Unchosen

by Katharyn Blair

  Dedication

  To my sisters—Hannah, Rachel, and Becca:

  This story is for you. May your small rectory always abut my estate.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Katharyn Blair

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  FOR ME, THE WORLD ENDED MORE THAN ONCE.

  The first was when I was thirteen and the yellow eviction notice appeared on our door in Delaware County, Ohio. That ending tasted like the cherry Popsicle I was eating on the stairwell and sounded like hushed, frantic whispers. A different end had already started, spooking researchers off the ocean and causing a round of layoffs at my father’s university. But I didn’t know it then.

  We were moving to live in the back house on my grandmother’s property in the Pacific Palisades. My sisters had roots that would take anywhere—Harlow, the guitarist, and Vanessa, the gymnast. I didn’t really worry about me—I didn’t have a thing. I tinkered on the piano and sang when the sanctuary was empty in church. I drew waves on my wrist with glittery blue gel pens. I was just Charlotte, and at the time, in Ohio, that felt like enough.

  I didn’t know then that this was the second of my endings, and one that happened slowly: when we arrived in Southern California and I realized it wasn’t enough anymore.

  We’d seen Dean around the neighborhood before when we’d visit my grandma, but that day was the first time we really talked. It wasn’t some earth-shattering moment or anything. It was just a floppy-haired boy helping me when my Beauty and the Beast jewelry box clattered against the ground outside my grandmother’s tree-covered front yard.

  He kneeled, grabbing the movie ticket stubs and braided friendship bracelets and other scraps of the life I had left behind, and handed them back to me. I watched his hand (big knuckles, scar on the back of his thumb) touch mine (small fingers and chipped Blackberry Crush nail polish).

  Hey, he said, and his voice rumbled against my ribs.

  Maybe meeting Dean wasn’t an ending, but I can tell you this: it was the promise of one.

  When the real end of the world finally came, it was a long time coming. Two years of watching him sneak through the window next door, lopsided smile curling up as he climbed the tree that bridged our bedroom windows so we could play Mario Kart. His boyish grin now had the scruff of a seventeen-year-old, and he had to tilt his shoulders to fit inside. In two years’ time, Harlow played more gigs and was featured in a local arts magazine, her chin tilted up as she leaned against a brick wall. She hated how my parents put the article on the refrigerator. I think that’s why they did it.

  Vanessa rose up the ranks in gymnastics—level ten. She placed second overall in regionals and took top five at countless other competitions.

  In those same two years, my greatest accomplishments were the three journals I’d filled and tucked away in my desk.

  But I forgot about that when Dean came over.

  Harlow would pull sour straws from under her bed, and we’d play video games until we knew we would pay for it the next morning with tired eyes and blistered tongues.

  Somehow, even with my gaze half fixed on the dip of his collarbone, I would always win.

  That’s the ending that snuck up on me, and it felt like the grease of sunscreen and smelled like chlorine. That ending was purple, cast in the evening glow of one of the last nights of summer at the public pool. It sounded like the low rumble of Dean’s laughter mixed with my older sister’s voice—the one Harlow usually used on crowds before her band played. It looked like his muscled back, tensing against her as they intertwined and leaned on the brick of the shadowed part of the snack bar, his mouth on hers.

  That was the first ending that really, truly felt like one. The kind that filled more journals and left tear tracks on my cheeks.

  Smaller endings happened all the time, but they were the kind I couldn’t really see until later.

  The footage from a research boat that disappeared after finding a shipwreck—footage that kept my dad up at his makeshift desk all night.

  Then, about a week later, the news confirmed the spread of a strange sickness.

  That night, Vanessa’s nightmares started.

  That’s the ending that started everything, really. When the Crimson slipped across the planet like spilled wine and stained history forever. When the stories weren’t whispers, but screams.

  When we couldn’t ignore it anymore.

  When that ending—the Real Ending—reached my shore, it smelled like chalk and tasted like blood.

  Chapter 2

  “THIS IS THE DUMBEST THING WE’VE EVER DONE,” Dean says, his voice somewhere between a whisper and a hiss. My fingers grip the edges of the roof, the ceramic tiles burning the edges of my fingertips. I chance a look down, blinking against the reflection of the sunlight in the mirrors I keep tied on my wrists and the tops of my boots. Dean’s dark hair is brushed back into a low bun, his brow furrowed with worry. He has a grip on my left foot, holding me up.

  “You’re forgetting that time we tried to give ourselves hickeys with the vacuum hose,” I counter as my right foot finds the window ledge. I hoist myself up, onto the edge of the museum’s veranda. I tighten the straps of my backpack as I look back down at the amphitheater, pausing for a moment to sweep the area. Overturned tables and chairs lie still on the black tile, but other than the slight flutter of napkins and old brochures covered with Ramses II’s face on them, there’s no movement. We’d raided this place several times in the past two years and never had any problems. Turns out that people don’t really have a lot of uses for history museums in the face of the actual apocalypse. Normally, we’d just walk right into the open front doors and go from there. But what we’re looking for is in a locked room. So the window it is. A cool breeze gusts over from the ocean to my right, which toils just past the western edge of PCH—Pacific Coast Highway.

