted the gurney. “Come on.”

She laid pithily, the idea of being within Sissy’s reach undesirable, and she trained her glance on her throughout. “Why’d you get a dog, anyways?”

“One of the strays had puppies. I just kinda said fuck it. She’s nice to have around. Useful, too.”

Ellie surveyed Sissy’s frame. “Useful how?”

“She’s a hound. Use your common sense.” Cat wiped a sodden cloth over Ellie’s arm, dampening the plain. “Just gotta shade the fireflies, and it’ll be good to go.”

“I can’t imagine her as a hunting dog.”

“Don’t underestimate her.” She adjusted her limb to lay flat on the armrest, craning her neck to view the previous work. Ellie herself often admired it. It was nicer than her first tattoo, everything more expert from the initial sketch to the cross-hatching. “She’s a savage.” She identified a starting point and lowered the gun, starting to fill it in. Ellie grated her teeth. “Heard your mind’s made up. Maria asked me to talk some sense into you.”

“Don’t even try.” A beat passed, and she softened. “I know what I’m doing. Nothing’s gonna stop it.”

“I’m well-aware. I wasn’t gonna try anyways.” Cat leaned closer, engrossed. “I told her she’d have to chain you down.”

“Why would you give her ideas?”

“Oops.” Her sigh wisped and rasped. “You can do what you want, but try not to drive Maria to an early grave?”

Scrunched, she scratched her nose. “No guarantees. I think I know what city I’m headed for first.”

“Hit me.”

“Ciudad Juárez. Steph said she lived there for a while, and that it was good the last time she was there. It’s close to the border, too. So it’s a good… checkpoint, I guess.”

“Checkpoint,” Cat echoed. “That sounds good. As good as your batshit plan goes.” She moved from the first firefly to the next. “How are you gonna get there? Because there’s no chance in hell that Maria’s giving you a horse.”

“I have feet.”

“... Uh huh. Okay.”

The tattoo gun dotted over Ellie’s wrist, and it panged. “I’ll try not to miss you too much,” she pushed from her gnashing jaw. But she knew she would.

Thankfully, Cat took that moment to pause, cleaning the residual ink with her rag. “About that.” She met her eye, allusive, meaningful, sincere, and nothing piqued her heartbeat further. “I kinda wanna make sure you don’t get yourself killed, so… I’m coming with you.”

Dissent wasn’t an option. Her certainty made that clear. Ellie gaped, utterly gaped, and hadn’t a clue how to respond.

Cat didn’t allow her to. “I’m not staying once you get there. Just there and back to Jackson.” Aside from insistence, her words veered to comfort. “You’re smart enough to know that going alone will get you killed.” Swift as it’d come, the reassurance shifted to the gun’s rupture, nailing her skin. It turned to another firefly. “So we’re gonna leave soon.”

She knew she should let her. Deterring Cat was impossible anyhow. She knew it wasn’t worth protesting, that her chances would be better if she allowed the aid, but half of her was heartsick with the idea of Cat hurting from her pipe dream while the other half, the half that she’d strangled, yearned for that connection. Camaraderie. Care. And once the latter headed, it didn’t conceal. She was at her own mercy.

“Well,” Ellie started, “it’s gonna take a while.”

“Really? I thought it’d be a daytrip.”

“Shut up.” She squeezed her eyes closed. It was a habit. That way, her brain didn’t have to deal with as much. The seeing, the hearing, the thinking. It got too overbearing. “Can you tell me why you really wanna go?”

She didn’t look for Cat’s expression, but she imagined it was something incredulous or amused. “Am I not allowed to help you out?”

“That’s beyond helping me out.”

Sighing, Cat deliberated. “It is selfish, I guess. I wanna get out of here just as much as you, even if it’s not for forever. Might as well tag along, right?”

“Tag along,” she snorted. “Why do you wanna leave?”

“Dunno. A change.”

“Sure.”

Ellie didn’t know when she fell asleep, but it was for a generous amount of time, because she woke to Cat snapping in front of her face and the tattoo wrapped in plastic, crinkling while she stirred and moaned. “Fuck, ‘m up, Jesus.” She peered drowsily. Late morning was in the windows, yet Cat didn’t look tired as she halted her hand. “Did you finish?”

“Yeah.” Somber and solemn and wide awake, fiddling with her tank top’s strap and eyeing Ellie.

She squinted. “Someone died.”

“... What?”

“You look like someone died.”

That made her chuckle, at least, even if it was quickly gone. “Nobody died. I was just thinking.”

“Oh?”

“Oh?” Cat returned. She crouched from her stool and packed supplies away, the clank and fumble loud beneath Ellie. “Just about what you’d said. Why I wanna leave Jackson. And I sort of realized that everything feels like it’s… on loop. It’s too small of a world. Yeah, I need a change, but I think it’s more than that. I feel like a… bored housewife that needs an affair.”

“You know.” Ellie rubbed at her exhausted eyes. “That analogy had no business being that perfect.”

“Thanks.” She stood, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear and disappearing into her bedroom. “Get packed. I wanna leave soon.”

“Like… now?” In spite of the need to leave, there was shame that lingered from doors shut past, and she knew it would only thicken if she didn’t bade goodbye, no matter how awkward or complicated or if they would beg her to stay. “What about your family — ?”

“We fell out.” It was spoken like the weather. “Jesus, I don’t even know what to take. I haven’t traveled far since I was nine.”

“Uh. Fuck.” Now that she’d properly arrived at the station, her feet felt glued to the platform. “Give me today. I have to figure some shit out.”

“When don’t you?”

So Ellie sat at her desk and wrote notes after collecting her bearings. It was the best way. They wouldn’t have to deal with her in person, she wouldn’t have to splay herself. Her pencil jotted unevenly, erasing and scratching and bleeding, its lead cracking a few times, forcing it to a nub from her sharpener. The most obvious to start with screamed in the headlining address.

Dina,

I’m pretty sure you’ve already heard, but I’m leaving. I’m sorry for what happened at the party. I mean it. You and Kate deserve each other. Take care of JJ. I’ve left some stuff for him if you want it. Feel free to swing by and get it. E

Things being a few stuffed animals from her youth, all horribly misshapen and worn over the years, but they were endearing in an ugly way. She figured it would be an olive branch. Ellie gently ripped the paper in half, just below where the note ended, and began the next. It was heavier.

Tommy,

Maria probably told you. If she didn’t, then I just wanted to let you know that I’m leaving Jackson for good. I know we’re on shitty terms. I don’t feel the need to change that. It’d take too much that I don’t have. I tried to be here. I tried to deal with Abby. Guess I didn’t have the stomach for either, and you can be pissed at me for both.

If you left the tote beneath my bed, thanks. Take it back. I don’t have room to take most of it with me. E

The guitar pick was dangling from her backpack, hole drilled atop to dangle it from a chain. As she started the last, she realized she didn’t have many ends to tie.

Maria,

Sorry. I’m out. It was a long time coming. E

The briskness nearly made her laugh. Neat, she stacked them on her desk.

She wasn’t eager to see Winona again. Last she remembered, their most recent interaction was her chasing Ellie and Dina down the street with a skillet for forking her yard, which was post Egg-gate, so it only amplified her fury. Fortunately, she was old and didn’t have much stamina, so they’d gotten away without a scratch. It was noon, and her walking dragged.

Winona’s porch steps creaked beneath her footfalls. She could hear the bustling within, children roughhousing, teasing, and arguing over which DVD to watch next. She steeled herself and rapped her fist on the door.

An elderly voice complained within, clearly disheveled by the arrival. That annoyance didn’t dissipate by the time she answered Ellie. Winona’s hair had gotten whiter, all in eccentric, thick curls fencing her pallid face. Her lips were painted an odd damson, and her breath still smelled of ale and smoke, cigarette held in her mouth. Her dress was stitched all over. Ellie suspected that the various holes and stains could be attributed to the number of kids she fostered. Her scrutinization of Ellie was nasty, an assessment of her threat level. It was agonizingly long.

“If you’re here for Steph, she’s upstairs,” Winona greeted gruffly. “I don’t wanna see any funny business, Elenor.”

Just Ellie, she would’ve said, but attempting to correct her had yielded no change since she was fourteen. “I don’t have any eggs on me.” Ellie slipped inside before she could change her mind, skinny frame packed between Winona’s stout one and the threshold. The children inside turned to look at her and muttered something to one another. She didn’t bat an eye.

The internal stairs were flimsier than those outside, tributing how much they’d been used, and Ellie kept a palm on the railing as she ascended. “Steph?” Her voice didn’t ring back. She didn’t blame her. “You up here?” She checked the most obvious rooms, a couple with their doors left open, but she wasn’t within either, nor the other bedroom, which she assumed was Winona’s given its single bed and unpleasant scent. “... Steph. Seriously. You can be pissed, but I’m not gonna leave until I talk to you.”

She might not have discovered her if a thump didn’t ring from the end of the hall, muffled by a closet she hadn’t bothered checking, and Ellie approached, slow and mummed until she opened it. Steph glared at her from the hung clothes around her scrunched form in the floor, comic in her hand and glare venomous, speaking somehow deadlier, “Thought you weren’t babysitting.”

Earned. She’d earned that. “I’m sorry about what I said. Maria was getting to me.” She inclined on the doorframe. “Can I sit?” Asking why she was curled in there wasn’t needed. Anyone with a brain would want to escape the noise for a while.

“No.” Steph closed her comic, the pages’ fhwip punctuating. “You can stand.”

“Okay.” Ellie fiddled with the plastic on her tattoo, its sleekness unreflective of her mind; everything was tumultuous and uneasy, turbulent flight without a competent pilot. “Seriously, though. I shouldn’t have said that. I’m not gonna keep apologizing, ‘cause… not what I’m here for. A little of what I’m here for, but.” She cleared her throat. “Yeah.”

Her glare bit. “... Spit it out.”

“Let me figure out how to say it, Jesus.” A sigh. “Since I’m leaving, I’m obviously not gonna be here.”

“That’s how leaving generally works, yeah.”

“Shut up,” Ellie mumbled, pinching the material harder. “I’m not gonna be here, so I’m not gonna be at my place. And I don’t wanna take up space for no reason. I wanna let you have it. Since you liked it a lot the last time you were there.”

Steph’s eyes went from serrated to wide, disbelieving, incredulous, that mysticism that Ellie had pinned when she was a kid, anything made special through her novelty. Children had to grow fast in the world, but she found that many had the same enchanted look as Steph for their own little things, quirks. “You’re serious?”

She simpered sardonically. “I mean, unless you wanna live here — ”

“No. No. I wanna stay at yours.” Steph stood, rolling the comic in her hands, bobbing on her tiptoes in giddiness. “When are you leaving?”

Ellie whistled and rolled her eyes. “You’re kicking me out already? Jeez. Shows how much you care.”

“You can’t blame me for wanting to get out of here.”

“No, I cannot.” She hummed, estimating. “All my shit’s already packed. I don’t know if Cat’s is. We have to leave at night, ‘cause… we’ll get stopped if not. So… tonight or tomorrow night, and you’ll be able to move in. I left you my comics.”

“Oh,” Steph mumbled, some of that captivation fading, “so Cat’s going, but I’m not.”

“Yeah, ‘cause I don’t think I’d be able to wrestle her off of me.” Ellie looked her up and down. “I think I could take you, though.”

She raised a brow.

“... Maybe don’t test that out?”

“I’m tempted.”

“Well, don’t.” A light chuckle escaped her. Effortless. Something she missed. “But for real, I want you to have it. It’s the least I can do.”

She muttered, “Yeah.” She watched Steph tug at her lip, nails digging into the crease, almost breaking skin. “I’m gonna miss you. I… thanks. You know. For being okay.”

“I’ll take okay.” Her smile felt bittersweet. “Maybe when you’re older, you can come visit.”

It came sooner than later. If she was a skilled sleuth, Cat was expert, her dark clothes melding with the night like a veil, a cover, and Ellie kept to her while they trekked to the east gate. There were less guards there, ones Cat had told her she was on good terms with. However, they had a third, cumbersome addition, one Cat cried so hard trying to leave — Ellie had never seen her cry before — that she caved and let her tag along. Sissy followed on stubby legs. Her tongue hung out of her mouth, ears flapping while her steps quickened.

“I swear to god,” Ellie grumbled, “she better help us hunt all the rabbits in the world.”

Cat was equally beneath her breath, “She’s just happy to be here.”

“Good for her.”

They stepped to the exit. Ellie let Cat do the talking. Waving, trying to flag the lookouts’ attention. “Dude.”

One of them was asleep, but a head of curly hair looked down at them. Ellie could tell he nearly went to aim his shotgun but repealed it once he recognized Cat. “What are you doin’ out? It’s curfew.” A thick southern accent.

“I’ll suck your dick if you let us leave.”

Ellie choked, coughed on her spit, and the guard looked shocked to the point of heart attack. He sputtered and clutched his gun before settling, “No.”

“I’m kidding,” Cat cackled, fisting her backpack straps as she doubled over, “holy shit. I was gonna give you cigarettes.”

A few blinks. “... Oh.” He considered it. “How many?”

“Two packs.”

Even through her resonant surprise, still ogling Cat like she was insane, she could tell he only pretended to think about it before nodding.

Cat approached and fished the two packs out of her back pocket. She tossed them up. “C’mon. We gotta get going, open the gate.”

After counting his barter, he did, and Cat led the charge with a salute sent upwards.

Ellie rallied herself and trailed. Like that confidence was contagious. But if it really was, her quickening heart would slow, and her ribs would not ache with each breath. That was the concession she lived with.

About four hours in, forest dense, Cat piped, “My fucking feet hurt.”

Ellie snorted.

About a week in, they passed Saint Mary’s Hospital, having had to take another route due to one being blocked. Ellie knew it wouldn’t be a straight line down. She also knew it hurt to look at, to see the sun illuminate its overgrown architecture, testament to what might’ve been. What was growing in her skull. She didn’t say anything but picked at her naked tattoo, plastic peeled.

A week and a half passed, held up by a horde, and they were in Nephi, a small, barren town aside from the infected they’d cleared as they passed. But night fell, and they had to take rest. Cat skillfully buried the hilt of her gun into a window, smattering its shards over the desert ground and slipping inside, hoisting Sissy in after. Though Ellie would never admit it, she’d been pragmatic, sniffing out infected and game.

They often got too tired to talk. Comfort was found in their silences and extended, helping hands, one tugging Ellie through the window then. Sissy didn’t bristle and the front door was locked, so she figured the house was free of infected. It reeked of mildew.

They collapsed unceremoniously into the master bedroom’s bed, and Cat was unconscious after what felt like seconds. Ellie gazed at the ceiling.

Her pen and journal slipped to her. She took the desert, the arid climate, the soreness in her feet. The plants, the infected, the bloodstains on their clothes. It seeped to her sketching. She drew Cat’s sleeping face, Sissy’s droopy one, her guitar pick. She drew the sun. The sights they’d seen.

The hospital, jotting its walls, clinical, carrying flesh and bone. She wrote, what if.

Another two weeks, and the border of Arizona was a hair’s width away, distance miniscule, exciting. Ellie felt herself grow keener, looking at the horizon like she could see where the states collided, tracing the little line on her map. They were in Kanab, an even tinier town, and she wondered who named these things.

Her and Cat slunk into a rest stop’s bathroom to change their clothes and were greeted by infected corpses on its tiles, blood coating what was once white, now crimson and aged yellowish from the years.

“Yikes,” Cat summed.

It didn’t shake them. Ellie knelt, patting their bodies for anything useful, and she found ammunition, a couple of pistols, canned food, and a medallion. Engraved was his name, Chris Lawson, and deeper, cerebral, and more jarring than the cadavers, she turned it to reveal the Fireflies’ emblem.

A fluke. Had to be.

The Grand Canyon was at their feet the next week. While Cat sat at the precipice and threw pebbles down to see what they bounced off, Ellie was having a borderline anxiety attack. If she thought it was reckless, it objectively was.

“Cat,” Ellie called, a decent way from the ledge, “stop. I’m gonna have an aneurysm.”

“Stop what?”

“Kicking your legs like its a bench.”

She giggled and scooted herself closer. Ellie deemed her own protest futile and grasped a small pebble, chucking it at her head. That got her away from the ledge, at least, even if she tackled Ellie to the ground. Her prediction had been right. She couldn’t wrestle Cat off.

Six days, and their route to Prescott was anything but easy. The infected clogged in more dense highways and cities, and they’d outran their share of mobs. However, they found an unlocked, uninhabited car with full windows, a rarity, to stay in for the night.

When Ellie pressed her head to the passenger seat, discomfort rattled her, the thickness of her bun protruding against it. She tugged her hair down, and shit, it brushed her shoulders, matted with blood. She didn’t free it enough to gauge it before then. “Fuck, Cat, I gotta cut my hair.”

“It looks fine,” she said from the driver’s side, “you just need to brush it.”

She didn’t just brush. When Cat slept, Ellie took her knife to it, the rearview mirror her approximate guide and a plastic bag from the car’s floor to catch strands. She cut it to be close-cropped on her head, shorter than when she’d lived with Dina, but it was just as choppy. She trailed her fingers through it. It felt nice.

Phoenix, Arizona, an abandoned QZ devoid of any groups, as far as they saw. Other than Salt Lake, it was the first big city they’d encountered about a month and a half deep. They soldiered through quick as possible, as the place was teeming with infected, but Ellie admired some impressive buildings in passing. They stopped at a… frozen yogurt shop to inspect it, looking quizzically at the selection bar’s spoilt ingredients. Ellie would eat some if it weren’t rotten and warmed, because it was unbearably hot. Sweat stuck to their skin, and she and Cat stripped to their tank tops and lightest jeans, toting their backpacks loosely as possible. Sissy lolled her tongue while they walked the suburban street.

“I better make it to Mexico after this,” Ellie panted, swiping her forearm on her forehead. “Jesus fucking Christ.”

Cat said, “We should rest.”

“And see the infected that are inside? Over my dead body. They probably have two heads or some shit.”

“Would you rather have a heat stroke?”

“... Maybe.”

“You’re dramatic.” Cat deviated to one of the houses. It was one floor at most, quaint, and its wood rasped while she traipsed the porch and pressed her ear to its surface. “I don’t hear anything.”

“... Are you sure?” She shifted uneasily, squinting against the sun to weigh the house. “If we get ambushed, that’s on you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She yanked the screen door, and it screeched.

Ellie startled. Cat glanced around. A thump resounded from a home adjacent.

One would have to be blind to not see it, and deaf to not hear its drawn groan. Drywall and brick collapsed in a disastrous display to reveal a bloater emerging, its fungi sprouting like tumors, limbs lopsided and hands swollen. It couldn’t see them, its eyes swarmed with Cordyceps. But it heard. And it surged, ground shaking and Ellie’s hands fumbling for her shotgun and Cat shooting at its face. When bloaters started a sprint, they couldn’t stop until impact or fall. Ellie sidestepped its lunge and toppled to the pavement. Her hip thudded. “Fuck!”

From where she laid, ache swimming in her side and asphalt hot, she saw it come to a screeching halt into one of the other houses, obliterating its porch and thundering, primal. It tried to right itself from the splintered remnants. Ellie pushed herself to sit, pain searing, and wielded her shotgun properly. She shot and missed. Another shot, and she hit its arm. Before she could attempt again, third time’s charm, it was running at her.

Scrambling, she ignored how it panged, dodging just barely. It rushed down the other end of the street until it crashed over a car. A roar of frustration from it, of pain in her hip, and she limped to put some distance between herself and the bloater.

Cat lit cloth in a bottle and pitched at it, and it flamed, all Arizona heat wave and distressed screeching, writhing against the car to stand. It blindly swiped for anything, everything, and propelled back down the concrete.

Ellie shot at its head and landed. It didn’t tear to its brain, only corroding the outer fungus, and she took shot after shot, reload after reload, trying to get it down until the bloater descending upon her. She wasn’t fast enough.

It briefly gripped her face, her eye in a burning hand, and she screamed.

She pounded her shotgun’s barrel between its eyes and fired, and it plummeted ablaze.

Staggering, stunned, Ellie touched her face and cried at the scorch, weighing the damage. She couldn’t see, couldn’t fucking see out of one side, it felt like her hearing was beneath water, and the weathered feel of her skin almost made her retch. It hadn’t burned to bone, the exposure short, but it went to muscle over her eye, cheek, jaw, mouth, left side of her face destroyed. “Oh, god,” she sobbed. “Fuck fuck fuck — ”

Before it went black, Cat finished the reaching creature with a frantic shot and led her inside, vague flashes of steps and a bedroom.

Ellie laid in bed — a pink, frilly bed centered in what was once a young girl’s room. Gauze covered half her face. Joel stood over her.

She didn’t question it. There was nothing to question. Joel was there, and Joel was Joel, so certain and steady and right as he stroked her hair. He had a fuzzy light around him. He stuck from the rosy backdrop. “Oh, Ellie.” Texan and gruff and deep, everything she pined for. “What happened?”

“... Bloater.” Her face hurt. Her hip hurt. The hand in her hair started to hurt, but she sank into it. It was worth it. “Overestimated how close I could get. ‘m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he softly admonished. “You’ll feel better in no time.”

Ellie saw him dim, his contact growing fainter and fainter and leaving, and tears pooled in her right eye, and she begged, earnestly begged, “Don’t go.”

“I have to.” A wound opened on the side of his head. It was the most vibrant thing left while he hazed. “I’m sorry, baby girl.”

And he did. And no matter how hard she tried to see him, reach for him, call for him, he didn’t return.

“... bad fever,” Cat said, shaking. Her previous words had been unintelligible, warbled in Ellie’s sleep, and she registered that oh, she’d been asleep. “I think her burn’s getting infected. Her eye’s, like. Crushed. It’s bad.”

Ellie stirred and looked in that direction. A direction that pulled her, again and again, because she saw her. A vicious true north. She saw her, and she saw her see her. Everything in her crumpled and festered. Old wounds opened, saltwater, new wounds screamed, she wanted to scream until she couldn’t anymore.

Abby looked at her from the doorway, mouth agape.

“You didn’t tell me that this was your friend.”

Chapter Text

Ellie thought it was another fever dream, another ghost in the child’s room. It was horrible and unfitting. Blood stained the pink carpet, rotted stuffed animals on the floor, cotton guts spilling. Sweat stuck to her skin in those pretty sheets. And Abby stared into her. All of it cut, and all of it made her sick because the longer she looked at Abby, the clearer it became that she was real and stricken. Despite her appearance having changed, muscle recouped and hair grown to her chin, she still had scars borne from their clash.

She choked from her cracking throat, “Get the fuck out.” Her teeth were tight, face strained with the clench of her muscle beneath the burn. “Get the fuck away from me!”

She forced herself to sit, discontent to splay herself in front of Abby, but nausea swooned her entire body, stomach and head reeling, and she leaned over the side of the bed to vomit on the floor. It was nothing but acid. She had no idea when her last meal was, but her appetite was gone with each bitter gag until she had nothing left to give.

She coughed and almost fainted, but Cat caught her swaying body, laid it back down. “You have a fever,” she explained frantically and reached for the nightstand, bringing a thermos to her lips. “You need to drink water so you don’t get dehydrated.”

Fired, she jerked her head away from the mouthpiece. “I’m not drinking anything,” Ellie spat. Her eye flicked, blazed to Abby. “If you don’t get the fuck out, I swear to god, I will fucking kill you.”

She’d deluded herself. Pushed that anger down to be better, to do better, and it’d worked for a while, but it was different when Abby was there, in front of her, mere feet away and looking at her like she was crazy. She’d made her like that, she’d patented the overwhelming, primal sensation in Ellie’s veins. It nearly broke her skin. She patted her thigh for her pistol and found nothing.

Abby raised her own in a millisecond, gaze steadfast as the barrel of her gun. “I’m not going to fight you. Cat brought me here.” Her voice didn’t waver. “I have a camp and medical supplies.”

“Fuck your camp,” Ellie replied, crueler than the gun. “I’d rather die.” Literally. She would rather die from her infection than follow her. “Why the fuck is she here?”

“We ran into each other while I was looking for supplies.” Pointed, Cat shoved the thermos’ tap into her mouth and raised it, lukewarm water funneling down her throat. It took a second for her to comprehend its feeling. “Drink.”

Ellie sputtered it, dripping down her face and onto her gauze, and turned from the bottle. “No.”

“Yes,” Cat argued. “I will shotgun this water into your mouth if I have to.”

“No — ”

Abby interrupted, “She’s in delirium, there’s no use.” She sheathed her gun but didn’t approach — good — , leaning on the door frame. “She’ll tire herself out.” The way she looked at Ellie made her skin flame in sheer hatred. It was like she was the gum on the bottom of her shoe.

“Delirium?” she repeated, sitting against the headboard with a wince. “No wonder I’m in fucking delirium, huh. Not like I have a fucking good reason! Do I, Abby?”

Cat looked between them, brows raising in surprise, and she was progressively flitting in and out of Ellie’s right periphery. It was dotted at best, gone at worst, flickering like an addled lightbulb. She couldn’t see to the left whatsoever. “... You’re Abby.” Deadpan. Her voice was muffled. “Didn’t catch your name before now.”

“Does that matter?” Abby retorted, jaw set tight. It was growing harder for Ellie to hear. “Look. She will die if she doesn’t get back to my camp. That’s her choice. I’m willing to help if she’s willing to be helped, but I’m not obligated to do anything.” Finally, prickling through the murk in her vision, she caught a moment of uncertainty. “I’m… gonna go outside for a second. I’ll start the van.”

She left, and Ellie sagged against the wood, panting. There wasn’t enough air. It was all unbearably hot, growing more with her heated exhales.

Cat mouthed something she didn’t hear. She succumbed to the fever.

Ellie woke in a gurney stripped of sheets. Digging, its pleated mattress dipped below her body, springs jutting into her back, and they shrieked while she stirred. Sweat covered her in a thin sheen, but her mind was more present than it had been, alert, while she opened her eye to observe where she was. It was a very large tent with a white exterior, clearly having been for military use, and it held two gurneys, one being her own, along with medical supplies sprawled on foldable tables. A fan was plugged into a socket block, which was powered by something outside, and it blew mercifully on her. An IV stood beside her bed. It was slid into her arm.

“Motherfucker,” she hissed and tore it out, but that motion alone was enough to tire her, her whole being slack with exhaustion. Fortunately, her clothes hadn’t been changed, and it was a site of small relief. Ellie gently rubbed where the IV had been. When she concentrated, one ear to the mattress, she could hear faint conversation. Not Cat, or Abby, or even anyone familiar, and that made her heart quicken. No one she didn’t acutely know needed to see her like that.

She hated that she knew Abby so thoroughly in comparison.

One of the voices was female and drawing closer just as Ellie’s joints went taut, tensed, and she pretended to be asleep. She heard the woman slip through the tent’s flaps and make a quick noise of admonishing, and a couple of minutes passed, the IV pricked her.

“I know you’re awake, Ellie.” Deep but soothing, a typical American accent. “Your breathing is fast.”

She forced herself to stop breathing altogether.

“... Very funny,” she sighed. “I need to change your clothes. I wanted to wait until you were awake. Figured you’d want a woman to do it, or I can get Cat if she can figure the gown out.”

Ellie glanced up at her and thought she was hallucinating. That was how startling her resemblance was to Dina. The differences were more noticeable than the similarities: Darker skin, more neutral eyes, and no freckles. Her hair was straight and thick, too, worn down to her chest and a lock pressed back with a hairpin. Her lips were fuller as were her years, as Ellie saw very soft crow’s feet and smile lines. But everything else was Dina. The nose, the gentle face shape, the small stature and feminine body.

Dismayed, she knew it was the only reason she muttered, “You’re… fine.” She couldn’t think straight if she wanted to.

So she changed Ellie out of all her clothes and into a blue hospital gown with impersonal fingertips, skidding carefully around the blossoming bruise on her hip. It was a myriad of blues and browns and yellows. She saw her eye her thinness openly, and it stabbed. She didn’t know how she wasn’t used to that look. “Your hip is alright,” she commented, “but it’s gonna hurt like hell for a while. Your face, though…”

“My face,” she vaguely agreed, pulling the gown around herself. It was nicer than her clothes. Less heavy. It allowed her to cool while she inclined into the mattress. “Yeah.”

“We had to remove your left eye. Your burn is infected, but it’s healing well. I’m sure you already know it’s gonna scar.” Meticulous, the woman removed the bandages, and Ellie couldn’t repress the pained noise in her throat. She’d been taught not to show pain, as strangers would take anything they could to overpower, but her mind was too blurred to restrain.

“Can I see it?”

“No.” That answer was not kind but immediate. “You’ll just get upset.”

“It’s that bad?” Slowly, her senses regained, and with that, confusion. “... Can I know where the fuck I am?”

She stared down at her for a couple of moments while she unrolled gauze from beside the gurney. “Oh.” An awkward laugh. One that humanized her beyond the similarity. “Of course. Our camp. You’ve been here for a couple of days, but… you’ve been unconscious almost the whole time. We were scared whether you were going to make it or not.” She blotted the burn with a wet, cold cloth before wrapping it, bandage circling Ellie’s head.

“Whose camp?”

“We’re Fireflies,” she clarified. Like that name wasn’t living hearsay.

When she turned to retrieve something from the other end of the tent, Ellie’s lips parted slightly, shock coursing. “Fireflies are still… ?”

“We’re a small group, but yes, Fireflies still exist.” She watched her sort pills into an orange bottle. “We’re on the way to Atlanta for a larger base. And, well… you’ve lit a fire under us to get going. Especially since that place gets raided every few weeks. It’s pretty unstable — I mean, they just took over Atlanta QZ, so the government is lasered on them — but it’s one of the only sizable bases left. Definitely the closest. There’s one in Portland and lots in Canada.”

Her mouth went dry, dryer than it already was. She knew. She knew it like the bites in her skin and Cordyceps in her brain and cursed blessings. She’d always had trouble phrasing it to Joel and Dina, how she had that sheer intuition of her purpose. To be cut into. To be put under tests and utilized. She muttered, “You know I’m immune?”

“Of course.” The woman approached not with a pill bottle, but an unscrewed thermos, offering it to her. “Wanna see if you can hold this down?”

Tentative, Ellie took it, weighed it in her hands, and smelled the mouthpiece. She was still a stranger, after all. But nothing toxic jumped at her, so she took a short sip. It was fine. Just water. No sickness burgeoned in her stomach, so she took another. And another, not quite realizing how needy she’d been and how parched her tongue was.

“I’m Romi, by the way.” She took the water bottle when Ellie was done, closing the lid. “Are you too suspicious to take a pill?”

She figured it best to be honest. “Yeah.”

Romi hummed and motioned to the IV. “Your antibiotic is in there with water. So it’d just be that, but… pill form. If you’re stubborn, you can keep the IV in for longer. My advice is to assimilate as soon as possible. You need to get used to your eye, or that burn’s not gonna be what kills you.” She twisted her watch around her wrist and read it. “I should get going, but we’ll talk later about your immunity. You should get a choice this time.”

“Yes,” she immediately said.

“Yes… ?”

“I wanna make the vaccine.” She’d never been surer.

“Oh.” She seemed surprised. “Good.”

“Don’t tell Cat that, though.” She bit her cheek. “I don’t think she’d take it well.”

“I already told her you’re immune, but no one else knows. I won’t tell her or anyone that you’ve made a decision if you don’t want that. I’ll just say you want them to run tests.” Romi offered a quiet, final few words as she left, “I’ll let Cat know you’re awake and call Atlanta.”

When she was gone, Ellie sagged into the gurney and stared at the tent’s arched ceiling, eventually squeezing her eye shut. It was too good to be true.

“So were you gonna tell me you’re a freak of nature?” Cat asked, arms crossed over her chest as she loomed Ellie. She looked the part of a military camp, wearing what Abby had been: A black shirt and green cargo pants. “Now I know why you got all those” — she employed air quotes — “chemical burns. Dunno how I was so stupid, but.”

Ellie bit her cheek. “That’s not exactly something to tell anyone, Cat.”

“Am I anyone? I mean, I thought we were really good friends, I just…” She glanced away. “Doesn’t matter. It was your choice.”

“Would you have felt better if I’d told you forever ago?”

She blinked. “Yes. What the fuck, yes.”

“Okay, then. I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure if she meant it. It was an insignificant thing in the grand scheme to get upset over, but Ellie wasn’t fond of Cat’s microscope.

“You’re full of shit,” she corrected, rolling her eyes. “Can I cash in my you-fucked-up-so-be-honest-with-me card?”

“... Uh.” She was pained by the mere idea. Her brow furrowed with it. “Depends.”

“Tell me what happened with Abby.” Before she could begin, Cat specified, “All of it.”

Ellie glanced at the tent’s entrance. Anticipating. “Is she still here?”

“What do you think?”

Aching, she reclined her head fully into the pillow, a groan leaving her tired, chapped lips. The anxiety was making her skin burn. Not just what had been touched by flames. “You don’t get it.” She didn’t. Nobody did. The only two people that could comprehend it were the two that lived it, and it was too big to share, weighing her mouth like final damnation. They were the only two conscious on that beach, in those waves, making each other bleed into the stormy water.

“That’s why I’m asking.” Cat pulled the chair from the other gurney to sit by her, reminiscent of her place in Jackson. Only it was a functioning hospital bed, IV and all. “If we’re traveling with, like, a baby killer or something, I’d wanna know.”

Ellie stiffened. “... No.”

She started counting on her fingers. “Not a baby killer. Okay.”

“It’s honestly not… I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“You never wanna talk about it.”

“Wonder why.”

“You know that if you keep it in, you’re gonna fucking explode, right?”

She was already close to the edge, and Cat’s nagging was only adding to the unrelent. “What the fuck do you wanna know? What else is there to know? She killed Joel, she killed Jesse, and she’s a fucking cunt. There. You’re caught up.” Her voice was ragged with barely controlled anger, jaw sutured. “Leave me alone, Cat. I’m serious.”

Cat glared. “Fine. But she wants to talk to you.”

“No.” Ellie sat, flinching at her bruise. “How the fuck do you even — no. I’m not talking to her. Leave me alone.”

Cat repeated, louder, “Fine!” She never raised her voice to that degree. It punctured harder than ever when she slipped out of the tent, leaving Ellie alone with the drip in her arm and swarm in her lungs.

In the hours gone by, Ellie was alone with her thoughts and apple sauce, eaten slowly. It tasted like shit. Undoubtedly homemade without any sweetener, but it was the only actual food she’d kept down in days. She savored it, taking small bites and chewing lazily.

A repeated flap came from the tent’s entrance. Someone was pushing it in and out. Makeshift knocking, she guessed. “Ellie?” The voice was one she’d heard before, a child’s. She couldn’t place it, though. “Can I come inside?”

She squinted. “Sure?”

When he slipped inside, it simply struck her, Him. All her guilt. All her nightmares, her regret, blade held and desperate clinging, using. His hair was trimmed, less unruly than at the pillars, but the scars along his cheeks were still deep. Telling. He seemed to have grown a few inches. Taller than Ellie, certainly, which provoked the softest twinge of jealousy. All she’d gotten was one massive growth spurt.

“Hi,” he greeted. His tread inside was careful. “Are you okay?”

She weighed the words before she said them, bite of apple sauce tentative. “I’m fine. What do you need?” It was the least she could do. For what she’d done. It was like she hadn’t owned her body, that vengefulness that’d swallowed her whole puppeting the knife to his throat. She didn’t know if he knew. She didn’t know if she should tell.

“To talk.” Lev walked up to the chair and sat, openly eyeing her. It didn’t feel malicious, though, more curious than anything. “I just wanted to say sorry.”

Me too. “For what?” She frowned. “You’re okay. You didn’t do anything. Not by your own, like… choice, at least.” Abby was the one that had dragged a kid into her shit.

“I did.” Lev’s voice was painstakingly gentle yet firm. “Are your friends okay?”

Ellie looked away. “They’re fine.” Internally, she clarified that they were family. But that didn’t seem to fit anymore.

“... Is her baby okay?” More nervous than the last line of fire, more expectant.

“Uh.” Ellie ate more, ruminating. “Her baby’s fine, too.”

He relaxed into the chair, and it was apparent that the latter question had been on his mind since the theater. “That’s good.”

“Yeah.” She flattened the liquid beneath her plastic spoon. It was growing progressively more disgusting, acrid on her tongue, and she didn’t know how much more she could hold down. She wanted to finish it of her own choice, though, rather than being forced, so she shoveled another spoonful, queasy. “Do you know where my bag is?”

Lev contemplated his answer. “Yeah.”

“Can you give it to me?”

The next was quickly decided. “No. Sorry. We aren’t… I mean, you’re…”

“Violent?” Ellie finished. “Delusional?” Humorous with apple sauce in her hand. “Whatever fucked up shit Abby has been telling you?”

Lev’s brow furrowed. She didn’t expect less. “You don’t know her.”

“I know her well enough.” Teeth in her joints. The hands that’d cracked her arm in half. Gritted threats, strangling her, strangling each other. “Look. Can you just tell Cat to fish my journal out of there? Please? I’m not gonna massacre you guys with a pencil and spoon.”

Briefly, she caught pity flash in his eye, how he wrung his hands, and it hit her that, yeah. She must look like a crazy person. There were times when she felt it, too. But she was being judged on her fevered survivor’s panic, and if everyone else in the world was held to that same standard, there’d be no good people left. Which frankly added up.

“If you do a favor, sure.” He toed eggshells. His tone was risky.

“Can’t do much that’d require me to get out of bed, but… alright. Depending on what it is.”

All he had to say was, “Talk to her.” No citing who he was referring to. It was a sixth sense. One she feared she’d have forever since she and Abby had brushed, contagious, infecting.

Ellie bitterly chewed her applesauce and pondered her choice.

