“A computer that Huxley has access to?” Jaxon presses. “That they could control remotely, even?”
I don’t know the answer to that, and even if I did, I’m not sure I would tell him. Because I remember what Violet said. And it’s crazy, maybe, but when he mentions control, the first thing I wonder is if what she said was true—am I the one being brainwashed? Is it really safe to be talking with him about all of this? I’ve been telling myself that I’m the one using him, but is it really the other way around? Maybe my sister was right to be angry with me for taking his side.
I turn the jammer over and over in my hands and pretend to study it. “I have no idea about any of that,” I say. “But can I ask you something?”
“Can I really stop you?”
“No.”
“Then go for it, I guess.”
“Why are you still here?”
He sighs. “I already told you—I want to know what really happened that night Samantha died.”
It sounds just as convincing as it did the first time he said it. Violet was wrong. She has to be wrong. He doesn’t know anything about Samantha’s death. He would have told me if he did.
You trust him so much, so why don’t you ask him?
The memory of her voice makes my head spin. I stop messing with the jammer and close my eyes, trying to make it stop. “Where were you the night she died?” I ask quietly.
“Why does this suddenly sound like an interrogation?”
“It’s just a question. You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to.”
A tense, hesitant silence stretches between us. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. And then of all the things he could do to break it, he laughs. “What did that clone say to you earlier? What did she tell you about me?”
“She doesn’t matter right now,” I say, my eyes flashing open again. “I’m the one who’s asking the question—I can think for myself, you know.”
“I do know that. Which is why I’m wondering what I have to do to make you stop thinking I’m the worst person you’ve ever met.”
“Just tell me the truth. That’s all I need.”
His sigh is softer this time. “Look, I didn’t even see Samantha the night she died. We were supposed to get together, to grab coffee before we went to this CCA meeting thing, but she never showed up. I didn’t think anything of it, because it wasn’t the first time it had happened. Her father doesn’t particularly care for me, as you might have noticed the other day, so she’s had to bail on me a few times in the past, whenever he managed to find out the two of us had plans. Then later, at the meeting, someone said she was sick and had stayed home. No big deal.”
“You didn’t think it was weird that she didn’t call or text you or anything?”
He raises an eyebrow. “How well did you actually know Samantha?” he asks. “She wasn’t exactly the dependable type.”
Unpredictable. I think that was the word Violet used to describe her—it was what my sister had liked best about her only friend. I guess the two of them were a lot alike that way.
“I never held it against her, though,” Jaxon says. “She could have turned out a lot worse, with parents like hers. And for all the crap people gave her about being rich and stuck-up, she wasn’t really that bad.” He shrugs. “At least not to me. And she definitely didn’t deserve . . . you know, what happened to her.”
There’s another long, awkward pause, and again he’s the one who breaks it. “I messed up, not telling you the truth about me from the beginning,” he says. “I know I did. And I’m sorry. But I’m not lying now—I wouldn’t keep something like this from you. I never wanted to keep anything from you.”
His voice has changed. There’s something vulnerable in it now, and that scares me more than the possibility of any of Violet’s warnings about him being true. I absently untuck my hair from behind my ears and let it fall into my face, like that could hide me. He’s not looking at me anymore, though. Instead, he takes the jammer from my hands and ties it into the makeshift bracelet, and then he fastens the whole thing around my wrist, somehow managing to barely touch me and avoid my gaze all at the same time.
“Probably not the best fashion statement you’ve ever made.” It’s a blatant change of subject, I know. But his tone still has that soft vulnerability to it, and it makes it difficult to keep fighting or to honestly doubt anything he’s just said. “Hopefully it’ll work, though,” he adds. “Now we just need to get out of here as soon as possible.”
The main problem, we agree, is Seth; until he comes around and we can tell exactly how hurt he is, we’re afraid to move him any more than we have to. Not to mention we’re both exhausted, and the thought of hauling all of our stuff to the car in the near pitch-black darkness isn’t exactly appealing.
“Less than three hours until morning,” Jaxon says, glancing at his phone.
“Might be enough time for Seth to start waking up,” I think aloud.
“And for you to get some more rest.”
I go and sit down on the bed, not because I’m planning on actually going to sleep, but because all of the thoughts whirling around in my head are starting to make me feel dizzy again. “What about you?” I ask.
“It’ll probably be a while before Huxley figures anything out, but we still don’t know where your sister’s run off to. One of us needs to stay up and keep an eye out for her.” He grabs a spare pillow, props it in the corner between my bed and the nightstand, and then leans back and tilts his head against the mattress. “I think I’m past the point of sleep anyway.”
I try arguing that it should be me who stays up—since I already had a few hours of sleep earlier—but he doesn’t budge from his spot on the floor.
“You could at least sit on the bed,” I say. “It would be more comfortable.”
“Not a good idea,” he says. “Something tells me I would get distracted from keeping watch.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see the wry smile spreading across his face. I force myself to stare only at the wad of covers balled up in my fist.
