by JA Huss
I look at Sasha and she shakes her head. She did not know they had some sort of business relationship. But am I surprised? James always said he worked for himself. And right now, that seems to be true. Because he’s been cheating against the Company since he stated playing the game.
“Matias,” Nick says, interrupting whatever is going on between these two killers. “Look man, you can kill James if you want, but I’ll have my sniper in the boat shoot you at the same time. And you’ll never walk out of here. Or, you can make a deal. You can take me. Leave James and take me and shit gets real easy, real fast.”
Matias stares at Nick for a few seconds. Then back to James. I don’t know what the two men are thinking, but somehow, some way, they come to some silent agreement. “Done,” Matias says “Take them now, before I change my mind.”
Sasha is wailing again, but James grabs my hand and tugs me along to collect her. “Shut up, Sasha,” he growls at her once he’s got a hold of her arm. And we are dragged from that beach. Me looking back at my brother. Sasha looking back at her promise. We are dragged all the way down to the very edge of the dock where James’ friend Merc waits in the boat. He’s still got the rifle trained on the gang members. But they are climbing the stairs.
Sasha is crying as she gets into the boat. “Why? Why did you do that?” She flings herself at James, pounding on his chest. “I hate you! I hate you!”
I should hate him too. I should hate James for choosing himself over Nick.
But that’s not what happened here.
Nick offered himself up for a reason. Several reasons, actually.
Me.
Sasha.
All of us Company kids.
Nick did the only thing he could.
Because James is the one who has the file, not him. James is the one who had to live, even if all the rest of us died.
Or everything we’ve done over the past year—the death, the struggle, the sacrifice, the pain—along with all the information on those two discs—would be lost to a vile street gang who would have no idea what to do with it if Nick didn’t get James out of there.
So I hold Sasha instead. I hold her tight and whisper soothing things in her ear. “They won’t kill him, Sasha. They won’t hurt him either. He will survive. He will survive and so will we.”
“He’s gone, Harper. He’s gone.” I know she wants to say more, but the sobbing takes over and she can’t.
There’s nothing more to say, anyway.
He’s just gone.
Chapter Ninety - Sasha
One week later.
Rock Springs, Wyoming
I look around the hotel room and the sadness is overwhelming. I can’t deal. I can’t deal at all. I have lost everything I’ve ever loved to bad people. My mother, who I never even met. My father. My grandparents. And now Nick. My last thread of hope that life would be worth living after all this was done.
But it’s not worth living.
It fucking sucks.
My chin starts to quiver and the tears begin to fall. Again. I’ve done nothing but cry since we got here to the hotel room a few days ago. Harper and James are staying in here with me. Against my wishes. I wanted to be alone, but James refused.
Today is the last paid day for this room. The last chance for Nick to come back to me.
And it’s almost noon now, past checkout time.
So…
Reality.
It sucks.
James walks through the open door and stands there, a black figure, backlit by the morning sun. “You ready, Smurf?”
I shake my head and sit on the bed, staring at the dirty hotel carpet. “No,” I whisper. “No.”
“He’s not coming here, Sasha.”
“I know.” I swallow down that rock in my throat, but I can’t seem to make it go away. “But I don’t want to leave.”
James takes a long breath and sits down on the bed next to me. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” He’s been apologizing for a week now. I’m sorta sick of it.
“But Merc sent me a message a little bit ago. He thinks he’s finally figured out how to get the files to open.”
I sniff and look up at my friend. “What’s on them?”
“Secret money accounts, mostly. Names of all the Company members, of course.”
“Huh. All that bullshit for money and names? It’s hardly worth it.”
“Yeah, but it’s the non-money stuff you’re gonna wanna hear about.”
“Oh, God, no. I’m not interested.” They’ve been talking about the ‘programming’ I was subjected to by my father. I’m having a hard time coming to terms with Nick being gone, I really don’t need to know that my father was brainwashing me to kill people when I got older.
“We still think it’s on there, Sash.”
Hearing James call me Sash makes me let out a sob. “Only Nick called me Sash. So don’t.”