Cut Saw into my brains

Finder’s keepers

Surgeon’s jargon i can’t understand consume

Oxygen masking my face

No protest then

None now

My closed casket, isn’t negotiable

inevitable

She wrote with finality, acquainted with her penultimate chapter. She wondered how long it’d take to get to Atlanta. How long their tests would be, the procedure would be. It was her redemption, what she could give for the lives she’d taken, the lives that’d been lost since Joel’s decision. It was her purpose, sought after for years and at her feet. Yet it felt anticlimactic. There was less heroism and more wallowing, waiting for her fever to ebb and shoving liquids down her throat to stay alive. Alive to die. Pig for slaughter.

Abby hadn’t stopped by the medical tent yet. Ellie figured she’d recoiled when it became touchable, real, and she had no complaints now that her journal and pencil were in her grasp, given to her by Cat, who didn’t look pleased. She’d sketched a lot. That bloater took most of her margins, leering and gigantic, flames billowing from its decayed, swollen body. She thought about who it’d been. If her vaccine could’ve saved it before it turned and if its swipe taken was karmic justice.

She outlined Dina. Or Romi. They were vague enough to be either. Steph, too, and she was more clear. She wasn’t fond of the nagging in her chest, but she missed her lightness, even if it was more snarky than reassuring. Together, the images she pulled drooped her eyelids until she slept, journal facedown on her chest.

It was gone when she woke.

Ellie shifted in the gurney, face creasing at its absence, a missing pressure from her body. She patted the bed for it but found nothing, and she opened her eye with a drowsy groan. It wasn’t on any of the tables or the floor. She had to fully crane her neck to look either way. She was adjusting to her missing sight, but that didn’t quell the resentment for it.

She steeled herself and withdrew the IV from her arm, letting the tube hang desolate, and stood, knees weak beneath her weight. Usually, she was unaware of her body’s fluctuating, but she was sure she’d lost some pounds, yet her limbs quivered under what little was left, ribs plucked clean, sickly. She’d barely moved her legs since consciousness. Enough to jostle them when they went numb.

It was a cold, Arizonian night, and Ellie trembled, nothing layered over or below her hospital gown, frail frame unable to conserve heat. But it was better than the days. She wrapped her arms around herself and walked to the tent’s entrance, uncomfortable and barefoot, and peered outside. There were smaller tents. Most closed. A couple of people she didn’t recognize stood watch beside a fire, chatting and drinking, but apart from them, no one was awake.

Cat was her suspect. She would’ve been able to slip in without anybody asking. She had no inklings on which tent was hers, though, as they were all identical, so she started with the closest. Its entrance was primly closed: Two flaps with a centered separation. She slowly advanced and peeked within.

Abby was awake and startled, clearly startled, and she looked up from Ellie’s journal with wide, surprised eyes that went still, shocked, like she didn’t deserve each look at her red hands. A thin blanket pooled her body. It was as if she’d been doing some bedtime reading.

At that moment, Ellie had the animalistic, slighted impulse to strangle her. She withheld for her own physical state and not wanting to draw attention. Those shadowed her meager, singing guilt, all tugging heartstrings and regret. Wanting to be better but her brain chasing worse. It was violent. It was what she knew, what she had, and she demanded, encapsulating, “Give it back.”

She closed it with a little snap of bookends and gunned a persistent glare. “What do you want?”

To bash your skull in. “My fucking journal.” Ellie skulked into the tent, smoldering, outstretched hand shaking from her fury or the temperature. “Give it to me. Now.” She felt rabid. Trying to contain herself, rattling from all that was in her skin. Teeth chattering.

“If we can talk.” She looked so fucking proud of herself, so factual and logical and expectant despite changing the terms midway through. “I need to set some things straight.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m all fucking ears.” Her voice was raised against her efforts to remain unseen. “Give me my shit. That was our deal.”

Abby shed her blanket and stood, frame clad in a baggier shirt and sweats, and when her comforter crumpled to the tent’s floor, she noticed another person. He was asleep, but his breathing was a firm, silent undulation. His face was smothered in freckles, and his hair was messy as their blankets. A cool brown, almost black, fading into a rough stubble around his chin. Ellie didn’t recognize him.

Pithy, Abby held her journal out, and Ellie snatched it tightly in her hand. “How much did you read?”

“Enough.” She shouldered past to slip into the medical tent, and Ellie was gawking after her, affronted, but followed. Pursued. It was both the insulation of the tent and Abby she trailed, entrance fluttering behind them.

“What do you want?” she asked. Her fingers cinched her journal’s spine. She sat on her gurney to put distance between them, Abby standing across, near the tables. “You’re already on thin fucking ice.”

Ellie watched her grapple with something. “You’re making the vaccine.” It was said like a precise truth until she corrected, “You’re… gonna let Atlanta make the vaccine.”

Journal set aside and bristling, she denied, “No. I’m not.” Because she couldn’t have Abby spewing that shit, especially if it got to Cat or the rest of the group. She didn’t want to be treated like precious cargo. If they knew she was immune, she’d become glass to them. They didn’t need to put her in a china cabinet.

“... I have reading comprehension skills above a child’s. You’re making the vaccine.” Abby crossed her arms in equal animosity and nodded towards the journal. “Your poem.”

What physical threat she lacked crammed into her eye, lone and rancorous, a peer that lanced from across the tent. “I don’t see how that’s your business, considering it was in my journal.”

“It’s all of my business, actually.”

“Fuck you,” Ellie barked, “it’s not. Just ‘cause you’re a fucking Firefly doesn’t give you the right — ”

“It’s more than that and you know it.”

“Bullshit!” Her vitriol was thickening in wild gestures, flaming eye contact. How Abby met her with such coldness, such lack of feeling spurred her. “You don’t deserve anything from me.”

“It’s not for me.” The more she talked, so defensive, so sanctimonious, the more punchable her face became. “If it were up to me, I’d have left you to rot in that house. But maybe I was considering someone other than myself. Something you clearly can’t fucking understand.”

“I’m” — her throat welled beneath the pressure, voice crackling — “I’m gonna die for this vaccine, I think I understand it crystal fucking clear! This is everything you wanted, what you killed Joel for, and you’re still managing to bitch — ”

Abby snapped, “I didn’t kill Joel because of the vaccine!” That sole sentence cracked and clarified and mummed them both, but it hit Ellie hard enough to make her throat swell, eclipsing her retort wholly. Abby recovered swifter but was still crumbling. “Are you really conceited enough to think that?”

Ellie shook her head and tried to swallow that pill, ribs aching beneath its weight, and she didn’t know how to hold that shake. That change to what she’d done, what they’d done. “It’s not like you said otherwise.” She’d grown conversational if stunned, losing her will for combat from the shock. “... Why, then?” It was asked out of selfishness, proving Abby’s point, but she had to know for her sanity.

She saw that the question pained her. Abby readjusted her posture, more downturned and solemn. Her eyeing wavered. And it took a few seconds for her to raise, “My dad was the one who’d be operating on you.” Ellie knew the next before they were said. “And Joel killed him.”

She looked down at her hands and recalled who she’d killed for less. The list was long and could hardly fit, but it rolled, their faces a dredged supercut, and she loathed her abrupt recognition. That piece was all the puzzle needed to grow sorrowful. To forge Abby in a mirror of her: A person who’d lost someone. Not the target of resentment and ruing, but reluctantly, horribly a person.

“Oh,” Ellie finally replied, “okay.”

“So, it’s for my dad. What he died trying to do. That’s why I care.” Abby sucked her cheek and rolled her shoulder, a habit Ellie regarded often. “I shouldn’t have looked in your diary. To be fair, I didn’t know it was one until I already had it open, so…”

It was a nasty revelation that Abby had been in the same tent as her while she slept, and that image alone elicited malice. Ellie expected a sorry that didn’t come and chided herself for thinking so highly. “And you took it back to your tent ‘cause you didn’t know what it was?” She laughed humorlessly. “Fuck off.”

She raised her hands in light surrender. “Yeah. Alright.” But there was something else nestled in her. Something she squinted at, awaited. Abby was a finely tuned clock, and Ellie was a wrench in the gears. But the wrench knew the working parts better than anything. “If you could go back, would you still do it?”

“No.” With no specifying it, no preamble. She’d imagined it a hundred times without coaxing. What she could’ve had if she’d bitten her lip and taken the high road. “You?”

“... I don’t know.”

“Why not?”

Abby shifted uncomfortably and dodged, hardly a mutter as she slipped from the tent, “I’m getting you a blanket since your fever’s gone down.”

Ellie’s protest was out of earshot, and by the time Abby returned, she’d already retrieved it, and she was chilled to her bones. There was no point in refusal. She still did it, though, out of principle obstinance, a stiff leer shot. “What do you care?”

“I don’t. I care about your Cordyceps.” Abby met her eye. She drawled, “But freeze if you want.”

“Me and my fungus will be fine, thanks.”

Abby sat the folded quilt at the foot of the gurney. “By the way.” She pursed her lips and pressed her hand to the blanket, that pressure indicative of some turmoil. It always headed when their gazes met, it seemed. “Don’t talk to Lev. Because I’m over your shit, and I’m not gonna fall into it again.” Her voice lowered. “But if you put him in danger, I will fucking hurt you, Ellie.”

Ellie swallowed. Her words were warranted, but they still jabbed. “What do you think I am?”

“A ticking time bomb.”

She simply replied, “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

Abby stood stubborn and worked her jaw, analyzing Ellie’s form, and it raked like hot coals, that bloater’s palm. “I don’t think I would go back. I’m alright with where I ended up.”

When she exited the tent, Ellie keenly knew who won the war.

A jolt to her face, and Ellie was awake, wild and seeking the source of pain only to find Romi’s skillful fingers removing her gauze. “Sorry,” she apologized, monotone, “I have to change these out. Sit up a bit.”

Ellie groggily propped her head and felt a certain relief in the cloth’s desertion. “Can I see it now?”

Romi made an unsure noise. “I guess so. But it’s really severe.”

“I’m not a vain person.”

“Even then. It’s jarring to see your face changed.” While she dressed her burn, Ellie didn’t mention that her body didn’t feel like hers most days anyhow. “I’ll get a mirror later.” Romi removed the IV from her arm, too, and found that the bag had dripped dry. “Do you wanna get on an antibiotic now? You need to start getting used to this place and whatnot. The breakfast canteen is starting soon. I got you some clothes, too.” They were neatly stacked beside her on the mattress.

“I don’t want breakfast,” Ellie brushed off, “but I’ll start it, I guess. The pills.”

“Good.” Romi crossed the tent and tempered her fingers over bottles, muttering to herself until she found the correct one, holding it to her face to count the pills within. “You’re eating breakfast anyways. Cat said you were underweight beforehand, and that fever didn’t help.”

“Thanks, Cat,” Ellie grumbled. “I don’t know what you want me to do about it. I’ve always been skinny even when I ate a lot. I don’t gain weight.” Kids at the QZ hadn’t let her forget it, either, always sloshing some snide remark about her frame. She’d heard every jeer in the book.

“There’s a difference between naturally skinny and malnourished.” Romi shook a pill out and brought it with a thermos. “Here.”

She swallowed it with ease. The water dampened her dry tongue and lips, and she drank another generous gulp, wiping her mouth when done. “Can you tell me more about this? Like… in general?”

Romi hummed, and Ellie knew she was in for the long haul when she sat in the near chair. “I joined this sect when I was twenty, and it was going strong. My mom was a nurse in the old world, so they needed more people with skills like mine. I didn’t really know much about the cause, per se, but I wanted to help where I could, and I got more passionate over time. Catalina — this sect, Catalina Island — was good for about eight years, which is long for Firefly standards. But… you know the Rattlers, right?”

She nodded, hanging onto every word. Her inflection was similar to Dina’s, though her vocabulary was more formal. She wondered if they were from the same state.

“Well,” she continued, “they killed a lot of our people. We only have about twenty left, and that’s the group we’re traveling with now. We had to leave before we lost anyone else, and I was made the de facto leader of sorts. But we’ve got Atlanta, so it could be worse. I just hope they can keep themselves together until we get there.” Romi glanced down. “We’re stopped now to get supplies and whatnot. It’s fortunate that we came across you.”

“You think?” Ellie said sheepishly. “I kinda feel like a nightmare. Ignoring the… cure for mankind in my skull. I think that makes up for the fact that I’m…”

“Spunky,” Romi finished.

“Spunky.” She snorted a dry laugh. “That’s one word for it.”

She offered a small, polite smile, but it faded into sobriety quicker than Ellie could admire it. How her full lips curled. Fuck. “I’m going to be frank and tell you that your procedure isn’t a guarantee. Atlanta is a trainwreck. They can hardly keep themselves alive right now, much less develop a vaccine, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”

Ellie picked at where her gown was clasped. “When are we leaving?”

“That hinges on you. Only more of a reason for you to get used to your eye and whatnot, though we’re all keeping a careful watch on you anyways. Since you almost died and whatnot. I’m sure missing fingers was already difficult to adjust to.” Romi stood and groaned lightly, rubbing at apparent tension in her lower back, but paused to eye the folded blanket. Ellie hadn’t used it. “Who got that for you?”

“Uh.” Dammit. “Cat.”

“I see.” Romi could tell she was lying. That was apparent. But she didn’t accuse nor prosecute her. “Well, when you’re ready, breakfast is soon. You can move into Cat’s tent and get your things together.”

When she vacated the tent, Ellie scrounged through the clothes chosen, and they were identical to what everyone else wore: A black T-shirt, cargo pants, long white socks, undergarments, and scuffed boots. She dressed and readied herself to head to the breakfast queue.

Afar, it reminded her of how they did weekly rations at the QZ, except they seemed to get more of a pick between which canned food they wanted, and there were a few plastic gallons of water that they emptied into their thermoses. It was mostly men, but there were a few women and children — she estimated none were younger than twelve, though — getting food and sitting at a long, foldable table with someone handing the cans out. She spotted Cat at the end.

Ellie got into line and clasped her hands behind her back, taking people’s lack of notice with bliss. She figured that since she got out of the hospital gown, she was a better fit with the crowd. When it was her turn, she stepped up and observed her choices, having to turn her head to see them all rather than just glancing. There was insecurity in it. Her vulnerability. She tried to hide her assailed fingers as much as possible from strangers, but her eye was impossible to cloak.

“Spinach or beans. Not a hard choice.”

In her piqued anxiety, she hadn’t realized it was the same man from Abby’s tent that was distributing rations. He was tall and built, and his eyes were very blue, arrestive against his dark eyebrows, hair, and tan skin. He looked like the kind of guy Dina would lust over in an old teen magazine. Ellie didn’t get the appeal.

“Spinach,” she muttered, and he briskly handed it to her. She walked away before that interaction strung tighter.

Luckily, the end of the table was sparse but for Cat, and Ellie took a seat beside her. Despite their spat, she’d rather deal with that familiar awkwardness than tackle a new group. Cat didn’t greet her, instead continuing to eat her spinach, and Ellie followed suit, opening the can with an effortful tug to the tab. It hit her that she didn’t have a fork.

“I’m sorry,” she offered, padding to her upcoming request.

Cat wasn’t fooled and didn’t acknowledge the apology. “We can share my fork.”

“Thanks.” Ellie was quiet, not wanting to draw looks towards them. She borrowed the fork and skewered a piece of spinach, chewing slowly, and it took more struggle than apple sauce, a strained swallow. That single can could fill her for a day, but she knew she’d be forced to eat more. She lowered her voice further and asked, “Do you know who the guy giving out food is?”

Cat took her fork back and stabbed a bite. “Luke. He’s Abby’s boyfriend.” Cat didn’t stifle her volume, and their gossip garnered glances, especially from Abby herself. She glared at the pair.

Warning, she elbowed her in the side. “Shut the fuck up,” Ellie hissed below her breath.

“Fine.” Cat ate a bitter mouthful, swallowing and trading the fork before she next spoke, hushed, “Why do you ask?”

“He was just a dick.” Ellie’s mouth was a thin, annoyed line. Abby with a partner was an odd concept to grapple. The idea that she could be mellow or sweet, or that someone could be able to love those blood-battered hands. “Figures.”

They continued eating in silence, the taste growing more unbearable with each bite, but she shoved it down, focusing until she saw Romi stride to the table and lean to Abby’s ear, whispering something. Judging from her dismayed expression and immediate look to Ellie, it wasn’t pleasant. And had to do with her. Though unpleasantness and her were generally intertwined.

Ellie met her gaze too long, and she pushed her own down to the can. It was barely half empty. Her stomach was already lurching. She’d find someplace to toss it, and when she began considering discreet places to rid it, Romi slipped into the empty seat beside her.

“Are you keeping it down?” Not particularly sympathetic but medical, analyzing Ellie’s frame and fork brought to her lips.

“Yeah,” she lied, “it’s pretty good.”

Romi hummed, a vague noise of agreeance, but she whittled to business quicker than Ellie could ready herself. She was close to her ear and soft, “Abby knows you’re making the vaccine, and she’s gonna be watch you to make sure you’re safe until we get to Atlanta. You’re gonna find supplies with her and Lev today.”

Ellie couldn’t revolt because Romi left the instant it dawned on her that, fuck, she meant it, and fuck, she’d told Abby the same thing, blatant in her hostile, familiar expression. The one that gutted Ellie, perpetrating her waking hours.

She moved into Cat’s tent and sat on its floor, pawing through her regained belongings, checking that nothing had been stolen. It was in order, but since she’d caught Abby looking through her journal, her paranoia was cleaving, and she flinched when someone rapidly tapped the tent’s flap.

“Can I come inside?” Lev asked.

Ellie hadn’t realized so much time had passed. Instead of rallying herself to confront Abby, she’d distracted herself with her possessions, counting ammunition and tracing her guitar pick. “Uh,” she hesitated, “sure.”

Lev peeked in. He wore his worry on his sleeve, apparent as Ellie’s. He had a bow over his shoulder and a frown etching his mouth, scars stiff in his cheeks. “We’re leaving soon.”

“You are.” She zipped her backpack. “I’m not. Do you know where Romi is?”

“She’s in the med tent with someone, but… you can’t change her mind.” Lev looked at her with such pity that it should have annoyed her, but he was a kid, and in kids, that kindness was more endearing than condescending. Like their faith hadn’t been crushed yet. “You and Abby should talk to each other.”

Ellie huffed. Their last conversation furthered her miffedness, her hand fisting around her backpack’s strap. “We did. Talking just… can’t fix this kind of shit. I’d rather not even look at her if I don’t have to, and even that shows that she wants to fucking kill me.”

“She doesn’t,” Lev defended. “She knows that the vaccine is more important than what happened between you guys, and she’s fine with watching after you for the sake of it.”

Somehow, miraculously, Lev knowing about the vaccine wasn’t the most infuriating thing about their conversation, and Ellie didn’t address it. It didn’t push to the front of her mind as Abby did. Her offense at the idea of being guarded. “Watching after me?” she scoffed. “I can take care of myself.”

“No, you can’t.” His staunchness almost impressed her. “You don’t know how to shoot with one eye. You’ll get killed.” He molded to something begging, desperate, a pleading child with bunched brows. “Try. Please.”

Ellie mulled begrudgingly, tracing the seams in her backpack. Another conversation with Abby wouldn’t mend their pasts, a little dab of alcohol on a stab wound, stinging but not of use, but she owed him. She owed him Dina’s life and her apology, even if he didn’t know what she repented. Ultimately, she grumbled and stood, “I’m talking to Romi first.”

He looked relieved, stepping aside for Ellie to exit the tent. “Thank you.”

“Yeah.”

She transversed the camp to get to the medical tent and didn’t announce her presence, slipping past its flap with silence and a set jaw, but that all fell when she saw Steph in one of the gurneys, slack. A gasp and worry so big it wracked her skin like goosebumps, indented her like a tattoo, pushed her footfalls forward to where she was being bandaged by Romi.

“What the fuck?” It was withered anger, concern drowning her irritation and breaking her voice. From Ellie’s vantage, she didn’t have a severe injury, and only her arm was being wrapped. Given her recklessness, she was surprised it wasn’t worse. Romi spectated. “Steph.”

Steph averted her eyes but flicked them back, inspecting Ellie closer. “What happened to your face?”

“What happened to staying in Jackson?” Ellie shot back, cadence thickening to a scold. “What — how did you even get here?”

“A map?” she chuffed. “And I was coming through and saw this camp, and my arm got cut, so I was like — ”

“On foot?” Ellie interrupted. She paced at the foot of the gurney, stressed hand to her forehead, and she was fairly certain that Maria would travel to Phoenix and kill her herself. “Steph.”

“Yes, on foot, they closed the stables!” Riled, she said it like the most obvious thing in the world. “There’s no way you expected me to stay.”

“I thought — ” I thought that giving you my place would hold you over. At least for a while. “... Why’d you even leave?”

Steph shrugged, and somehow, that infuriated Ellie more than anything.

“Are you fucking serious?” she reprimanded. “You could’ve gotten killed, and you don’t even know why you came down here?”

“I mean, I know, it’s just not — ”

Ellie alternated her attention to Romi, snapping like a gunshot, “Why are you making Abby look after me? ‘Cause that’s not gonna happen.”

She stopped mending Steph for a moment. “Because I’d prefer if no one else learned about” — she glanced at Steph — “it, and I think you should, too. If they learn about you and Atlanta doesn’t work out, they’ll have gotten their hopes up for nothing… and a lot of them resent you for what happened in Salt Lake. They could try and hurt you. The best way to make sure no one else finds out is assigning you with Abby and Lev. I know you have… history, but — ”

“And do you know what that history is?” Ellie asked harshly. “Or did Abby conveniently leave that out?”

“It’s not my business. My business is getting you to Atlanta unharmed.” Romi continued bandaging Steph’s arm, ripped gauze punctuating her stance. “I’m sorry, but if a grudge is more important to you than this — ”

Steph cut, “What are you guys talking about?”

“Nothing,” Ellie answered. “I’m still not going with her.”

Imploring, Romi latched their stares, and she looked exactly how Dina ached. Big eyes, brown eyes. Always the caretaker, the healer, grounded like a sepia photograph. Ellie felt like she’d shot an arrow into her sternum. Maybe she was seeing what she missed, what she needed. But it was alluring, convincing enough to make her reconsider. And, rationally, she knew she had to get some experience with her lacking eye sooner than later.

She reproached Steph with a glance. “We’ll talk later.”

Posture slouched and exasperated, she slunk from that tent to hers and Cat’s, sidestepping Lev to slip in and sling her bag over her shoulder. Her dropped weight made it harder to bear, and she grunted while it settled on her back.

“You’re coming?” He sounded excited, but Ellie thought him more curious than anything, watching her prepare inquisitively.

She fastened her holster on her thigh and sheathed her pistol. “I don’t have much of a choice.”

“Not really,” Lev agreed, and she snorted.

She and Lev crossed the camp to where their trucks were. There were three, all in various degrees of condition, and Abby was in the nicest’s — a black van — front seat, arms crossed and staring at nothing while she waited. The purling engine whirred her frustration into the hot asphalt. Ellie approached the window and knocked, reluctant.

Abby rolled it down and concisely stopped her from speaking, “Don’t talk to me or Lev.” The window was promptly put back up, its mechanical purr determinate.

Ellie was alright with that sentiment. Lev rounded the jeep to sit in the passenger seat while Ellie seized the chance to keep her distance from Abby, taking residence in the backseat diagonal her and lugging her backpack beside.

She watched the pair, investigative. Wondering when they met, how Lev made Abby melt, why they stuck together through all that time. She knew Lev had seen Abby at her most savage, pulled by grief and tugged by rage. He had been the single thing that stopped her from slitting Dina’s throat, been a bargaining chip on that bloody beach, and when Abby looked at him, she saw her ease despite Ellie’s company. She guessed that they’d been brought together via hardship, or Abby was seeking atonement through him.

Ellie knew that from Joel, and she could almost see him and her in that front seat. Or her and Steph. Something innocent where she thought half the pair inhuman. She sagged into her seat and stared out the window, keeping to their mutual lull; however, Lev was not held to it.

“Where are we going?” he asked, shooting Abby an eager smile.

“Downtown. We’re gonna check out the basement of that pharmacy before we leave Phoenix.” Abby drove well, obviously experienced, and Ellie loathed it. Her glide on the steering wheel was supple, palms steady and abruptness rare, and her eyes didn’t leave the road. “There are a lot of clickers down there, so be prepared.”

Lev nodded, and their stillness was more comfortable than tense, familiar enough with one another to share contentment without verbal exchange. Ellie pressed her temple to the glass and watched the houses they passed, the abandoned cars they avoided. She hoped that there weren’t any remaining bloaters as the engine would be more than enough to rouse them. Eventually, the moldered suburbia became more of the same, and Ellie noticed their surroundings when the van stopped in front of the supposed pharmacy.

It was decrepit as every other building, and its shelves were notably empty through the display windows, the glass in front of the counter was broken. At its side, Ellie noticed a basement hatch and figured that the volume of infected within had deterred anyone from going inside. That left it to them to clean up.

“There are spores,” Abby warned, and she and Lev adjusted their masks accordingly.

Ellie did not. She didn’t even recall if she had a mask. Not that it mattered anyway, as when she went to open her car door, it didn’t budge. Meanwhile Abby and Lev exited the jeep, their doors’ slams striking. The air conditioner left running and clicking lock of the two front doors confirmed Ellie’s suspicions, and she scrambled to the driver’s side to rap on the window, shooting her the nastiest glare she could muster. “Let me out.”

Abby leaned down to the window and simply said, “No.”

Ellie was floored by her gall and kept knocking until they disappeared into the basement, Lev’s protests apparent but muffled, not only through the car window but to Abby’s ears. She didn’t even send a cursory, pitying glance to Ellie before they descended.

Ellie pondered if she should punch the window out, and after a few painful minutes of thought, attempting to roll the window down or find the button to unlock with no results, she resigned to crumple in the backseat, glaring at nothing in particular. Abby’s sourness was contagious.

Her musing was snipped by a faint, aching groan in the distance, and she crammed herself into the floor, unholstering her pistol and listening for its direction, back against the door. Closer that time, anticipating, veins running cold and hot. It rang again, a grisly rasp, and she heard it from somewhere in front of the van, another two of varying pitches following, coming nearer until she heard staggers around, palming on the windows. Ellie gritted her teeth and tightened her grip.

Whereas two were behind her, one was on the other side, and it spotted her through the window. Its noises were kindled and its hands frenzied, ravenous, and she wracked herself for a course of action. A gunshot would attract more, and a silencer was useless. The glass would be heard shattering. She couldn’t stab it through the window. She couldn’t not clear them, as they would break the window open. And she had no clue how dire the consequences would be with the camp if she damaged the windows.

She supposed she’d find out. She shot the infected’s throat, and it gurgled on its blood, spewing it on the glass, and she subsequently fired into its head to drop it. The flurry of movement engaged the two behind her, and they stumbled to the other side, spotting her curled form on the floor. It was unsightly. And blood just kept spilling on the windows and sides, more infected drawn the more she shot, and the more she shot, the more her aim wobbled, the more shots she missed, and they were swarming like the adrenaline in her gut and one cohesive thought: Fuck Abby Anderson. Over and over, minutes on end, it coursed her like flesh.

They smacked the window, a cacophony of dead grunts and skidding, rotten frames against the jeep’s metal, a chorus so repetitive that the sudden crack within was a shock. On the other side, Abby knocked one’s skull against the hood of the car, and when another lunged, teeth perilously close to her neck, she stabbed a shiv into its throat and kicked its stomach, jolting its limp corpse back. Blood spritzed her gas mask.

Arrows rained from somewhere further, only a couple missing their targets, and Ellie hadn’t expected Lev to be so proficient with his bow. It was a difficult weapon to master, one Ellie forced years into learning, and she hefted herself from the floor to watch. They worked in sync. Abby’s strength carried them, demolishing the infected in relatively quiet methods, and Lev shot what she couldn’t handle, the excess.

When the density of infected thinned, few baited since the combat had quieted, Ellie moved to the side Abby was on and jostled the door handle. “Let me out!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Abby hissed in return. She didn’t spare Ellie a glance, instead monitoring for oncoming infected.

“There are too many — ”

“Because someone decided on fucking target practice instead of waiting it out!”

Suddenly, Ellie heard the other side’s door open, and Lev held it for her. It’d been locked from the inside. “Come on,” he urged.

“Lev,” Abby chastised, but she was occupied by an approaching duo of walkers and couldn’t halt him. She speared her shiv into the first’s eye and snapped the second’s neck, brittle bones and dying cries. Ellie wondered how easy it’d be for Abby to snap her neck. If she wanted to.

But she didn’t linger on the thought, pushing herself out of the car and donning her backpack. Her perspective was wider in the open, not confined to a single window, and it shook her. Her blind spot seemed bigger, her depth perception fraught, but her hearing was keener, and it alerted her to the clickers flooding from the basement.

They stepped and swiped, desperate for anything they could clutch, and Ellie counted five. She reached into her bag and pulled her new switchblade, flipping it, and Lev’s arrow soared, hitting the furthest between the eyes.

The closest detected their presence from the thuds and bangs of Abby’s fighting, and it barrelled quicker than Lev could nock an arrow.

Ellie didn’t know why she did it. Why it was instant to her, utterly automatic. She slotted herself between Lev and the clicker, jutting her shoulder upward for it to sink its teeth in, barring it from biting Lev’s throat, and shanked its ear, swirling her blade in its skull until it went listless. It fell with Ellie’s flesh in its mouth. The wound didn’t hurt. Not with her adrenaline, yanking the blade out of its head and stepping out of Lev’s way so he could shoot. But his aim was unstable.

Another clicker barrelled to Ellie, and she cursed with exertion, jabbing that one in the throat. The repeated stabs to its vein gushed blood on her hands, face, beneath her nails. Two precise gunshots rang, and the two unscathed dropped.

She unsheathed her switchblade from its flesh and scowled in Abby’s direction. “And you got on my ass for shooting?”

“We’re leaving,” Abby said shortly, sliding into the driver’s seat. “Get in.”

Ellie got in the backseat, and Lev trailed, slamming the door behind. Keys were inserted in the ignition as more clickers poured from the basement. Tires squealed on the road. When the van surged, it caught an impending clicker beneath its wheels, cracking bones and a dying screech, but they were gone before more could reach them. Yet Abby’s driving was still perfect. Even with one hand steering, the other removing her gas mask, she didn’t swerve or falter. Ugh.

She felt a hand on her left, injured shoulder, and she turned to watch Lev inspect it. He’d taken his mask off since getting inside. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, “I didn’t mean for you to get bit.”

“I’ll live.” The irony of that was realized, and she huffed a humorless, bitter laugh while the pang of her wound processed, adrenaline fading. She’d been bitten four times, and each, the severity diminished, the cerebral nature gone. Desensitized. Ellie pulled her sleeve up further, frowning. It was deep and bleeding, arm and shirt bloodied. She shrugged her backpack off and reached for her gauze and disinfectant, but didn’t find the latter. She decided to bandage anyways for the sake of stopping blood flow.

Its location was unfortunate. She attempted to roll the cloth around with one hand, but it hung loose and useless. The more she tried, the more agitated she grew until she’d wasted a considerable amount.

Lev offered, “I can do it.”

She wanted to deny him, but she knew that if she went into camp with a bite mark, her immunity would be exposed. So in spite of — perhaps spurred by — Abby’s glare in the rearview mirror, she nodded and gave him the roll of gauze.

Lev wasn’t as good as Cat or Romi, fingers clumsy and squinting, but he was alright. Better than Ellie’s tries. When he finished, she traced the edge of the mending. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Lev looked pleased. “Do you want a granola bar?”

“Lev,” Abby chided, “put your seatbelt on.”

“Oh.” He hurried to buckle it, his rush somewhat endearing, and looked at Ellie expectantly. “Are you gonna put yours on?”

Ellie snorted. “If not wearing a seatbelt is what kills me, then I would honestly take that over getting my throat torn out by a clicker.”

“... Fair.” Lev scoured his bag, and Ellie noticed the pins and charms on it. Sharks. Some more toony, some realistic, and she thought it suited him. His searching hand paused over something, and he pulled two crunched granola bars out. “They’re a bit crushed,” he said sheepishly, offering one to Ellie.

She would have refused, but she skimmed the label, saw that it was peanut butter, and was weakened. “Thanks,” she muttered. Ellie opened it and tried to minimize the crumbs that fell.

Lev the second between the two front seats, urging Abby to take it, but she shook her head.

“Why not?” Lev asked, waving it.

Abby looked at Ellie for a millisecond before locking her eyes on the road, sentiment clear. “I don’t really have an appetite.”

Ellie entered the medical tent with a soothing hand on her wound and watchful gaze, eyeing the interior for Steph and Romi. Steph was asleep on her gurney. Romi wasn’t there. She sighed and sat her bag on the floor, readjusting her shoulder and wincing in discomfort. It’d gone from sheer pain to a subtle burn deep in her skin. She would put clean bandages on, but it would be too difficult to do herself, so she decided to wait until Romi returned.

She rationalized it with that explanation. Part of her knew she just wanted to see her, feel the curing hands on her skin.

Slowly, she walked to Steph’s gurney and peered inside. Wound wrapped, she slept peacefully, breath slow, and Ellie didn’t know what overtook her when she tucked one of her braids behind her ear. The sudden urge to comfort, console, be someone to lean on. She retracted her hand, the notion searing like her bite that she cared. And she couldn’t do anything about it. She couldn’t do anything about the fact that Steph would hurt. She couldn’t guarantee that she would be safe.

Abruptly, her groggy voice rang, “I’m, like, half-awake, psycho.” Steph looked up at Ellie with lidded, drowsy eyes. They sobered on her wound. “What happened?”

She was grateful that Steph didn’t grill her on the touch. “An arrow accidentally brushed me.”

“... D’you need new bandages?”

She appraised the bloodied, red-brown gauze. “Probably. I can’t do it myself.”

“Y’want me to do it?”

“No,” Ellie said too quickly and cleared her throat. Steph couldn’t see what was beneath. “Uh — no. I’ll just wait for Romi. It’s fine.”

“I’m not that bad at bandaging.” However, she didn’t fight for it, instead burrowing her head against her pillow. “Whatever. I’m going to bed.”

She nodded. The secret between them was palpable, the gurney’s frame wedging like it. “Okay. Goodnight.”

“... Ew.”

“I’m not allowed to say goodnight?”

“No. Literally no.”

“Fine,” she surrendered, and in place of a gentle brush, she flicked Steph’s temple. “Sweet dreams.”

When she groaned, Ellie knew her goal of being as embarrassing as humanly possible was a success. It almost shadowed the terror of wanting to be close, yearning to aid, protect her. And when she laid in her gurney, staring at the tent’s ceiling, she didn’t feel at ease until Steph’s soft snores reached her.

A stinging sensation on her shoulder shot her eye open, and she moaned, part exhaustion and part shock. Romi was over her. It was night, and her skin looked very pretty in that light. Lunar, almost, and smooth, long black hair a veil.

“Sorry,” she apologized, quiet. “Cleaning your… wound.” Ellie could tell she’d almost said bite.

“Thank you.” Ellie sat upright to give her better access, watching her dab at the scabbing with a sanitized cloth. Her brow furrowed just slightly in her concentration. Her eyelashes were abundant, thick. She didn’t know what overtook her, but she knew her mouth, her words were not of her own logical volition. “... You’re beautiful.”

“... Thank you?” she echoed.

And suddenly, she didn’t look like Dina at all. The compliment wasn’t taken in stride. It bloomed an awkward silence, a gawky nod from Ellie to try and make the tension ebb.

Romi left after dressing her wound without a goodbye, and Ellie immediately padded across the tent and practically tore her journal and pencil from her bag. She sat at her gurney and wrote, all frenetic penmanship, fuck my life.

Chapter Text

Abby and Luke were fucking annoying, and if Ellie heard her get called babe one more time, she was going to blow her own brains out. They didn’t show a lot of PDA at the camp, but when Ellie was forced with Abby for supply runs, it was either Luke or Lev that tagged to mediate. With Lev, it was nice. She was able to bounce off of him, and he was a smart, observant kid nowhere near as snarky as Steph. The con was that he was too intelligent, too pacifist, and tried to push Ellie and Abby to interact. Questions posed to the group. Subtly trying to get them to both sit in the front seat. She felt bad but didn’t give in. Wouldn’t give in. And she averted her eye from his disappointment, the other still bandaged and wounded.

With Luke, a benefit was that Ellie went entirely ignored, barely garnering a glance. That was simultaneously the worst part because they bantered and flirted and bickered in her company, and it was insufferable, particularly during their tense silences or when they shared an inside joke. It was like they spoke a language she couldn’t understand. To be fair, Luke was the half who started most of it. Abby seemed more withdrawn. Hesitant to reciprocate.

Ellie remembered when she’d shared herself with Dina and knew that, in spite of how irritating, how grating it was to see Abby somewhat content, a green feeling embosomed her at their comfort with one another, and it hit her that she hadn’t been with a partner in a year and some change. She was fine with being single, not really searching in her teen years, but when you had a relationship as serious as moving in together, raising a child together, it was hard to relearn how to be alone, one side of the bed void and desolate.

They’d been in Phoenix for a few days. Their food supply was diminishing, and the three were tasked with getting into the QZ barrier’s reserves since they were all familiar with FEDRA structure. From eavesdropping, Ellie had learned that Luke grew up in NYC QZ, and it was odd to think that they’d been raised so near. She recalled that Abby would be familiar from Seattle’s.

They were in the van, Abby driving and Luke in the passenger side while Ellie was relegated to the back, attempting to tune out their conversation as they crossed downtown, avoiding various groups of runners on their way.

“I’m just saying,” Luke argued, “that blueberries are more… sort of indigo than blue.” He had a very persuasive, pandering way of speaking like he was opening the curtain on an exhibit.

“Blue is in the name,” Abby shot. Ellie could see her hand tightening on the steering wheel. “You’re just trying to make me annoyed.”

He smiled, wide enough to show his gap teeth. “... Is it working?”

