by Meg Collett
Ollie sat beside me and stretched her legs out on the grass. “Is Zero okay?”
I shot her a surprised glance. “How did you know about that?”
“Marley,” she said weakly.
“Oh.” I let out my breath in a whoosh. “She saw what happened in the woods?”
“She knew about the well. That’s why she marked it that time you followed her out. Were you bitten?”
“Just twice,” I said, but I was distracted. The rawness in her tone caught my attention. “What’s going on with you? You sound like you’ve been crying.”
“She and I had a long talk.”
It was my turn to narrow my eyes in suspicion. “Did you two try to kill each other?”
She gave a half-hearted laugh that sounded like a limp whoosh of air. “We called a truce, I guess you could say.”
“About what?”
Ollie was silent for so long I thought she wouldn’t answer. When she spoke, I almost didn’t catch the words they were so quiet. “Nothing good.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
Her focus remained on her hands in her lap as she picked at her cuticles, her gaze far away. “I don’t think I’m strong enough,” she whispered.
A chill swept through me. Ollie was the strongest person I knew. The fact that something was beyond her strength terrified me. I wanted to be brave enough to ask, to help her shoulder it. I wanted to be strong enough. I wanted to be that fighter Hatter couldn’t love.
But I couldn’t. My heart ached. And the weight on my shoulders was already heavy enough. Just for a few hours, I thought. I’ll ask her in the morning when I’m feeling stronger.
“Why were you crying?” she asked.
I wrapped my arms around my shins and held tight. “Hatter and I broke up. I mean, I guess that’s what happened.”
The heat of her gaze landed on me. I sensed her searching my tear-streaked face and noting my red-rimmed eyes. I expected her to demand to know where he was and then go and throttle him. I expected her to take a stand in her normal Ollie-fashion and insist on fixing everything for me. But she sat quietly at my side, watching me.
When I met her eyes, I knew whatever had happened between her and Marley was bad.
“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked in that same raw tone.
“I don’t think I’m strong enough,” I said, echoing her words.
She shivered, but she accepted my answer with silence.
She was scaring me. Maybe I was scaring her.
A long moment passed before she spoke again. “Can I ask you something? And can you answer with complete honesty?”
I nodded.
“If you could choose to know the future, would you? But you couldn’t change it or affect the outcome. You could only see what was going to happen.”
“Marley had a vision?” I sighed. “My brain says yes, and then if I didn’t like it, to fight against it with everything I have.”
Ollie didn’t blink as she stared at me. “But if the fight doesn’t matter? If you hated it with every ounce of your being, if you knew it would take everything you loved from you, but no amount of fighting would save it, would you want to know?”
Her voice cracked as she spoke, and her eyes welled with tears. It wasn’t the wind that had made her throat raw. She had been crying with Marley. I took her hand and held on.
“No,” I whispered. “My heart says no. That would be horrible to know. To feel it coming closer with every breath but unable to stop it. That would be the most terrible thing in the world.”
She squeezed my hand back and pressed her other hand to her belly. To Pinto. I stared at her hand on her stomach, and a horrible, terrible, awful feeling hit me. But it was too bad to speak aloud, to ask her. It was too bad, and I was too weak.
“Would you want to know?” I finally whispered, staring at her hand.
“My heart says no,” she whispered back in the shrouded silver light of the moon.
Her heart said she didn’t want to know, but in her voice, I heard the truth.
She already knew.
N I N E T E E N
Ollie
The first slivers of dawn tumbled over the finely frosted evergreens. I had been awake all night with the handful of professors, hunters, and fifth-years gathered in the gym with me, Marley, Mr. Clint, Luke, Hatter, Thad, and Sunny.
The gym’s lights were off, but there was enough light from the coming sunrise to see the stark expressions on everyone’s faces. In the tight press of their lips, the rigidness of their jaws, and the deep wrinkles around their eyes as they squinted at me, I saw their fear.
I had told them about the governor’s bombs and the hopelessness of waiting to be evacuated. I had told them we had nowhere to run on an island full of monsters that was about to be nuked to kingdom come. I had told them, and they were scared.
I thought it poetic in a fucked-up way. These people had lived their entire lives hunting and killing aswangs, but it was humans—the true monsters—who might kill us all.
“I can’t believe it …” John Henry shook his head, his massive shoulders curled forward. “There are children here.”
“Can you try calling him again?” a professor asked Marley, though I heard the resignation in his voice.
She stood by the back of the gym, near the windows. At the question, she turned around, her hair blazing in the light. “He’s been a family friend since I was born, but he’s a proud, stubborn man with too much power. He only sees a prison full of criminals when he looks at this place, with no publicly scheduled field trips to justify the presence of children. He thinks I’m pulling a stunt to get back in my father’s good graces.”
“And our planes …”
“Will be shot down,” I said. “Or we have to assume they will be. I’m not risking putting kids on a plane.”
“But what about Miss Summers’s helicopter? We can fly it low enough to stay out of the protected airspace,” John Henry offered, beaming like he’d discovered our saving grace. “We can make trips back and forth until everyone is far enough away!”