But warmth is already rushing into my cheeks. Even now, with everything else I could be focusing on, and with all the doubt these past few days have left between us . . . why do I still not have any control over the butterflies he sets free in my stomach when he smiles like that?
What is wrong with me?
I draw my knees up to my chest and rest my chin on them, take a deep breath, and try to force my thoughts away from Jaxon. Away from all the possible ways I could distract him.
I shouldn’t be thinking about things like that.
I can’t stop thinking about him completely, though. Not when he’s this close. Not when I’m having to make a conscious effort to keep from reaching a hand out and running my fingers through his messy hair. I should say something. Anything to divert my thoughts away from the roads they’re trying to go down.
“Do you remember the first time we met?” I ask quietly. Not the best diversion, maybe, but it was the first question that came to mind.
“Vividly.”
“The music room,” I think aloud, and I’m instantly back there; back to the scent of instrument polish and the lingering cloud of floral perfume that our teacher always left in her wake.
“You thought you were alone that day, didn’t you?” he asks.
“Of course. That was the only reason I was singing.” The rest of the class was at lunch, but I wasn’t hungry; so I’d wandered into the room the older students sometimes used for recording. There was all that fancy equipment, and the walls were covered in soundproofing foam. It felt so . . . professional. And for a moment, I forgot the disapproving looks my mother always gave me when I would sing, and I just closed my eyes and belted out the first song that came into my head.
When I opened my eyes, Jaxon was standing in the doorway of the room.
“That day . . . I’d never been so mortified in my life.”
“I tried to apologize,” he says, “but you ran away. You didn�
��t even look back.”
“And you spent the rest of that semester trying to get me to sing again.” The whole thing seems kind of silly now that I say it out loud.
“Because you were better than anyone else I’d ever heard. You still are. Whenever I hear that song now—which I swear is all the time, because my mom plays it constantly—I hear you singing it. I don’t even remember the lyrics, just your voice.”
I’m staring at him again. I can’t help it. His gaze, meanwhile, is distant and lost in thought.
“There was something in your voice that day that’s never let me go,” he says after a minute. “Something that’s there when you perform in all those plays, too. And that’s why I . . .” He twists around and rests his elbows on the edge of the bed. “I mean, there were other places I could have gone when I was blowing off my duties as an office assistant. But I knew you’d be there in the auditorium. And I’d watch you performing, and I’d get the same feeling I had the first time I heard you sing. That feeling I’m still trying to figure out.” His eyes meet mine again. They’re less anxious now. “So if you don’t want to believe me about my first reason,” he says, “there’s another for you. That’s the other part of why I’m here.”
“I was only pretending when I was on that stage,” I say, and suddenly all the nervousness is gone, replaced by a swift and strange sort of sadness. Because I hate to break this to him, but he’s followed a fraud. His infatuation isn’t with me; it’s with the person I become when I put on whatever costume the play calls for.
“No one can pretend that good,” he says.
“I can.”
I can tell he still doesn’t believe me. And it’s frustrating—because I don’t know how to make him understand how incredibly wrong he is.
Because he is wrong.
Isn’t he?
It’s then that I realize I can’t even answer myself. I was wrong about who Violet was; who says I haven’t been wrong about myself all this time too? How did this conversation even become about me, anyway? This wasn’t supposed to be about me. I don’t like talking about myself, and I don’t like the thought of someone else knowing me better than I know myself. Especially when that someone else is Jaxon, considering I still don’t know what to think about him.
I know what I want to think, though, don’t I? I have to admit that. I want to think he’s on my side. Though I’m not sure if that’s because he truly is, or if it’s because he’s so dangerously persuasive and I’m so incredibly tired. Or maybe it’s simply that, after what’s happened with Violet, I’m just about desperate enough to hope anybody is still on my side. I don’t know. Sometimes it would be nice to have even a tenth of that relentless confidence he seems to have about us.
I grab the pillow at my feet and toss it behind my head, intent on going to sleep and putting an end to this conversation before it becomes any more confusing. When I start to turn away, though, he grabs my wrist. I keep my focus on the pillow. I can feel his eyes on me, waiting for me to turn and look at him. But I don’t know which face he’d see, or if it’s even the right one anymore, so I don’t move.
“Let go,” I say.
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I answered your question from earlier,” he says. “Now I have one for you.”
“What?”
“You found Violet. So where are you planning to go now? What are you going to do?”
I almost breathe a sigh of relief. Somehow, I find it easier to talk about my crazy sister than about whatever is going on between Jaxon and me. Though my answers are just as inconclusive about her as they are about him.
“I don’t know.” I try to pull out of his grasp; I think he sees the pain it causes me—the way my entire sore, broken body cringes with the movement—because he’s quick to let go then. But he still stays close, his body leaning into the mattress and sinking me toward him. “But if you don’t want to follow me around anymore, I understand,” I say. “Especially after . . . after what my sister did to you.”