“Is it?” Abby echoed, and she caught her rolling her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Blueberries are blue.” Said like the sky was.

“Why’re you so riled up, Abs?” he teased. “Lev agrees, I asked him — ”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not!” He looked shocked that she could insinuate it.

Abby was reaching a tipping point, evident in how she drummed her fingers on the wheel, set her jaw harder, avoided eye contact with him. “Lev isn’t an idiot.” Her face considerably soured, and she huffed, “Look, I’m super fucking nauseous, so if we could do this some other time, that’d be awesome.” She dripped with sardonic venom like a viper.

His smile fell. “Are you sick?”

“No, I’m just…” Abby trailed. “Stressed, I guess.”

“Uh.” Luke sagged into his seat but kept his eyes on her, scanning, surely not taking that as an answer. Not for forever. “Alright.”

A blissful silence came for a few minutes, and Ellie soothed herself, fiddling with the ends of her sleeves and rubbing her forearms while she watched Phoenix pass by. After a while, their destination farther than the prior pharmacy, the pane started to rub her temple where she leaned on it, and she went to roll the window down. It didn’t descend.

“Unlock the window,” she mumbled, clicking the button a few times to check if it was jammed.

Abby ignored her. Ellie was certain that she was doing so because she saw her glance back in the mirror, rest her gaze on Ellie’s for a sparking, resentful millisecond, then veer her eyes to the road. It was the first time she’d noticed the color separate from the rage, the blood. Ellie couldn’t place it. Abby’s eyes were a brownish, blueish, hazelish, shifting in hues, saturation depending on the Arizona sun tapering through the houses, the driver’s window. It was interesting. It was… captivating, for lack of a better word. If only she weren’t such a cunt.

“Abby,” Ellie repeated, harder, “unlock the window, or I’m gonna punch it out.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

“Bite me.” She glared at her from the backseat and noticed Luke eyeing her. “What do you want?”

To her surprise, he replied openly, “I’m just wondering when you’re gonna start acting like a person. That’s all.”

Abby mumbled, “Don’t talk to her.”

That hit her like a nail in wood, final and breaking, and she sagged into her seat, arms crossed. She and Luke wired their gazes until he looked back to the dashboard, sighing.

They arrived at the barrier with an unceremonious halt of the engine and opening of doors, Abby pulling Ellie’s for her. She’d learned her lesson since leaving her locked at the pharmacy.

Ellie stepped out, adjusted her bag on her back, and rounded the van to pop the trunk, looking at how much space they had. They’d cleared it beforehand to fit as much food as possible, but she wasn’t hopeful. It’d probably been swindled by then. She appraised their destination: A warehouse of some kind labeled, 006, rusted and bolted. Abby and Luke approached to jostle it first. It didn’t move.

“How are we gonna get in?” Abby asked.

Luke hummed and took a few steps back, taking every inch of the warehouse in. Ellie did the same. Their gazes latched on the same thing at the same time, she was sure. An air vent was above the door. It was screwed in, but it was their best bet. And Ellie knew she was the only one who could fit. They both wordlessly looked at her.

“No,” she instantly said, “I’m not letting you guys pick me up.”

Abby scoffed, “Ellie, I swear to god — ”

“I do not care.”

She chuffed and glanced around, apparently searching for something, anything to convince her, but Ellie knew her stance was obstinate.

“If you do this, you can pick music for the ride back.”

Just like that, it crumpled, nowhere near as hard as she’d thought it. Ellie chewed her cheek. She’d taken a couple of CDs from Jackson but hadn’t thought she’d get to use them. “Fine.” She walked over and squinted at the vent. “But if you drop me — ”

“If you were about to threaten us,” Luke began, pawing through his bag, “I dunno how I feel about putting a screwdriver in your hand.” He apprehensive held it out to her.

She took it and turned it over a few times, running her finger along the tip. “Then you’d better not drop me.” Ellie waited for them to move together and clasp their hands before stepping atop, keenly keeping her balance as she rose and splayed her free hand on the warehouse, maintaining her upright standing while unscrewing the vent.

Halfway through, she heard Luke mutter, “Jesus, does she eat?”

Considering he handed out her rations, he should fucking know she’d been shoving food down her throat three times a day like clockwork, only missing a goddamn feeding tube, so she sent a sharp kick to his nose. “Whoops.”

“Fuck — ” Their structure toppled. Instinctually, Luke went to cup his nose, and that shook where Ellie had one foot planted, and she swooned back, arms flailing to try and hold onto the vent, the warehouse, but it didn’t hold her.

Abby did. When Ellie fell, without purchase or aid in the descent, she held her, raised her from the hard, hot pavement, and she had never seen someone seem so disgusted and dismayed. Ellie curled somewhat in her arms, stunned, before edging her feet towards the ground, but Abby dropped her before she could stand.

“Shit,” she cursed on her fall, and she hit the ground with a resounding thump, hissing her pain through gritted teeth. “Fuck you.”

“I caught you, didn’t I?”

“You did a half-assed job.” Ellie pushed herself to stand and shot a glare, punting all the pang from where her bruised hip had impacted it. “C’mon. Hold me up, if you’re so adamant.”

“You’re fucking impossible.” Abby pooled her hands together, though, and Ellie stepped on.

Luke didn’t enlist his own that time, and Ellie felt a certain smugness at that as she undid the last two screws. They hit the concrete in a metallic clatter, and the vent itself followed, landing with a harder clank. “I got the vent,” she said, tossing the screwdriver someplace to free her hand. She peered inside. Nothing jumped at her, and there was no noise, but her senses bristled nonetheless. “Lift me in.”

Abby shoved her up and in, hold on her feet constant until half her body shimmied into it, and with a grunt, muscles tightening, she propped herself in with her knee. The vent was dark and long, and it went upwards. Ellie didn’t see where, if it ended, so she pulled her flashlight out to illuminate her way, crawling through until a particularly loud wail of metal suffocated her, enough to make her ears ring, and the ceiling beneath her abruptly crumbled.

Her descent wasn’t far, but it ached. She idly struggled in the air until she hit the top of some shelf and rolled onto the floor, coughing up the dust from the razed architecture. Ellie’s flashlight shone, however, on shelves lined with cans and cans of food. “Fuck me,” she grumbled, urging herself to walk. She smattered her light over the walls, the food, and honed it on the far door, and she approached until the circle became a pinprick on it. There was a lever but no power, so she tried to switch next to it and marveled when the warehouse’s electricity jumped to life, sparks briefly flying from the unused panel and lights.

“Huh.” Ellie hadn’t expected it to work, but she supposed there had to have been an electricity source somewhere, considering that the camp had some. She tugged the lever and watched the door slowly peel open with a mechanical whir. “Damn.”

It revealed Abby, who stepped in rather quickly, ducking where the thing hadn’t reached yet, and Luke, who was looking in the van for something.

When Abby saw the setup, she hummed, “Huh.”

“That’s what I said — ”

Ellie’s rapport — fuck, it hit her that that had been rapport — was interrupted by the lights fizzling, the power panel hissing, and the door plummeting in a behemoth, screeching bang on the ground, and Ellie flinched back from it. If Abby had been a second later, she’d have been crushed. She shouldn’t have been concerned by that.

Abby stepped to the door and knelt, attempting to lift it, but there was no use, too heavy even for her. “Shit… Luke!” No reply came. “Luke?”

“He probably can’t hear you.”

“Yeah, I picked that up.”

Ellie bitterly chuckled and cast her flashlight around, trying to find some way back up to the vent. The shelves were too flimsy to climb on. There was no ladder. “You got any ideas?”

“No.” Abby sank against the metal entrance, leering up at Ellie. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”

She rose her brows while she continued scouring for an alternative exit. She knew what Abby said was true, but it was very rich coming from her, and she made that known, “Takes trouble to know trouble.”

“I guess,” she muttered. Ellie saw her fiddle with her hair, fingertips brushing for something below where it ended, obviously still used to the phantom sensation of something long. She pondered why they’d cut her hair. Probably humiliation. A detriment to her pride, days spent worn at those pillars, months in that camp. If it’d had any lasting effect on her stubbornness, Ellie had yet to see it. But she could just be fronting something false. Abby pulled her own flashlight out and toured it around the warehouse. “Lots of stuff.”

“Why are you small talking?” It left her before she could stop it. Not offended, not annoyed, but curious, if slightly suspicious.

They both moved their lights to each other, two focuses, two interrogations, and two bloodied pairs of hands.

Abby challenged, “Would you rather I not? Would you rather talk about you?”

“What do I have to do with anything?” Ellie took a step closer. “It’s not like you had a part in it, huh?”

“But you know why I did what I did,” Abby argued, “and I don’t know why you… killed all those Wolves. I know why, but I don’t…”

Nameless faces, named faces, unborn faces. All of them circulated in her mind like a carousel, all pinned in place as if it was their final resting place. Ellie bit her cheek. “Can you fucking spit it out?”

“Can you shut the fuck up and let me think?” Abby countered. “Shit.” She crossed her legs where she sat and leaned forward to scrutinize Ellie, her eyes kindled, intense beneath the spotlight. Her elbows rested on her knees. “Who was Joel to you?”

That was a question Ellie had faced often. People had assumed they were relatives, that he was her uncle or some distant older cousin. But most often, most bitingly, they had commonly thought them father and daughter. She didn’t know what tipped that apart from their ages. She hadn’t seen many fathers and daughters together, so she didn’t have inklings for what that entailed, what made them fit the mold so clearly for some people. She and Joel had never addressed it. When people asked, they fidgeted with their hands and avoided each other’s gazes, giving some awkward, unfulfilling answer to mum them, change the subject.

It was no different then, but Ellie didn’t have him to look from. She aimed her eyes at the dirty floor. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

She glanced at her. “That’s what I said.”

“I don’t believe you.” Abby’s face was placid, steady. “You don’t do what you did for — ”

Beginning to pace, Ellie cut, “Maybe it’s fucking complicated! Maybe it is fucking complicated, Abby, and maybe I wish I knew what I thought of him! Is that what you wanna hear?”

“No, I wanna hear the truth.” Abby’s peer from the ground tapered, face creasing with it, and Ellie could hardly stand to see her.

“You want the truth?” Her hands were futile, trying to find how to gesture it, push it, yet her words still struggled to flow. Like her throat got caught on their barbs. The tartness. “I wish I could fucking hate him for what he did at Salt Lake. I wish I could. I wish I could bury him and never look back and just forget he ever existed,” — and she was on a tangent, rambling as she paced, and she couldn’t halt it, pause it, and it tore her mouth — “but I can’t. You think I’d feel so much about him if I could help it?” It was fucking torture. Her hand started to drive every word she spoke, motioning to nothing in particular. As if Joel was standing near her to exhibit, to show Abby what she’d taken. “You think I’d care so much if he weren’t my best fucking friend?”

Abby stared at her and opened her mouth to speak, but Ellie promptly cut her off, shaking her head and raising a hand to stop her.

“Don’t. Seriously. I don’t care.” Beneath her skin, in her flesh, Ellie hated her, scorned her, and didn’t want to share their breath. The warehouse was claustrophobic. Closing in on them. “Every time I think of him, I see your fucking face. And I have to live with that, seeing you every goddamn day. It’s like — ”

Abby argued, bitter, “And how do you think I feel, Ellie? You think I can remember my friends without seeing you, talk to Lev without seeing you?” Her flashlight was shaky in her hold. Shaky as Ellie’s knife wielded, all Santa Barbara heat and waves. “You’re no better than I am.”

“I don’t act like I am. You do. That’s the fucking difference between you and I, your goddamn pedestal is sick.”

“I wouldn’t hurt a kid, would I?”

She yearned to beat Abby. To knock her flashlight against the side of her temple until she was gone. But the words bound her motionless and gaping, trying to comprehend their weight, how she was a hit dog yelping, and all she could see in the back of her mind was Mel’s swollen belly. How she’d left JJ not once, but twice. Lev’s unconscious, pained face, having underwent so much hurt.

She shifted her flashlight to her free hand and drew her pistol, and Abby instantly drew her own in return. They were panting. The grip on her flashlight was loose, three-fingered.

Ellie spat, “Say that again, you fucking bitch.”

“I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, now put your gun down.”

“No.” Ellie moved closer, voice rippling beneath her rage. “What’re you gonna do about it, Abby?”

Suddenly, Abby stood, asserting her height over Ellie’s with the slight crane of her neck, the barrel of her gun targeted at her face. They could kill each other. But they didn’t. Not yet, opting their contempt through mouths, breaths fanning in their proximity. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what? Call you on your shit?”

“Dish what you can’t take.” Abby splayed a hand on Ellie’s chest and shoved her back. She tried to ignore how effortlessly she sent her feet staggering. “Now get the fuck out of my face.”

Ellie tutted, exhale hissing crisp as carbonation, but she slid her gun into her sheath and held her light on Abby until she holstered her own. “I didn’t know.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“I didn’t know that she was pregnant.”

Abby blinked. But stubborn, unmoving, fucking infuriating, all she said was, “Okay.” No changed tone. No apology.

“God — whatever.” She turned her back and retreated into the shelves. “Your lover boy better figure out some shit soon. I don’t see anything in here that can help, and I don’t wanna suffocate to death.”

Ellie stayed on her side and Abby stayed on the other, waiting for the door’s creak. She occasionally heard Abby knocking and some things being returned, and eventually Ellie discerned that it was Morse. She didn’t know enough to understand them. Hours passed.

She was sketching fruits in the bylines of her entries when the warehouse’s lights quivered then beamed, gleaming the shelves and drawing Ellie’s grateful eye. The door rose soon after. Ellie flicked her flashlight off and stowed her supplies in her backpack, moving to the entrance with her hands on the straps, thumbs anxiously tracing.

She caught the tail end of Abby’s voice, “... long enough.” When she got closer, she saw that it was night, and the door had undoubtedly attracted infected, so they’d have to be hasty.

“I got you out, didn’t I?” Luke tossed them each a sizable bag, and Ellie looked inside.

It was tan material stitched together. It had undergone stains, tears, and every horror imaginable for a cloth, and she prayed that it wouldn’t break. She didn’t need to be lectured on how to shove cans into a bag, especially from people as dull as them. Admittedly, she grabbed food in her own interest, all fruits and vegetables in place of canned meat or beans. She didn’t know if she could take any more of the latter. She filled a few bags to their brims, tying them, until the trunk couldn’t hold anything else, and she was the first to climb into the jeep.

Not before getting some canned peaches for Lev and Steph, of course. They were hidden in her backpack where she pawed then, seeking which CD she wanted to use, and landed on one. She didn’t know if it was an album. Its case was only labeled Dolly in Joel’s messy, heavy-handed penmanship. Ellie took it out and inspected it for scratches. There were only a few.

The trunk slammed in tune with a distant infected yelling. Abby slid into the driver’s side of the van and Luke followed, eyes constant on her. “Are you still feeling sick?”

“Kinda,” Abby mumbled, “it’s nothing. Let’s get out of here.” She drove quicker since the route was trodden, and Ellie had noticed her remarkable memory when it came to directions, locations, something she herself had to learn the hard way from traveling. She wondered if Abby had trekked far, too. Not that it mattered.

And her feeling sick was the least of Ellie’s concern. Really. She shoved any nosiness she had for it down, instead shoving it to hand her CD between the two front seats. “Here.”

“What is this?” Abby didn’t take it.

“Dolly Parton.” Ellie waved it with more insistence. “This was the deal. Play it.”

“I fucking hate country,” she grumbled but grabbed and inserted it anyhow, pushing a few of the dashboard’s buttons until “Jolene”’s soft start rang.

Ellie was aware that it was overrated, but it was the start of the album for a reason. Joel had taught her the chords ages ago. Her fingers still had the muscle memory, her stubs phantoming the motions while the remainders played them on her thigh, brushing denim. The beginning’s repetition was soothing as the verses were familiar, and she would’ve sung along if she weren’t in company.

Your beauty is beyond compare

With flaming locks of auburn hair

Ivory skin and eyes of emerald green

Brownish, blueish, hazelish, she caught Abby’s eyes on her in the mirror, but she sent her gaze from the second she was caught.

Your smile is like a breath of spring

Your voice is soft like summer rain

And I cannot compete with you, Jolene

The song had always reminded her of Dina. Not the appearance described, but the aura of Jolene, able to take whatever, whoever she wanted and lure them like a siren, gentle touches given and flirtatious beam wide. As Ellie grew up, her feelings for girls like Dina were perplexing, somewhere on the precarious scale of admiration and attraction, but she’d grown into it with the years, sinking into herself. She wasn’t a Jolene, and she would never deserve a Jolene. And she was content with that. There was no point in chasing the unattainable.

A tiny voice screamed that she’d had it, though, and she’d fucked it, but she ignored the voice and affixed to Dolly’s.

They returned. Ellie wasn’t asked to unload the trunk, so she sleuthed to her tent and peeked inside, spotting Cat asleep and Sissy curled beside. They looked so peaceful. So unlike themselves. Ellie mused about what she looked like while she slept, if the nightmares scrunched her face and made her ugly.

She removed her bag and knelt to it, fishing the peaches out and holding as many as she could in her tired hands, one in her left and two in her right. The hardest part would be finding the kids.

Abby’s prior words flashed briefly. Ellie shook her head to try and rid them, but they stayed, sticking like grime, glue, a shadow she couldn’t banish. Maybe the fruits’ sweetness would redeem Santa Barbara’s salt.

She exited her tent’s flaps and startled when a figure hidden in her blind spot to the left spoke, “Hey.” Lev’s voice, blatant when she turned to see him.

“Jesus Christ,” Ellie panted. She pressed a can to her jumping heart. “You scared me.”

“Sorry,” he apologized sheepishly, shifting his feet. “What are all the peaches for?”

“Right.” She offered one to him. A little smile perked her lips. “They’re for you and Steph. Snuck some from the warehouse. Do you know where she’s at?” They’d been talking a lot, probably since they were so close in age. Ellie couldn’t blame them. She’d glommed onto any teenager she and Joel ran into when they traveled.

He grinned wide. Since Ellie had seen him in the boat, his face had filled, less sickly and more jovial, friendly. Inviting. All the things she didn’t deserve. “Uh — the med tent. Thanks.” He took it from her. “I was hoping I could talk to you.”

Ellie’s brow furrowed. She and Lev were fine. They had some nice conversations, ones she thought were weirdly enlightening to be having with a fifteen year old, but they didn’t talk when they weren’t with Abby. She might have shivered at the thought of her finding out. Then again, fuck Abby, so. “What’s up?” Ellie readjusted so there was one can per hand.

“... In private?”

Her intrigue only piqued. “We can talk in my tent. Cat’s, like, dead asleep, and nothing’ll wake her up.” Ellie moved the entrance back for him. “Come on.”

They slunk in and Ellie sat in her nest of blankets, tugging her can open with her teeth. She searched her bag for a spoon. “Alright. Now what’s up?”

Lev sat beside her but kept some distance. He grabbed one of the pillows to hold to his chest, setting his chin atop and trying to flip the can’s tab with his nail, face ridged in concentration. “Not this thing.”

Light, she laughed, sat her own aside, and helped him, slipping her unrulier nail beneath to wedge and pull it. “There. You need a spoon?”

“Please.”

Ellie retrieved one, and there they sat, eating peaches in ginger, unbroken silence. Food had started coming easier to her. Small amounts didn’t make her as sick. She sought the canteen if they were serving something she enjoyed; however, that was few and far between.

Lev spoke first, swallowing before. “Do you know what’s up with Abby?”

Ellie answered around a mouthful, “Why the fuck would I know? I’d expect you to.”

“She’s being weird about it.” Lev frowned. “I was just wondering if she said something while you guys were out.”

“Just that she was nauseous. She’s sick or something, I dunno.”

He sighed, “I guess so. But she doesn’t seem sick any other way.”

“Probably just a stomach thing.” And that explanation hurled her back to when it’d left Dina’s mouth, Dina’s, who had been pregnant. Pregnant. Ellie almost spat her peaches out. She knew that Abby had the mere sign of it and a boyfriend, two fatal pointers. She didn’t say anything. She only ruminated on the utter terror that Abby could hypothetically have a life inside of her. But there was no reason to scare Lev, so she continued, somewhat hiding her shakiness, “Is that it, or… ?”

“I also wanted to ask about you.”

“Well, you’re in luck, ‘cause that’s my favorite topic.”

“Oh.” Lev smiled. He didn’t pick up on her sarcasm. “I mean… how did you start with Abby?”

“Fucking peachy.” She nastily laughed into her fruit, catching the pun too late. He chuckled with her. A soft moment. “Did she tell you what happened in Jackson?”

“Yeah.”

Ellie scoffed, “Her version, I’m sure.”

Lev looked at her like she’d grown two heads, and she realized the implication of her words, shoveling another peach slice instead of addressing it. “That’s the point. That is… legitimately why I’m asking.”

She’d never met such a mature fifteen year old. “I dunno what you want me to say. She hurt someone I cared about. I hurt people she cared about. It’s a fucked up situation, I don’t… I don’t know.”

“Why do I feel like you do know?”

“Because you’re reading into it.” Because you’re crazily observant. “You’re close to Abby, and I like you, man, but I can’t deal with her. I appreciate you trying. I see why you care. But it’s not gonna happen.”

“Maybe I’m not asking for her.” Lev moved his spoon in delicate circles around the can, contemplating something. “Maybe I’m asking for you. It could be nice to talk about it.”

Sighing, she sat her spoon and empty can aside and moved her knees to her chest, sitting her chin atop. Wrapping her arms around. It was secure, and she was so waifish that she folded with ease. “You think?” Sometimes, when she sat like that, she liked to pretend she was in utero, docile in the darkness. Her mom was a nurse. She would’ve known how to take care of her, what music to play. What soothed her reckless kicks.

“It can’t hurt.”

“Fine.” Ellie massaged small, grounding circles into her legs. “Guess you need context. I’m from Boston QZ. Grew up there, didn’t even see the outside until I was fourteen. My mom got sick and died. I never really knew her, but her friend raised me. Marlene. She was nice enough but kept me in military school, so I didn’t spend that much time with her, and I got into… a lot of shit at the academies, so I was suspended and moved around a lot.”

She glanced at Lev. He clung to every word, almost seeming to eat them for their worth.

“And I had… my friend. Riley.” Her throat always choked on that name. “We spent a lot of time together where we could, but since she was a Firefly, she had a lot of other shit to do around the QZ, and they wanted her to leave eventually. Before she did, though, we, like… spent the day together and whatever.” Ellie spoke in a mumble, half in the present and part in memory. Her first kiss. All rashness and fear, pining for reciprocation. But Lev didn’t need to know that. She hadn’t told anyone about her first kiss. Not Cat, not Dina. It would ruin the sacredness. “We ended up getting jumped by infected. She got bit. I got bit.”

Trembling, her breath shuddered. “She turned, I didn’t.” Ellie cleared her throat. “After about a day of not turning, I went to see Marlene. She knew I had to go to the Fireflies for tests. To make a cure. And Joel was supposed to transport me. It ended up being more than that, and I think it blindsided the both of us. Uh.” She scratched her nose, sniffed, tried to find words that encompassed every feeling in her skull. “When you go through fucked-up shit with someone, it feels like you’ve spent more time with them than you have. Y’know?”

Lev nodded. “Yeah.”

“Yeah.” She closed her eye. She knew Joel so well she could imagine his scent, his presence, and she didn’t want to desert him. Not again. So she kept her lids down and chin there, nestled into her jeans. “We went across the country. Eventually got to Salt Lake, and… they were gonna do surgery on me.” She stopped and clarified, “Abby’s dad was gonna do surgery on me. Joel ended up killing him and probably killed a fuckton of other people. That’s why Abby killed him, and… that’s why I hurt Abby’s friends.” Ellie glanced to the side, and Joel was gone, no trace, and she didn’t know how she wasn’t accustomed to his absence. “I know that this is fucking rich, but I do feel bad.” Nora. Mel. Nora’s beaten face, looking unlike herself after Ellie had finished. Mel’s pregnant stomach. Frequent stars of Ellie’s nightmares, flashes of recall that would come to her throughout the day. “But Abby’s not asking for that, especially not after Santa Barbara. You’re not asking for that.”

“I think it’s important that you do feel guilty.” Slowly, Lev laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and Ellie couldn’t bring herself to push it away. “It’ll let you grow.”

But Ellie was stuck in the dirt, buried six feet under, her roots’ tendrils curled and tethering, and she hadn’t blossomed in years. She wasn’t perennial nor anything of use. She was bones and crime scene evidence. “You’re, like, fifteen,” she grumbled, “you don’t need to worry about my emotional stuntedness. You’ve probably got enough shit on your plate.”

Lev shrugged. “I like helping where I can, and helping you will help Abby.”

“Abby hates that you even talk to me, but I’ll take your word for it.”

“She’s softer than she looks.” Lev retracted his hand.

Thinking of Abby’s obsidian and solidity, she snorted, “Again, I’ll have to take your word for it. How’d you guys meet, anyways?”

“Uh.” He chewed on a peach and seemed soured by it, swallowing like a bad pill. “We saved each other.”

Ellie figured she shouldn’t ask, but she nodded, taking Lev in for a moment. She’d hardly seen him before Phoenix. Both times, she’d regarded a certain, recent sadness folding into his dark irises, a tell of grief. Of hurt. But it had snuffed to wisdom and acceptance, something Ellie could never grasp herself. “You’re a pretty cool kid.”

He smiled, carefully leaving his spoon in his can. “What makes you say that?”

“I dunno, you’re just so sure of yourself. You’ve got your shit together. It’s admirable.” Ellie cocked her head. “If I was anywhere near that, like, cohesive at fifteen, I’d have taken over the world by now. Some of the things you’ve figured out I still have trouble with.”

“Like what?” Lev asked, face flushed with bashfulness. “I don’t see what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t know much about your past, and you don’t have to tell me anything, but this world? Sucks. And you’ve got a handle on it. Plus, you know yourself so well. When I was your age, my identity was super tumultuous. It still is sometimes.” She exhaled, having been speaking too fast, and mulled how to word it. “Gender and gayness and all that bullshit are pretty intertwined, so my gender was pretty fucking confusing for a while. Like, I knew I wasn’t a guy but not exactly a traditional chick, and that it wasn’t one thing or the other, but… I dunno. It’s the apocalypse. Doesn’t matter. People in the old world worried more about that stuff. But it’s nice to see that you’ve figured yourself out.”

She saw the sullen glint from the past return, gleaming fleetingly while he answered, “I’m glad it seems that way.”

The food found facilitated their packing the next morning, finally readying to leave Phoenix through dawn, and Ellie had never been sicker of the heat and aridity, having to wipe her brow. She didn’t have much to pack, only what she’d brought, but it was interjected by conversation from Cat and Steph who rallied in the same tent. Cat was smoking a cigarette, and Steph tried to force her can of peaches into her overflowing bag.

Ellie was enraptured by the process. She watched her press her clothes and supplies down to no avail, all of it coming back up. “You know, if you eat the peaches now, you won’t have to shove them in there.”

“I’m saving them” — Steph grunted in exertion, bandaged arm at work — “for later.”

Cat squinted. “Are your clothes folded or just stuffed in there?” A pause passed. “No judgment, but — ”

“They’re stuffed, and it’s fine,” she answered, rumbling with frustration, and she managed the zipper over the can. Its outline was visible against the fabric. Ellie pursed her lips so she didn’t chuckle and saw Cat do the same. “There.”

“Well.” Ellie stood and walked over to her bag, hoisting it, and it was heavier than her own, but she swung it around. “If you need to lay blunt force on an enemy via backpack, the can will make a great head.” She kept a steady grip on the handle, throwing it from hand to hand until Steph grabbed it back.

“Fuck you.”

“It was a compliment,” Ellie laughed. “Jesus, I can’t win.” She put her own backpack on, the weight merciful compared to Steph’s. “I gotta talk to Abby. I’ll be back in a sec.”

Cat blew smoke with her reply, “If she doesn’t kill you first. Why’re you talking to her?”

There was no delicate way to voice her deduction, at least not inconspicuous enough for Cat not to gossip to the whole camp about it, so she left without addressing it whatsoever. Abby and Luke’s tent was at the edge of camp across from the med tent and seeing it reminded her of something. She entered the med tent first and scanned it for Romi, and Ellie caught her sorting something into boxes.

“Hey,” she greeted, more awkward than polite. Their previous conversation was a harsh reminder in her mouth. Like glass. Embarrassing glass. You’re beautiful wasn’t the worst thing she’d said to a girl, but the reaction stung. “You ever get that mirror?”

Romi looked up at her and sent a small, courteous smile, and her hands flitted to another box that had been folded, undoing it and delving. “I think I put a small one in here.”

“Uh. Thanks.” On closer inspection of the tent, the gurneys were gone, likely packed into one of the vans. “Do you know where we’re going next?”

“We’re probably gonna stop tomorrow in New Mexico, either in Albuquerque or Santa Rosa. It depends on how far we get. Ah.” Romi pulled a small mirror out. It was circular, broken off some sort of adjustable makeup stand. She held it out to her. “Here. Do you need help taking your bandages off?”

“Nah.” Ellie angled the mirror to her face and was taken aback, even with the bandages covering the most grotesque sight. Her hair was mussed and her skin was sunburnt, red, reminiscent of Santa Barbara, and her freckles were more prominent beneath it. Her face was less gaunt. Padded with what she’d eaten. She held the mirror in her left hand while she undid the gauze in her right, and when she witnessed her reflection, she witnessed her shock, the clash of the new face with what she’d known. Her eye blew wide. Reflexively, she expected the other to broaden, but it didn’t move. It wasn’t there. Her eyelid was sewn shut below the leathered, rippling skin, the left side of her face discolored, similar to the shade her bitten fingers’ remnants had healed, and its shape was ambiguous, though like the bloater’s hand. Her lips parted in soft breath. “Oh.”

Romi took it before she could wallow, sulk longer, and Ellie knew that was probably best. She would’ve spent forever mourning the edges of her face cast by scorch, not Narcissus but grieving, trying to remember what she’d had. “I told you,” Romi muttered, gentle. “Do you want me to put some new bandages on?”

Between her agreement and the application, Ellie lost herself, not alert until Romi was finished and urging her out, saying something about needing to pack in peace, and she let her, walking to Abby’s tent in a daze. So disoriented, arms crossed tight over her chest, she bowed into the tent unpermitted and saw Abby cleaning her gun. She startled and glared up.

“Thanks for knocking.”

“It’s a tent.”

Abby rolled her eyes and corrected, “Thanks for pressing the flap in a couple of times.”

“You’re welcome.” It hit her that she should’ve drawn her plan further, a strictured blueprint lacking in the back of her mind, and improvisation was a dangerous game with Abby. Asking, hey, are you pregnant? wasn’t an option unless she wanted to get her skull caved in. Besides, she wasn’t sure if she could bring herself to pose it. She had to be more discrete. Smarter. And she settled, avoiding Abby’s eye like the plague, “Do you have a tampon?”

She blinked. “Are you being serious or stupid?”

“Why would I be stupid about asking for a tampon?” Ellie already regretted it. “Do you have one or not?”

“... Duh,” Abby said, hesitant. “If you need one, get some from Romi.”

“No, like… I don’t need one, I just. You know. Whatever.” She anxiously shifted from her heels to her tiptoes a few times, almost bouncing from her nerves. Jesus, she’d never loathed herself more, and that was a tight contest. “Do you get your period, or — ?”

She dropped a cartridge of ammunition. “You think I’m fucking pregnant?” Abby burst, and the whole camp probably heard her. Ellie would’ve fallen into laughter if her annoyance wasn’t so fraught. “Do you think that I am fucking pregnant?”

“I mean” — Ellie’s hands fell at her sides, not offering any punch to her debate — “I dunno, are you?”

One of Abby’s talents was a particular look she had, and Ellie had never seen anyone else master it. It was manufactured, crafted with such skill, and no name could do it justice. Ellie simply dubbed it the are you fucking stupid? eyebrow raise coupled with a sharp, “No. What made you even think that? That I have a boyfriend? Shit.”

“Not just that,” she defended, but it felt weak in her mouth. “You’ve also been nauseous, even Lev noticed — ”

“Okay, first of all: No. This conversation isn’t happening, because even if I was pregnant, if it could even be possible that I was pregnant, that wouldn’t be close to your business. Second of all: Stop talking to Lev.” She listed them off her fingers. “Third of all: I’m nauseous because being around you makes me nauseous. I’ve been so unbelievably fucking anxious since you came to camp. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I keep thinking about you. Wondering if I’m gonna get a goddamn shank in my throat.” Ellie could tell she wanted to say the third for days from how she continued, “It is exhausting to be around you, Ellie, bordering on fucking torture. And I thought I’d have this to myself, I thought I’d get to do good, but then you come along and upheave all of my shit. Everything I have, you just managed to put yourself in the center of it.”

She listened and immediately, deeply knew that no one could rile her like Abby, rile them like each other, and it was intimate, in a way. Ellie imitated, pitching her voice higher and mocking her accent, “Okay, first of all — ”

“Stop that.”

Huffing, she begrudgingly did, sitting on the tent floor. It was more barren than her own, blankets and pillows probably packed. “Okay,” she began in her own voice, listing, “first of all: It is my business since I have to deal with you all the fucking time. Second of all: Lev talked to me, I didn’t talk to him, and you’re delusional if you think you can control anything a fifteen year old does. Third of all: Same fucking here. I didn’t want to run into you, it’s not like I was seeking you out. I’m over it. I was originally headed for Mexico, you know that? That was how far I wanted to get from this bullshit. But I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”

Abby opened her mouth to speak, but Ellie held a hand up to stop her. Her words were flooding then. She couldn’t dam them. “Fourth of all: When I was talking to Lev, he said some shit that was enlightening, I guess. And I don’t wanna deal with this anymore. So I just wanted to say…” It was excruciating, clawing up her throat and leaving bloody splotches. “I wanted to say sorry. For Santa Barbara and for your friends. Sorry.” She briefly splayed her palms before clasping them. “Take it or leave it, doesn’t matter to me, but we’re stuck until Atlanta.”

The words sat between them, dangling unforgiven and unresolved, a palpable twining of their loss and hurt, and neither dismantled it. Ellie didn’t rescind her apology. Abby didn’t accept it.

“... Alright,” she muttered. “I guess I’m sorry, too.”

The bundle thickened and still, it hung heavy.

Ellie echoed, going to stand, “Alright. If that’s it, I’m gonna go.”

No goodbye was given.

That afternoon, Ellie, Abby, Lev, and Steph loaded their belongings into the van — more like Abby taking theirs and putting it in for them, really — , and the group didn’t pass without Ellie’s skepticism. They were an odd collection. No sign of Luke or Cat.

“Where’s lover boy?” she asked, removing her journal and pencil from her bag. She needed it for the drive there.

“Stop calling him that,” Abby replied. She would definitely keep calling him that. “He’s driving another van. None of the people here can drive for shit.”

Ellie zipped her bag and squared herself in front of Abby, forcing her face deadpan while she lied, “I can drive.”

She smiled, fucking smiled, and scoffed, “In your dreams.” Like they were friends. Like they could converse and have something without it breaking, withering in their palms, and she realized what she’d done when Ellie did, when Lev and Steph did, seeming equally confused.

Lev bounced back quicker than them. “I wanna sit in the back with Steph.”

“Uh” — Ellie looked at Abby — “I’m not sitting up front.”

“I don’t want to, either.”

Steph said at the same time, “Stop being a pussy, Elenor.”

The nickname hit her like a bullet, and she groaned so hard she threw her hair back, eye screwed shut. “I thought we were done with the Elenor shit.”

“It’s funny.”

When she looked back, she saw Lev and Steph hopping into the backseat before Ellie could sit there, and she’d never hated kids more in her life.

“Elenor?” Abby repeated, closing the trunk. “I didn’t know that was your full name.”

“It’s not, Steph’s foster was just annoying and called me it and it stuck — ”

“Get in the car, Elenor,” Abby interrupted her, and Ellie was left without a word in her dry, affronted mouth until she remembered the second missing addition.

“Well, where’s Cat, Abigail?”

Abby parroted the tone, “With Romi. Now get in the car.”

She didn’t have time to think about how weird that pairing was before she was being ushered inside, the engine’s thrum deep in her feet.

The AZ skyline is gorgeous. I just fucking wish it didn’t sunburn so bad. Or that I was looking at it through this dashboard. Lev and Steph have been asleep for hours, I think they wore themselves out. But Abby keeps sideyeing me while I write and it’s pissing me the fuck off and she just did it again.

Her sketch of dusk didn’t complement the sheer rage in how she wrote, handwriting suddenly skewing and lines darkening beneath pressure each time she seized tense, long eye contact with Abby. She’d never seen her gaze leave the road so much. “What the fuck are you looking at?” Ellie finally asked. “Do I have something on my face?”

All she answered was, “No.”

They didn’t see each other after that. She figured they tuned their respective presences out, and if Ellie sketched Abby in her margins, it wasn’t a big deal.

Her least favorite nightmare always made an appearance. Ellie could forget about its imminence. She could lose herself in the weeks, maybe think that it was over, that it’d left her alone, but it always clutched her sleep and wrung her for each nervous twitch, each sting of guilt she was worth. All she had in her skin and bones.

She walked the farmhouse, and it was like she spectated and acted the scene before her, in her eyes, in her sight. Perspectives flipping. She was aware but not, doing it but not, and the halving was agony. But part of her always expected it.

JJ was in her arms. He was swaddled and newborn, cheeks fat and healthy and so fucking happy, and it was alright for minutes. That was the worst. The bait. The idea that she could have him being pulled like a carrot on a string. Dina was never there, and Ellie thought it better that she wouldn’t have to see it. Those minutes ended.

He got heavy. Not older or bigger, appearance unchanging, but heavy.

Too heavy to hold until her arms almost gave out, and she had to lay him on the mattress, try to pick him up, but he only got denser, more impossible. Something she couldn’t bear no matter how much she wanted to. And he cried, fuck, he cried for her, wanting to be picked up and held as Ellie did, as everyone did, and she couldn’t give him that. She could never give him that.