“Helicopters require different fuel from planes,” Marley said to the windows, her voice far away. “We could maybe make two trips, but how do we pick who goes? How do we value one life over another?”
Everyone fell silent. That was why I had gathered who I had. These were the people who’d stayed after Dean, who would sacrifice their lives to fight him when he came back. The thought of deciding who would get on the helicopter and who wouldn’t wasn’t a decision they were willing to make.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Luke staring hard at me. His gaze scorched the side of my face. I knew what he was thinking. He wanted me on that helicopter.
Because of Marley’s vision, I knew no matter what Luke did, I wouldn’t be on that helicopter.
Even if I was going to fight like hell to change the events she’d foretold.
I didn’t care if she told me it was impossible. My mother had believed they could be changed, and I would too. Until the very end.
An older fifth-year who acted as the leader of her class—her name was Viv, and I’d grown to like her over the last few hours—spoke up. “But … the governor knows there are people here, even if he thinks they’re criminals who deserve to die, and he still plans to bomb the island? That’s murder.” She turned to her fellow students, her teachers, the guards meant to protect her. Her eyes pleaded with us to negate her words, to tell her she was wrong. “It’s murder.”
As fifth-years, Viv and the others knew all the horrors the woods contained. They knew all about fear and pain and war and monsters. But nothing had prepared them for this.
“I’m sorry,” I said simply.
Viv wrapped her arms around her middle and stared at the ground.
To the others, I said, “We’ve talked it through. You know everything I know.” A lie. Only Marley and I knew the full truth. The full end. But I’d kept those words from them just in case I cou
ld change none of it. “Mr. Clint, what do you think?”
The acting president hadn’t spoken much. Like Marley, he stood at the fringes of the group and listened. While I had worked to keep everyone calm and convince them that bombs would be falling on our island, Mr. Clint, Marley, and my friends had listened. They didn’t need convincing. They already understood that there was no running.
No rescue was coming.
“I think,” Mr. Clint started, coming forward into the group, “that our options are few. We could take small groups of kids and students and escort them through the pack of aswangs guarding the fence. We know it’s possible.” At this he looked at Sunny and Thad. “It’s daytime, and the ’swangs don’t have the advantage of their night-forms. But …”
“Not everyone would make it. We have to assume there would be fighting, that the pack would close in once they figured out what we were doing, and the kids aren’t old enough to defend themselves,” I finished.
“We can’t fly, and we can’t run,” Mr. Clint told the group. “So, we stay. We take the day to prepare. The garage is three levels below ground. We can stock it with food, supplies, medicine, and everything else we might need. We move the students down there tonight, and we weather the storm.”
It was the solution we’d been circling all night. It was the one no one wanted to admit was right. Not even me. We were hunters, trained to fight back and take action, not hunker down and pray we all made it. It went against everything we knew.
Quietly, John Henry asked, “What will we tell them?”
“For now,” Mr. Clint said, “nothing. Let’s start moving supplies into the garage, and let’s do it quietly.”
With a nod, he walked to the gym’s doors, and the group followed. My friends fell into step behind the guards, ready to help however they could. I started to follow but realized Marley was still standing beside the windows. I paused.
“Coming?” Luke asked from the door.
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
His eyes went from me to Marley and back again. He didn’t say anything as he left, letting the gym’s glass door swing closed behind him.
“You haven’t told them about my vision,” Marley said from the window.
I walked over and leaned against the glass. Below, the courtyard brightened beneath the orange and pink sunrise. Sunlight beamed across the campus, spilling light like it was gold.
I turned away and studied Marley’s profile. “It’s the one thing I haven’t decided.”
“It’s a burden.”
“And there’s nothing I can do to change anything?” I asked for the countless time. I would keep asking it. Over and over.
Her eyes were far away, like she was thinking of things long past, as she said, “No, it won’t change anything.”
“It sounds like you’ve tried.”
It was slight, but I thought I saw her shiver. “I have.”
“And that man’s picture in your locket?” I thought I knew the answer to this too.
She turned and looked at me. “His is an event I cannot change, though I have tried a million times. Some of the things I see … I would give my life to stop them. I would sacrifice countless others to stop them. I am not a good person, Ollie. You were right about that. It’s why I’m far too grateful you’re in the position you’re in and I’m just the messenger.”
“You know how he’ll die. Or is he already dead?”
She faced the courtyard again, her eyes on the fluttering umbrellas above the tables and the blooming trees. “We’re all dying. Every day. Every minute. We’re just dying.”
I couldn’t look at her anymore. She was becoming far too real for me. I preferred to think of her as the bad guy. The one I disliked, with her cowboy boots and stupid jeans that made her ass look amazing. But things were shifting, and that expression in her eyes—defeat if I ever saw it—told the story of a woman I could respect.
Dammit, I really didn’t want to like her.
I sighed.
The gym door opened, and expecting Luke, I turned around to ask for a few more minutes alone with Marley, but I found Mr. Clint walking back in. “They have their assignments. They know to go about it discreetly. But what will we tell the students?”