  Dean eyes me. “Right. You’re so right. This closely follows the vacuum hickey experiment. Which should tell you something, Charlotte, since that happened when I was fourteen.”

  I twist a rope around the railing that circles the veranda, testing once to make sure it’s secure before I throw it over the edge to Dean. Within seconds, he has hoisted himself up next to me.

  “Harlow will absolutely kill us both if she finds out I helped you with this,” he says as we walk over to the sealed double doors. I slide my fingers over the edge, finding nothing.

  “Nah. I’m blood. You’re just her boyfriend. She
’ll just maim me. But yeah. You’ll for sure be dead.” I wipe the grime off the glass of the window and peer inside. I can’t see much, but there are no obvious threats, and that’s as much reassurance as I’m going to get. Dean adjusts the mirrored bands on his forearms.

  “Sounds about right,” he says, pulling the glass necklace from under his shirt and wiping it on his sleeve.

  I wind a scarf around my elbow and then take a deep breath as I turn around. With one quick movement, I shove my elbow back and the glass pane shatters.

  We both pause as the sound echoes off the hills around us. I grip the iron blade that rests in a sheath tied to my belt. I’ve only ever used it for cutting rope and the limbs of stubborn trees on food raids, but I know that any time we step out past the perimeter of the fortress, I might have to use it for something much darker.

  Dean pulls a mirror from his back pocket. “Mirror” is kind of a loose term—it’s a shard of reflective glass, but he’s wrapped the edges in black electrical tape. He holds it inside, tilting it to get a full sweep of the room.

  “We’re good,” he says, stepping inside. I follow.

  Wings flutter above us, and Dean and I duck. Birds leave their hiding place in the rafters, swooping over us before they take to the skies.

  “Shit,” he mutters, looking around at the chaos.

  I turn, surveying the marble room and swallowing the weird burn of emotion building at the back of my throat.

  Leaves and dirt line the floor, and vines that cover the far side of the building have since slunk in through a crack in a high window.

  The Getty Villa used to be a sanctuary for me. Vanessa always had gymnastics practice and Harlow was usually getting ready for one gig or another, so I’d go alone. It was like a seaside palace—perched above the waves on a cliffside in Malibu, full of gardens and fountains and marble staircases. I would spend hours getting lost here, sipping my coffee and looking at the statues of men long since dead.

  I felt at home here then.

  Now I look around, at the cracked plaster of the walls, the nostalgia souring in my gut.

  “You okay?” Dean asks. I feel his eyes on me. I used to love the sound of his soft voice checking in on me. I bristle at the kindness—it just shows that he doesn’t think I’m strong enough.

  I pull the blade out from the sheath and step over the crumbling remnants of an upturned limestone statue before giving Dean a nod. He walks to the locked door and throws the bolt. We freeze, waiting to hear any telltale scuffles on the other side of the door. When it’s silent, he pulls it open. The hinges let out a low moan, and he sticks his head out into the hallway. Satisfied that it’s clear, he looks down at his watch and holds up a hand, flashing an open palm twice. We have ten minutes.

  He pulls two knives from a holster strapped across his chest and walks stealthily down the hallway. I let myself watch him for a couple of seconds. Only a couple of seconds, admiring his broad shoulders and the slight sunburn on the back of his neck.

  A familiar tinge—something like guilt and sadness—rolls over in my chest, and I force myself to turn and scan the room. It is much bigger than the other ones we’ve broken into, and filled with stands topped with ancient busts. The rays of sunlight streaming through the dirty glass ceiling throw the room into a dusty haze. The far wall is made of all windows, overlooking a great hall below. I peer over the edge, eyeing the fountain at the entryway. It used to be a shallow pool surrounded by a red velvet rope—something children would throw coins into, giggles bouncing off the marble as their parents whispered softly to make a wish.

  Now the ground below it has collapsed, deepening the once-turquoise fountain into a deep pit of murky brown water. I can’t even see the bottom.

  I creep through the room, pausing at a bust to my right. It had always been one of my favorites. A woman’s face stares ahead, her mouth puckered slightly. A Woman in Pompeii, the plaque beneath it reads.

  Not an emperor. Not a soldier. Just a woman, carved into stone.

  Pompeii. The city that disappeared into ash and fire in 79 AD. All that was left of them were things like this. I bite my lip and lift a hand, half expecting to hear a security guard hiss at me to not touch the statues. After hesitating for a second, I let myself run my finger over her lip, wondering what she’d say about all of this now, if she knew that the world survived once only to fall differently. Our sky didn’t darken when the Crimson came, and our ground didn’t tremble when it spread from the Pacific Northwest to Portugal and then Cape Town within a week. We lived in a world that predicted our doom at least twice a week. We had shows about it; people stood on street corners, screeching about the end. We were so ready for the fall of mankind. But when it actually came—we didn’t see it coming.