The dream never had a concrete end. It just faded into his bawling and Ellie’s struggle.

She woke to a hand jostling her shoulder and a blaze of indignation when she realized the owner in her drowsiness, swatting it away. “Fuck off.”

Abby retracted her palm and rolled her eyes. Fucking pleased with herself. “You were having a nightmare — ”

“I could tell.” In the night, her words were cast darker, huskier in lethargy. Ellie didn’t know if they were still in Arizona. “You didn’t need to wake me up.”

“You were twitching.”

“I was fine,” Ellie spat. “Mind your fucking business.”

“Uh, what were your words?” Abby pretended to think, and Ellie wanted to sock her right in the jaw. “It is my business since I have to fucking deal with you all the time? Right?”

“Shut up,” she gritted out. “Don’t pretend to care when the nightmare is because of you.”

“I thought it was about your son.”

Ellie looked sharp at her, razoring so far to cut herself in her glance, and a primal disgust boiled in her chest. “How do you know that?”

She could tell that Abby knew it was the wrong thing to mention, but she didn’t back down. “You talked in your sleep. Mentioned him in your journal.”

“Yeah, well, don’t mention him. Ever.”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

“But whatever happened with him is not my fault — ”

The first thing she could grasp, the first thing she could tug, Ellie grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it, relishing Abby’s surprised noise and the van’s swerve. “Shut up, or I will crash this van.”

“Shit — !” Abby struggled to get them back on route, and it was the first time Ellie had seen her panic at the wheel. “What the actual fuck is wrong with you, you fucking psycho?”

“Psycho?” Ellie repeated. “You think I’m a psycho?”

“What other word is there?”

“I dunno, asshole — ”

“Stop being a psycho asshole!”

“Stop being nosy!”

Steph shouted from the backseat, “Shut up!” It stopped their arguing in an instant. “We’re trying to sleep.”

“Uh,” Abby attempted. She cleared her throat and glanced at Ellie.

Ellie looked back to the road. Abby could take the fall, for all she cared.

And she did, mumbling, “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

With some rather creative curses, Ellie watched Steph curl into her seat in the rearview mirror, and she pulled her feet into her own to tug her knees close. Phoenix was absent outside her window. It was a smaller town, and it was apparent that it’d been in shoddy conditions even before the apocalypse hit. “Where are we?”

“New Mexico. I don’t know what town.”

“How long until we stop?”

“Probably tomorrow afternoon.”

Ellie noticed a yawn burgeoning Abby’s throat but said nothing. It wasn’t like either of them got much sleep. “What if I have to piss?” Not genuine. Pointed to stamp her nerves.

She savored Abby’s face wrinkling. “Are you serious?”

“I'm only human.”

“Well, I can tell you’re joking, so no, we’re not stopping.”

“Damn.” Ellie reached for the radio. “You really just want me to piss myself.” She slapped the panel a few times, but that didn't help her bleak situation, trying to figure out which button would play the CD.

“Please don’t — oh my god, here.” Abby adjusted the radio for her, and the chorus of “I Will Always Love You” sounded. “... You actually like this music?”

Ellie leaned her temple on the window and thought. “I’ve had some time to get used to it.” And no matter their talk, deceptively normal, it would always circle back to what Abby had taken.

Chapter Text

Ellie jolted when the van braked. She nearly flew, merely kept idle by her seatbelt, which she hadn’t fastened herself. Groggy, suspicious, she glanced at Abby, rubbing her eye. She was backdropped by the New Mexican morning, profile in red and pink, and her grip was tight on the wheel, jaw wired harsher. Something had stopped them. But Ellie needn’t look to the road to tell. She could see it in how Abby’s brow furrowed, inconvenienced and stubborn.

When she turned her gaze to the asphalt, however, she caught sight of rubble on the road. It was a concoction of dented fenders circling and rotting cadavers within, infected corpses stripped of skin and showing skeleton, still. Cordyceps sprouted. The hats were behemoth, ascending upward and curling at the stem. Spores flittered, surrounding the mess. They were at a fair distance. It didn’t quite reach them down the suburban street.

“The fuck?” Ellie grumbled, squinting. She heard the following cars stop behind them, the route halted. “What is that?”

“Infected grave.” Abby sounded certain. She always did.

Various confused, tired grunts rang throughout the van, Lev and Steph woken and drowsy. Ellie was first to ask, “What?”

“A mass grave,” she explained, “but for infected.”

“Why?” Steph questioned, yawning. She peeked from behind the front seats to get a closer look, leaning between the passenger and driver’s sides. “Gross.”

“It’s to destroy the corpses before other infected can smell them. They attract each other. And the metal and stuff is to keep the fire from spreading.” She swallowed. “We had to do it a lot in Seattle. I don’t think this one got around to getting burned, though.”

Ellie’s mouth was agape with thorough, deep disgust. “Imagine the fucking smell, jeez...”

Abby huffed. “I don’t have to imagine.” She tugged the key from the ignition, strapped a gas mask on, and stepped out, treading the cracked pavement and crouching at the metal precipice. Doing god knows what.

Ellie scoffed.

“The fungus is so big,” Lev whispered.

Ellie pivoted her attention from Abby to Lev, shifting in her seat. “You’ve never seen one of these?”

“I’ve seen them when they’re burnt, but… not like this.”

Steph’s lips parted, brown eyes graying stricken, and her confoundment was contagious, coloring Ellie’s worry as she kept her eye on her, waiting for her to speak. “... Are the Cordyceps still growing? ‘Cause they’re making spores.”

Oh, fuck. “Oh, fuck — ” Ellie whirled. The grave shrieked and moved in a shapeless heap as if cued, a grappling hand jutting from the top, a leg kicking wildly from its left. It didn’t lunge forward for Abby, though, when she staggered from. It was unable to move, useless. It couldn’t form anything but pained screams, molded from dozens of mouths, bodies, and futile struggles from its jutting parts.

Lev called, “Abby!”

“She’s fine, Lev, it can’t move — ” Ellie was cut when she heard him clasping his gas mask. She contorted over the driver’s seat and flicked the back’s locks on, barely in time. She caught Lev’s hand on the door in the rearview mirror. “Jesus.”

Her patience was strung taut. Gritting her teeth, Ellie looked at Abby, and there was a supple temptation to lay it on the horn to grab her attention. She seemed frozen. Motionless. Her posture was hunched with defensiveness, flyaway hairs wild against her mask’s material; they were the most frenzied thing about her, wisping with the spores on her unmoving stance. It was in stark contrast to an infected trampling from between the little lining houses, nails flinging and mouth wide with spit and rot.

“Let me out!” Lev pleaded, tugging at the door.

For him, only for him, Ellie slung her bag over her shoulder, unholstered her pistol, and stepped out of the van, feet frenzied, sprinting to the scene. As she raised her gun, her aim was off as she moved, and the infected was getting closer to Abby.

Abby finally registered that it was approaching and turned to it, shocked, and clambered for her weapon, but Ellie shot at it before she could. The first bullet missed. The second honed on its upper neck, splintering its brainstem. The infected toppled.

She ran to Abby, and possessed by exasperation, resentment deep in her bones, knocked her upside the head with the heel of her free hand. “Are you stupid? Oh, gee, the corpses attract other infected, let me just — ”

Abby shoved Ellie by her shoulder. “I was seeing if I could get a Cordyceps sample, and if this is attracting them, god knows what you going fucking Waco did — ”

“What the fuck is a Waco?”

Steph called from a rolled window, “Get in the car!” She was frantic and, Ellie found, wounded, her voice crackling.

Ellie’s mouth parted in protest until she turned to the van and noticed the sheer volume of infected approaching in her periphery. There were at least a dozen at an underestimation. Before she could render it, Abby grasped her upper arm and dragged her with ease to the jeep, almost her entire hand clasping around the waif limb, and she might have stared at its proximity if it didn’t bruise, imprinted in her skin.

“Jesus Christ — ” Elle gritted and tore her arm from Abby’s grip, cradling it while they ran. “It’s not like I’m fucking going anywhere.”

“You’re too slow!”

Pointedly, Ellie pushed forward, lither and quicker than Abby. “Fuck you!” She reached the van first, and advantaged, she slid into the driver’s side and twisted the keys in the ignition, feeling the engine rev beneath her soles. Inspecting, she craned her neck to look beneath the dashboard at the pedals. She stamped the left, and the van didn’t move. Brakes. So the right was —

“You are not driving,” Abby said, as she clambered into the passenger side, tugging her mask off.

All Ellie did in response was take a u-turn and follow the other deserting cars, drift in her steer and thrumming below her hands. In the rearview mirror, she saw Steph and Lev grasping the grab handles.

“I am not that bad of a driver.”

She swerved at the end of the street and hit a trash can, its bags spilling on the asphalt.

Abby jutted, “Ellie.”

“I know.” Brows furrowed, she turned to avoid the mess in the road, eye on the infected in her exterior mirror. In the rearview, Steph’s eyes were saucers.

“No, Ellie — ”

“Abby, can you hop off my — ”

“You didn’t wear a mask.”

Her hands went on autopilot for a second as her brain caught up to that implication. “Spores don’t affect me.”

Abby reached and took the wheel out of her hand, the whole van briefly jerking, and Ellie loathed that she was a better driver from the fucking passenger seat. “Steph saw you without a mask,” Abby clarified. “Everyone did.”

Ellie ran her thumb over the wheel, accidentally brushing Abby’s hand, and she moved it lower to avoid her, to fidget, to aid her thinking in some kind of response, but she knew nothing would land quite right. “I’m immune,” she settled, and those two words carried the weight of the world.

Steph replied, “Okay.” She was wrecked and scared and everything Riley had been, Marlene had been, Tess and Joel and Dina and Cat all not wanting to believe such a thing rested in her, a Cordyceps over her brain. “I mean. Okay.”

“She really is,” Lev assured her.

“It’s not that I don’t believe her, I just…,” she trailed and rested her temple against the window, hers steady where Lev’s was shattered from Ellie’s previous bullets. “Nothing. Nevermind.” Many more seconds passed. “Awesome.”

Ellie felt like ash from the end of the world’s fire.

While she drove, Abby allowing her the wheel, Ellie eyed the cars in front of them for any sense of direction, but they just seemed to be going in circles until they lost the infected tailing them. Once they were secluded, though, the van Luke was driving abruptly pulled in front of them, blocking the middle of the street. The white pickets didn’t stop him.

Ellie hit the brake just in time. “Fuck,” she cursed as her body flung forward, seatbelt forlorn. Her chest bumped the steering wheel. “Why the fuck did he stop?”

Her question was answered when she saw the jeep’s passengers exit with guns in their hands and sour expressions.

“Shit.” Abby undid her seatbelt and left the van, slamming the door behind her and holding a defensive hand while she approached the oncoming group.

Steph and Lev bristled in the back, and Ellie caught Steph pulling her knife from the corner of her eye.

Fortunately, Ellie didn’t need to descend her window as she’d shot one of the backseat’s out, allowing her to eavesdrop keenly on Abby’s words.

“She’s not infected.” She said it like a curse, a bitter taste in her mouth that killed her to speak. Ellie heard that tone in herself, her head, I’m not infected. Spat. “We need her.”

Luke lowered his pistol when Abby approached. “She breathed spores. A lot of them.” He glanced her way and returned his gaze, lowering his voice to mouth something. Ellie read his lips, “And what do you care, anyway?” He was right. Abby would’ve killed her by then if she wasn’t of use. Ellie couldn’t say Abby wouldn’t deserve that, at least.

The other Fireflies gave their agreement, from diplomatic to sneers, one going so far as to comment with crooked teeth, “One less ration to give.”

Abby spoke over all of them, “She’s immune.”

It was funny how not infected carried such a heavy burden yet immune was something easier, because the latter could save them all. She watched the reckoning, the encompassment flood all their faces as they contemplated how she could save them, could martyr herself. And Ellie hated it. Hated the sympathy and knew that it was more earned when she was a child, a poor girl to be sacrificed for the greater good. Now, she was grown, meat and bones, and she was nothing but dura mater between the apocalypse and possible world peace. Not to give herself too much credit.

Of all the eyes on her, Luke’s cut deepest, puzzled and bright blue until he looked back to Abby. “Is she the one from Salt Lake?” He swallowed. “The one your dad…?”

“Yes,” Abby snipped the question short. At the mere mention of her dad, she glanced down at her hands and began picking her nails like a nervous teenager. “We’re taking her to Atlanta so they can make a vaccine.”

She couldn’t withstand any more. Ellie left the driver’s seat, the door crashing to the van in a punctuating snap. It arrested the crowd’s attention. The barrels of their guns, pointed at her, appraising for any signs of infection. Ironically, she thought, Either way, the whole world wants me dead. She raised her hands, red and molded pacifist. “Can you stop talking about me like I’m not there? ‘cause if you have questions, I’m a great fucking interviewee.”

Yet none looked at her for her speaking but Abby. Ellie could tell she listened to each word. Even if it was only to scoff at and counterclaim. “Who gives a shit about what she’s saying? Why wouldn’t you believe me?” Pertinent, she gestured to herself. “I’m not trying to cause an outbreak in camp.”

The more credible of the two, the surrounding throng considered her words, and some holstered their guns, murmuring to one another. They seeped their vitriol when Ellie was in the car yet none when she was in their line of fire.

A ginger, sunburnt girl — Ellie thought her name was Terra — suggested, “Let’s just keep an eye on her for a few hours. People usually turn within a few or show symptoms, at least.”

“It’s been around an hour already,” Ellie argued, “and I’m not even coughing. Spores usually turn people faster than bites, and I was in there for ages. I’m fine.”

They couldn’t disprove it, and their faces scrunched.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, familiar and with long fingers. She turned to see Cat having exited the other car and urging her to back down. “You’ve had your scene.”

“They’re pointing fucking guns at me — ”

“And do you think acting like an ass is gonna help?” Cat challenged. Blunt and risky, she was never stupid, never creating disproportionate risk without reward, so she addressed the group diplomatically, “I’ll keep an eye on her in the backseat.” Quiet, just for them, she muttered, “Get in the car if you don’t wanna eat bullets.”

Her protest fell in her throat while she was dragged to it. It had eight seats in three rows, all occupied except for one in the back, the remaining space crowded by luggage that hadn’t fit in the trunk and Sissy sprawled on the floor. Romi had been driving, grip clenched on the wheel and eyes tight on Ellie’s frame when they climbed in, shuffling to the rear to saddle beside one another, shoving the items there into the floor so they both could fit and maneuver around Sissy. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth in excited breaths.

“You can sit in my lap, if you want,” Cat teased Ellie.

She shot her a dead look.

“You let them see,” Romi began, turning her key in the ignition, “that’s not ideal, Ellie.”

She sagged into her seat, a child with her hand in the cookie jar. “Was the plan to keep it secret the whole way to Atlanta with fucking… I dunno, secret service around me the entire time?”

Many in the car glanced at her. And she began to regret her tone, her curse. The disrespect in her voice directed at someone who could make her life very, very hard, someone with the same authoritative cadence as Dina. Romi, however, didn’t retort. All she did was furrow her brows and ask, “Secret service?”

“Abby.”

Cat choked a laugh into her hand.

“Oh.” Romi frowned and shifted the stick to drive, honking her horn to get everyone’s attention. They didn’t need any other signal to pile into their vehicles. “Again, I know you two have history, but I don’t trust anyone else to do the job right. We can’t sell your importance too short.” Romi used we a lot like the group was at the center of her chest. “Abby is responsible and intelligent and cares.”

“Not about me.”

“Not about you,” Romi agreed, “but about the cause. And that’s what matters, right?”

A fucking emblem. Not a soul. But that aforementioned cadence rang clear, and Ellie nodded. When she laid her head against the window, surveying the smudges, she caught Abby’s eye across the street. They held the stare for a few seconds until it cut, both of them veering their gaze. Ellie stared at the back of the middle seats. Abby was harsher than any of her links in a long chain, electrifying her skin and boiling her blood with a mere look, and she felt herself begin to rust, gritting, each time their eyes latched.

Per Romi’s prediction, they stopped in Santa Rosa. They were at its edge in a rotten inn’s parking lot, a tall sign reading motel with an arrow pointing to the place. It’d been a former neon in blearing red, but it no longer flickered, the beating afternoon sun was its sole light.

“We’ll stop here for the day,” Romi decided, unsheathing her key. The car’s purl went silent. “We need to discuss some things.”

Ellie wanted to curl into a ball at those words, but she followed Cat out of the car, standing awkwardly as the rest grabbed their luggage. Hers was in Abby’s ride. She waited, watching her pull into a parking space — perfectly within its worn lines — , and approached the trunk when she halted completely. It wasn’t unlocked. “I need my bag!” She knocked on the metal to grab Abby’s attention.

She watched her from the back window, rapt, and saw Abby process the knock, the request, have time to decide her course of action, and land on burying her face in her hands, forehead against the top of the wheel. Relinquishing one hand from her face, she handed the keys to Steph and mouthed something.

Ellie couldn’t decipher it, especially beyond trying to comprehend where Abby got her fucking gall from.

Steph got out of the car, twirling the key ring around her finger, and shoved it into the trunk’s lock upside down, attempting to turn it. “The fuck?” she mumbled. “Stupid thing…” It took her a few seconds to figure it out.

“Have you never used a key before?”

“This one is weird.” When it popped open, she lifted it, the roof bobbing slightly. Steph’s bag was on top, and she slung it over her shoulder. “I don’t know where your stuff is.”

Ellie moved beside her and pawed through everything clustered, all of it pressed far too tight for safekeeping. She sat burlap sack after backpack out, some of it laden with food, some with supplies, and it took her burrowing beneath it all to find her own. Abby had crammed it to the bottom of it all, which had surely taken effort.

“You’re an asshole,” Ellie muttered as she grabbed it.

“What did I do?” Steph questioned, shocked.

“Not you.” Ellie banged on the side of the van again. “Romi wants to talk to us!”

She swore she saw Abby sink further for many seconds until she got out, door slamming in her wake and expression pinched. “What is it?”

Ellie shrugged, more inclined to persecute than acknowledge. “You didn’t have to bury my bag like a fucking body.”

Abby didn’t reply, grabbing her belongings. Lev trailed behind and retrieved his own.

“Guys,” he pleaded, “come on.”

“She’s being immature,” Ellie retorted.

Abby snapped, “Why are you assuming I did it on purpose?”

“‘cause you’re the one who loaded our stuff in — ”

“I had to fit a lot — ”

Across the parking lot, Romi stood a fair length from the thickening Fireflies and called, “Everybody over here!”

The response was thorough. Everyone shuffled to her, lemmings, and Ellie was no better because from that angle, the sun hitting her face just right, hair tugged into a chignon, she resembled Dina so much it made her want to cry or crawl into a hole or both. She traipsed to the back of the crowd and ignored the glances she drew.

Once they were all gathered, Romi cleared her throat and spoke, “As you’ve figured out, Ellie is immune. She was the subject they were going to make the vaccine from in Salt Lake City years ago. Now” — she lifted a hand to quell the muttering crowd — “we are taking her to Atlanta so they can attempt to make another one. She’s fully on board and — ”

“Atlanta is a fucking mess!” someone called out. It didn’t soothe Ellie’s anxieties.

People snickered, and behind her, Ellie heard Abby sigh. She moved so they were standing next to each other, level, and as she loathed the closeness, she figured she’d hate a knife in her back more. She looked her up and down. While Romi spoke, she could tell they were both majorly tuning her out, sizing one another up.

Abby whispered, a hiss, “You are so lucky we’re in a crowd right now.”

“If you’re gonna smack the shit out of me,” Ellie taunted, “do it.”

“It only pisses me off because you assume — ”

Romi raised her voice, “Ladies. Please.”

Abby shot a glare that rivaled cyanide before turning back to Romi.

“As I was saying,” she continued, “I want a few people to come with me to inspect the infected we saw. The large one. I think there’s something valuable to be learned from it, especially with Cordyceps samples of that size. And, if we’re assuming the infected were dead when they were piled there… it could mean something different for how Cordyceps infects and maneuvers its hosts.”

Practically pouncing on the opportunity, Abby raised her hand, “I’ll go.”

Ellie thought she seemed hungry. But not in the ravenous, desperate way she was acquainted with. She didn’t want to tear meat off the bone, speaking like she had flesh in her mouth, but she wanted to absorb as much as she could. A poster child for the sentiment to never stop learning that’d been knocked into her brain at school when they weren’t preaching unyielding loyalty to the feds. Match made in heaven, Ellie mused.

Romi nodded and scanned the crowd. Ellie tried to make herself seem small, but those dark eyes still landed and stuck on her, consideration in how she chewed her cheek. “Ellie can come with us. She could be useful.”

She didn’t listen as Romi handpicked whoever else would tag along, caring far more for getting the first pick of a motel room than whatever asshole she’d be stuck with on their most likely useless escapade. The doctors had tried everything. Every experiment, multiple species, branded on her when she read their files at the hospital. Their desperation was palpable in frantic scribbling and empty cages where infected had been kept. The records there showed which nurses got bit, hypotheses that had never been brought to fruition. And she was exhausted from being one of the latter.

Licking her lips, Ellie scoped the place for the closest room and pried its unlocked window open, pretending not to hear the mumbles that followed.

It took me years to relearn how to draw eyes. I can’t not notice them now.

Ellie couldn’t muster poetry in her dirty motel bed, her previous attempts marked out, and her page was instead steeped in gazes. Some were coupled with thick eyebrows, a few raised but most bunched in disapproval. Long lashes fenced a couple, clumsy and varying in their length, their density. Lopsided. When she made mistakes, she tended to try and loop them into her art, discontent with the concept of killing her darlings. Many times, though, it was only a mess of odd blots. There was only one set of eyes she drew perfectly from memory, and they stared at her from each sector of the page, jotted many times.

No color was needed to envision the brownish, blueish, hazelish filling the whites for Abby’s irises. Her angled brows, her cynicism smattered Ellie’s margins like a chorus she couldn’t shake off, some old lyrics glued to her instincts. Before Arizona, they’d only seen each other the times Ellie could count on her fingers — more said, as she only had eight then.

The lodge. Her cheek had been pressed to the cold floor by Nora and Leah, dead, so dead, one at her hands and the other only having been seen later in a polaroid picture. Leah had looked so alive in it, playful and coy, she’d been alive, hands hard on Ellie’s body. Memory ghosting her skin. Joel’s blood and brains — she wanted to gag — ghosting the floor even though Ellie had begged her not to.

The theater. Since that day, Ellie had pondered the why of Abby’s motives, leaving her coughing, bones shattered in her arm. Bruises forming on her throat. She’d stabbed her then, felt the flesh tear in her thigh. And she’d begged, pleaded, again, that time for Dina. Dina, who she’d loved. Dina, whose eyes were sketched once, full and pitch and warm. Dina, who she didn’t deserve and who she’d left.

The beach, which she would prefer not to think of.

Three times she’d seen Abby’s eyes before Arizona, and that did not detract from how they seeped into her skin. Ellie paused her pencil over her paper, blinking a couple of times, and her chest cinched. The world paused in her thinking. Although most depictions strewn were harsh and typical, some were softer. The way she looked at Lev.

The window flung open with Steph and night; it’d become dark while she was sketching. “You’re a hermit,” Steph commented, collapsing into the room’s second bed.

There were two, both modestly sized and spaced from one another. An old, unoperational television was mounted on the wall. The place reeked of rot, but Ellie was certain she’d become nose blind in her time spent.

“I’d rather be a hermit than have my head chopped off,” Ellie grumbled, “they probably want to mount it on a pike.”

“You think you’re so important, don’t you?” Steph began unpacking her things for the night.

She frowned. “Trust me, I’d give anything for it not to be true. And I don’t blame them for resenting me. I would, too.” I already do.

Steph shot her an odd look. “Why?”

“‘cause I didn’t do anything to deserve being immune. It was pure coincidence. And… I got a lot of fucking people killed over it.” The second half of her sentence was mostly to herself.

“How?” she pried, sitting on the foot of her bed with canned peaches and a plastic fork. Ellie was surprised she hadn’t eaten them already.

“Do you ever stop asking questions?”

“I’ll stop when you stop being so moody.”

That was fair. Fairer than fair. Exhaling deeply, Ellie closed her journal and sat it with her pencil on the nightstand, laying back to take in the ceiling. It was falling apart. A mirror of her own barely glued pieces. She cracked her knuckles and thought of how to word it. “Have you heard of Joel?”

“Sort of.” She heard the clank of her spoon on the can. “Maria talked about him sometimes. Said you’d… I dunno. Changed since he died. And I sort of assumed that you guys were close.”

“Yeah.” So fucking close. “We were closest when they were gonna make the cure in Salt Lake, I guess.” No bad blood. No lies, no secrecy. Just the comfort of his scent when he embraced her, winter whirling around them, the air reeking of smoke and blood. “And making the cure at that point would have ended up hurting me, so he… stopped them.”

Ellie knew Steph picked up the undertone when she let out a little, “Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s messed up.” She swallowed. “If I were a Firefly, I’d be pissed at me, too. So going to Atlanta is what I owe them.” It was the sole thing that could give her peace.

In her periphery, she saw Steph set her peaches aside and turn to wholly look at her, quizzical. “Will it hurt you now?”

A lie nestled on the tip of her tongue. It yearned to be released, and she knew Steph noticed her hesitance. She recalled the ache in her chest from Joel’s false words. How trying to shield her had only bred bitterness crammed in her lungs. So she answered, simple and true, “Maybe.”

That seemed good enough for her. It was wounding, the possibility of what might come frightful, lulling her nail to her lip. Pulling skin. But Ellie could tell she appreciated the bluntness.

Steph fell asleep, breaths soft and churning slight in her bed, but Ellie was left, grimly conscious and blinking at the dark, chasmed ceiling. She reached a hand up a few times like she could touch it. Could fix it. She would have looked insane to any onlooker. Eventually, Ellie abandoned sleep and moved upright, pawing through her bag for a repurposed tin. Its former inhabitant was caramels. Now, there were a few thin, rolled blunts skillfully done by Cat. No one could blame her for craving it, and if they tried, she’d blow the smoke right into their face.

She plucked her lighter and a joint out, checked that her pistol was strapped to her thigh, her blade in her back pocket, and she slid out of the cracked window in the corner of the room, landing on her feet. The outside was barren. Santa Rosa was a comparatively small town, so there weren’t overwhelming amounts of infected. She was more cautious about the humans than anything, with their nasty jeers and pointed guns.

Ellie lit her joint as she walked and took the first drag, eye slightly rolling in the sheer relief it brought. It burned her lungs, scathing like little embers, a firecracker in her chest, and she exhaled the smoke against the charcoal sky, watching it dissipate. Her lips curled in a tiny smile. She hadn’t smoked in many weeks, so her tolerance was low. In lieu of that, she elected to take her smoke patiently, leaning against the near wall of the motel to savor its earthy taste and comforting raze. She was at the very edge. It was the perfect position to overhear the conversation around the corner.

“Do you know the click a gun makes when it’s out of bullets?” Abby asked. “That’s how my brain sounds all the time.”

Luke laughed. It was a bright noise, windchimes in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t mocking. Accepting, if somewhat amused. Empathizing. The things that could surely never be Abby’s. The things that could never be Ellie’s.

She felt that burrowed, crawling feeling again, green as the rolled herb between her fingers. She didn’t know what Abby had done to deserve companionship, how she’d hidden the darkest parts of herself. Or changed them. Just that it seemed like an insurmountable task.

“What?” Abby said, but she was chuckling too. “I’m serious.”

“I know you’re serious, that’s why your delivery was so funny — ow, Abs!”

Ellie was fairly certain it was only a punch to the shoulder. Fairly. She toked again, wholly eavesdropping.

Abby’s amusement tapered when she spoke, “But, really… I feel like I’m going crazy. Like, every single time I turn around, there’s Ellie. I’m trying to clean my pistol, there’s Ellie. I just — I can’t stop thinking about her. And every single time I try to think of something else, it always loops back to her in some… way, or what she did.”

Luke hummed. “I thought you said your brain was haywire all the time, though?”

“Yeah, but.” Her voice lowered to a mumble. “It’s gotten worse.”

Ellie thought that was rich. So rich. It wasn’t like Abby didn’t keep her up at night. She resisted the urge to huff, settling on another drag. Her vision was dulled to a pleasant buzz, things more of the whole picture than specific, not focusing on one certain object. It was nice. Not having to hone in. Her bones felt comfortably jellied, slack while she leaned further into the motel. She wanted to sit but knew the concrete would be freezing on her.

“Abs,” he said, ginger, “c’mere.”

She didn’t want to imagine their position. Her hearing the slight shuffle, pressing of bodies, was more than enough.

He continued, “You’ve dealt with so much already and come out the other side. You can’t let her take this away from you.”

“It sounds so easy when you say it like that. Like it’s just her.” Silence filled the gap for a moment. “But part of it is my guilt. My shit.”

“That means you’re sorry, and that’s more than she can say — ”

“Why are you even with me?”

Abby’s words cut so deep Ellie could practically feel them slice through the air, wedging between them like a schismed cliff. A shift of skin rang again. Smoke billowed from her parted lips. Fuck, she was too high to hear that conversation.

“... Because I love you?” He said it like the most obvious thing in the world. Like salve.

But it was salt in a wound, drawing a sigh from Abby. “You don’t realize how — how bad this shit is gonna get, Luke. As long as she’s here, I’m not… I don’t know if I can be the bigger person. Or even a fucking person at all.”

“Just ignore her.”

“I would if I could, but Romi wants me to keep tabs on her per the fucking hour, ‘cause if she gets killed off before Atlanta, we’re screwed.”

“Ask if she can be watched after by someone else, I don’t know, but Abs — ”

“What?” she snapped. That was the only word for it. Her voice cracked, jutting like a finial, tight as a braid.

Neither of them said a word aloud, but Ellie saw their expressions in her mind’s eye: Pinched and considering, hurt to the bone. She recalled when those looks had become more common by the end of her and Dina’s relationship, a frequent ending to their evenings, a lance through their peaceful nights.

“I’m gonna go to bed,” he finally decided, more even than she had expected. “You’ll feel better if you get some rest.”

“Can’t sleep.” Ellie could tell she regretted it. “It’s fine. Just… I’m gonna….” Abby’s footfalls were clear on the pavement, an indication of her exit. “I’m gonna take a walk.”

She heard Luke walk in the opposite direction, and Ellie melted into the hard surface, hardly realizing she’d slipped to sit with her blunt in hand. The sidewalk was just as rigid as she’d expected, and she winced. “Fuck.”

“You’re joking,” Abby deadpanned.

Through the high, Ellie looked at her. She’d turned the corner and loomed over Ellie, standing stiff. Stiffer than usual, which was a feat. She’d changed into a tank and sweats, similar to what she’d donned in Seattle and Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara. Canines in her skin. Burning saltwater. The flume of anxiety in her ears, that high, tinny noise resonating throughout their brawl, accompanying the splatter of blood across her skin. How she’d been so lost, knees curled to her chest as she mourned her fingers, mourned Joel, that she’d forgotten to pat for her knife. Subconscious, she felt her free hand’s nails dig into the pavement’s firmness, searching for something in its cracks. There was nothing.

Her searing inhales quickened, and she dropped her joint. Its ash tainted the ground. “Shit.” Either she couldn’t breathe or couldn’t stop, too little air or not enough. “Fuck. Fuck.” She felt the edge of her pointer’s nail bend, and she made a small, involuntary noise of discomfort through her pants, tugging it away. Instead, she laid it on her chest. Tried to press and regulate it. Tried to not smell salt, feel waves pooled at her legs.

“Ellie,” Abby muttered, “you’re high.”

Spearing it all, Abby’s dead voice was a shock to her system for many, many seconds. Until she laughed. It was fleeting and sardonic, but she did it. “Lemme guess, I’ve also got one eye?”

She smelled the beach’s scent, the musk of cadavers tied to the pillars. It was rotten and alluring, shrouding her senses in a storm. But through it, she’d seen Joel, and he spurred her, a catalyst. She’d wrestled her to the water. Seen her face blurry beneath it, felt her teeth in her knuckles, close as anyone had ever dug to her bones, and when she finally pressed her for good, could no longer see her eyes. She knew there was salt beneath her lids. And she knew Joel would have pulled her off. So she’d stopped.

“Do you need me to get someone?”

“No,” Ellie managed. “No, Jesus.”

Soothing herself, she stroked her hands up and down her upper arms, the fabric of her tee brushing her skin, texture grounding. She didn’t realize her knees were strung to her chest, tied tight until she felt them against her chin. The outside was still. Eerie in comparison to how she’d lived in Jackson, always hearing some wild, drunk neighbor or yowling feral cat. Or on the farm, where the bullfrogs thrived and the weather pelted off their roof like a symphony.

“How long were you eavesdropping?” Abby asked.

“I wasn’t… eavesdropping,” Ellie grumbled. “I was smoking and I heard you guys.” Santa Barbara’s ocean was gone, only leaving the aftertaste in her mouth, but she still smelled it. She scratched her nose. “Maybe you could’ve had that conversation in your room.”

Abby scoffed, “Maybe you could’ve let us know you were there.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She looked at her joint and frowned at its disheveled state, processing it slowly. Or maybe it just felt slow. “Shit.”

“You didn’t strike me as a smoker,” Abby commented.

Ellie squinted up at her. “Do I not have the look?”

“I don’t know. You just… don’t.” Abby shrugged. Her voice had picked up in that way it did, searching while she talked, clinging onto things to steer the subject away from their tense footing. “I’ve never smoked, so I wouldn’t know.”

“Of course you haven’t smoked.” Ellie repressed her curling lips.

“Do I not have the look?” Abby echoed.

“Not at all. And you’re, like, a goody two-shoes. You’d probably go on about how bad it is for your lungs, and — ”

“It is bad for your lungs.”

“Called it.” She traced her finger in the ash, fascinated by how it spread and stained the sidewalk. “That’s just tobacco. Weed isn’t bad for your lungs.”

“Don’t tell me you actually believe that.”

“It’s true.”

“Where do you think the burnt rolling papers go? Or the resin from the bowl?”

“You’re saying words.” She was more enthralled by her blunt’s remains than their conversation.

“It sticks to the sides of your lungs.”

“Oh my god.”

“And I’m not a goody two-shoes,” she added, and Ellie knew she wouldn’t be able to resist tacking that disclaimer on.

“Uh, tell that to Romi.”

Abby scoffed, “It’s not that I have to be told what to do. I just like… order. It makes things easier for everybody.”

Ellie hummed, not quite believing her. Without direction, Abby tended to have watchful eyes for it, a moth without a lantern. And if organization made things easier for everybody, Ellie didn’t want to consider herself part of that population. It was stifling to be folded in a box and deployed when needed if that wasn’t of her choosing. If it wasn’t for the greater good. She looked up at her. “Is that what you told yourself when you were with the Wolves?”

She blinked many, many times, and she could tell she’d pissed her off. Not on the surface level of annoyance nor striking her dignity, raising affront, but to her core. Abby’s face was flat and cold. “Goodnight, Ellie.” She walked to her motel room, leaving her on the pavement.

Goodnight. It was odd even sarcastically. Fuck, they were sleeping in the same place. Nary a trek from each other and they weren’t clawing, weren’t shooting. If she told Ellie from years ago, heartbroken and grieving, that she wasn’t finishing the job, that Ellie would kill her herself. Both of them. Unable to look past her hurt.

Whereas Abby retreated to her motel room, moody and peeved, Ellie had gone for a walk through Santa Rosa. It was a typical New Mexican town laced with sparse infected she was able to circumvent with other routes or her blade. It was like it was plucked from Dina’s stories, arid and squalid from the apocalypse, leaving its passerby to fill in the gaps of what it’d once been. It’d had nuclear families and bustling bars, pedestrians and running cars. They had dogs to have dogs, not as vessels for attack. There were bonds broken, promises severed in that very town on Outbreak Day so many years ago. Before Ellie was even born. It was borderline inconceivable.

Ellie wondered if, had she been born earlier, she would’ve acclimated to the way of the world. Maybe she would’ve gotten a dog instead of veering from them.

Inebriated, her walk was slow and cautious over the town’s cracked pavement. She didn’t know how long she’d been out. Didn’t quite care, either. It was still night when she saw a rising beam crowned with a speared car, a rusty yellow in dire need of upkeep. Askew, it seemed to teeter on its edge, overlooking the town. Ellie blinked several times to make sure it was there. Naturally, drawn like a reel, she approached it and splayed her hand on the metal pole, gazing up. She couldn’t tell if it was real or fake.

“Woah.” In quiet awe, her gaze trained on its underside. “How’d they even get you up there?” Ellie knew that firefighters in the old world had lengthy ladders meant for reaching the top stories of buildings, so she ruminated on if there was something similar for construction. The name was on the tip of her tongue. Something akin to, Staffing. Or scabbing. The latter being farther than the former.

Her enthrallment ebbed and was arrested again by the building near, its front reading, Route 66 Auto Museum: Over 30 Cars on Display. The sign was flipped to closed. Like that’d stop her. Her head to her toes was thrumming as her heart piqued, and she tried to pry open the doors. But that’d be too easy. They didn’t budge. She peered inside and found that a crowbar was jabbed through the interior handles. Whoever was occupying the place was either dead within its walls or out for a supply run, another occupant within to wrench it from the handles when their partner returned. It reminded her of the theater.

From the transparent glass doors, however, she eyed the displays and was floored. The automobiles were dirtied with time and lack of proper care, but their vintage bones were strong, showing old structure and the curves of the fifties, sixties on display. Ellie had never seen that type of car in person. Maybe once or twice in passing. She saw paint of various colors, some pale and some more saturated, one with a black coat and faded flames down its side.