“After what she did to me? Are you serious? What about what she did to you, Cate?” He takes my arm again, much more gently this time, and tries to meet my eyes. I do my best to avoid his. “Please don’t tell me you’re thinking about going after her.”
I’d be lying if I told him the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. It’s not like we can just carry on as if none of the past few days happened; my sister and I are going to have to meet again. That seems inevitable. And I’d rather be the one tracking her down. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for her to sneak up on me. If she’s going to try to turn this into a game for her own personal amusement, then fine—but I at least want to be the one making the rules.
“I think it’s time for a plan B,” Jaxon is saying. “Even if she knows what happened to Samantha, do you really think she’s going to tell you? You tried to talk to her, and she tried to kill you in response. Remember that? She doesn’t really seem like the divulging type.”
“Except she did tell me.” I regret the words the second they leave my mouth, because I can’t elaborate on them. I can’t bring up that she did mention Jaxon’s name, even though he’s already guessed as much; it will only lead us back to our argument from earlier. I don’t want to go there again. I want to believe what he’s told me and leave it at that. And the only other thing Violet said was that Samantha wasn’t supposed to die that night, but I don’t know what she meant by it, either, so I’d rather keep that to myself too. Maybe I’m just afraid of what Jaxon would make of these things—that he might see something incriminating in her words, some sort of proof that I’m trying desperately to overlook.
All I really know is that he’s watching me expectantly now, so I have no choice but to follow up with something. I manage a stuttered, “I mean she started to tell me,” which only earns me an exasperated look from him, since I guess we both know that all I’m doing is grasping for answers I don’t really have.
Because whether it was supposed to happen or not, Samantha is still dead, and everything still points to it being Violet’s fault.
“She tried to kill you,” Jaxon repeats in a perfectly monotone voice.
“If she’d wanted to kill me, she would have.” I realize how insane it sounds—to still be making excuses for her right now—but for some reason I can’t make myself take it back.
Maybe because she didn’t kill either of us, even though I know she could have. Easily. I keep thinking about that, and how that’s the other part of the equation I can’t make sense of. However violent and out of control she seemed tonight, my sister was still in there. She still had her memories of us, and the second she saw the blood on my cheek, she stopped.
It makes it seem like she’s the one in control. Like maybe she hasn’t been brainwashed by them at all. Not completely.
But that would mean it was actually Violet who let Samantha Voss bleed to death on those railroad tracks. The girl who is supposed to be my sister. Not some zombie being controlled by Huxley. If she can walk away and leave me and Jaxon alive, then she could have done the same thing with Samantha, right? If she was really there that night, she could have saved her, even.
Except she didn’t.
I don’t understand any of it. All I know is that the more I think about it, the more I want to scream. The more I want to track her down right this second and do whatever it takes to stop her from hurting anyone else—even though I’m afraid to think about what, exactly, that’s going to mean.
“How do you know she won’t kill us both next time, though?” Jaxon asks.
“I don’t.” The words are numb, lifeless. It’s not on purpose; I think I’m just feeling so many different things at once that they’ve all mixed into one bland blob of emotion—like when you mix all the different paints together and get that awful brown color.
“I think you should stay away from her.” There’s something in his voice that breaks through the blandness of my
thoughts; something violent, almost. And when I turn my head and meet his eyes, I see aggression shimmering there, just beneath the surface. “And if she knows what’s good for her,” he says, “she’ll stay away from me—and from you and Seth—too.”
Out of all the emotions inside me, anger is the one that fights its way to the surface. It’s not really anger at Jaxon, I know; but my voice is still seething when I say, “You do realize that’s my sister you’re threatening, right?”
“No she’s not, Cate. She’s not the Violet you want her to be, and you can’t keep protecting her like this.”
Not the Violet you want her to be.
That’s exactly what I thought earlier, wasn’t it? That this Violet was some sort of impersonator, a memory thief masquerading around in a part that she was playing all wrong. So why can’t I stand to hear Jaxon say the same thing? It’s like a kind of unwritten law, I think—that you can be as pissed off at your family as you want, but the second someone else has anything bad to say about them, you’re suddenly ready to forgive even the most heinous crimes they might have committed.
Because other people don’t get it. They don’t know all of the good parts of Violet. They don’t realize that she’s as much a victim in all of this as anyone else; it’s not like she asked to be Huxley’s creation.
“I’m not protecting her,” I say, “I’m only trying to—”
He’s just watching me now and shaking his head in disbelief. It’s irritating.
“You have no idea what it’s like,” I snap. “You have no idea what we’ve been through, so just . . . just stop acting like you do, all right?”
“Fine.” For a moment I think that’s going to be the end of it. But then he fixes me with a very serious look and says, “But I do know what she did to you, don’t I?” That violence from before hovers at the edge of his voice, and suddenly his face looks like it did when I opened my eyes beside the pool; pale and sick, like we’re reliving that moment here and now. “And I just . . . I just don’t think any answers we want to find are worth you getting killed over. That’s all I’m trying to say.”
Falls the Shadow Page 15