I made room for him to join us by the window. “Are you asking me as a student or as a hunter?”
He offered me a sad smile. “I only wanted you to have some peace.”
I laughed quietly. “I appreciate that.”
Below, the school’s front door opened and students spilled out into the morning, ready to enjoy their weekend. They found spots beneath the checkered umbrellas, spreading out their textbooks and breakfast. More professors and off-duty guards came from the barracks, walking across the sun-warmed patchwork bricks. Farther out, the guards languidly walked the fence, tossing jokes back and forth as they passed each other. Beyond the fence, even farther, the mountains gleamed, their snowcaps foretelling another unchangeable event: winter. Soon, it would be cold again and we’d wish for the dewy days of summer. Soon, the days would pass faster than a blink and we’d wish for the endless evenings. Soon, it would be time to start again, a new cycle, and we’d miss the old, the past, the gone again and forever away.
Soon, it would all be over.
“Let’s leave them be,” I said.
Marley’s gaze slid to me. “Not tell them?”
I sighed. It was an easy sight to watch. To take in. My home. My school. My mother’s legacy. How many times had I imagined her here, beneath this warm sun, on these very bricks, watching a scene too similar to this? Too many times to count. Too many times to wish for. And yet I was coming to understand her struggle, her enemies, her war.
“I used to think Dean a fool for not telling the truth about the aswangs to the first-years,” I murmured. “I used to think it cowardly that we lied to them. Told them a pretty little fairy tale. Give them the truth, I preached. They can handle it. And they could. But I understand why he didn’t tell them.”
“Why?” Marley asked, though I suspected she knew the answer—the one I had realized while staring out at the courtyard.
I turned to Mr. Clint. He was still smiling sadly at me. He knew. He understood. “It’s the same reason you wanted me to just be a student. To stop hunting and go to class.”
Mr. Clint nodded.
“Dean didn’t want to ruin it for the first-years,” I said. “He didn’t want to ruin the good days. The feelings of safety and joy. He wanted them to enjoy the time they had while they had it. To hold on to the last dregs of youth before the nature of our world tore it away from them.”
I hated that he’d been right about this one thing. He’d been right, and I’d been wrong. Youth and happiness and the casual easiness of a sunny Saturday were precious, wonderful things that could easily be shattered into a million wasted slivers of life. We had to protect them, harbor them, keep them safe at all costs. Even if it meant lying and shouldering that burden. Because in the end, these lives in front of me were all that mattered.
It was why I’d made the decision I had last night. And it was why I made the decision now.
No one but me could ever know Marley’s vision.
There would be no more ruining of today.
There would only be living.
It would be on me and me alone to try and change the future.
“Yeah, let them have the day. They don’t need to be afraid. The rest of us can prepare for tonight.”
The sunlight fractured through the window. Squinting, Marley shielded her eyes against the sun. “I see her a lot when I look at you.”
My stomach squeezed. “Irena?”
She nodded. “She was the best and bravest woman I knew—until now.”
I didn’t want to like this woman before me. I really, really didn’t.
But dammit, I did.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
Marley pressed a hand to the glass like she was saying goodbye. With a sigh, she turned
to Mr. Clint and me. “Let’s go get ready.”
Ready for war.
Always.
Always ready for war.
T W E N T Y
Sunny
The planes came exactly at midnight. Like so many angry hornets, they flew in beneath the cover of darkness, droning and rumbling and spitting fire onto our island.
The first bomb dropped on the city center of Kodiak. It erupted into the obsidian sky with a white flare of pure light. Almost thirty miles away, the fence wall we stood on rattled beneath our boots. Ollie’s hands flew out and grabbed the railing, gripping it tightly as though she needed to hang on. In her eyes, I saw the reflection of the flames billowing upward.
Kodiak Island would be on fire for a long time after tonight.
The next bomb fell somewhere around Kodiak Station and the airport with a banging explosion of fuel reserves. I flinched, fighting the urge to cover my ears. It wasn’t possible, but I imagined the air grew hotter as the fire licked upward, turning the sky into a smoky, angry haze of red.
Another bomb fell near Port Lions. Almost immediately after, another dropped close to Women’s Bay. When the fifth hit Terror Lake, directly to the southeast, the woods surrounding the school started to shift with whispers.
At first, I thought it was just the wind, but the sound grew louder. Seconds before they poured from the tree line, I recognized the sound as the pounding of hundreds of aswang paws running straight toward us at full tilt, leaping and tearing through the forest.
The pack of aswangs who’d been prowling our fences flung themselves at the base, scrambling upward with their claws. Some made it almost fifteen feet, nearly halfway. They didn’t even care that we watched them, our hearts pounding in our throats, the fires on the island growing ever higher into the sky on our horizon.
“What are they doing?” John Henry asked, his deep voice rumbling with a touch of fear.
“They’re scared,” came Ollie’s whispered reply. Her throat was tight as though she were holding back tears. “The school is the safest place.”