Clouded by the weed, Ellie knew it wasn’t the keenest choice to drum her fingers on the door, but it was successful. The screech of an infected hurled from within, and in seconds, it was pressed, flattening itself and banging its hands on the surface. It didn’t break. Ellie stepped back. It’d advanced to the Clicker stage, chattering its rotting teeth, seeking the source of the noise, but after some time, it got bored and staggered someplace else. She wasn’t dull enough to sneak in alone, even worse, high. So she yearningly cast a final glance at the museum before traipsing the way she’d come, the breadcrumbs of her giddiness fading.

She felt stupid for it and recalled the photograph of her balancing on the T-rex.

When she returned to the motel, dawn was breaking; there was no sun yet, but the red-pink of its imminence was stark, a hazy line across the bottom of the sky. Her high had faded to a headache. Ellie massaged her temple while she eyed the room numbers until she finally found her own and hoisted herself through the window, its door still unmoving.

“Have fun?” Steph asked from her bed. She was sitting upright and braiding something, two blankets pooled around her body: One from her bag and another from someplace in the room, certainly not of the bedspread. It seemed in good condition.

“Where’d you find that blanket?” she queried, a yawn tapering her words.

“In a drawer in the bathroom. Basically untouched.” She was smug, and Ellie was impressed that she didn’t have to have her gaze down to continue weaving. Before she could bring it up, Steph did, offering, “I’m making bracelets if you want one.”

“Huh.” She sat at the foot of Steph’s bed and lifted one of the finished products. It was simple, a braided band of different colors of yarn, tighter than she expected. That particular one was of pale greens and blues, some of the edges frayed. “Can I have this one?”

“That one’s all frayed.”

Ellie shrugged and slipped it onto her wrist. Soft. Hardly noticeable to the touch. Yet bright and striking on her pale complexion. “I found something cool. I’ll take you out to see it before we leave here.”

Steph perked, tying the end of one of an orange and yellow rendition. “What is it?”

“It’s a car museum. Has a ton of vintage stuff.” Ellie tugged on her bracelet, observing how the fibers stretched. “There’s a clicker inside, and I couldn’t get in to take it out, though.”

“Was the door locked?” Steph was interested, smile bright and brows raised.

“It was blocked by the handles.”

“... Was there a window or anything you could smash to get through?”

Her lips were a thin line. “I was by myself. I didn’t wanna draw noise.” And was too high to think about breaking it in.

Steph eyed her but looked back down at her bracelet, indifferent. “Well, when we go, we can just go through that. And if it was only one, then that’s easy.”

“I’m not one hundred percent certain it was one,” Ellie muttered. “But yeah. We can try that.”

Ellie’s eye was heavy. The sunrise was inching, a ring of morning color tracing the sky, and Steph was done talking, enthralled in her tying of yarn. For the first time in ages, the hard, unforgiving floor of the tent forgotten and the car outside, Ellie slept on a bed. An old bed that smelled of years past, but a bed. And she couldn’t quell the abrupt yearning in her chest for the farm, a mattress that never moved, never got farther. Not unless she took the first step away.

“Kiddo,” Joel said, “hop in.” In the driveway, was nearly drowned by the raring motor of his car, its noise as bold as the flames painted on its side. Somehow, Ellie knew he’d gotten a fresh coat the other day, its sheen evident. The top was down.

Ellie’s steps felt light as she walked and slid into the passenger side, smile so wide it nearly reached her ears. “Where are we going?”

Joel shrugged, and it was nice. When they were together, they always had a destination. Somewhere to be, things to do. They took some time to smell the roses but not much. It was strange how they’d gone across the country, yet the most vital thing Ellie could remember from that year was his comforting presence.

He began driving, wind rustling their hair, passing all the homogenous houses with their two-car wide garages and prim lawns. The road had no bumps. Clean, smooth cement never trampled by the worst of the world.

“I always hated these things.”

Ellie looked at him, resting her elbow on the side of the car. “Hated what?”

“Things that are all nice like this.”

Within herself, a break happened. Nowhere in her body particularly. Just a little shatter, a twinge of something unnameable. “Why?”

“‘cause I always end up ruinin’ it.”

The pale blue sky briefly shifted gray. Not with clouds. The color itself tinted. “... Yeah?”

“And you do, too.”

The next change was permanent: A turbulent road shadowed by the dark sky, the cracks hardly visible within its reach. Ellie grabbed the side of the car to steady herself. She knew he wasn’t Joel as she knew him, some amalgamation. When they hit speed bumps, Joel had always stuck his arm out to keep her from keeling forward. He didn’t that time nor the times following, and there were many, tires screeching beneath the speed he took. “Joel — ”

He was gone and the wheel jerked left, burrowing the car into the side of a house. Her throat was too tight to scream.

When she woke, she was greeted not with a jostle to her shoulder complemented by good morning, but she’d take the rush out of bed without any nicety before she’d confront her eye blown open, the sun beating the windows. Tears tracked her face. She hoped she hadn’t made any noise. Ellie turned on her side to see Steph’s bed. She had left and made the bed before going.

Dina came back to her, bright and flowing and flirting, a dashing smile on her lush mouth and curls waving as she strode — strode, not walked. Like she owned the place. She was so good. So nice, the dream reverberating while she thought. And Ellie, Joel’s jacket and a bag on her shoulders, had ditched it for darker grass.

Sniffing, she swiped her sleeve over her face and sat up, and out of the window, caught the scene outside. Abby was loading things into one of the cars. She supposed they still had to see the infected grave, and no one had woken her yet. She’d surely missed breakfast.

Ellie grumbled and cursed under her breath as she fished her blade and pistol out from where they were sheathed and changed into a tank top, tee, and cargo pants, the heat relentless. The bite on her shoulder still needed to be hidden. She collected her possessions and hopped the window, immediately feeling the sear on her sunburnt face. Shit. The commotion was a tell to the center, and she walked to it, hands in her pockets while she slipped into the crowd. Luckily, their hatred for her had mellowed to not wanting to acknowledge her whatsoever.

A hand clamped onto her shoulder from behind. “There you are,” Romi said. “Someone was about to wake you up.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Ellie muttered, moving her shoulder away. “What exactly are we doing?”

“Getting samples. Because you’re immune to spores and bites, I figure it’d be best for you to collect them, since we don’t know how large the infected is et cetera.”

“Immunity doesn’t mean shit if I’m getting chased by a giant glob of — ”

“I know,” Romi interrupted, “but we’ll be around to make sure you don’t get into too much trouble.”

“Who’s we? You and Abby?”

“And a few other folks. Cat. We aren’t letting any of the kids go since it’s unpredictable.”

Ellie could have laughed. “Gold star for that.”

“Go ahead and hop in the van.” Romi pointed at the eight-seater.

Scorned by her and Abby’s spat, Ellie didn’t load her bag into the trunk. She kept it in her lap and slid into the passenger seat, setting her chin on it. The interior was hot, and she left her door open to circulate air, perspiration beading on her forehead. The gauze on her eye was uncomfortable. When she saw herself in the rearview mirror, she was scorched by a thousand suns, vibrant as a tomato, similar in shade to a goddamn firetruck. It’d gotten worse overnight. Received time to settle. “Christ,” she muttered, picking at the peeling skin on the tip of her nose.

On the driver’s side, the door opened and Abby slid in, keyring jangling. However, she noticed Ellie and stiffened, obviously still thinking of their exchange. Then, she saw the hint of a smile. It was schadenfreude. “You look ridiculous.”

“Fuck off, Abby,” Ellie grumbled, “I’m from fucking Wyoming.”

“Does that mean you don’t know how to use sunscreen?”

“Oh, sorry, let me hit up someone up for SPF 3000 real quick.”

Abby snorted, “SPF doesn’t go to 3000.”

“Can you — ?”

The rear door on the passenger side swung open, and Cat slid in with an emphatic groan, rubbing her lower back. “Those motel beds are fucking brutal.” She barely finished her sentence before a beat of silence filled the van, burst by with her clambering laughter.

Ellie turned in her seat, both perplexed at the cackling and eager to wrench Abby from her sight. She already filled her sketches. “What is it?”

“Oh my god, you’re fried!”

Somehow, beneath the sunburn, she felt her face flare in an embarrassed flush. “I’m fucking pale!”

“Not anymore!”

In a huff, Ellie swiveled and sank into her seat, tugging her backpack down to somewhat hide her face, but her arms were still visible clutching it. Lobster arms, Dina had affectionately dubbed them.

“Don’t be like that,” Cat teased, “I have something for it.” Ellie heard her searching her bag for a long time, clearly having hit the dusty bottom of it, investigating every pocket until she whispered, “Gotcha.” She spoke louder, “Hold out your hand.”

Tentatively, Ellie did. She didn’t turn. Just extended her arm. Her trust was greeted by a lukewarm, slimy substance being spurted over her cupped palm, and her entire body jerked, spine crackling in utter shock and disgust. It felt like some kind of slug. Some cruel, sick joke. “Fuck!” Frenzied, she jolted and flung the fluid — she wanted to die — wherever was closest, which happened to hone on Abby’s black tee. Cat was crowing in her amusement.

She’d received many stares from Abby. All of them, she could draw from memory. Each pinch of annoyance in her brows and every ember of fury in her irises. The exact indescribable color bracketed in tan skin that caught the sun better than hers, either from SPF’s precaution or adapting to the road for much longer, illuminated by the Fireflies’ light for ages. But the stare Ellie received then was something raw and pure and embed in loathing.

“Can you get out of the passenger seat?” Abby said, stoic. She reached into the glovebox for a cloth and dabbed her shirt.

“Jesus Christ, El,” Cat managed, “it’s aloe!”

Memory lane jutted her. Joel had always hassled her to put on sunscreen. Staying out in the sun without it is dangerous, kiddo. During Jackson summers, she’d come back from patrol burnt as pastry left in the oven, and he’d get aloe from the plant in his living room. He’d loved that thing and had a surprisingly green thumb. He’d smooth it over her nose, scolding with his mouth yet alleviating the pain beneath his fingers. She figured it was his hand that soothed more than the aloe.

“Why is it warm?” Ellie retorted, ignoring Abby’s request and smoothing the residual substance over her cheeks and forehead. When it touched her skin, it went cool.

“Everything is fucking warm!”

“Whatever!” she scoffed. Admittedly, it was an effective salve, calming the burning and a bit of the red tinge to her skin, less severe.

With a brief noise, the other rear door opened, and Ellie took that as a cue to finally shut her own. Those who were accompanying them slid inside, most being those Ellie had barely spoken to. Aside from Luke and Romi, of course. Luke didn’t look at her. He didn’t look at Abby, either. Romi glanced but said nothing of her disheveled state.

Once they were all inside, Abby gave Ellie an up and down appraisal, and she could tell she wished she’d moved to the backseat while she had the chance.

They reached the infected grave in about an hour and a half, and it still seemed motionless when at a distance. Abby pulled the van to a stop. Everyone within stirred for their masks and weapons, daggers and pistols and things that could hold no candle to the mass. Ellie detested that she perhaps had the best defense in her spore-lined lungs and brain crowned in Cordyceps, all with no work or deserving on her part.

“So,” she began, meeting Romi’s eye in the rearview mirror and repeating, “what exactly are we doing?”

Rather than replying, she pulled a first aid kit out and opened it, turned for Ellie to gaze inside. Its contents didn’t match the cover. It was scalpels and the littlest mason jars she’d ever seen crammed. “I need you to cut a Cordyceps near the stem. One of the smaller ones, one that we can divide amongst the jars. These were the best I could find. Other than that, the rest of us” — she lifted her head to address all the van’s occupants — “will simply be observing it.”

As she spoke, Cat mouthed the words she was saying with a stupid expression that simultaneously made Ellie want to smack her and laugh at her. She pressed her lips into a thin line.

Romi frowned. “What’s funny?”

“Uh — nothing.” Flustered, she cleared her throat and reached into the middle row of seats for the kit, skeptical with her hands. “Won’t the Cordyceps die?”

“The fact that it’s alive now is an anomaly,” Romi countered. “Previously, we’d just assumed that once the brain or nervous system of the infected was disrupted, the Cordyceps would no longer be able to control it. I think this has proved that wrong.” After letting such a thing simmer, the concept of undead undead, she added, “But we’ll have to see. Plus, I haven’t had a chance to get any proper Cordyceps samples in a while. They wither overtime.”

“Right.” Ellie sighed and drummed her fingers on the kit. “Now or never.”

She was the first to exit the van, the others righting their masks or hesitant, closing the passenger door and walking forward with long steps on broken concrete. The closer she got, the thicker the spores became. Spores didn’t cause her discomfort. They didn’t hurt. But she could feel their presence in her chest as she breathed the thick air. When she exhaled, her breath was tinted yellow. It was like an ashen winter.

Ellie stopped when she was a few steps away to inspect the thing. It was still. It reeked of carcass and time yet something natural, the fume of the earthy fungus overpowering. Some of them were taller than Ellie, leering down at her like a reaper, but their span provided the benefit of their littler descendants, more sprouts than tyrants. She spotted one low to the ground peeking from the gap between hunks of metal.

Swallowing her anxiety, she approached and crouched a few feet away, the soles of her Converse a comfort. The fungus didn’t move to bite her, didn’t try and tear her throat between its teeth. It was only a plant attached to a heaping mass of cadavers. Nothing intimidating about that. Quiet, she unclasped the kit and plucked a scalpel, unsure of how to begin cutting, whether she should grab it by the hat and slice swiftly or be subtle. She moved forward and reached to steady it.

It spurred, groaning like a machine without oil, pained and crying for absolvement. A thousand mouths made the noise. Reverberating through the area, she knew it had to have drawn attention.

“Fuck fuck fuck — ” Ellie cursed. She fisted the stem and swiped the blade over the base of the hat, frenetic, her veins alight as she watched the thing ripple and heard it scream above all else. If someone, ally or infected, was coming, she was unaware. Fortunately, the size of the Cordyceps itself allowed for a small stem radius, and it detached into her hand, the force of the release almost making her fall. But a cold hand clamped on her wrist.

It was frigid, fingers spreading from one another with the remains of months, flesh crawling and bones pointed. “Motherfucker — !” Ellie stabbed at the limb and the grave wailed. She eyed for the source, panting and panicked, and found it: A part of the collective intertwined with rot and Cordyceps, but it was majorly on the exterior, though had been somewhat obscured by the metal until it moved. Its arm was outstretched and its head was visible, two bulletholes burrowing in its cranium. It should be dead. A permanent death, death of death, yet it wasn’t. It had enough mind to grasp and scream.

With a few more jabs, Ellie freed herself and moved back, rubbing her wrist. “Fuck you!” she breathed. Comprehending, staring. The kit lay forgotten.

An arm fenced her chest, encouraging her to step back, and she turned, wild, before realizing it was Romi, big eyes visible through her mask’s visor. “It doesn’t need the brain?”

“What are you talking about?” Ellie shoved the Cordyceps towards her, scalpel coated with blood in her other hand. “Here’s your fucking sample, let’s go.” Shots were fired in the distance. Infected were coming and were in the line of fire.

“Ellie.” Romi leaned forward just enough to grab the kit before moving away, nimble and breathless and gazing. She lowered her voice, “If it doesn’t need a brain… maybe we won’t have to use yours. Since the issue with using preexisting Cordyceps has been its attachment to the brain, the dependence. As soon as it gets torn away, it dies within days. But these are still alive.” She began speaking with her hands. “If we can recreate something like this in a lab — I think the quantity of the Cordyceps is why it’s been able to operate —, we’ll be able to see how it connects and figure out a way to stop it from doing so.”

It was the most horrifying thing Ellie had ever heard.

She didn’t speak during the commute back. She didn’t do anything but watch the passing rubble, thinking about what her brain would look like on a sanitized tray. Previously, Ellie had thought the surgeons would marvel at and prod and bless it, and it was a comforting thought that something that made her feel so listless could save someone else. Dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin and anything else, a chemical to push down canals, could get fucked for all she cared. But they might be able to find something in a garden of corpses, one of them not being her own.

Once they returned to the motel, Romi having separated the sample into jars on the ride back, she and Cat were the only ones remaining. Cat was fidgeting with her pistol. Ellie was waiting to be alone.

“Why do you look pissed off?” Cat asked, not looking up.

“I’m not pissed off,” she echoed, “I got grabbed by a… clusterfuck of shit and infected and…”

“Shit?” Cat offered.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

Silence burgeoned, only dented by the clink of Cat’s pistol against her nails. She’d grown them out, filing them obsessively for days. Ellie tuned it out and stared out the dashboard. They parked facing the motel that time, and she could see everyone returning to their rooms and exchanging goodbyes. She perked when she saw Abby and Luke on the right. Their words were not easy to eavesdrop on that time, the door and distance a barrier, but they were calm. They didn’t seem to be fighting. Luke grabbed Abby’s hand. They slipped into the room.

Ellie desperately longed for a joint. She longed for touch, for a hand in hers.

She turned. “Hey, Cat?”

Cat looked up. “Yeah?”

She bit her lip, feeling its chappedness below her front teeth, something lonesome clawing and craving in her ribs like the green. “I want you.”

Her brows raised, and Ellie climbed into the middle seats.

Chapter Text

Ellie stared at the dingy motel ceiling and sucked her cheek, feeling Cat’s hands beneath her tank top. They groped and grabbed and tried to elicit from on top of her, but she had nothing to give aside from burnt skin and pessimistic venom. She couldn’t focus. The room felt like it was in orbit. Her worry made her dazed. If the grave didn’t work, she’d be brought in with disappointment, a plan B, and she wasn’t even a guaranteed success. Plan C was to let humanity rot, something she could hardly comprehend.

Cat relinquished her touch and frowned. “What are you thinking about?” She stared, not looking but seeking.

Abby the grave the cure Romi the hospital Joel the vaccine Abby. “Why’d you stop?”

“Because you’re being a dead fish.”

She should have been offended, but she knew it was true. “I’m just… I don’t know.” Conscientious, Ellie pulled the hem of her tank top back down. “The grave.” It wasn’t a tenth of all in her mind.

She squinted, eyes like arrows. “You should be having a fucking celebration right now.”

“Should I?”

“We discover an alternative way to get the cure that doesn’t involve scrambling your brains around, and you’re mad?”

Puzzlement soured her tongue. “How’d you know they were gonna do surgery?” It was as if she was something to read up on. A thing, not a person, and Cat was the last person she expected that insinuation from.

Cat hesitated and glanced away, gaze flicking like the wall could give her an answer, and she replied, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to infer, Ellie.”

“No, I know Romi’s talked about using me for the cure.” She sat against the headboard and fixed her tank top’s straps. “But she never said anything about surgery or my brain, Cat. The fuck do you know about my fucking brain anyways, I was gone for years — ”

“And I was one of the first people you came to when you came back to Jackson, so don’t give me that, Ellie!” The motel walls were thin, and the neighboring inhabitants could probably hear their row. “I’ve been trying to think of a way to tell you without coming off as fucking skeevy.”

She scoffed, “Since when do you care about sparing my feelings?”

“God, just” — Cat straightened her furrowed brow with a massage of her fingertips, and she took a deep breath — “Romi has been talking to me about you. She told me to… that if you told me you wanted to back out, I needed to force you to stay. Regardless of what it took. And I thought that was fucked up, so I’ve been trying to avoid her.” She sighed. “I didn’t want to tell you ‘cause it’d sour the whole thing, and I know how important it is. Especially to you.”

Ellie bit her cheek. The insinuation that she needed to be strapped down and held wasn’t what burned; it was the insinuation that she would have something as selfish as cold feet when it came to something so much bigger than herself. “I guess it doesn’t matter now, does it?” Jackson reflected from the back of her mind, the stanza she’d crafted there recalled: Rotting corpse, sour grapes / Rigor mortis will keep me. Jackson was different. Jackson was a piece of her she couldn’t give without it crippling the ground beneath her feet. Her Cordyceps would make it flourish.

“Not as much,” Cat agreed, “but… god, Ellie, I don’t wanna talk about you like you’re an asset. Fuck, I’m glad that you’re gonna be alive to see the benefit of all this.” She didn’t tack if it goes well. She wanted to be certain that the plan would work, wanted to manifest it with her words.

“I’m sure you’re the only person here who thinks that.”

“Yeah.” Cat straightened her clothes and left the bed to stand, grabbing her bag off the floor. “It sucks that that includes you.”

As Cat left her motel room, door slamming in her wake, Ellie supposed that they were switching places for the night, one with two beds exchanged for a solitary cell, smaller. Lonelier. She glanced around. When she slipped in prior, Cat was kissing her so hard she hadn’t taken it in. She couldn’t even observe the place wholly then, worry consuming, but she spotted the aloe sitting on the nightstand. She must have had more than one vial in her stock. Left it out to deal with her own sunburn.

She grabbed it and her backpack, shoving it into the back pocket for when her skin flared the next morning. It was always the worst when she first woke up. Not just her skin, but the realizations, the comprehension that she had to get through that day, and the next, and the next without an end. She saw her burnt forearms while she zipped it and thought of Abby’s remark, You look ridiculous. Forlorn in the motel room, miserable, she figured that comment true.

They were in a hubbub, a routine Ellie had seen and partaken in a few times, but she didn’t provide much help then. She was content to watch the crowd converge in a communal sense. Everyone having their assigned chore, their itinerary. She leaned against the side of the van and observed. It was dawn: Not too hot, not too cold. Not yet. A good time to pool their things before they left. Their next destination was Arkansas. The early start was patented in hopes of getting through Oklahoma in a day, but Ellie was wiser than that as she knew they’d get stopped somehow, someway by an inconvenience, so she didn’t get her hopes up.

Her sunburn was better, at least, slathered in thieved aloe. The expanse of her skin was littered with peel, but the scorch was less. Her gauze was uncomfortable over her eye, moist in perspiration. However, there was a gnawing, burrowing sear within her, turning all her insides to magma, churning her pulse. Whereas the Fireflies had stack the canned food and make sure the vans have gas on their dockets, Ellie’s felt was as heavy as bricks.

When she closed her eye, she saw that infected’s hand clamped on her wrist like a handcuff, saw the black, spoilt blood that spewed when she stabbed at it, heard the bones crunch. It was unthinkable that such a sordid thing, such a gross thing was the cure’s ticket. The thing Ellie had been thinking of since she’d gotten bit and hadn’t turned, smoothing her hand over her bite over and over to make sure it was there. Pinching herself like it could be a dream. Just because someone forgot to take a lit fucking match to the grave, she was stuck with the teeth marks on her arm forever, useless. The Cordyceps she would’ve been killed for, useless.

The abrupt weight and twist of her plans sent her mind staggering, searching for any steady ground. She hadn’t thought that far. She’d only thought of the gurney and the anesthesia and the postmortem worth. There was no alternative. A unique tombstone for a one-of-a-kind situation that was no longer so extraordinary.

Aside from that, her time with Cat only worsened things. She’d left Ellie to ponder why she had initiated at all. Desperation being the obvious answer. Even as Cat was on top of her, though, nipping at her jawline and sliding her hands beneath Ellie’s tank top, she knew it’d been an attempted distraction. A failed one, at that. With the touch buzzing and heat between bodies, Ellie couldn’t push Abby from the forefront of her mind, and she hated her for it. Hated her for taking up so much goddamn space. Hated her for being on the tip of her tongue, what she searched for in the crowd. She needed a favor.

She caught sight of her hefting her backpack from her motel room, sweat glinting off her forehead. Her hair stuck to the back of her neck, veiled by the beating sun, and Ellie wrenched her glance to meet Abby’s squinting eyes. But she looked away and walked to the back of the van, popping the trunk to load her back inside. Ellie supposed she would be driving again. Romi’s guard dog was insurmountable, after all, and she repressed a scoff. She had to seem approachable. For Steph’s sake.

Ellie moved to her and closed the trunk to get her attention, the loud thud puncturing the parking lot. Heads turned. Abby’s did. And the latter was all that mattered. “I need you to take Steph somewhere.”

Abby ground her teeth, mulling. “Is it important? We’re all kind of busy.”

“You’re not gonna crush a kid’s heart, are you?” She looked her up and down. “Besides, I think Lev would like it.”

She sighed and stared at their boots. Like she was restraining herself tight as her laces. “Where to?”

A smile piqued Ellie’s lips for the first time that morning.

“Is that a car?” Lev gasped, practically crawling out of his rolled window to catch a better glance. He was in the passenger side. When they piled into the car, he’d called, shotguns, and no one had the heart to correct him.

During the day, the mounted display’s former colors were more obvious. It’d once been vibrant but was worn by doomsday, perhaps tired of people looking at it, so it willed its colors to fade. Since she was a child, Ellie had been able to empathize with objects. Odd, something many pointed out to her. She saw cars rusting on the sides of roads and felt a purling ache, noticed teddy bears with their insides out and felt nauseated. She apologized to furniture when she stumbled over it. When JJ threw his tantrums, he often tossed Ollie in his conniption, and while she bounced him on her hip, she’d crouch and mutter, I’m sorry. Sobered from her high, her heart lurch for the piked car, speared never to wander again.

Abby’s brows rose, a complement to how Steph bounced in her place, craning her neck over the front seats to see it. “How old is that thing?” she marveled.

Pleased with herself however saddened by its state, Ellie leaned into her seat and watched the kids frenzy themselves.

Abby spoke, “Does the inside need clearing?” It was a stab through their flurry, bouncing off the walls.

“Yeah,” Ellie replied, “I only saw a clicker in there.”

She pulled into one of the empty parking spaces and rubbed her shoulder, nose scrunching. “We can clear it first, then. Steph and — ”

But they already jumped out, running towards the tall pole to stare up at it, eyes big. Lev looked at it like he could climb it if he really set his mind to it. Steph looked at it like she was engrossed, a similar expression to when her nose was to her comics, pages flipping.

Ellie chuckled and grabbed her bag, stepping out of the car as they were distracted. “I’ll have to smash the windows in and get its attention. The door’s locked, anyways.”

“Okay.” Abby pulled the key and stuffed it into her pocket. When she slipped out of the car, she always had to lean inward more than most, her height crumpling. It tensed her muscle, showed the cords in her arms. Yet her judging look perforated. It went up and down Ellie’s form like a glaze. “You don’t have to wear that anymore.”

“Wear what?”

“Your bandage.”

She frowned and glided her fingers over the fabric. “You don’t think it’ll get infected?”

“Not if you clean it every so often. And it’s not like you’ve been on top of changing your bandages.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Ellie grumbled but untied it, brow bunching at the unsheathing of gauze around her head, though when it got to the burned side of her face, she didn’t feel it. The skin was numb. She couldn’t see herself and didn’t care to. She let the cloth flutter to the asphalt and shifted her bag on her shoulder, relishing the weight of it to cope with the lack of touch on her eye, her obliterated cheek, and stepped to the entrance, drawing her pistol and readying herself. Abby’s reaction wasn’t seen, and Ellie didn’t care to know it.

She bashed the hilt of her gun into the glass three times until it shattered, webs of rupture twining across the surface, no longer withholding the clicker within. Its noise emanated. Little ticks and taps like old, creaking machinery that climaxed in a screech when it barrelled for the glass. Before it could reach, Ellie put some distance between herself and it and fired three shots, two of which missed. One buried in its sprouting head, but it wasn’t enough to halt it.

The clicker broke the glass and scrambled forward, swiping. Ellie shot again. So did Abby. Abby’s bullet was concise, biting in its neck like an obedient soldier. Blood spewed from its wound onto her clothes. Red poured where it fell. No others accompanied it, yet her skin prickled with adrenaline, goosebumps below the sun.

Whirling to face her, Ellie said, “I had it.” Her breath was fire. Panting leveled her whole chest.

“You did?” Abby said, disgustingly flat. Her gun was already holstered. Ellie found that that was her mindset: Find the task, do it, wash her hands of it. She had long-term wants, things she longed for, some of which were things they shared, but she tackled life like it was all a challenge. Pointed, she stepped over the corpse and approached the window to eye the remnants. She swept them away to make light room, somehow not pricking herself. Ellie wanted to roll her eyes. “Lev, Steph, be careful when you’re climbing in!” she called.

Ellie glanced for the pair and expected them to still be enthralled, but they were alert in the distance, eyes watchful and hands on their weapons. She’d nearly forgotten they were there and had seen it. Seen her almost get eaten alive because of her shitty aim. An embarrassed flush fumed over her face, and if she weren’t determined to see the interior, she would’ve retreated to the car to wrench all the stares off her frame.

Abby slid through, cautious, and Ellie followed with less restraint, nicking the side of her right hand on a shard. She winced and sucked a breath through her teeth. The glass crunched beneath her feet. She clutched the wound and squinted at it; it was small and stinging. The interior was all she’d dreamed of, vintage cars with wild paint in rows, relatively untouched compared to the one outside, but the pain in her hand jabbed too much to appreciate it.

“God.” Before she could protest, Abby walked forward and glared at her hand. “So you wanted to trade out one bandage for another?”

“Sorry I didn’t see the tiniest fucking shard of glass.” In spite, Ellie wanted to let the blood run down the side of her hand, shading and drying within her palm’s etches, blurring her life line, but it hurt like a bitch, so she sat on the ground and opened her bag. She pawed through and bloodied her belongings thoroughly until she pulled out a roll of gauze, shifting it to her other hand. Her left. She held the bandages clumsily in her three fingers and struggled to wrap them around, annoyance piquing. She felt Abby watching her. Looking at her fingers and remembering Santa Barbara. It was like that beach was where rationale went to die and pillars shadowed their bodies, salt burrowed in their wounds. It had driven them mad.

Perhaps the memory spurred Abby — the only explanation, the surefire one, nothing else, nothing Ellie would ever accept — to kneel and take the gauze from her, tearing the crumpled, stained segment off and setting the clean slate aside. They were silent. She reached into Ellie’s backpack and her hand returned instantaneously with alcohol. Searching was not for her. Action was. Neither moved for many seconds, Abby with that disinfectant in her hand and Ellie with the marring, and there was hesitance between them. It was uncharted. They had never wavered prior, determined, but that was with hurt, not salve. She realized, however, that salve was what she was withholding.

Because Abby didn’t want to touch her. Maybe it was repulsion or fear or sorrow, and she didn’t want to touch her.

Ellie slowly moved her hand to show the cut and held it closer so Abby didn’t have to hold her wrist. Kill her before she let that happen. There was no contact when she dripped alcohol into her wound, all of it felt in Ellie’s ground teeth, the tense noise of the cap being screwed back on. She proceeded to trail the gauze around her hand in skillful fashion, not gentle like a medic but experienced like a soldier. It was a bit too cinched. Abby tucked the fabric in. Her callused fingertip brushed Ellie’s hand.

It was a ghost, gone quick as it’d come, and a startle, eliciting the short impulse of met eyes, making Ellie swallow. Brownish blueish hazelish. Blonde wisped around her anomaly eyes. Their surroundings went hazy while she focused on the brush, wondering if a stab or punch would follow. A broken arm, even, its snap echoing throughout the museum. It was one of the first times Abby touched her that it didn’t hurt. It was the first time Abby had touched her to heal. Three steps forward not easily taken back, yet Ellie tried, pulling her hand away. “Thanks,” she muttered, zipping her backpack to nail the conversation. After all, she heard Steph and Lev approaching the window. The moment was so short she almost wanted to forget it, but such a specter was stark.

Abby didn’t reply and walked around her to help them through the window. No yelps ensued. Ellie figured they made it in without any catastrophe, and even if there was, they didn’t seem to care. They sprinted past her on either side to inspect the closest car. It was olive green with a dented hood, damaged over the years, but they didn’t notice. It had no roof. And that was ideal for them.

Steph climbed into the driver’s seat with a big, adoring smile, jerking the steering wheel in her hands despite it not budging. “This is amazing,” she said in one breath. “What kind of car is this?”

Quick, Lev followed her. He sat in the passenger seat. Flicking toggles and tugging the stick shift didn’t satiate him, as when Steph asked, he turned to Abby with questioning eyes, repeating the question without repeating the question. Curiosity was always his hunger.

Abby shrugged. “I don’t know much about cars. It probably says somewhere around here…” She scanned the place and her brows rose when she landed on the entrance, and she walked to it. There was a tipped rack, spilled brochures surrounding it, and she picked up two. They looked like they were crusted with something. Ellie almost winced, but everything in there was aged anyway. “I found some booklets, if you guys want these.” She walked back and held them out.

They snatched them instantaneously, Steph flipping through, pronouncing something in German that Ellie didn’t catch, and she finally stood and approached, joints aching. There was an instinct that lurched in her to barricade Steph from Abby, so she wedged herself into the interaction, standing beside the car with crossed arms, but she pondered what that made her. If she deserved to be barred from Lev regardless of her best efforts to make amends, in spite of him not recalling the knife to his throat. In spite of her shoulder between the infected and him, taking all the force. She hadn’t managed to find a coverup since. Just tees. It was thankless and a stronger sixth sense than pushing Abby away: Protecting. Paying back what she owed.

Ellie shot a sideways, warm glance to the kids who didn’t note her, and she looked back at Abby, who seemed just as fond. She didn’t need to drive them there. But she had. It was too simple to cast the favor as manipulative. Abby didn’t have that bone in her body, far too forward. Ellie knew she’d simply wanted to. For the kids.

She sucked her cheek and leaned against the car and recalled her birthday so long ago, dinosaurs in hats, novel things. “Thanks.” It was tight in her throat and hardly audible.

Abby averted her eyes. “Yeah.”

They returned to camp by noon and loaded into the car, the same group and van as previous. Just Ellie, Abby, and the kids. She wanted to laugh when she thought of it, dry. It sounded like a shitty band name. Once more, she was pushed to the front. Steph and Lev liked setting their bags in the middle seat too much to give up — something about convenience and it being so annoying to have to stop the car and get in the trunk — , and a bull couldn’t hold a candle to their stubbornness.

Specifically, the group was honing on midway through Arkansas, certainly passing Oklahoma. Atlanta was imminent. After the current journey, they’d only have a couple of states between them and their base. The lab. The experiment would take time to curate, infected cadavers collected and kept in a steady environment. They would be there for ages.

Last, Abby slid into the driver’s side and moved her seat up, straightening her back. Her skin grew more tan by the day, freckles enunciated. Nose bumped like a hill, squinting from the sun. Ellie was acquainted with her side profile from hours stowed in the passenger side.

“Can I drive?” she asked sarcastically.

Abby snorted.

A few hours in, weaving through blocked roads, Steph and Lev had worn themselves out. They were asleep with their cheeks on their seatbelts, temples pressed to the doors. Occasionally, Ellie checked on them through the rearview mirror, just to make sure their necks weren’t too crooked. She didn’t want them to wake up with sore napes.

Given their sleep and the lack of music, the journey was wholly silent apart from Abby muttering to herself at certain points. Directions, curses at the others’ shitty driving. Each time she spoke, her hands gripped the steering wheel like it took immense effort to push the words through her concentration. She checked the rearview just as much as Ellie, though.

She sagged in her seat and stared at the ceiling, making up stories for the stains. Some thrown coffee and spilled blood, neither being things she was particularly fond of. Even her daydreams were falling short. She sighed. Turned her attention to the window. For many minutes, the broken clock on the dashboard was unhelpful, rubble and overgrown forest filled her vision. But it was broken by a jutting sign. It read, Welcome to Texas, subtitled, DRIVE FRIENDLY - THE TEXAS WAY.

Her lips parted so her breath shook and her eye went big, bigger than the star punching the flag’s blue. Abby passed quick as Ellie could read it, and they were in Texas. Joel’s home, the home.

“What is it?” Abby grumbled.

In the thickness of the Texan air, Ellie almost took it as her muttering to herself again. She was suffocating. “Nothing.” Her voice had a cadence of something, always betraying her lies. Her heart was on her tongue.

“You look like you’re thinking.”

You don’t know that. Ellie shrugged, feigning carelessness. “So do you.”

“About what?”

“The massive stick in your ass.”

“... Stop talking.”

“No.”

Abby huffed and slowed the speed of the van. Their surroundings went like eons, elongated and stretching and slow, curled like a basking cat. The world shrunk to the front seats. Abby’s voice, smooth, frustratingly fucking smooth. “I could reverse psychology the shit out of you.” She said shit with a laugh, more irritated than mirthy, probably to keep her own sanity during the long drive.

She rose to the bait. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’ll just tell you to do what I don’t want you to do and you’ll do the opposite.”

“Why do you think I’d do that?”

She saw Abby’s jaw go tight for the nth time that day alone. “... Because,” she began, tentative as tiptoes, “that’s what I’d do.”

Affront burgeoned her throat, but she was right, and Ellie could do nothing about that.

They drove for an hour more until the car at the front of their march swerved, an abrupt turn to the right. The road ahead was clear. It wasn’t rubble that deterred it.

“What the fuck,” Abby muttered, slowing the van to a lurch. “What are we doing?”

The reply was silent, the kids still asleep and Ellie shrugging.

She grit her teeth and surged forward, looking out the window. Ellie eyed her own for anything that could have drawn them in or propelled them away, the latter explanation prickling her arms, fingertips ready to reach for her holster. However, what she saw was not as alluring as a siren song nor repulsive, something to run from. It stunned her and dredged the memory of Seattle like a bad aftertaste, an unwanted encore.

Over the crest of buildings and homes strewn throughout the city, sunlight battering rooves and long grass, she saw the crown of a rusted Ferris wheel. It was behemoth. Foreboding in a bout of intimidation that rendered Ellie still, only able to shoot her glance and remember the last she’d seen of something like that. In all the movies and TV shows, VHS whirring to display them back in Jackson, the amusement park was a pipe dream, sweeter than sweet and that of desire. It just made her sick. Like she’d taken one too many rides on one of the rollercoasters.

Tension spiked beside her, as Abby followed her gaze and saw the contraption, leering. She didn’t seem annoyed or shrieking in a blot of her own injury. There was quiet hurt there, memories that stretched farther than Ellie’s.

“We should just wait around here,” Ellie suggested. A nudge away.

Abby brushed her finger on the steering wheel and looked away, around the street. “We can’t stay on our own. We’ll lose each other.”