  I wonder if this woman would tell me that we will survive this, too.

  I don’t know if I’d believe her.

  I step around the bust and tiptoe over to the display case, wiping my hand over the dirty glass.

  The velvet lining inside is blank. To the untrained eye, this display looks empty.

  And if it is? I’m going to feel like a total idiot. But I’m staking a lot—a lot—on the hope that it’s not. That all the hours I spent here, idly tracing in my sketchbook and avoiding texts from my friends, will pay off.

  I break the glass with my elbow again. It sounds more like a violation than the window, and I feel bad as I use a cloth to hit pieces of glass aside and reach in to touch the velvet. I peel the bottom of the display up, revealing the lip of a drawer.

  Usually, the artifacts would be safe in the curators’ building behind the museum—on the upper back slope of the hill. But I doubt, when everything fell apart, that they’d had time to do that. The next best thing, then, would be for the curators to put the artifacts in the temperature-controlled drawer beneath. I often stayed until closing, and watched the curators move artifacts more than once. I’m sure they thought they were shutting the doors of this place for a couple of weeks. I’m sure they thought they’d come right back.

  I pry at the edge, lifting it slightly. It sticks, but then slides open. My breath catches in my throat.

  A gold headdress with drop-like rubies sits at the bottom of the drawer, haphazardly wrapped in a cloth. The light inside is dead—there hasn’t been electricity here in years. That, I’m used to. There hasn’t been electricity anywhere except in settlements like the Palisade, which has one working generator—and even that, they use sparingly. I don’t even hesitate to grab the giant piece of jewelry. The gold is heavy and almost soft beneath my hands. I’d seen this so many times under the lights of the display. Even though I should be used to unlikely things happening—it feels strange to be holding it.

  “You were right. It was there.” Dean’s voice sounds behind me. I jump, spinning around and backing up against the case. My hand hits the edge, and glass digs into my palm. I curse under my breath, and Dean rushes to me, swearing loudly as he pulls a bandanna out of his back pocket.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” I grumble as he inspects the wound. I stop breathing, trying to stop the wood-spice smell of him from filling my senses. He’s close. He’s too close.

  “I’m sorry! I thought you could hear me. This whole place has amazing acoustics.”

  The cut is shallow, but it stings like a bitch. I whimper slightly as he tightens the bandanna across the wound and ties it around the back of my hand, just above the cuff of yet another mirrored band.

  I look up at him, and he smiles down at me. A familiar twist in my gut coils around my spine as I meet his ice-blue eyes.

  Dean is beautiful.

  He was beautiful when I first saw him moving boxes into the house next to my grandmother’s when he was eight and I was six. He was beautiful when I was thirteen and he was fifteen, and he let me teach him how to braid hair so that he could help me with Vanessa in the mornings and we all wouldn’t be late for the bus.

  He was beautiful when I found him kissing Harlow behind the
snack bar at the pool two years ago. I’d never told Harlow how I felt, so I couldn’t blame her. Dean couldn’t have known, so I didn’t blame him, either. It’s almost worst, I think, when there is no blame. Maybe that would have been like a cauterizer on the wound or something. If I could be pissed at someone, then my feelings for him would have been singed up in my anger. But instead, they just curled up in my chest. Never dying, never leaving—just stirring at the worst possible moments.

  Moments like this, when he’s standing close enough for me to see the cracks in his chapped lips, the ones he has because he always gives away any lip balm we happen to find. I wonder if they’d feel rough if I touched them. If he’d wince.

  I pull my hands away from his, coughing as I adjust the straps of my backpack. I hold the headdress up between us, just so I have a reason to step back.

  “You think we would have learned our lesson about treasure by now,” he breathes, looking down at the exquisite piece of gold. It contrasts strangely with the dirt smudged on my fingers, and I turn it over in my hands, staring at the red stones.

  To think, it was a stone like this that started the whole thing.

  Dean holds his hand out, and I look up. His face carries a hint of mischief, a smile that tugs on the corners of his mouth. The whole world has gone to shit, but I can count on that smile. The one that talked me into throwing a water balloon through the school bus window at Michael Precocci after he made fun of Vanessa for not shaving her legs yet.

  That smile could get me to do almost anything. I hand the headdress over, and he lifts it to my head, setting it gently on my unwashed hair. The space between us is open again, and feels like it crackles with a dangerous promise. I ignore it, focusing on the ruby droplets as they skim the skin on my forehead. Dean raises his hands, his smile deepening as I turn to look at my reflection in the broken glass.

  I think I look ridiculous. The headdress leans to the left, awkwardly balancing on my greasy ponytail. My eyes flit to Dean’s reflection. His brow is furrowed, his eyes narrowed like he’s thinking about something.

  “What?” I press.

  “I just wonder what she looked like, you know? Anne.”