“They’re the ones who decided to have a day at the fucking carnival.”

“We don’t know if that’s why they turned.”

“There’s nothing else over there — ”

Lev chimed from the back, “Why are we stopped?” His words spiked in a yawn, the shuffling of his movements accompanying.

Ellie didn’t know how much he’d heard. “The others went off on their own — fuck’s sake.” The car behind them drove around and took the same turn, leaving them to their own devices and surely catching Lev’s eye.

“Oh.” She turned in her seat to face him and he was staring, eyes sparkling at the Ferris wheel. “There’s one of those in Seattle. I don’t really know what they’re supposed to do.”

“Yeah.” Ellie sucked her cheek. “Did you ever go on it?”

Lev shook his head. “Anytime we went to Seattle was for an ambush or… something like that. I only saw it once or twice.” He fiddled with his hands, holding his palms and rubbing them. He had unique hands. They were callused only in certain places where he held his bow, the firm wood etching on his skin, a home for jagged nails. He picked at them too much, always needing something to ground himself. “What is it for?”

“Uh.” She didn’t have an answer. “I’ve never seen a working one, but I think it was to ride. It goes around in a circle real slow, and it just, like… takes you super high.”

“That sounds boring.”

“Wouldn’t say I’m a fan.”

Abruptly, Abby drove and turned right, grip so tight that when Ellie turned her attention — attention, arrested by her in a way that curdled blood — that it showed the outlines of her knuckles and veins below her skin, burning blue. “I’m gonna fucking kill him.”

Him went without saying. “Luke’s driving that one?”

“Yes.”

She pursed her lips and repressed a laugh. “I didn’t notice.”

Abby looked so annoyed. Such a short temper. “Well, we have to go now since everyone else did. We can’t split up too much. It’s like they’ve never seen a horror movie.”

The road was bumpy, trash strewn and pavement worn, and the van bounced over potholes and speed bumps leading up to the place. Throughout the drive, Abby repeated renditions of this is so fucking stupid to herself. Ellie could tell that it was a full-scale park when they edged closer. She saw the summits of rollercoasters and other rides the closer they got, all of them seeming like elaborate torture or execution methods. Other buildings thinned and they approached a long stretch of road leading to the park itself blocked by a toll booth, but the others had simply driven into the grass to avoid it, the plants mashed into the dirt.

“Oh my god.” Abby veered the jeep to follow the trail, the whole frame bumping over the uneven terrain. It was reflective of the irritation coming off of her in waves.

Ellie jeered, “Do you have high blood pressure, by any chance?”

She didn’t reply. Her pull into the parking lot was tight, no swerve, no drift, her tension almost seeping into the tires and grasping them. There were many abandoned cars, most horribly out of shape. The entryway had a small building with a sign that read, Wonderland. It was red cursive. Big and gaudy, aged. Ellie assumed it was where people had gotten their tickets before entry, which seemed fucking excessive since you had to pay to even get into the parking lot and to park at all, evident by the meters at each space. Money was such a bizarre concept. One of the only upsides to her time was the lack of it, all reliance on bartering and favors.

Abby slipped out of the car and slammed the door behind her, stamping to where Luke was parked with balled hands, heavy footfalls. When Luke stepped out of the car to greet her, he had a stupid, punchable smile on his face. Pleased with himself, hands in his pockets.

Ellie rolled her window down a sliver to eavesdrop. Lev noticed, and she noticed Lev notice… but he didn’t say anything. They wanted to hear it in equal measure.

“Why did you pull in here?” Abby asked, strained. The sun hit her face in a way that highlighted her wrinkled brow. “We need to go.”

And in equal measure, it lit Luke’s confusion, his grin growing apprehensive. “Going around the whole park is the quickest way out of this town.” He softened. “And… I wanted to show you.”

“Why?” Not snapping with her usual annoyance nor cracking with a whip’s impact, but breaking.

When he stepped forward, she stepped back. “You said there was one in Seattle, and I figured… I mean. When I saw it.” He cleared his throat and looked at his feet. “I thought it’d be nice.”

Abby smiled, sarcastic and nervous. “Like I need a reminder of Seattle.”

He sucked a breath through his teeth. “Okay. You’re right.” Luke met her eye. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset” — she sounded very upset — “I just feel like it’s obvious.” Before he could input anything else, she strode down the line of cars, their hoods popped and dented as the mood. Irreparable, at a certain point. “Might as well go in now.”

Alight with scrambling, she heard Lev open the car door and bound out of it, catching up to her. The farther they walked, the more unintelligible their speech. From that distance, though, she could discern that she and Luke weren’t built to last. They weren’t molded together by Seattle’s petrichor, the downpour, the wet, sticking socks. The blood that diluted in puddles was thicker than water or honey or anything of sustenance. He tried to give sweetness and underestimated that city’s hold.

It reminded her of Dina, who, despite being in Seattle with her, lit nice candles, ignored the storms, dried her socks, wringing them out and watching the memories drip, drip down. Someone as manacled to that city as Abby would be the only one to comprehend it.

“Wow,” Cat said from the left side of the van, “what a bitch.”

Ellie jumped and swiveled to face her. They’d parked right beside them. “You scared the shit out of me.” She clutched a hand to her panting chest. “Asshole.”

“Sorry.” She wasn’t. “Guess we’re in for it now.”

From the adjacent car, Romi called, “I’d rather not!”

And so what if Abby was right, because that reverse psychology-ed the shit out of Ellie. It didn’t help that when she looked around, everyone was already exiting their cars, even if the air was heavy and Luke couldn’t wrench his gaze from his feet, his fiddling hands. The awkwardness and looming shadow of the Ferris wheel was a small price to hold her nose up at Romi and knock down bottles. Maybe climb some shit, break some shit. Besides, Steph would wake and wander in. Ellie might as well accompany her. She wasn’t keen on leaving immediately, her bag in the trunk and limbs lazy too lazy to pull it, but it wasn’t like she could leave a kid unattended in a place as big as Wonderland. Especially with Abby in the midst.

Ellie undid her seatbelt and turned, reaching for Steph’s shoulder to jostle her. “Steph.”

It was enough. Heavy sleepers were doomed in the current state of the world; most kids got trained out of the habit fast unless they were like Cat, who made every nap a hibernation.

“What?” she mumbled and rubbed her eye.

“We’re going out.”

“Where…?” Steph inspected the window for a sign, squinting in the drowsiness. The revelation made her eyes blow wide. Her experience would be untainted by Abby and Luke’s lover’s quarrel — gag. Ellie envied her for it. “Oh my god.” She had her backpack on her shoulder within a millisecond, slipping out the door like a slippery slope, all swiftness and frenzy. “C’monnn,” she rushed, “hurry.”

Ellie opened her mouth to reply, but it was nipped by Cat offering, “If you want a second to breathe, I can take her.”

“Please.”

“Alright.” Cat clicked her tongue as she walked through the parking lot, hands in her pockets. “Lead the way.”

Steph hurried in front of her. The throng thickened as the other Fireflies left, degrees of enthusiasm and unease varying on their faces, and Ellie picked at a scab on her elbow, hissing at the pinch and tug. She watched the crowd filter in. When most were gone, reluctance burgeoned but she quelled it, reaching for the lever to pop the trunk and stepping out of the van. Her lower back popped, and she grunted, rubbing it, an attempt to soothe. She regretted every time she’d teased Joel for his backaches. It was cosmic karma.

She walked to the trunk and lifted it, one hand on her back and the other on the metal, eyeing the items for her bag. It was near the top, and she hadn’t put it in herself.

“Is your back hurting?”

Dread strangled her stomach, her voice box, and she made a pathetic expression of a mouth slightly agape, a humorless silence. It was easy to think Romi was a cunt from afar, part of a crowd where she couldn’t aim at her in return, those Dina eyes and Dina brows. But when they were alone, she had a knack for taking all the air out of her lungs.

“Is it?” she reiterated, breaking her anxiety. “I have some painkillers.”

“It’s fine,” Ellie mumbled and gripped the handle on her backpack, the weight confounding what was already on her shoulders. “Thought you didn’t want to go into the place.”

“I don’t. But I have to look after you all. Make sure you don’t get your hair caught in a merry-go-round.” It was an attempt at a joke, and the accompanying smile was stiff.

She swallowed. “Hey, Romi?”

The grin faltered. “What?”

“Why did you think I was gonna back out?” She reached up to clutch her backpack’s strap, hand fisted around it, trying to contain all her resentment and her uncanny resemblance and worry. The sheer worry that none of it would work, not a single vial or drop of a vaccine.

Romi stared openly. “Why do you think that?”

“Don’t do that.”

“Do — ?”

“Act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.” Her voice croaked. “You know exactly what I mean.”

Slowly, in such a way that made Ellie want to rip her own hair out and screech, Romi spoke like she was smoothing a toddler’s temper tantrum in a ginger, infuriating pitch. “Because you’re human. And young. You haven’t lived a life yet, so I wouldn’t hold it against you if you weren’t ready to give it up — ”

“What do you know about what I’ve lived? What do I have that’s so special that I wouldn’t be able to give it away to save fucking humanity?” She scoffed, rolling her eyes. “Do you think that little of me? Maybe you should pickle me in a goddamn jar so I can’t fucking run off. Throw me in with the infected pile and see if the Cordyceps grows on me, I don’t know. But!” She raised a spiteful, sardonic finger with the pique of her voice. “At least you’ll have me, whatever you do. You can sleep easy at night knowing you made the hard decision of forcing me to stay for the good of humanity. Why would it ever be my decision?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It sure fucking sounds like it!’ Ellie burst. Birds chirped from the fraying telephone wire. It was like her voice echoed, playing in her ears. Letting her know what she had said. Her breath shuddered as she lowered her voice. “Enjoy the fucking amusement park. Maybe you’ll have fun now that you’re out of Cat’s ear.” Turning her heel and trudging away, she resisted the urge to mutter bitch as a bade goodbye.

It wasn’t bad. The barriers at the entrance and fence bracketing the entire park served well to keep infected out, and the place had probably been evacuated when the outbreak hit, so there weren’t many inside. The few that were had sagging skin berated by the Texas sun, and they were slowed from it, ligaments withered. Target practice more than threats.

Laughter rang around the place from their group, everyone apparently having an utter ball, but it wasn’t contagious; each giggle speared her sternum like a dagger, and she wondered, Why can’t I do that? Why can’t I figure it out? She’d had it down when she was younger. She guessed she just wasn’t as fun anymore. Like a muscle out of practice. Ellie sleuthed Wonderland with her hands in her pockets, teeth in her cheek. The booths were empty, rotting from the inside. The prizes were on the ground, never to be won again, only thieved. Finders, keepers.

The more she walked, the more the attractions ebbed, most of the rollercoasters on full display near the entrance. Her radius was all shops. She raised a brow at one, with its red-trimmed door slightly ajar and dirty windows, concealing whatever was within. The sign was too faded to infer. Ellie glanced left, glanced right, and walked to it with a curious bounce in her soles. If anything had been inside, it would have been drawn by the commotion by then. She expected no more than rats and grimy Wonderland memorabilia. Worse laid within.

It was a little mildewy cafe, and Abby was seated at a tiny table in the middle of the eating area, stark as a sore thumb. Her elbow rested on the table and she covered her mouth with her hand, the same hand that had bandaged Ellie. She was thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking, startled when she caught her entrance. “Oh.” An exclamation that wished it was blunt but came choked.

“.... What are you doing in here?” Ellie didn’t care. “Pretty far from the party.”

Abby snorted. “Do I seem like a partier?”

“Absolutely.” She leaned against the jagged doorframe, more inclined to get a splinter than nearer. “Where’s Lev?”

“With the group. I didn’t want to ruin this for him.”

“Right.” Ellie sighed, looking anywhere but Abby. She inspected the shadows of her eyelashes, strands of dark at the top of her vision. The sweltering, hardly visible sunburn at the tip of her nose, shrouding her freckles. The framed and mounted photos of those who had completed the restaurant’s challenge of eating two large pizzas and chugging three milkshakes. It was stupid. She was unable to stay solemn. “I mean,” she muttered, feeling the idiocy seep into her tongue, “it’s not like I’m having a ball either.”

She didn’t know what the desired effect was. The intent behind her words. But she designated that it was a smile when Abby did just that, small and stressed and more teeth than amusement, and she hated it so much. She hated her. “If you were having a good time, you wouldn’t be here.”

“True.” Ellie sagged further to the wall, clasping her hands behind her back. She pressed in a futile attempt to crack her spine, a knot lumped at the bottom of it. God, she was getting old. “I just can’t look past it. I don’t… making new memories is too much effort. They’d have to be fucking potent. Or whatever. To drown all the” — she gestured around her skull like she was about to scoop the brains right out — “noise.”

“Noise.”

She knew. Of course she did. “Amongst other things.” Precarious, Ellie shifted her gaze to her. “How long were you in Seattle?”

Short, she answered, “I don’t think you get to bring it up.”

The pain in her back spiked. “I don’t think you get to tell me what to do.”

“Fine.” Abby adjusted her shoulder and bounced her knee beneath the table. Mindless fidgeting. The silence stretched for miles of untapped road. “Six years and some change.”

Somehow, Ellie knew she hadn’t been born there. Not from the context clues, her dad being in Salt Lake City when Ellie had arrived. Abby didn’t have the Seattle rainfall in her veins, nothing so dark it was internal, a birthright. She’d learned it as Ellie had. Instead, the cruelty slipped their knuckles like papercuts, slowly seeping into how they moved their hands. It formed a mould for them to become, and Ellie’s legs still ached with growing pains.

“Why were you there?”

“Why?” Abby retorted simply.

She shrugged. “I’m not having fun anyways.”

“So you’d rather be uncomfortable than bored?”

“Wouldn’t anyone?”

“No.” Abby drummed her fingers on the table. It was a wave, tapping each of her long fingers onto the wooden surface in little thumps that were movement instead of sound. “Not me.”

“Well, you haven’t told me to scram yet, so I find that hard to believe.”

“Trust me, the fact that I haven’t is not personal.”

“Then what is it?” Ellie crossed her arms, and when she rested her head against the doorframe, she felt the sweat at the top of her nape, dampening her hair. “If not deeply personal.”

“Uh… ethical.” The way she said her open sounds and vowels curled into one another, spiraling as a snake’s length or the night cycle. Seamless, something rare. Abby sounded rare, vocabulary large.

“Oh, right,” Ellie laughed drily, “you’ve gotta look after my fungus.”

“You should give it a name, at this point.”

Faintly, it clicked that she was joking, and Ellie chuckled. “Any suggestions?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m no good with names. I had this succulent in Boston. Couldn’t think of any better than Princess. Granted, I was, like, eight.”

Abby laughed, a small exhale from behind her teeth. “You were born in Boston?”

“I’m from a little bit of everywhere.”

She shot her a look.

“... But I was born in Boston, yeah. You?”

Abby pursed her lips. “Oklahoma, originally. I don’t remember much of it.”

That’s why she tans well. “Fucking Oklahoma?”

“Bite me.”

They laughed, and Ellie felt neither bored nor uncomfortable and then she felt the latter all at once, that revelation icing her blood. She froze. The sudden realization of it ached like a phantom limb, fingers twitching. It was almost as if she could see the bite through Abby’s smile. They were having a conversation, but it was odd. It was a talk meant to be had sitting down, and Ellie was across the restaurant with hardwood on her back, and Abby was a stiff display. The air shifted. It strangled her lungs like a noose.

Ellie bit her lip and walked — stalked, really — forward, tugging a chair out from the table to slouch in. It creaked. The mahogany expanse was blank between them. Everything had room to be laid. “What the fuck are we?”

Abby’s lip twitched, sheer contempt. She took a lot of space when she wanted to, broadened her shoulders and splayed her legs where she sat, knee bobbing. Her eyes alone took permanent residence in the pit of Ellie’s stomach. “I’m just tolerating it.”

A howl of guffaws rose from the group outside complementing the noise of heavy machinery moving, yet it didn’t take Ellie’s focus. “I’m not trying to play nice.” She wasn’t. Every time they talked without gnarled purpose, not spitting but speaking, it resonated that it was a mistake, a mistake, a mistake. “I know that Romi asked you to tail me, ‘cause she thinks I have less brain cells than a fucking… I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean I want to be friendly.” She didn’t want to. She didn’t.

“Then don’t.” Her voice went low. “Fine by me.”

“Fine.” Ellie stood, hand flat on the table over the blood they’d spilled, and she stepped on the clutter on her way to the exit.

“I have a question, though.” She could envision the look on Abby’s face behind her back, so fucking pleased with herself.

She splayed her palm on the doorframe and grit her teeth. “Then fucking ask.”

“If you’re so set on the cure,” she began, “then how do you defend what Joel did?”

“We had” — her nails dug into the wood — “this conversation. I don’t defend it.”

“But you think of him highly.”

Her, and her prim fucking words and smug fucking mouth and the way she invaded everything, Ellie’s dreams and nightmares and stanzas. “Lev thinks of you like that, and it’s not that goddamn different, so stop running your mouth.” She began gesturing wildly, turning to face her. “Seraphite blood, Firefly blood, the fuck is the difference, Abby? At least I’m trying to do the right thing. Okay?”

She was quiet. Not out of wordlessness, shocked that way. No. Ellie could see her gears moving, jaw working and begging to speak. It would probably tear her to pieces, yet Abby reined herself. “You don’t know anything about me.”

“Don’t I?”

“You don’t.” Abby straightened her posture. “Seraphite blood, Firefly blood, Wolf blood.”

“Oh, fuck you, you fucking cunt.” Ellie slunk out of the door and slammed it, feeling the cold handle. It rattled on its hinges, the noise reverberating for a few seconds even as she walked away and into a presence. A dark head of hair, a couple of inches taller than her, and fuck’s sake, she couldn’t catch a break.

Lev asked, “... What were you guys talking about?” He was holding a stuffed animal with one ear, a hole on the side of its head where Ellie assumed the other was. It was haphazardly sewn shut with yarn she recognized from Steph’s backpack, a shade of navy blue. She couldn’t tell whether it was a bear or a dog.

Her mouth was almost too dry to speak. “How long were you here?”

“I came at about fuck you, you fucking cunt.”

It was no use trying to lie. About the situation. About the shameful flume on her cheeks somewhat concealed by her burn. There was no anger in the red, just a desire to crawl into a hole and die. “That’s… embarrassing. Uh.” Ellie licked her chapped lips. “I’m sorry.”

“What were you fighting over?”

Her brows rose to her hairline. “What don’t we fight over?”

The door creaked, and Abby emerged, eyes flicking to Lev. Then the stuffed animal. The bear-dog got more recognition than Ellie. “Where’d you get that?”

“Uh… one of the booths.” He held it up, and from Ellie’s expert vantage, she dubbed it a bear. “I was gonna give it to you, but I don’t know if you have room in your bag.”

“Probably not.”

His face fell.

Abby corrected, “But we have room in the trunk, so I’ll just put it in there.”

And simple as that, he beamed. “Okay. Do you wanna carry him?”

“It’s a him?”

“Yeah.”

She watched Abby think, practically contemplating her life up to that moment to figure out whether she should hold the thing. “Why not?” She took it from him and held it to her chest.

Ellie laughed, stifling it behind her fisted hand. She couldn’t take her seriously with that thing in her hands.

There was a wide berth of no conversation until Lev piped, “Have you guys been talking?” He was still trying. The kid was persistent, Ellie would give him that.

Abby echoed, “Talking. Sure.”

“That’s good.” Lev shifted on the balls of his feet. “There’s something I wanna show you.” You was obvious.

Subtly, Ellie took a few steps away from the pair. They walked down the street, and she walked up it.

When in Texas, do as the Texans did. From a primary source, she’d learned that they drank copious amounts of beer and whiskey and moonshine, though, Joel had said, moonshine was more of a Kentucky-Tennessee-Carolinas area thing. Upper-southern, borderline Yankees. Like anyone gave a shit anymore.

Ellie didn’t search for it. She happened upon a sports bar at the place and found intact bottles of ale behind the bar, the sunset glinting off their glass like stop signs. But most stop signs were too faded to tell, then.

She sat on the floor, uncapped a bottle with great exertion, and slung it back until she downed a fourth of the liquid, throat groaning in protest. She splayed a hand on her stomach and quietly swallowed her spit, trying not to retch all over the floor. It didn’t feel quite right. She knew alcohol didn’t expire, but the taste was off. It didn’t bear resemblance to the concoction of ale and hot chocolate Joel had made and she’d snuck a sip of. But that was Joel, and she supposed she couldn’t expect an old bottle in a dingy, squalid bar to hold a candle.

Ellie nursed the bottle again, and the bottle became bottles, caps and nausea and Joel Joel Joel, she didn’t want to think about him but couldn’t stop, the signs illegible. Her breath was labored. Where she sat, she shed her backpack and laid, her free fingers brushing the ground while the other clutched the neck of her bottle. She’d finished five. Four and a half, technically, and her tolerance was shit. Too scrawny to hold her liquor worth a damn. Her four and a half went whole when she gulped the bottle’s remnants and flung it down the room, hearing it shatter. She didn’t know how long she’d been there.

A groan pushed past her lips as she rolled onto her side, head knocking on the counter’s baseboards. Seraphite blood, Firefly blood, Wolf blood. Ellie didn’t know if her blood was of the Fireflies. She felt that people expected hers to spill like ichor, golden, the same shade as the fungus. The sheen of an immortal. It was always the assholes that got to be immortal. The second chances got to their head.

I’m rambling, she thought, though she wasn’t speaking aloud. Wasn’t immortal, per se. Even if she acted like she was. Ellie clutched a hand in her hair and slurred curses like they’d cover the noise of her thoughts. Similar to static. She remembered when her VCRs would end in Jackson or the farm, and the screen would turn that closing blue with the abrupt, screaming sound. Many nights, the blue would appear behind her eyelids, but she’d be too lazy or high or drunk to get up and turn it off. After all, so much time passed, and she grew accustomed to it. Dependent on it. Couldn’t sleep without its looming presence, no matter how much it irritated Dina that she’d sleep on the couch or Joel said she was wasting electricity by keeping it on all night.

When she closed her eye, she could almost see and hear it.

In place of blue, she got the pain of red in a kick to her shoulder. “Wake the fuck up.” Abby.

Ellie moaned for several seconds, head panging, and she slapped a palm to her forehead. “Give me a fuckin’... break.” Still drunk. Very drunk, writhing where she laid. “Not you.” She didn’t open her eye.

“Yes, me, I’ve been looking for your dumbass everywhere.”

Ellie scoffed, “That’s your own fucking fault.”

“Get up.”

“In a second.” Ellie squinted upwards and was greeted by Abby’s typical expression. Pissed. Inconvenienced. Familiar. “I was just having a drink.” She appraised her. “Where’s your bear?”

“Ellie.” More of a breath than a word. “Get up.”

She conceded, “Fine, holy shit.” Her back ached and her knees were jelly and when she rose, she had to splay both hands on the counter to keep from falling. Her shoes felt too heavy and her feet were both left. “Fuuuck.”

“That’s your own fucking fault,” Abby parroted. “Think you can walk to the car?”

“Hell no.” Ellie swiped a forearm over her sweaty forehead. “Get Cat.”

“Everyone else is already waiting in the parking lot. I got designated search duty.”

When Ellie noticed the windows, it was dark. “Is it night?”

“No, there’s an eclipse.”

Her eye widened. “Really?”

Abby gaped and blinked and bit her lip, holding something in. Yet her delivery of one word was venomous with its malice: “No.”

As swift as it’d come, it fell. “Oh. Well.”

“Well.”

“I dunno.” Ellie brushed her thumb on the counter. “Dina knew, like, all about that kind of stuff. I mean. I was astronomy, so I know what an eclipse is, but she was astrology. So she knows what it means. Did you know…,” she cut herself off with a snort. “She held our kid in until Pisces season was over just ‘cause she fucking hates Pisces?”

“Oh.” Abby slid her hands into her pockets. “You know what I think about Pisces?”

“... What?”

“I don’t care.” She nodded towards the exit and tutted. “Out.”

“I can’t — ” Ellie sputtered. “I can’t fucking walk!”

“I’m sure you don’t want my help.”

She considered that deeply and found that she agreed. Walking and busting her temple off the pavement was approximately ten times better than leaning on Abby. So she hoisted herself over the bar, clumping onto the floor, all a pile of groans. Smelling of spirits, surely. She sank down the side of the counter.

“Ellie,” Abby began, trying very hard to be foreboding, “if you don’t get your ass up and walk to the parking lot, I’m gonna leave you here.”

It made her laugh aloud.

Her memory lapsed on the how, but they made it to the van, Abby practically tossing Ellie into the passenger side with a disdainful huff. She didn’t even bother to take her backpack, so she haphazardly let it fall below the glovebox, crowding her Converse. The headlights of the other cars were like little spotlights, blinking at her display. The one Luke was driving was the first to pull out of parking.

Abby slid into the driver’s side and started the van, somehow steering perfectly despite her tired eyes and taut hands and plush bear in her lap.

“You forgot to throw it in the trunk,” Ellie observed, words no different from one another.

“... I did, huh.” They both knew she hadn’t forgotten.

It might have been minutes or hours or miles or meters, some measurement Ellie couldn’t be bothered to discern at that time. They didn’t break the silence. Lev and Steph were asleep, which was always a good indicator of how late it was at night.

“I’m sorry.” It felt right despite making her want to upchuck her beer.

“For what? Calling me a cunt?” She punctuated it with a hard press to the gas, surging the van for a second, a foot, a gram weighing heavy in her lungs. There was no adequate way to scribble the way Abby made her feel, no label.

Ellie laid her temple on the cool window. “Definitely not for that.”

“At least you’re honest.”

She sighed and watched it fog the glass. Like a cloud that couldn’t join the ones in the stratosphere. God, she was wasted. “I’m sorry you had to get me. It was fucking dumb, I know.”

Perhaps infinity could hold the description of them, intertwined for what felt like lifetimes, their quietness so mummed and heavy it was sickening. “It’s fine,” Abby finally replied, and somehow, Ellie thought it would be.

Chapter Text

Ellie had never been so hungover. She suspected it was a concoction of the uncomfortable sleep and sheer volume of what she’d drunk, but when she woke to the blearing sun, sheening in her sore eye, she groaned, “Oh my fucking god.”

“Good morning,” Lev said quietly. Shame jabbed her gut for exposing him to her temper lost. Her memories flowed back like slivers of water, reminding her of what he’d overheard. Curses and vitriol gunned.

“Morning,” Steph chimed, too, but hers was far too chipper to be anything but sarcastic. “You thirsty?”

Her lips were chapped and pursed. “I don’t think I could drink more if my life depended on it.” She pressed her face to the window, raising her hand to shield her eye from the sun. She was hungry in a specific sense where it felt like her stomach was devouring itself, but if she ate anything, she’d retch it. She shot a glance at Abby. She was still driving, nostrils flared. It seemed Ellie’s waking had dampened her mood. The bear was in her lap. “Did we drive all night?”

“We?”

Ellie rolled her eye.

“No, I didn’t drive all night. We all pulled over and rested for a while. We’re about to pass into Oklahoma.”

“Your homeland,” she jeered.

She huffed, “I’m not taking shit from somebody born in Boston.”

“Like Boston’s worse.” She didn’t have pride in her birthplace, never had. Boston QZ was a nightmare. But if Abby was the one criticizing it, she could make some exceptions and force a snobby chin up. “It’s good that you got some rest, at least.”

Abby shot her a scrunched look, and she longed to recall her words. For all Ellie cared, Abby could be ambling with exhaustion, hardly awake so long as she wasn’t at the wheel.

In the quiet scarcely interrupted by Lev and Steph’s conversation, she reached into her bag and retrieved her journal and pencil. She had no inklings of what to draw, the forefront of her mind void of anything but pain. All she knew was a need for distraction from it. A dull throb pistoned in her skull, pushing a hiss past her teeth. She flicked to the next empty page, the amount of blank margins diminishing.

She began in lines, gaze a squint and strokes of her lead narrow. They were vague. Squares and rectangles, nothing more until she could make them so. She licked her lips. They were arranged in an almost circular shape, and her mind constructed the groaning metal and churn on its own, pressing the image to the precipice of her mind. With no reference, it would be difficult, but she’d drawn it once before. Remembered

When she’d drawn a Ferris wheel last, it was conceived in a haze of storm and whipping winds, the immenseness jostling her frame, the point of her pencil. Its lines were shaky. Reflective, mirroring her. However, she’d gotten a better look at the device’s inner workings and could invoke more of its essence. The lines were clear. The large, main rim of the wheel was dark and thick while the spokes were whispers, yet had all the might. Without them, the figure would crumple.

She noticed a dip in the backseat conversing and sensed Lev leaning close, peering from behind her headrest. “What are you drawing?”

“Just sketching,” she muttered, trailing her lead from the paper. The product was fine. Nothing special. There were no battering winds or sea pictured, only the objective truth of the contraption. “Trying to warm up.” Because she wouldn’t, couldn’t admit that the landmarks of Seattle still gripped her focus like an entree or centerpiece, however loose their grasp had become. Especially not in front of the perpetrator, who gazed anywhere but her.

“Oh.” Lev paused. “How did you get so good at that?”

“At what?”

“Drawing.”

“Uh.” Ellie remembered how she’d begun with gawky limbs and heads too big, harsh shading and holes in sketchbooks where she’d erased too much. “Practice, I guess. I drew a lot of portraits. And having a reference doesn’t hurt.” When she got bored of tracing comics, despite his playful annoyance, Joel would pose for hours on end until she got him just right. The juts of his beard and jaw serviced her beginner lines fine. He fenced the margins of her journal entries and took pages even then, even presently. But he began to share the space the longer they remained in Jackson with Dina, Cat, and Jesse. That blankness, however, had conceded to Abby lately. “I had too much free time.”

“I never got the chance to do anything like that,” Lev muttered. “If we had time to do things like that, we had time to help on the island.”

She felt the vibe in the van drop. The island. She hadn’t treaded its land but heard wind of it from Seraphites’ conversation Abby bristled next to her, and that was contagious.

“Well,” Ellie broke the silence, “if you set your mind to it, I’m sure you’d do awesome, man.”

He smiled, and she didn’t know why, but he looked so much like JJ at that moment.

If anyone asked, Ellie wouldn’t be able to verbalize the dynamic of the van. They had different roots, stretched so far from their original ground that they might snap. After all, her own were brittle from hers and Abby’s intertwining. They were so close, so bonded by it, yet they hardly spoke a word to one another. They didn’t have to; spiteful glances were all they needed.

At least, up to that point.

Because, in their journey, state lines and Ferris wheels and close calls, there were instances where those spiteful glances couldn’t encompass it. Them. The drive barely held their weight, so Ellie had no expectation of a single expression. Their hateful tie was frayed by pitiful looks, by brief sarcasm, by an intangible divide. There was before Arizona and after Arizona, and a new knot formed in her throat when she glanced to the driver’s side. It was instinctual.

When she envisioned Abby, she was no longer wielding a club and covered in blood, reeking of vengeance. She simply steered, one of the most driven people Ellie had ever met, not stubborn to be stubborn, but for a purpose. The southwestern sunlight glinted off the dip in her nose. It illuminated the edges of her pout. She eyed her mouth a lot. Then, it was a tight frown as she surveyed the route.

“What are you looking at?” Abby interrupted the daze.

Ellie blinked and swallowed. She felt caught. And didn’t know why. “You look pissed.”

“I’m not.” But her shoulders tensed as she gripped the wheel, knuckles protruding, sidelined by the veins in her strong hands. She was earthy like that. Dextrous.

Ellie glanced at the road to try and find what had irked her and found a sign: Welcome to Oklahoma. Fuck, if she saw Welcome to Boston, she figured she’d have a stroke. It was understandable. She repeated to herself, slow, Abby was being understandable. I understand.

“What city are you from?” Ellie prodded. In the rearview mirror, she saw Lev perk. Maybe he didn’t know, either.

“Tulsa,” Abby answered, snipping the conversation. Her voice was steady but hard.

Ellie could fight, bear her teeth in and draw the information out of Abby like spilled blood, but that was bitter. The tangerine of Oklahoma’s sun was too sweet for it.

Afternoon light berated her, sweat beading on her forehead. Ellie had shed down to a tank top, the bite on her shoulder not a target now that their crew knew of her immunity. She swiped her arm across her forehead. “How are you not dying?” Abby and Steph were unperturbed whereas she and Lev were practically boiling puddles.

All she got in response were a couple of shrugs and a wide silence. They’d been on the road too long for casual conversation. She wasn’t complaining and sank into her seat. She watched their surroundings, occasionally catching sight of a rogue infected or crumpled business. Over time, it was as though her feet had a mind of their own, moving to rest on the dashboard, stained laces loose.

Abby’s side glance pelted at Ellie, yet she said nothing at all about her dirty Converse.

The group came to a halt around five in the evening to stretch their legs and converse on routes, the area free of any hordes. They would have startled already by the sound of their engines. Abby twisted the key in the ignition and left the van quickly, heading for Romi’s.

Ellie tutted, exiting just as swiftly. A walk would relax her back, hopefully, drawing the ache from it. She rested her hand on it as she strode down the sidewalk. It wasn’t glaringly bright anymore but light enough to navigate the town. The area, once surveyed, was clearly a forlorn shopping district. Mannequins were toppled in windows, the latest fashions draped off their shoulders. There was a store of simple knick-knacks. A craft store. Her brows rose.

She approached it and peered inside. Spools of yarn were on the floor. Markers and pens and notebooks. Bags of pipe cleaners collected dust while stacks of colored paper had lost their radiance, and yet, they were the brightest thing she’d seen in ages. She thought of the crown Dina had made for her on her birthday so long ago, but the memory was swallowed as it appeared. Replacing it, she recalled Lev’s enamoredness with her aimless doodling, the twinkle in his eye. It was inspiration. Every artist’s kickstart.

Ellie was lucky to have had the means to pursue creativity, with supplies to be stolen from schools she attended and things for barter in Jackson. Most importantly, she’d had encouragement of it, interest shown from Riley, Joel, Dina. She’d had art to aspire to, her Savage Starlight volumes still in her old home. Lev had never had that chance. Until then.

She checked for her knife and sleuthed within. Her hands were dextrous. She might have gotten too much, but for a kid that hadn’t had much at all, she didn’t mind. Time was lost on her. There were hues of marker she’d never gotten to use before. Deep, deep blue, a luminescent fuchsia, something labeled chartreuse. She tested each on blank white paper, and although dulled, their swatches were adequate.

Her test paper was a technicolor mess. When she heard the entrance creak, she was slipping some markers into her backpack.

“What are you doing?” Abby said. Ellie needn’t look to know it was her voice.

She glanced up from her open bag, its maw brimming with the supplies. “Grabbing some stuff.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to.”

Abby leaned into the doorframe. “Kinda seems like a lot to carry.”

“I’m not keeping all of it. I’m giving some to Lev. Or Steph, if she wants some.”

“Why?”

“It seemed like he wanted to draw. Or whatever.”

“... Okay.” She looked Ellie up and down. It was undefined. Not quite snarky, just raking her in. That was almost worse. “We’re leaving. Come on.”

“Right.” She zipped her bag and slung it over her shoulder, admittedly feeling a margin more weight than usual. She donned both straps instead of one to balance it. “Are we driving through the night?”

“Probably.”

“This’ll give him something to do, then.”

Abby looked to the ground, something weighing on her. It was so clear, if for a fleeting moment. Practically a black cloud hovering over her head, furrowing her brow and rendering her small, something Abby should never be no matter how short. The only time she had looked so withdrawn was Santa Barbara, where everything had been taken. Ellie didn’t know how to hold the feeling in the shop. What to say, if she should say anything at all. Abby spoke first, “Remember what I told you back in Phoenix?” She regained her stature. Her shoulders squared. Her jaw tightened.

Ellie answered, “You said a lot to me in Phoenix.”

If you could go back, would you still do it?

No. You?

I don’t know.

Why not?

“Lev,” Abby said, pointed. “Don’t talk to him if you don’t need to.”

She scoffed, “We’ve had this conversation. He talks to me, and you can’t stop him. It’s not like I’m trying to get under your skin.”

“I’m the one that’s looking after him, and I don’t need you — ”

Ellie moved to her. “Me? Really? I don’t think we wanna talk about role models, Abby.” She was trying so very hard to withhold. And she’d been succeeding. But Abby had decided to press and pull and twist until she nearly came apart, a splatter of gristle and fury on parchment.

There was a long pause. It all went static.

“I don’t think you do, either.”

The red became too much to bear. Ellie lunged at her, limbs crazed, swinging for her nose. A fist connected and broke the bridge, eliciting a yelp of indignation. In return, she received a hook to her kidney. Excruciating pain shot through her torso, enough to make her bend.

“Fuck you!” she shouted. Another hit did not come, not from her, not from Abby. Their panting was loud enough. Ellie retched, feeling her stomach clutch from the punch, but she gulped the mess down. Abby was cradling her bleeding nose. Ellie pondered if it would change the arch of it, perhaps sculpting it to something more crooked. Maybe producing a deeper croon. Not that she would notice anyhow.

Abby gritted, muffled behind her hand, “We’re not doing this.”

“Then stop being a cunt.”

“Stop trying — ” she cut herself off, swiping the blood from her face. The corner of her mouth twitched. What she wanted to say tripped in her mouth, parting and closing, unsure.

Ellie didn’t hear what she said next, because when she stood upright, she did not listen. Whether it was a threat or apology — yeah, right — or reluctant truce, she did not hear. She was eyeing the way blood stained the valley of her lips. She was acquainted with this version of Abby, a bleeding heart. But her reaction was different. She blinked. There was no pleasure derived from the hurt. No pity, either. Abby bandaging her hand flashed in the back of her mind. A subconscious, burrowing, biting desire to return a favor that made the world slip on its axis.

She broke her thoughts, “Are you listening to me?”

Ellie couldn’t say she was. It was hard to discern what she was saying from behind her palm.

Abby didn’t repeat what she didn’t hear. She shook her head and wired her jaw, that stance that made her imposing. And she seemed to know the effect it had, because her voice gained clarity, despite cracking with pain in some places. “You don’t understand that I can barely look at you.”

She almost laughed. “I think I understand more than anyone else.”

“And you don’t understand how important he is to me.” Gentle.

So soft that, by replying, Ellie thought she might break it. But she had to. Or else she would be giving Joel no credit. “I think,” she repeated, “I understand more than anyone else.”

Abby sniffed and wiped her mouth. Blood had dripped down her chin, onto her collar, all over her hands. “... We’re leaving.”

They were back where they began, something Ellie refused when it’d make Lev concerned. He didn’t deserve to worry. “Here.” She tossed it.

Abby caught it with one hand, the other drenched. The blood was a pique, drawing her eye. But ultimately, with each tinge in the store, Ellie’s gaze returned to that brownish blueish hazelish.

“I got a nosebleed,” Abby explained shortly. It took each synapse in Ellie to keep from guffawing at the cloth stuck up her nose as she started the van. “I’ll be fine.”

In the rearview mirror, Lev had some suspicions, Steph utterly unbelieving. Fortunately, she had a distraction on hand. “I ran into an art store.” She reached for her bag and sat it on her lap to unzip it. “It had a bunch of sketchbooks and markers and stuff. I figured you guys might like it.”

Like the memory of a goldfish, they quickly forgot their concern, Lev beaming and Steph leaning forward. Ellie handed them each a small notepad, not wanting it to take too much of their backpack’s space, and a couple handfuls of drawing utensils, letting them sort them out amongst themselves. It was a good distraction.

“Uh.” Ellie crossed her arms, sagging. She kept her voice low. “Sorry.”

Abby didn’t reply for several seconds. “Thanks. For the cloth.”

“It’s fine.” She curled her palm and traced her thumb over the bare scratch there, Abby’s bandage unneeded then. “You look ridiculous, though.”

“Bite me.”

Ellie allowed herself a brief smile.

Nighttime fell. So did the kids, fast asleep with their notepads open. Abby was focused on the road. There was nothing but the van they followed and sound of broken asphalt below the wheels. Moments like then consumed Ellie’s days. The relative nothing and all of them, so much tension strung tight, yet a soothing pitch black sky. It was pacifying. Toning down the most mauling conversations, ones that threatened to tear their throats open with sharp words.

She subtly reached into her bag for one of her CDs and slid it into the tray. A couple tracks came until it landed on one she liked.

Clear a path into the room

And pushing everything off the table

Crashing on the floor

People start to scream

Ellie drummed her fingers in imaginary strings, chords she could still recall. The song grew deeper as it went on, relatively short, but nice, so nice when accompanied by the expanses they drove past. They were halfway through Oklahoma, she estimated, neatly slotted in nowhere. The state lines didn’t matter as much as who she was with. That was where she was. She glanced at Abby.

On the wheel, her fingertips pattered offbeat. It was like a dancer with two left feet.

“What are you into?” Ellie asked, because it wasn’t music she was familiar with, or art, or anything she knew.

Abby hesitated. It was as if she thought Ellie was addressing someone else. “... Coins.”

“Coins,” she repeated.

“My dad had a collection. I only have a few states left to find.”

“And what else?”

“Uh.” She bit her lip. “Reading. And movies, I guess.”

Ellie perked. “What kinds of movies?” Certainly not the old, corny action ones she and Joel reveled in.

“Old ones. We’d always have movie night back at the stadium, and we had collections of VHS you could check out. There was a lot of good stuff.”

“What’s your favorite?”

“I don’t know. Maybe…”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

She took a right turn. Her arms were so skilled and sure, yet her expression didn’t read the same. “I never had time to think about it. It was always pretty go, go, go in Seattle. Salt Lake, too.”

“Boston was like that.” Ellie leaned her temple onto the window. “I never got to know myself until I left. Maybe it’s ‘cause I was also, y’know. A kid.”

“I can’t imagine you as one.”

She chuckled, “Just think if I was even scrawnier.”

“That can’t be possible.”

“I was. You could’ve snapped me in half.” Ellie looked her over. Abby was this Abby. Brooding strength and a steady motive, always ready to claw for a purpose. Aside from Santa Barbara, she was always a paragon of what it meant to be fully realized. At least, that’s what she’d thought. “I can’t even comprehend that you were a kid.”

“It was a while ago.”

“How old are you?” The simple questions, the core questions you would ask first about someone had been forgotten for jabs. Vindictive fury, each of them so convinced of their own righteousness. It was the face of them. So much so that basics, birthdays, birthplaces, ages felt deeply personal. Intrusive.

“Twenty-four.”

Three years older than she was. Seventeen the day her father died. It made Ellie’s gut curl. “Right.” The presence of the kids became heavy. They’d dealt with so much loss. In the months after Joel died, everything fell flat, no sympathy burgeoning its way into Ellie’s mind. The only thing that had existed was her grief and the wild need to atone for this death. The error in how she had not saved him, or at least had the dignity to die with him. Not to escape when she hadn’t deserved it. God, she’d pushed him away up until that previous night. A stupid grudge. A stupid, stupid amount of time wasted for nothing. “You’re lucky.”

“Am I?”

“You ended up in a good place after all the bullshit.”

She sucked her teeth. Took another turn, an infuriating, perfected glide. “Until you came along.”

Ellie stiffened. “I didn’t plan on ruining your life.” The music changed to something melted, slower. “Not… recently, anyway.”

“I didn’t plan on ruining yours.”

“But you did.”

“I did.” Abby’s grip flexed on the wheel.

Scratching her nose, Ellie tried to disappear into the car door, bunched. As if she could be overlooked in her rotten nature. “You have something to live for, though.” Lev needed her. At the end of the day, no matter how much he’d beared the brunt of, he was a child, and he needed soft hours of sleep, nothing able to harm him. He needed a protector. Steph had Cat and could get on without her. JJ had Dina. And Ellie had no one, down to the wire.

“The cure,” Abby countered.

Stumbling through the crowd

I was heading for the door

Remembering a cooler party

“They’re gonna figure it out without me. They’ll just use the grave.” That mass of bodies was worth more than she ever would be. And they’d already, unwilling or unknowing as they were, given their lives to humanity. “I’m just… here.”

Angels started in song

There was something in their eyes

The time was standing still

“You’re here.”

It sounded different coming from Abby. Spoken from the one that could have killed her, again, and again, and again, yet Ellie was with her. The music faded.

Arkansas. The most nothing Ellie had ever seen through groggy sight. It could have been something once, but she was doubtful, eye raking for any potential but growing bored. She didn’t know how anyone could live in such barren straits. Even the kids didn’t know how to comment, focusing on their notebooks. In spite of the new distraction, though, she could pinpoint their incoming frenzy. Fuck, even she was feeling cooped, legs bunched below the glovebox as if they were shackled.

“Did you expect it to feel more grand?” Ellie asked. The words weren’t a clear address, settling into the van for all the passengers to hear. But, at the very depths of her longing, she knew who she wanted an answer from.

Abby replied, voice clear without the cloth clogging, “I didn’t expect it to, but…”

“You hoped?”

“Sure.”

Ellie nodded. Mutual understanding, two words that spanned so far from Ellie and Abby. “We’re close.”

Lev perked and joined, “We are?” His eyes were bright, the uninterested dullness lifted from the scribbles on paper.

“A couple of states,” Abby supplied. “We’re gonna stop for a bit soon. We’ve been driving for too long.” Aside from bathroom breaks every few hours, it’d been a continuous climb. Drivers switched out in the other vehicles, yet Abby never let anyone else touch the wheel. It wasn’t like Ellie had genuinely offered, though.

He closed his notebook, setting it in his backpack. “I could go for a nap.”

Abby laughed beneath her breath, “Couldn’t we all?”

All the rundown hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts began to look the same. The rotting linens reeked of mildew to the damaged ceilings. The sparse noises of infected within served a moaning reminder of the world they were in. These spots were for survival, not leisurely travel as their spot had once filled. The group flitted to their own rooms at the motel, listening and peeking in windows to spy for threats. A couple dying groans of walkers welled behind Ellie as she walked the pavement. Her eye was shielded from the Arkansas dusk by a green trim around the building.

She puffed her cheeks and exhaled from her nose. A rule of thumb was choosing the last door down, farthest from the entrance. It would be the one people had stayed at less before Cordyceps, so there was less chance of slumped bodies or clawing hands. She pressed an inquiring ear to the door. There was no sound. The threshold, however, was firm, and there were no windows to shatter. It didn’t budge when she pushed forward with her shoulder.

“Fuck,” she cursed, surging again. All her body weight wasn’t enough to gouge it off the hinges.

“You’re gonna kill yourself.” Abby’s patronizing, infuriating criticism loomed behind her, and Ellie had no clue how long she’d been watching. Not knowing where Abby was didn’t settle in her bones.

“Were you following me?” she asked.

She simply rolled her eyes. It was enough to make her feel dim for asking. Since Abby had pointed it out in Phoenix, there were times when she caught herself being conceited that she loathed.

Ellie retreated from the door, perspiration making her hair stick to her forehead, her bangs unruly since the last trim they’d gotten, and she huffed, “Show me how it’s done, then.”

Abby readied her stance.

“I was being sarcastic — ”

In two heaving motions, form perfected and her full body forward, the door yielded, swinging open in dramatic fashion. It swerved inward, so much so that it hit the wall and echoed back, a desolate creak all that remained of its solidity. And she hadn’t broken a sweat. “There.” Abby’s hair had gotten in her face, so she tucked it behind her ears. It was nothing like it had been, though it was longer than Ellie had seen it when they met again. Instead of her chin, it scarcely brushed her shoulders.

It suits her, Ellie thought, and resented her own mangy hair, frizzing and matting. “... I didn’t ask.”

“You needed it.”

“That’s not…” She gestured vaguely. Attempted to push the color of husky blonde and chameleon eyes looking at her from the forefront of her psyche, where they had gotten so very comfortable. As if mimicking — she wanted to eat her own hands when she realized, but it was already too far in motion —, she moved her bangs behind her ears, too. They fell back instantly. “I didn’t ask.”

Abby didn’t need to offer her reasoning. Ellie could glean it instantly; she’d felt sorry for her, pitying. She could keep it. “Your hair is in your face.”

“I couldn’t tell.”

“You might wanna take care of that.”

“I don’t see a salon around here.”

“Yeah, well. Might wanna find some scissors, because whatever rusty razor blade you used last time — ”

“Keep talking.” She wasn’t angry or indignant. Nor bored, wanting to get through the interaction. She craved more, said more to get more, more, more, wanting to banter. Her quick tongue would surely rot, wasted, otherwise.

“Oh, I will.”

It had to end. She had to end it. “Can I at least get some sleep first?”

“... Sure.”

Tense, but not awkward, as the latter would entail nothing left to say. Staring at one another, like they were each an exhibition, beheld. Ellie bit her lip, trailed her gaze to the ground, and slipped into the motel room, not a single goodbye bade. She couldn’t close the door behind, and she felt Abby’s eyes pelt her for several seconds. Until the sense disappeared. And she was left with nothing but a scarred back, drilled by prying eyes.

I can’t stomach you swallow you ache for you

And she couldn’t write anymore. The sentence glared at her, practically searing holes into her journal. It melted like a sinner in church, no amount of blessed water able to extinguish its insistence. For days, the words had lived in her knuckles, waiting to be said by motion or punch or poetry, and they had been, but each medium didn’t suffice. It lurched from her knuckles to her gut, upset, to her brain, fogging, to her eyes, blinded.

Ellie cut her stanza off in a swift flick of her hand, closing the journal and casting it somewhere. Too far, as it’d hit the wall, flopping to the musty floor. Too much space. Too much time to think. She was beginning to miss her twin bed in Jackson, because at least it owned her complaints for the night. Not enough room, not enough warmth, too stiff, so picky, so ungrateful. She curled her knees to her chest where she sat upright.

She could leave. No one would notice. But she was experienced with leaving the consumption, thinking it would simply eat through the earth where it was left. Instead, it ate at her. She would rather coinhabit than become so ill with it again, as she had on the farm. The longer she stared at the sickly wall, the more it began to wave, vision dotty.

Her door creaked. She didn’t have time to recover. Look natural.

“Did you fall or something?” Abby asked. She didn’t sound tired. In fact, she didn’t sound like she’d slept at all, but she appeared as if she’d tried, flannel sweatpants and a holey tank top draping off her shoulders. Perhaps she’d heard her curse beneath her breath, attempting to dredge her soul in pen.

Ellie looked at her, then at her sagging journal, then at her. It was an obvious scene. “No.”

“What was that noise?”

She didn’t answer.

“... Well.” Stern — she wanted to wipe the look off her face —, Abby crossed her arms. “If you’re gonna have a temper tantrum, can you do it quietly?”

“You have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“Thin walls.”

“Picky ears.”

She rolled her eyes and walked towards the journal, and every synapse in Ellie’s body fired. Adrenaline. Shock, dismay, lips parting for something to say. Either convincing or intimidating enough to steer her touch away from its delicate spine, for her not to read its contents. She couldn’t think of something quick enough. Abby picked it up, strode over, and sat it on the nightstand. Ellie loathed her. Always, but particularly then. Always, always, always chorused within her, trying to make her believe.

There, she sat against the headboard, and Abby stood with her hand flat on the notebook’s cover, like she was making sure it didn’t scurry away or get flung again. Moonlight filled the room. It made white bedspreads blue. She slipped her hair behind her ear to see better. Obscured vision couldn’t be afforded, certainly not with one eye, with such an imminence leering at her.

“You should cut your hair,” Abby muttered.

“What do you care?”

“You can’t see.”

“What — ” Ellie cut her repeat off. Sagged to the headboard. Looked into her. “Why are you here?”

Abby didn’t know how to reply. Maybe it was some magnetism, disallowing her sleep and dragging her to that motel room. But there was no tangible reason as to why she should be lit by the moon at that howling hour. “Just making sure you weren’t dead.”

“After everything, now would be a pretty shitty time to go.”

“I guess.” She tensed, brandishing her palms over her pants. “I’m gonna try to sleep.”

“Sure you will.”

“... Right.” Abby hesitated, pausing her palms, before she slunk out of the room, the only evidence of her arrival the mess she’d cleaned up.

Ellie tugged her knees tighter to her chest, so utterly pathetic she felt like she could crumple. Her fingertips drummed her calves. She tried to set a steady rhythm to her heart, but it was hard to hear, too deep inside her ribs. However, she could discern Abby and Luke’s muffled conversing. The walls really were thin.

“Where’d you go?” Luke asked. She couldn’t parse his tone, but she figured he was concerned if not annoyed. Abby didn’t reply, and he posed another question, “What are you looking for?”

“Scissors.”

Her hair was in her eye. She didn’t brush it away.

A faint, shuffling noise. “You need to rest, you’ve been driving for forever.”

“I will after I give these to Lev. He needs a trim.”

“When are you coming back — ?”

She burst, “Jesus, Luke!” Neither spoke for several moments. Ellie’s own mouth went dry. She felt invasive, as if she were a vine breaking into a building, grabbing it by the windowsill and seldom releasing. Somewhat quieter, Abby continued, “It’s not important.”

“It is to me, but it’s not like you’d know that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He laughed. It was a laugh that made Ellie want to punch him in his teeth. A bitter scoff, pushed between gritted teeth, meant something different from her, or anyone. That sound from him was a sting of disrespect. “I get the fact that you’re dedicated. I know. But I’ve been here for you since you came from Santa Barbara, and all of a sudden, I don’t even exist to you.”

“That’s not true.”

Luke rephrased, “I’m not your priority.”

Ellie felt Abby’s considering face like a phantom limb, working everything over. Chewing her cheek. “No. You’re not.”

“So she is?”

“She’s what I need for Lev to be happy. So, yeah. I guess so.”

Ellie felt like a spotlight shine on her face, illuminating each wrinkle in her forehead, her imperfections and blemishes on display. Everyone had cast their vote on her, hitched their steeds. As if she could even hold herself upright.

“What does Lev have to do with anything?”

“More than you!” Her volume raised. Others had to hear them. “Look, at the end of the day, it’s always gonna be Lev, and if I have to tolerate Ellie to make everything better for him, then that’s what I have to do. It’s for my… it’s for the Fireflies, too, it’s for more than us. Whatever we are, at this point.” Ellie knew she had almost raised her father into the conversation but had choked on it. A sensation they had certainly both felt, speaking of ghosts only to shut down. “... I’m leaving.”

“Can’t we talk about this?”

“Later.” Any eavesdropper wouldn’t believe that word. Not for a second.

Before Luke could protest, Ellie heard the door to their room shut, something falling from its shake. A feather’s fall could be heard in the silence, a bubble around the motel. Her lips parted in shock. Further, they went agape, unable to speak, when she heard her door creak again, opening to display Abby. She had scissors in her hand and a thoughtful frown, hair mussed from where she’d run her hands through, worried fingertips skimming her strands. Disheveling it. She wasn’t crying, bleeding, or injured in any way Ellie could see. But there was melancholy, pure, undiluted grimness. She’d lost faith. So vulnerable it made Ellie want to gently pry the scissors from her hand and show her to a seat. It was the last look in Dina’s eyes she’d witnessed before turning her back.

“I thought those were for Lev,” Ellie muttered, low to repel eavesdroppers. According to Abby, everything was for Lev. And though true, they both knew there was a coinhabitant in that spur. It was obvious the moment she’d shown at Ellie’s door instead of his.

Abby shrugged. She was a bad liar. “Does your bathroom have a mirror?”

They stood in front of the sink, mirror heading it, decades of grime on its surface. The more the tried to clean it, the worse the debris and smear became, so they left it and settled, their reflections disrupted by years gone by. Abby was much taller, much broader than Ellie, standing behind her.

“You don’t look like you used to,” Abby said. She parted Ellie’s hair with the closed scissors, skirting skin from skin at all costs.

“I guess. I don’t remember a lot from then.” Snapshots of gore. Seattle’s puddles. Dirt caking her face. “... I heard everything you said to him.”

“So?”

She looked at the ground and disrupted Abby’s hands. “Sorry,” she apologized, for that and more. “I didn’t… look.” It was getting harder to collect herself in Abby’s presence. “I didn’t mean to get so close to this. Especially not to… screw your relationship over. I get how it is.” When the nightmares wouldn’t stop, Abby’s contorted face infiltrating every inch of the farm. “I don’t care about you anymore.” Not a better liar than her, but more convincing denial.

Abby pinched a lock of hair between her pointer and thumb, her other hand wielding scissors, and skillfully snipped it, dropping the auburn to the tiles. It was just more waste. “The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think I just needed something to work out. When I got to Catalina, they were struggling. And I didn’t want to fight anymore. I hibernated with him, instead. Until I found my own strength. And he…” She cut something at the back of her head. “Shit.”

Ellie’s hand flew to the back of her head, frantic, eye blown wide. Their hands brushed. Abby reared hers away. “What the fuck did you do?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Abby — ”

“I can fix it.” She flicked Ellie’s wrist.

Immediate, she pulled her arm away, rubbing the spot. “Have you even done this before?”

“Yes.” She smoothed her scalp. “Your hair is just thinner than I expected.” Snips. Cuts. Her shoulders tensed. Abby could jam the blade into her brains, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to. “I used to…” She cut herself off, pursing her lips. Everything went warm. Not hot, heat burning her skin, but warm, like an embrace, one that coaxed secrets. “I used to cut my friend’s hair.”

Ellie wondered if it was Leah, gorgeous in the way Dina was confident. Or Manny, Mel, hair close-cropped, Owen’s, names swirling in her head like the jurors at her death, choosing how she was to be remembered. There was no option but guilty, a spectacle, a cautionary tale. She didn’t respond. All she could do was stand, allowing her to take that control as she had before, steering wheel clutched tight.

“Luke doesn’t let me touch his,” Abby murmured.

“Oh.”

“Never has.”

“I’ve always cut my own.”

“Obviously.”

“Wow.” Ellie chuckled, just briefly. Their eyes met in the mirror. So deeply intimate, as if their irises stroked, comforted one another in their anxieties, thoughts, pasts. “What are you gonna do?”

“About him?”

Anything. Anything she wanted to bleed, Ellie would drink. “Sure.”

Abby contemplated, cutting another strand. Her head only felt lighter, not lopsided, and she could see. See clearer than ever before, even with one eye. Obstruction shed away as she answered, “Nothing gold can stay.”

She smiled, a meek thing. “Like The Outsiders?”

“You know that book?”

“The movie.”

“It’s one of my favorites.” She craned her neck to inspect a cranny, the bang tucked behind her ear. She unsheathed it. Sized it.

Ellie could smell her, the scent of pine and hot flesh suddenly looming around the entire bathroom. Her face grew hot. It was a familiar sense, so close. It was hard to pinpoint.

“You smell like blood,” Abby said.

“You smell like me.” They paused and watched one another’s lips, waiting for who was going to speak first. The smell was so slick, fading into obscurity as Ellie grew used to it being so close. In a fleeting second, she caught it, “I use that soap. Pine soap.”

Abby smelled her again. She saw her pupils blacken. “You’re right.”

“You smell like blood, too.”

She didn’t respond. Just rustled her hair until it fell naturally. The trim was nice, and Ellie could see herself beneath her scissors again. “Thanks.”

“Yeah.”

And there was no excuse for Abby to stay, nothing that could pull her with good reason to Ellie’s motel room. There were plenty that were empty. Plenty that could call her. But neither of them could sleep, and that was reason enough to stay standing. That’s how she rationalized it, and the beat of her heart could be boiled to fear. Fear, is all.

“Are you gonna go back to Luke’s room?”

“No.”

“... Are you gonna leave?”

“Do you want me to?”

No. “I don’t care.” I can’t sleep without knowing where you are.

There were two beds, and they retreated to their own. A few feet separated their laying bodies. God, they really should be in caskets or the earth by then. That would make things easier. It would save so much heartache.

“I feel so fucked,” Ellie whispered. She didn’t expect a reply, certainly not from Abby. The ceiling would be more likely to speak.

“Everyone does.”

“This” — she squeezed her eyes shut — “is everything I’ve lived for. And it’s gonna get taken away from me, so what is the fucking point of me being here? To be a poster child? I don’t — ”

“Stop it.”

She continued, “I should be grateful to be alive, and I feel like shit because I can’t. I — why them? Why them and not me? I never wanted this.”

“Then make the fucking best of it, or everyone died for nothing, Ellie.”

It was afternoon when they regrouped, everyone packing their belongings and getting into their vehicles. They got the same van. The same four. Something different flitted in the air, however. The blood and pine was so noticeable, and Ellie felt herself inhaling just to smell it.

And she’d slid into the driver’s seat before Abby could.

Abby leered into the open window, glare sharp. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Driving. You’ve been doing it for days.”

“For good reason.”

Lev said, “Maybe you should take a break, Abby.”

Yes. “Yeah, Abby.”

Abby glanced between the two. She couldn’t fight his concern. “Fine.” Perhaps she was too tired or too weak for him, but in either case, it was enough to for her to fish the keys from her pockets and hand them to Ellie. Her skin seemed softer.

“You should’ve turned right there.” It was the nth criticism she’d made from the passenger seat, looking ridiculous with how tall she was, the seat unable to recline, stuck on something.

Ellie rolled her eyes. "Okay, Abs."

Chapter Text

Ellie liked driving. She liked the weight under her hands, the gentle drift of the wheel. Her hands glazed over the knobs of the radio every so often, adjusting the volume. There was no need for a map; she was between the two other cars, following wherever the first led.

“We’re super close.” She’d said it a lot in the past few hours, yet each time, it gained more imminence.

Steph asked, “Where are we?” Through that trip, she had focused on weaving her bracelets. Lev had gained more and more on his wrists.

Through Mississippi to the heart of Alabama, she’d driven, and she recalled the last road sign. “Hoover? Alabama?” Her voice piqued, unsure.

She stared. “You sound really confident.”

“No, she’s right,” Abby confirmed. “We’re around there.”

Lev spoke, “How much longer?” He fiddled with his bracelets, attempting to space them from each other.

“Uh…” Ellie looked at Abby.

“Two-ish hours.”

He blinked. “Holy shit.”

She continued, “So make sure you guys have your stuff together soon.”

Sure, the kids needed to get their stuff together, but Ellie didn’t think she had enough time to pool her brain, much less her life, in anticipation. For years, she had lamented her lack of choice, the doctors looming and Joel stealing the opportunity from them, but with it on the horizon, she felt her heart patter, patter, patter. Her nails dug into the wheel’s leather.

“Do you know what they’re like?” Ellie muttered.

Abby shook her head. “Most of the people I was with in Salt Lake stayed on the west coast. I know that their resources are shaky, though. They need more people.”

She recalled Romi’s warning about them, her wariness when Ellie had first shown. It was as if she didn’t want her hopes to peak. “And we’re entrusting the cure for humanity to them?”

“We don’t have any better options.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

—

“Abby?” Ellie asked. They inched closer to the Georgia border with every second, every pile of debris swerved. “Can you get a CD out of my bag?” She was getting bored of just the wheel to keep herself grounded.

Abby blinked. “Why?”

Ellie huffed, “Were you dropped or something?”

“No, I just don’t know what the point is when we’re almost there.”

“There doesn’t have to be a point.”

She went quiet. It seemed that Ellie had cornered her, as she pulled her bag into her lap in a jerking motion, clearly disgruntled. “Where are they at?”

“Top pocket.”

Abby pawed through, coming back with a CD Ellie hadn’t played yet. It had no label, no color. Just clear. She squinted at it. “What’s this one?”

Ellie shrugged. “They’re not mine.”

“Whose are they?”

She sucked her cheek, and let the unanswered speak for itself, returning her eye to the road. “Just play it.”

A little fwhip, Abby ejected the previous CD and inserted the one, her brow furrowed in Ellie’s periphery, all arched and concentrated and her. There were very few people Ellie could glean from one portion of their face, and Abby was one of them. Perhaps it was the scars they’d left on one another that made them so memorable; her broken nose had etched into a more dramatic bump, after all, somewhat sideways from the front. A constant reminder of their spat.

It took a few seconds to play, rearing into an atmospheric, deep sound punctured by piano. She recognized the voice when he began singing.

Sing me to sleep

Sing me to sleep

I'm tired and I

I want to go to bed

Sing me to sleep

Sing me to sleep

And then leave me alone

Don't try to wake me in the morning

'Cause I will be gone

“This is bleak,” Abby grumbled.

“You’re bleak.”

A chorus of ooo’s sounded from the backseat. Pride swelled in her chest at the successful burn.

Abby rolled her eyes and placed the CD case back in the bag, zipping it in a loud, annoyed fashion. When she was irritated, her irises swelled like the eye of a storm, lids squinted. It was the expression Ellie knew best on her.

“So,” Abby started, and Ellie already loathed it, “if they do the surgery, who do you want to have your stuff?”

Her hand faltered on the wheel. She’d never envisioned what would be left in her wake, aside from what she owed. A vaccine. Growing peace. No, she hadn’t thought of herself in the possessions that would remain. “Cat, I guess.”

“You can’t just say I guess. It’s gonna be soon if they decide to do it.”

She swerved at the next turn, watching Abby’s shoulder shove into the door. “You talk too much.”

And not wanting to prove Ellie right, she pressed her lips into a thin line, letting the music overshadow the engine. Ellie supposed it did have a point.

Welcome to Atlanta the sign read. The hair on her arms prickled with it, those three words, and she sucked her tongue, the only thing keeping her grounded being the van in front of her. Easy to follow. Easy to repeat simple instructions to herself to quell her heartbeat.

When she squinted ahead, southern sun blazing in her gaze, she saw Romi in the passenger seat speaking into a walkie, the outline of her lips moving quickly. She couldn’t lip-read what she was saying.

“Do we have any idea where their base is?” Ellie asked.

Abby answered, “It’s at an old high school apparently.”

“I’ve never been to a base like that.” She made a turn, the van jostling over a speed bump. Everything was becoming more suburban and less endless road. Businesses, street signs, once bright colors. “In Boston, we used most of the schools that were left for military schools.” Flicking, her eye moved to the rearview mirror. Steph and Lev were enraptured by their surroundings, watching the town pass by. It was odd to think that they would be in high school in the old world.

She snorted. “I can’t imagine you in FEDRA.”

“Fuck FEDRA. All they did was get fat off our fuckin’ rations.”

“I hardly knew any. I got to Seattle after that whole mess.”

Ellie hummed. “You’d have fit right in.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. Tall. Broad shoulders. Goody two-shoes.”

Abby sneered, bunching in her seat with affront. It was hard for her to look imposing from the passenger side. “How many times are we gonna have this conversation?”

“When you stop being a goody two-shoes.”

“Or when you — ”

Her words were cut by an influx of emerging people around the street corner, approaching their vehicles. The van in front of them halted to not hit any of them, and Ellie braked harshly, sending them flying against their seat belts. The group wasn’t decked in sleek, hardened gear like FEDRA, government-sanctioned, but they had makeshift vests and helmets. Some had large machine guns, others wielded pistols.

“Shit,” Abby muttered, subtly unsheathing the handgun from her thigh. “Do you think they’re raiders?”

“I dunno.” Ellie squinted for any sign of peace in their intent and spotted Romi rolling her window down, pointing at her walkie and speaking to one of them. “... Are they Fireflies?”

“They haven’t started shooting yet.” Abby didn’t relinquish the hold on her gun. She was so prickly, so ready to jump into conflict. Not for the sake of it, but to solve it. And she didn’t soothe until it was all over, all the remnants ash on the ground. “They probably are.”

She watched the leader gesture to the curb, and when she looked, there were other vehicles parked there, far too neat to be left there from the old world. The van in front pulled over to park, readying to leave the vehicle. Ellie followed. The bump of the sidewalk jutted beneath the right side of the jeep. Steph barked a laugh at it.

“You can’t parallel park for anything, Jesus,” Abby griped.

“Who cares?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

“Then maybe you should have drove.” She pulled the keys from the ignition.

“That’s literally what I was saying.”

Ellie opened her car door, letting the snap of it muffle Abby’s voice, and stepped out, keys jangling in her hold. The moment she stood upright, Romi looked at her. On the spot. She didn’t know what else she expected.

The group — who she assumed were Fireflies — ogled her, some cocking their heads, others raising skeptical brows. It was typical. The display of it all, so emblematic. She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned on the van, content to keep her distance and stare back. When she actually met their eyes, most looked away, embarrassed.

Romi projected her voice so she could be heard, “This is Ellie from Salt Lake.” At least she had the guts to keep their gaze.

Flaring, she ground her teeth and pinched the skin on her elbows, dragging her boots on the dirty ground when she approached. “I’m not from Salt Lake.” If she had the chance, she’d want to erase her history, her birthplace, where she grew up and hit every milestone. She wanted to be a tree lacking inner rings. A pure seed.

She held a polite smile like she was negotiating with a child. A particularly petulant one. “You know what I meant.”

“No, I don’t.” When she was younger, she’d never expected a separateness from the Fireflies. She expected to join them, to wear their logo and fight their fight and gain camaraderie. But she was a tool. And if it brought change, if it helped people… she had learned to be fine with that.

That didn’t mean she’d thought it would feel so lacking. There was no drive in her heart, no goosebumps along her arms. She was just annoyed. Annoyed by Romi and Abby and everyone, and ungrateful, and she couldn’t change it. She could hardly keep her eye open, pinned beneath the exhaustion of it all, the gutting nature. She carried tan skin from the burns and tattoos to obscure her mark and she was sick of getting new scars. The final snip around her skull was all she could withstand.

And, to get the fawning and speculation over with she said, “I’m immune.”

As Abby had said, their base was in a high school, its lockers faded and halls suffocating, stairwells winding throughout the building. North Atlanta High School, old murals read, a knight as their mascot on the unkempt walls. Most had a Firefly sprayed over them. There was an uncanniness within like there should be more people than there were. It should smell more like victory and less like chemicals and dust.

Romi had mentioned that they weren’t put-together, but at least they had something. Guess I have some optimism left, Ellie mused, hands in her pockets. She followed a woman with gray hairs and big eyes up a set of stairs, her palm skating the rail.

Romi walked beside her, saying, “I’m so relieved that we’re here, Jane. We didn’t know if you guys would be able to stay together for much longer with your numbers.”

“We managed. They’ve been quiet lately.”

“No raids?”

“Not for a couple weeks.”

Ellie didn’t know who they were but didn’t ask. It wasn’t her world. Factions always fucked each other over, and she’d learned that it was always better to skirt them entirely. The crossfire was too vicious. And if they weren’t gonna treat her like a Firefly, she wouldn’t fight like one.

They reached the top floor of the base and strode to the end of the hall. Jane pulled a keyring out, sorting through copper and silver until she found a long, spindly gray, geared in the rusty door that opened in a creak. They entered, and she flicked the light switch. One fluorescent bar flickered overhead, going dark and reviving in sporadic instants.

The place looked like it had been used for an infirmary with gurneys around. One was occupied with a sleeping girl, the gauze at the end of her knee a fiery red. No calf, no foot. She couldn’t have been older than fifteen, and here Ellie was, grown, about to get her blood taken and brain praised in the same room. It was so slimy.

“Sit on one of the gurneys,” Jane instructed as she wrapped a stethoscope around her neck.

“Let me guess, you just need to run some tests.”

She pulled blue gloves onto her hands. “... Yes.”

“Right.” Ellie strolled to an empty bed and sat at the foot of it, its border collapsed at the end. “Blood test?”

“All your vitals.”

Romi muttered something below her breath, and Jane chuckled.

Ellie perked, “What was that?” Always the spectacle, never inside.

They ignored her. Jane walked over with a tray of tools, some she couldn’t even name, and sat them at the bedside before placing the stethoscope’s buds in her ears, and the flat end to Ellie’s heart. Thump. Thump. Thump. Sometimes, she forgot it. Jane moved it to her diaphragm. “Take a deep breath.”

Raggedy bones, constricting lungs, all the inner workings in her flesh. She tried to ignore the scrape of them against one another, slammed against the black tar of her blood. Ellie knew it had to hurt.

Her ears, her nose, her reflexes. Kneading fingers on her joints and stomach and throat, checking her swallow. Gloved, sterile fingertips skated along her tattoos, her scars. “It looks like a chemical burn on both.”

‘cause it is, no shit. “Yeah.” The room was void like someone was missing beneath the humming light and little breaths of the bedridden girl. It was too clinical. Not enough to keep her thoughts racing, her chest pounding. And she couldn’t put her finger on what she yearned for. “I burned myself to hide them.” She did have the bite on her shoulder she took for Lev, but if they didn’t ask, she wouldn’t bear herself.

“Then got tattoos over them?”

Are you blind? She nodded.

“What about your eye?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

Romi and Jane shared a glance before she continued, “It’s in your brain, right?”

“The Cordyceps? Yeah. Something about it being in there, but not, y’know. Doing its job.”

“Hm.” Jane reached out and went to trace her head.

It was a flash. Ellie reached and grabbed her wrist, halting the motion and burrowing her eyes into her. It was just… too close. She didn’t know her. Not like that. There weren’t many people who ever had the privilege of her hair.

Jane narrowed her eyes and revoked her hand, scanning her. “I was just going to check for swelling.”

And she felt small, because she had to bear the stranger tugging at her scalp and pinching her hair and feeling for her brains. The least they could have done was put her under.

It was inconclusive. There were no outward, clear signs of her infection that they could find, nothing that could have separated her from a normal person. Maybe that was better. It could keep her low on the radar while they figured their shit out. After all, she was the last resort; they were going to attempt to study an infected grave first.

Room 243 and 303, Romi had told her, and she watched the plaques by the doors descend until she arrived at the first: Steph’s. She wanted to make sure she was settled. It was too new of a place to leave her alone. Ellie knocked.

“What?” Steph shouted from inside.

It almost made her laugh. “Can you let me in?”

A series of grumbles, and the door cracked, her brown eyes peeking out. “Aren’t you busy?”

“Why would I be busy?”

“‘cause you’re the chosen one.”

She rolled her eyes. “Even if I was, do you think I just… wouldn’t visit?”

More grumbles. Steph opened it enough to let her in. “What do you want?”

“I was just making sure you found your way to your room.” It was large with two sets of bunk beds, though all seemed unoccupied but one, Steph’s belongings sat at the foot of it. The walls were a muted green, and the floorboards were dusty. “Do you have this whole place to yourself?”

“Lev said he might come around.”

“Cool.” Ellie stepped in and closed the door behind her, leaning against it with her hand pocketed.

Steph walked to her bed and sat with a bounce, head nowhere near the top bunk. So short. “D’you know when they’re gonna figure all your… shit out?”

She shook her head. “You know as much as me.”

“So they’re doing surgery whenever?”

“I don’t even know if they are.” A hope, at the back of her mind. She teased, “Would you miss me?”

Steph went silent, looking up at her through her eyelashes. She looked especially like a kid, bracketed by a bunk bed and so small.

She sobered, walking forward and sitting beside her. The bed dipped with their weight. “Hey.”

No response.

“You know that it’s gonna be for the better, right?” Ellie laid a hand on her shoulder.

She sneered and shrugged it away. “So I’m not allowed to be upset?”

“That’s not what I said, Steph.”

“You know I went looking for you in the first place because I… because I cared, right? And now… I’m just… gonna be by myself. Again.”

“You won’t,” she assured her. “You’ll have Lev and everyone here. And you’ll be able to go anywhere you want.”

“I don’t want anywhere. I want… here. Right now.”

But it couldn’t stay. So Ellie laid her hand on her back again and gave her what she needed. If only for a few minutes.

She expected Abby to be behind the door to her room, some twist of fate forcing them to board together. At least it gave her time to steel herself as she unlocked the door and pushed through the threshold.

She could have noticed the natural light in the window, its old, floral curtains fluttering, or the utter size of the room, once for a full class. She could have commented on the pale areas of the wall where posters or whiteboards once were, or the scrapes on the floor from chairs. The shaky tile. The old mahogany desk. Even the dust making her want to sneeze, for fuck’s sake. But all she knew was Abby’s absence.

Ellie hesitated at the door, fiddling with her remaining fingers, and walked in, watching the room get smaller the further she entered, the lack of company choking her. She guessed they had the room to give everyone their own place, considering their lack of numbers.

Her bags were sitting on the bed to the right. Tentative, she moved toward her backpack and unzipped it, ensuring her belongings were intact, and she found that her CD had been returned to its case.

Night came. It always did, the most reliable thing Ellie had left. Sun would come and go away, everything dissolving without its light. It eased her, yet didn’t make sleep any less difficult. She investigated the room, sitting on the big desk, laying in each bed to find the stiffer one — it helped her back. She scanned for loose floorboards and opened the window to look down at the ground, eyeing for movement in the city.

The school was structured more or less like a prison, one big block of white with windows and halls, rooms bunched together in cubicle fashion referred to as numbers. However, there were spins, subtle twists that indicated that people occupied the space. A ladder hung outside most windows, each knotted to the roof in some fashion. She suspected it was for a quick escape in the case of a raid.

Ellie leaned out, half her body hanging, and gripped the rope of it, testing its sturdiness. It didn’t waver. “Try not to die,” she muttered, crawling out and finding her footing on one of the rungs. They were rather wide and easy to step onto, but the cold night made her shiver and wince, teeth chattering, knuckles clenched when they found purchase on one of the upper steps.

The rhythm came, and since her room was on the top floor, it was a short ascent, wind rustling her clothes and hair. It smelled like the suburbs. It smelled like forever ago.

She reached the top of the building and hoisted herself over its edge.

“Oh, shit.”

Abby was the first thing she knew, and she didn’t even know who had said that. It could have been both of them, meeting one another’s eyes for the first time in a small eternity. Abby’s looked red, even below the churning stars that looked so clear from there, their shimmer still a backdrop to her. She outshone them. Blearing.

“Why are you up here?” Ellie questioned, approaching where she stood at the precipice of the base.

She shuffled, shoulders tensing at their closeness. “I don’t know.”

She appraised Abby, looking her up and down. There was a clench in her jaw, messiness to her usually kempt hair. Her under eyes were dark pink, her hands fidgeting. She wore a tee and sweats.

“Were you about to go to bed?”

“No.”

Slowly, she asked, “Were you crying?”

Drily, Abby laughed, placing her palms on the border to stand straight, but she didn’t intimidate Ellie, no matter how imposing she molded herself. “What do you care?”

“Just curious.” It wasn’t a lie.

“... No.” That was a lie. “I wasn’t.”

“Whatever you say.” Ellie went to lay her hands on the edge, but her pinkie brushed Abby’s. A second. A pause. Her fingers were much thinner, brittle, paler. Dirtier nails. She hardly showered anymore. Abby had more calluses and sharper knuckles, bone that flexed below her skin, a perfect outline. She didn’t need to see her skeleton, tendons and all, to know how she worked. Restrained, she moved her hand away, curling her fingers over the ledge.

“Why are you here?” Abby fired back.

She shrugged.

In her periphery, that brownish blueish hazelish flitted over her bare arms, down the length of her tattoos and into her elbow, her big, bandaged vein. “They took your blood.”

Ellie looked at the gauze, trying not to think of the girl that was in there. “They said they had to run some tests. Whatever that means.”

“They’re probably checking your white blood cells. Stuff like that.”

“I don’t see how that matters.”

Abby sighed as she looked into the city. “Do you think the Cordyceps changed you?”

“That’s vague.”

“Like, how you act.”

She sucked her cheek, biting the urge to say a million things, tell twice that many stories of why she was a murky, forlorn house, shingles falling and floors holey. “If anything did, it was you.” And that said everything.

“I guess that’s what it comes down to. Us.”

“Us,” Ellie repeated, trying to make it feel the same in her mouth as Abby’s. It couldn’t. “There’s no us anymore.” The very fact that they were speaking meant otherwise. It made her throat sore. “You don’t have to be around me.” It felt so much better when she knew where Abby was.

“And I shouldn’t, because that was the plan. To get the fuck away from you.” Her voice went hoarse.

Normally, Abby was not so open. She was blunt and short and hard, able to shoulder the harshest weather, but that came from not splaying herself, the slightest breadcrumb of her heart never falling from her lips. Ellie didn’t know how to hold it. She shouldn’t. She should let every word fall and shatter on the dirty ground, but if they were there, they could cut her soles.

“But I can’t now,” she continued, “I can’t get away from you. Now that I have the chance, I don’t even want to, because… shit.” She drummed her fingers on the concrete, the vibration of it traveling to Ellie’s. “Your music helps me concentrate.”

Oh god, she needed her, and she needed her, and they needed it. Her ribs hurt, her eyes felt so lackadaisical next to her colors. Oh, god, God, if They were there, They wouldn’t be able to halt her eyes as they skimmed the contour of her nose, bumped where Ellie had broken it, the scar in her collar where Ellie had stabbed it, the darkness beneath her eyes where Ellie had made her tired, and if They were there, Ellie did not need Them. She could sustain herself on Abby’s profile and the spite between them forever. Forever, light under the moon. Abby looked back, intent, locking their eyes.

Ellie breathed, “Seems like you’re concentrating right now.”

“Your voice.”

She said nothing.

And Abby looked at her voice — her mouth. Her lips. Then, to her eyes. “Your voice helps, too. And I hate it.”

Ellie parted her lips, suddenly conscious of her words, thinking over them carefully. She felt like she was writing in her journal. Abby a shadow box holding every piece of her, the person to whom almost every letter was addressed. “It feels weird when you’re not around. Like I’m forgetting something.”

“Yeah.”

They were quiet for some time, returning their gazes to the city, not searching — concentrating. Just looking. A breeze chilled the back of her neck, wisping both their hairs.

“Thank you,” Ellie finally said.

“For what?”

“For putting my CD back.”

Abby closed her eyes, thinking for several seconds. Like that, Ellie could see the veins on her eyelids. “They’re Joel’s, aren’t they?” She said his name with such effort, firm and grating.

She didn’t answer, picking at her nails and letting the dirt fall stories down. She tried to strain her eyes to watch it the whole way. But she lost sight. “Abby?”

“I asked you — ”

“What was your dad like?” Someone so close to her, yet she didn’t know his name. She didn’t know where he was from or what he did before the outbreak. She didn’t know what music he loved or where he took Abby on her birthdays. All she had of who could have killed her was his daughter’s anger. Maybe she’d had his nose before Ellie broke it.

Abby opened her eyes, her eyelashes skimming one another, damp. More evidence that she’d been crying before Ellie intruded. She scratched her nose, furrowed her brow. Nothing could encompass it. “He cared.”

Ellie nodded. “That’s all anyone can really ask for.”

“He cared about you,” Abby said, “and I almost killed you.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“But he could never forgive me for that, and Lev wouldn’t either.”

She blinked, averting her eyes, feeling a melancholy blue sleuth through her, beneath the gauze and her blood-stained flesh. Forgiveness. What a difficult word, from the little push of air to sleek sss.

Abby kept going, “So you’re here, beside me, and you’re alive.” The only word more difficult. “And I can’t bring myself to be anything more than annoyed. They can’t do anything with you, not for months, and now, I have to live without you when what my dad started isn’t finished. All of this is mine. And I can’t have it.”

It sank in, the air cold at the tail end of summer, out of place as things tended to be with them. “Well.”

“Well?” She always asked questions, never content to just talk.

Ellie leaned against the border on the roof, resting her elbows on its hardness and taking it all. “You can’t deny the view.”

She stayed in her big, empty room with herself, mumbling under her breath about the little things, occupying herself with her journal. Waiting for Jane or Romi to swoop around with her lab results, some chart she couldn’t read despite it being her blood on paper. Until then, she drew.

Her and Abby’s conversation repeated at the back of her skull, and she caught herself glancing out the window for her form descending the ladder, hoping she would knock on the glass or let herself in. Instead, she contented herself with sketching her face.

Content.

She pushed her lead so hard into the page it broke.

Chapter Text

Ellie kept thinking about the splotch in her journal at the canteen. It looked like everything she was. It looked like everything she’d ever feel. Ambiguous and dark and something gritty, scraping on paper, ruining the picture. Her mind trained on it like a sniper with a scope, her shuffle through the line mere muscle memory, no focus on her feet.

Abby was nowhere to be seen in the cafeteria, and that was for the better; Ellie had to gouge herself from her, like a particularly needy leech from someone’s thigh. Thirsty. Thirsty, thirsty, thirsty for the hunt, and perhaps even more delirious than that. Delusional. Delusional, she repeated, mouthed the word, delusional. Mantras were the only thing that kept her grounded alongside fidgeting with her fingers, picking at her nails.

Delusional.

When she reached the front of the queue, a booth where the volunteers handed out trays, she caught their lingering stares, hesitant, before they handed her an ensemble of baked potatoes, a cheese sandwich, and miscellaneous mystery meat. They kept their eyes on her as she walked away. She had to stop looking so neurotic. Just… be cool.

But she couldn’t when all she thought about was the color of Abby’s eyes and the starry skyline of Atlanta enveloping them, when all she pondered was why she had been crying. She didn’t want to comfort her. She just wanted to know, deep and intrusive, a morbid way of acquaintance. It was as if all of Abby’s moments were hers, and she was Abby’s.

Hold tight on her tray, she stepped into the menagerie of tables, some circular, some long, and scanned them for anyone it wouldn’t be direly awkward to sit near. There was no sign of Cat, which, sue her, she was grateful for. Her working with Romi had left a sour taste in Ellie’s mouth, staining each time they were around one another. No Lev, no Steph. Just the familiar faces that had sneered at her from Arizona to Georgia, some new ones accompanying.

She sat at the corner of a vacant table, pressed against the wall next to an old anti-smoking poster. Her company was some kid on the PSA with bad SFX makeup and faux dentures. Her nose wrinkled with distaste as she pressed her plastic fork into the potatoes, squashing them and stirring them around, trying to find any amount of seasoning. Only when she ate did she miss Jackson, with its hot food and flavors other than salt and pepper.

Ellie resigned herself to eating her sandwich first, trying to pretend it was better than it was, and watched people from her bubble. There were some kids, some preteens and teens interloped, grouped to the same couple of tables. An older woman had to be helped to her seat by someone who looked like her daughter, as they had the same freckles and ginger tint to their hair. A blind girl bopped her cane along the floor, a metronomic noise among the chatter.

At the very right of the cafeteria, surrounded by their original crew, she spotted Luke without his other half, stuffing food into his face. His beard was overgrown, and he had dark circles. Hands hard on his plasticware. He didn’t laugh when his tablemates did. His gap-toothed smile was forgotten.

Thoughtfully, Ellie chewed, trying not to make eye contact. She had a feeling about why Abby had been crying. But she didn’t care. Not really. It was a mere malfunction of heartstrings that, when Abby emerged from the line, they twitched.

Abby stood in place for several seconds, eyeing the room, and looked to Luke, who didn’t lift his head from his meal. She bit her lip. Clearly wanted to scuff her boots, make a scene, go red in the face, but she was confined to doing that with only her gaze when it hit Ellie.

She halted her eating, looking back at Abby until she tore her surveying and walked away, sitting with her tray at the utter, complete opposite table from Ellie’s, diagonal and far against the other wall. It was fitting that they were in a former high school – it was just like the petty shit she’d seen in old teen movies.

By the time Ellie parsed through her potatoes, the parts she could stomach on one side of the tray and the other bits swept aside, Steph was sitting across from her, the clatter of her plastic plate announcing her arrival. Ellie surveyed her expression but didn’t find anything telling. “Why aren’t you sitting with the other kids?”

“‘cause they’re stupid.” Immediately, she began shoveling as much food as possible onto each spoonful, indiscriminate. “And loud,” she added with a full mouth.

“That’s everyone.” She began eating her potatoes, nose crinkling at the texture. “... Why are they slimy?”

Steph shrugged, humming something from behind her chewing. As if Ellie could understand what she meant.

“Right.” Skeptical of the lunch, she sat her fork down and slid her tray across the table. “It’s all yours.”

Finally, Steph swallowed. “You’re gonna get scrawny again if you don’t eat.”

“I can live with that.” Below the table, her knee bounced, energy with nowhere to go. She knew that they had patrols around Atlanta, bases other than there that needed guarding, but her hopes weren’t strong that they’d allow her to go on the frontlines. Immune, yet a bullet to the skull would take her out like anyone else. “What have you been up to?”

Again, it took a small eternity before she finished her bite. “Thinking.”

She teased, “I didn’t know there was that much going up there.”

“Whatever,” Steph scoffed. “Basically, Romi asked me if I wanted to do an apprenticeship thing with the doctors here. Thanks for asking.”

If she had any food to look at, to pretend she was interested in, she would have done it in that moment. But she had to meet Steph’s eye. “Are you interested in that sort of thing?”

“I don’t know. Like, yeah, it’d be cool to help people, but… it seems like there’d be a lot of pressure. And all the kids here are already getting trained in medical stuff because they need them so bad. The raiders took a lot of people down.”

“Yeah. Just do whatever makes you feel… y’know,” – her mouth nearly tripped — “good.” And it was hypocritical, and her heart was starting to pace again, and she couldn’t stop from glancing at Abby, who sat alone. But not really. Because even from across the room, Ellie was still with her.

“Your white blood cell level is alarmingly low,” Jane commented, reading off a marked-up sheet she’d printed, its roots plucked from Ellie’s veins, “but you don’t seem to have any problems relating to it. Do you get sick often?”

From the foot of the gurney, she shook her head. She felt ridiculous, like she was a kid visiting the doctor’s office, her sneakers dawdling above the ground. The prior girl was still in her bed, asleep. She had gotten a change of nightgown, at least. Apart from her, they were alone.

“You’re… abnormal, for lack of a better word.”

“I get that a lot.”

She looked up from the paper. “Do you feel it a lot?”

Ellie shifted, digging her nails into the material of the thin mattress below her. Her weight hardly dented it, and when she got off the thing, her imprint would vanish. With anyone else, they’d linger. She supposed that was the difference between her and others. Ghastly versus permanent. “No,” she lied.

Jane hummed, folding the stats back to how they’d been and putting them in her pocket. Her life, practically like a handkerchief in this woman’s jacket. “We’d like to keep you around until we get concrete results from recreating the grave.”

“How long will that take?”

“Until we achieve the same results Romi described.”

The grave as they had found it was melded together, lurching, a behemoth testament of something unburned. The minds of those people had morphed into one. With the living, that took conditioning. Patience. Time. With the dead, there was no mind to unite, just synapses that had not yet decayed, becoming something beyond the grave. “So what am I supposed to do until then?”

“Look pretty,” Jane replied, drawling sardonically.

“That’s not my forte.”

She laughed drily, crossing her arms and pacing. Gears churned behind her dark eyes. “We’ll probably have you help with setting up the grave since you’re the lowest risk out of us. Especially when or if it gains consciousness.”

Ellie stared, waiting for the punchline. “So you want me to drag dead bodies around?”

“They’d be on a stretcher, obviously. And we’ll need you to take samples from it.” Jane stopped at the wall, leaning on it as she spoke. “Until we get to that stage, there’s safe jobs you can do within the base to help out.”

“... You have my blood in a vial somewhere, I think I’ve pulled my weight.”

“Fireflies usually give more than just their blood.”

“I don’t want to be a Firefly,” Ellie snapped. The first time the words had left her mouth, and they cracked in the air like lightning, the only noise left was the sound of the air conditioner, its thrum tinging judgmentally. The insult of its home ringing in it. “I just want to help. I don’t want to be a part of your fucking crew and sing kumbayah or whatever the fuck you want me to do. I’m not doing anything other than what I want to.” She hadn’t gotten that choice prior. If she were an entertainer, as some thought she was, she’d have difficult to work with penned beneath her name.

But Jane didn’t say that. Instead, she looked at Ellie with a deadpan stare, as if to say, really?

Yes, really. Ellie sighed and pointed her toes, trying to touch the ground from where she sat. Cat would have been able to reach it without issue. “... Have you seen Cat?” she asked. “Tall, tattoos, black hair.”

“Smoker?” Her tone was hostile and short. It almost amused Ellie how quick the coin had flipped.

“Yeah.”

“I’ve seen her with the dogs.”

Dogs. Her stomach twisted in a knot, a tight center in her torso. “Where’s that?”

She raised her brows and contemplated an answer, working her jaw harshly. “Figure it out, since you don’t wanna be part of our fucking crew.” Just another name on the list of people who scorned her.

Posture broken, her gaze trained on the dirty floors, she asked around. She avoided the questions slung at her like at shots — D’you remember what happened at Salt Lake? and So, like, if an infected bit you right now, nothing would happen? Her bar for politeness had lowered quite long ago, so she didn’t bother entertaining them. She just left when they gave her the info she wanted.

Ellie walked outside, the Georgian breeze rustling her hoodie and jeans. She couldn’t recall the last time she had dressed so casually. Like she had nothing to prove, nobody to match. She and Abby had been a unit, donning the same cargo pants, the same boots. The only difference was Ellie’s long sleeves to hide the bite on her shoulder. It was practically torture in the southern heat, and that hadn’t changed.

She lifted the hem of her hoodie as she walked and swiped the sweat off her forehead. The football field was a hike from the base itself, crossing a wide field with dummies and targets erected. Some had their heads blown off. Ellie envied them.

The closer she got to the place, its shape resembled a dome, some halved goldfish bowl. Fitting, since she felt like she was swimming in circles, the same tired routine each day with a crucial gear missing. She couldn’t act normal when what she’d grown accustomed to was gone. She didn’t know Abby’s room number.

She shoved her hands in her hoodie’s pocket and trudged up to the arched entrance, a gate covering it. She sifted her fingers through it, jingling it, seeing if it would loosen for her, but it stood resolute. From there, she could see dogs prancing in the green grass, yipping and chasing one another’s tails. None of them bared their teeth. They didn’t chase her, nipping at her ankles. That didn’t stop the nervous bob of her throat.

“Cat?” Ellie called. Some of the dogs turned their heads. “Are you there?”

No one replied. She almost turned to leave before she saw Sissy bounding up, her ears flopping, chubby as ever. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth in the hot. She had a new black collar, a Firefly emblem dangling from it.

“Hey, Sis.” She crouched down to her level but relinquished her fingers from the gate. She liked her. But not enough to let her lick her hands. “Is Cat here?”

Sissy didn’t respond, just looking at her with her stupid, watery eyes.

Ellie chuffed and tried to ignore how that breath, that sigh sounded like Joel’s annoyance. Maybe she was getting old. “Do you really think this is all gonna work out?”

She said nothing.

Her ankles were holding all her weight by that point. “Like, does it never cross your mind that this is too good to be true?” Ellie wondered if her collar was a perfect fit. Not like she’d know any better.

“I want to think this will work,” Abby spoke from above.

Ellie looked upward. She was wearing a dark green tank top and knee-length shorts, her white sneakers scuffed with grass stains. Her hair was up, though her front strands were loose, not quite long enough to be encapsulated in her bun yet. She was used to seeing her in glinting light through car windows. The shadow of the entryway was a different hue, enunciating her veins where they trailed her biceps.

“Can you not sneak up on me like that?” she said, standing upright. “Or eavesdrop?”

“You eavesdrop like it’s your life mission.”

“And you avoid me like it’s yours, so what’s the sudden interest?” Ellie countered.

Abby thought for several seconds, eyeing her. It never got less exhibitionistic. She was surprised she had anything left from how often Abby devoured her. She had her mutilated fingers to show for it. “I was wondering when you suddenly became a dog person.” It harbored the unsaid, You killed my fucking dog.

“Never. I’m looking for Cat.”

“She’s in here.”

Ellie was silent. She should’ve anticipated Abby making her spell it out. “Can you go get her?”

“Why not come in?”

“I don’t really want to be in a cage full of dogs.”

Abby huffed, “It’s not like they’re gonna hurt you.”

She tried to bite back her words, but with a smile on her face, they spilled on their own, “I’m looking at one of them right now, and she seems pretty… bitchy.”

Immediately, she turned to walk away.

Her grin fell. “Wait, wait, wait — ” Ellie reached her fingers through the gate for her. “I didn’t mean to make it a pun — ”

“Bye, Ellie.”

“Can you at least get Cat?”

Abby stopped, shoulders squared. They were noticeable from behind, her scapulas shrouded by formed muscle. “I dunno.” Expectant. It made Ellie want to punch her all the more.

Steeling herself, she sucked a breath through her teeth and swallowed her heavy pride. “Please.”

She swore she saw Abby’s shoulders jostle in a silent laugh. “Fine.” And she whisked off, Sissy following her ankles with her quick feet.

It was a few minutes before Cat appeared, striding over with her hands in her pockets, tall and spindly with her long pants, hair tied in a ponytail. She worked her cigarette around her lips before she asked, “Do you still hate me?”

“A little.” Ellie fiddled with her fingers, averting eye contact. “I just wanted to see what you were up to. Make sure you aren’t dead.”

“Nah. I’ve just been hanging out with the dogs. They have a lot. Apparently, they get strays from the raiders.”’

“Right up your alley.” She cleared her throat and kicked at the dirt. “Look, I just wanted to say… sorry. For being distant. I get that you were put in a fucking awkward position. It sucks, and I guess it wasn’t fair of me to be mad at you.”

“You guess?”

“I know.”

“Know-it-all.”

She huffed, letting her arms fall to her sides. “I’m trying to be genuine, here.”

Cat grinned, smug. “Your mad face is too funny.” Yet she let her expression mellow, words growing more level. “But, yeah. I guess the whole point of us leaving was to get away from all the fucking… shit. We don’t need more.”

Her chest felt tight. It wasn’t like Cat was wrong — they did leave for that. To rinse all the implications of Jackson from their skin, the scars remaining only a whisper of an awry patrol or a fight in its streets. There would be no lingering kisses on her collarbone from the two girls she’d loved, because she was grown, then, too grown for sneaking in alleys or getting so stoned she could hardly feel her mouth. Too old to hold onto it. There wasn’t any naivete left for her to believe in those butterflies.

She preferred moths.

Ellie stepped back and retreated, tail between her legs, ignoring Cat’s protests from behind her.

The roof became her utopia, hardly disturbed. Occasional guards climbed up, but most of the time, they stuck to their business and snacked on pocketed food on the job, eyes glazed over with boredom. They didn’t linger on Ellie’s scrunched, shivering form, chilly with the midnight breeze. The only noise was cars driving up to the base, probably from supply runs. Her penmanship was messy. Letters jutted every which way as her goosebumps pricked. She didn’t want to return to her room and become discoverable, so she would settle for the rigid night jittering her bones.

She sketched ladders on the margins of her pages, twisting, turning, leading nowhere, but it could be assumed that they meant something. They had to, for her own sanity. If they didn’t, it would render the climb meaningless. Every inch she had ascended, worthless. Ellie chewed on her cheek as she glared at the empty lines. She could write her own meaning. But she was hopelessly stuck in place, no words on the tip of her jaded tongue.

Ellie scribbled on the expanse, hoping that a start would come of the mindless strokes, until a BANG pierced the air, making her press her lead harsh in startle. Shouting, and another crash, and another, glass shattering, frenzy flooding Ellie’s veins. Growing up in this world taught all its inhabitants from very early on to run when the crowd ran to avoid the flood. The roof, however, was empty but for her.

Quick, she pressed herself flat against the roof’s border, scrunching her body tight and shoving her belongings in her bag. Her fingers were deft as she unholstered her pistol, squinting as she rose just slightly to peek over the roof at the scene.

The cars she had heard weren’t theirs. They were raiders’. They donned black, utilitarian pants and bulletproof vests, the weight shaping their gaits into more of a stomp than a stride. They were all men, and they all had a hungry look in their eyes, dark as their tinted windows.

A sniper shot whistled above her head, and she collapsed down to dodge the next, breathing going haywire, heart palpitating. It had nearly grazed the top of her skull. When their sharpshooter missed, she could make out the edges of his comrades chastizing him, annoyance in their tone. Annoyance that she wasn’t dead.

“Oh, fuck,” she panted. I need to get inside. The ladders were on the other side of the building, opposite the entry gate; the more she considered it, the more she realized how many guards they had to kill to breach the base. They could have been teenagers, they could have been someone she knew. Someone who was someone to her. “Fuck.” So much to lose, something she hadn’t felt in so long.

Ellie slung her bag over her shoulder and kept prone on the cool, concrete roof, the chill numbing her fingers and jabbing her veins. For the first time in months, her exhale left in a faint, translucent condensation, blurring the divot between day and night, sun and moon. So cold. So freezing. More shots sounded the further she crawled, and some were close. Before descending the edge wholly, she crept her hands up to the top, scouring for where the ledge ended and the ladder began for the quickest jump over, the fastest dodge.

She pocketed her gun and slunk over, grasping the rope so tight it stung her palms. No bullets went over her head. They’d moved on, but there wasn’t any relief in that — they were inside. Ellie climbed down, wind rapping her hair and rustling her clothes. Her trek was unsteady as the breeze jostled the cables. The pace was painstaking. A fall or shelter hung in her balance. She could taste it, her heart rate spiking. About three feet left. The screams didn’t wait for her, nor did the pistols and dogs yapping in the distance.

It felt like Seattle’s rain in her shoes.

“Shit.” Ellie was at her floor, and she reached to tug the window up, hardly able to burgeon the force it needed. Where her room had been unoccupied, its window was stubborn still. “Come on!” But not as steadfast as her, her obstinate fingers managing a crack high enough for her to slip in, shut, and lock it. The world — her whole world, pitifully restricted to this abandoned high school —, got louder, more real, people cursing right outside her door. She had to find Steph, or Cat, or Lev. She had to find Abby.

She paused her way to the door to think herself over. Abby. It was like Santa Barbara’s waves lashing at her ankles, urging her, yet there was no bloodlust in her heart. Abby had left insurmountable scars on her, dragged her to where the sun hit hardest, left the most burns and tans. Ellie couldn’t let her go. She would have to shed her own skin, a map of their battles and words.

Ellie grabbed her handgun and opened the door, peering around each corner. There were stragglers of their own but no raiders. A wounded man slumped against the wall with his friend tending him, her words frantic as the blood pouring from her broken nose. Her blonde hair was matted with it. The girl glanced up at her when she emerged.

“Go back in your room,” she ushered, “you don’t have a vest, you’ll just get killed.” When the man grunted through his teeth, a low hiss, she turned her eyes back to him. “I know, I know, stay with me, please — ”

She watched them and swallowed. “I’m looking for someone.” And that string for a stranger was all the girl needed to understand and retract her concerns.

Abby would be with Lev, and Lev would be on the same floor as the kids. As Steph. It was only one below but had winding halls, so many glass cases for things to shatter. The noise from beneath echoed above, rumbling the floor. Ellie kept near the wall as she walked, listening for footsteps among the chaos. More Fireflies rushed past her, carrying the injured as they bled. The further she tried to go, the more the question seared itself in her mind: Will I be carried or carry? No ending could hold them both unscathed. Maybe there was a book penned in some dusty, locked library where they were clean. Where they had met somewhere else. Where what happened didn’t.

The temperature dropped as she stealthed down the stairs, eye alight for gunshots or glinting daggers, some shadow waiting to grab her from behind. It was quieter. More horrible, dread pooling in her gut at the lack of sound but for one voice, calling out, unmuffled.

“Shit!” Abby cursed, pained.

Ellie ran. The scene splayed made her stomach curdle, the taste of bile at the back of her throat. Bodies, about ten, littered the floor like fallen flies both Firefly and raider, all unmoving, mouths slack in screams. Their eyes were open. In the center, calamitous, everything she had nearing the end, Abby was floored against the wall, calf bleeding profusely, her pistol a few feet from her, with a man looming, finger on the trigger. He aimed at her head.

She shouted, “Fuck you!” And she shot at his. Once, and he was down, his brains splattered among the gore. It was sick, the fact that his blood was mixing with Abby’s. She seethed, breathing heavy, gazing at his limp body to be sure that he wouldn’t return.

With trudging feet, Ellie skirted around the corpses. If she recognized any, she didn’t notice. Couldn’t, with Abby wounded. “Fuck you,” Ellie repeated as she neared. Softer, that time. Shakier. Like a wisp could blow it down. “I can’t believe you.”

“The doors that lead up here are closed.” So objective, combat at the front of her mind. It was what she was trained for, focused on for years after everything was taken from her. She knew Abby couldn’t forget it, but in that moment, it made Ellie’s lip curl that she could stand to bring up the battle. Ellie could judge by Abby’s demeanor, trodden and clutching her calf, biting her lip, applying pressure, that Lev and Steph were fine, somewhere. If they weren’t, she’d be up in arms. It was just them. And all the more fucking enraging.

“Abby, shut the fuck up.” Ellie crouched to the floor, feeling the blood soak into her pants. She tugged Abby’s pant leg up to see the wound; it was bad, a big, gaping hole surely shot in short range, red squelching from it. She pulled her hoodie over her head, leaving herself in a tee, and wiped it off with the fabric.

Abby’s brows knitted in pain. “Ellie, stop — ”

“No.”

“I don’t need you to — ”

“I need you!” Ellie stared up at her. She was so tall, even crumpled to her foundation. “I need you, and you had to race into this shit like… like you’re some kind of hero? Fuck off.” Pointed, she pressed the hoodie into her harder. Abby was on her clothes. Abby was all over her hands. “Fuck you, Abby.”

“What are you talking about?” Abby talked with her breath, and she was out of it, so her words were muddled with hurt, low and trembling in the dark hall. “I just want you to get the fuck out, you’re too important to be down here.”

“Why?” Ellie knew the answer. She leaned close to her face, hoping her blood boiled into her eye and scorned Abby. “Am I just the host for it, to you? Just a fucking vessel for my brain?”

Abby’s lip quivered. “It’s you.” Casually proving her wrong, objecting to her words with such slight cadence that would leave her feeling patronized, if it were anyone else.

And Ellie’s brows rose, eye wide. She expected the worst. She had lived through the dark for so long that she could hold it all herself, but it stained her palms. Her sooty touch contaminated all she had. No one wanted her. No one could brush her without dirtying themselves. Unless they were ashen, too.

For the first time that night, her heart stopped. “Don’t. You don’t get to… you don’t get to do this to me.” Abby is every journaled thought, every sketch in the bylines, every dream and nightmare, no longer terrors of her scowl, but of losing her. She doesn’t get to leave after consuming her.

“Ellie, I — ”

“You don’t get to claim you care when you’re bleeding all over me. You’re fucking reckless.”

Abby laughed, short and sarcastic, nothing more than a bark through the pained sighs. “You’re saying that to me?”

Finally, Ellie tore her gaze and refocused on her calf, tying her hoodie around it. Just tight enough so she wouldn’t have to hold it so much, but not enough to tourniquet. “I would have never done this to you.”

“I did it to find you.”

Ellie paused, unable to respond. Abby’s warmth on her hands was enough to render her too mellow to speak.

She continued, “And you did the same.” Abby sank into the wall, her pressure on her thigh growing more slack. Abby’s eyes fluttered shut, the wrinkle between her brows creased deep. She was growing paler by the second. “Shit. Let me get up to one of the medical dens, I feel lightheaded.”

“You can’t walk on your own.”

“I know.” Her breathing slowed. Not enough to be concerning. Enough to denote her fleeting consciousness from the blood loss. “I can — ”

Ellie looped an arm around her back and under her shoulders, and gingerly began rising from her crouch. Abby lifted with her, though when the weight shifted to her injured half, she flinched. “Don’t lean that way,” Ellie mumbled. “Lean on me.” And it felt like her heart began beating anew.

All the beds were full. Some Fireflies were laid on the floor, even, the gurneys not ample enough to hold them. The gunshots had died by the time Ellie reached her room, both sides realizing it was futile, and that they needed to retreat before losing too many. The air was still. The only thing that punctured it were Abby’s breaths.

Ellie dragged her feet as she walked in, shutting the door behind, and bubbling them in the space. Everything outside halted. They were alone, together. “Right here, Abs,” Ellie muttered, “lay down.”

Abby grunted. Ellie carefully let her slip away, her body hitting the — her — bed with a bounce, the springs squealing. She placed a pillow beneath her calf to make it easier to inspect. Her hoodie didn’t come off without a fight, the cloth a sickening peel from the skin, dried blood staining it. Where it was once gray, it was splotched.

“I have to disinfect it.” She took her backpack off and pawed through her belongings, the CDs and pens, flannels and ammunition, until she felt the bottle of alcohol buried. “Sorry.” Meticulous, she dribbled some onto the clean sleeve of her hoodie and swiped the wetness over her wound, gritting her teeth. Recalling how biting the chemical burn to her hand was.

But Abby didn’t pull away or shake. Rhythmic, she breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth. Nothing made it waver.

“Abby?” Ellie said.

For several seconds, she didn’t reply, and it drilled a hole into Ellie’s chest, a hole she didn’t want to label, afraid to make the feeling real. Tangible. Finally, she whispered, “You’re good.”

It was the blood loss. It was her clouded head speaking, so Ellie chuckled, “Don’t ruin my rep.”

Abby’s throat bobbed. Her eyes opened, half-lidded. “Fuck. You’re good.”

They stared at one another, and Ellie licked her lips, not sure which would be easier to stomach: The wound or the look in her eyes. “I’m not.”

“I wasn’t prepared for this.”

“What?”

“You.”

“... I’m a lot.”

Abby sat against the headboard. “So am I.”

Her hands were smothered in her. Abby’s blood wasn’t spilled by Ellie, but conserved by her. The window cast a navy tint to the room. Where Ellie was, she cast Abby in her shadow. Something dark, just for them. A pocket of time where the temperature dropped and their skin was on fire.

“No. You’re not.” It wasn’t fair, how someone who had caused her so much grief had begun to relieve it. It was a trick of the moonlight, some higher power’s final twist of the knife. “You’re…”

Ellie couldn’t say it. Not out of reluctance, or pride, or terror of ruing the words later. She simply didn’t have any syllable strong enough to become laden with it. Abby was there, in her dark room, bleeding, veins pulsing, and there was no name she could give. Nothing weighty enough, but for Abby.

Abby, Abby, Abby.

Her ribs were too small for her heart. “Abby?”

Abby waited for her to continue, too patient for the world, but there wasn’t anything left to say. Just her name. In Ellie’s mouth.

Her taste, on Ellie’s lips.

Ellie kissed her, and she tasted like the grit of a wound and the creaking mechanisms of forlorn Ferris wheels. Rainwater. Aloe. She was so lush. She was nothing like her scars, she didn’t hold the past in her mouth, her teeth — she didn’t bite at her. Abby pressed in. Ellie leaned down.

The ends of her mangled fingers brushed Abby’s cheek as she tucked her hair behind her ear, and Ellie thought, Don’t cut it. Don’t let it grow, don’t change it, don’t leave. Don’t break the moment. Don’t break me again. She wanted to pull off and tell herself to hush, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to breathe if wasn’t Abby’s exhale, and didn’t want to face the day again if it’d take their shadow.

Her body was familiar. Every curve of her jaw, Ellie knew, every callus as Abby cradled her neck, just below where her hair ended, was expected. She had her. God, she had her. Hers. And it was a fever dream, a haze of inescapable brownish blueish hazelish. They were so linked by the pinkies. Unspoken promises.

Abby pulled away, eyes open, their color calling Ellie’s name like a lyric. The shared nature of those CDs. The road, gravel drives. State lines. Loss. Oh, loss, more terrifying than success.

“I…,” Abby trailed.

Ellie’s lips were still parted, parted for her, but she didn’t come again, leaving an empty house in her wake. And she knew, by the tenseness in the room, the silence, that she’d made a mistake. Her love never ended well. Slowly, she stood upright, her hands shaking as she reached for her bag.

“I should go.”

Her lips were so shiny. “What? No — ”

“You need gauze.”

“Will you be back?”

“Yes.” Sss, the sound trailed to an exhale. Some blinks. A sigh in the night. “I just…” Fuck. “I’ll be back.”

Her body wasn’t hers. She was on the same auto pilot that made her nauseous, made her fidget, made sweat bead her hairline and render her a mess. She had to leave, oh god, or she’d be trapped. Trapped, having to gaze into Abby’s stare every second, always at the back of her mind. The butterflies would patter her stomach, the nights could never be spent alone — always, always, they would carry Abby’s whisper. Ellie couldn’t grow close enough to disappoint her again.

Dina’s face, as she left. Surely, Abby wouldn’t be able to inject herself with Ellie.

She walked out of the room. The hall was flooded with bodies, some groaning, some limp. “Abby’s in there,” Ellie croaked softly, to no one in particular. Anyone who would listen and care in her place. “She’ll be fine, just… she needs bandages.”

And it was unspeakable that Ellie could live forever without another touch, so long as the memory of her mouth remained.

The gate was unattended, as were their vehicles. She approached their van like it was a headstone, a graveyard of all their conversations. A tomb opened as she dug the key out of her bag. They’d never asked for it back. She’ll be better off, Ellie chorused. She’ll make something of herself.

Ellie slid into the driver’s side and twisted the key. The jeep sparked under her touch and rumbled at her feet. She almost reversed without looking behind, until she recalled that there was no Abby to tell her when was good. When was bad. Left, right. Stop. Now. Ellie, in that annoyed tone. Ellie. Exasperated.

She pulled out of the lot and sped, wheels shrieking, away from the base, and finally breathed. Breathed. Deep, until her chest was full, and when it left, her lungs were renewed.

It took a few minutes for her to realize, when she swerved to avoid a rabbit, skidding to a stop in the breakdown lane.

“Oh, shit,” Ellie laughed, caustic, “my fucking headlights.”