James takes a deep breath and lets it out. “OK. But that brainwashing stuff might be true, so you need to be aware of it.”
“Consider me aware.”
“We’re ready to hit the road now, so where should we go? You get to choose.”
“I’m not going.”
“Sasha, don’t press me,” James growls. “I get it. You’re broken right now. But you’re not gonna stay broken forever. You gotta let that shit heal. And today is the day you start, Smurf. I brought you here so you’d see for yourself. Nick is not coming back, OK? He’s not coming back. He made a deal with that cartel and he’s gonna see it through. And you are thirteen years old. You can’t just wish yourself grown up and start a life with a man who really is. He’s not gonna come back and bring you into that life, Sasha. He’s not gonna take a child bride. Everything he stands for is against what you want him to be. So let him go. Let him make his way in the world. He let you go so you can make yours. Don’t give up. He’d never give up if you were the one who sacrificed yourself to give him a second chance. He stayed behind for you. So you’d get that information off that disc. Information your father put on there. Information you need.”
“I know all this.”
“Then snap the fuck out of it, Sasha. He’s not dead, OK?” I don’t respond, so James lifts my chin and forces me to look at him. “He’s not dead.”
I shake off his hand and continue looking down at the carpet. “I know he’s not dead. And—” I let out another sob. “And that’s even worse, James.” I look up at him as the tears stream down my face. He tisks his tongue at me and lets out a sigh. “It’s worse because that means he chose to leave me.” And then I can’t hold it in anymore. I just cover my face with my hands and cry.
James leans over and pulls me into a hug. I wrap my arms around his waist and press my tears into his soft t-shirt.
“I’m sorry, Sasha. I really am. I know you love him. I know you thought you’d have that happily ever after with him. But it was never meant to be, kid. It wasn’t.”
“It’s not fair,” I whine. “It’s not fair that you get Harper and I get no one.”
“You got both of us, Sobby Smurf. You made out like a bandit. And besides, I didn’t get Harper right away. I had to wait twelve years. She was too young when I fell in love with her. So that’s one reason why Nick had to leave, Sash. He fell in love with you and you’re too young. He’d be a very bad guy if he didn’t walk away, you have to understand that.”
I have nothing to say to that. I know it’s true, but I don’t want to admit it. I don’t want this to be my reality.
“So, Harp and I were thinking. We’d sorta like to go see all that dinosaur stuff you talked about back in the desert. We’re close to Thermopolis. We looked that dinosaur place up online. Did you know they were voted number one dinosaur museum in the whole country?”
“Duh,” I say. “I’ve been to Thermopolis dozens of times.”
“Well, we haven’t. It’s only like three hours away, kid. What better way to spend a summer afternoon than driving up to see some dinosaurs?�
��
I look at him. He’s trying so hard to be here for me. To help me.
“Right?” he asks again.
I nod out a yes. “I suppose. You guys really don’t know enough about dinosaurs.” I sniff away my leftover sobs. “History is something you should understand, you know.”
“I really should, Smurf. I need you, kid.”
I look up at him and the tears are back.
He leans down and presses his head to mine. “I do, Sasha Cherlin. I need you. I can’t lose you to this sadness. You have to snap out of it. We’re gonna take our time, OK? We’re gonna take things slow. Go on road trips. See the West from the window of a truck. Just… relax and be normal for a few months before we decide what to do. OK? Sound good?”
I nod again. And then we stand up and walk towards the door.
I take one last look around the room. I remember Nick, lying on the bed next to me. Telling me these same things.
I give up one last sob for what could have been, and walk out.
James closes the door behind us.
And that’s it.
It’s over.
Chapter Ninety-One - James
Six Months Later
Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark
Bighorn National Forest
Wyoming
“Oh my God, I’m freezing!”
“Wimp,” I say to Harper as we climb the hill that leads to the medicine wheel monument. Sasha is way out ahead, halfway up the hill already.
“Why in the hell did we wait until December to come to this place?” Harper asks as she hugs herself.
It is damn cold up here. Negative two. But we’re all dressed for it. We’ve got the best winter gear money can buy. Merc finally cracked the financial accounts on those files, so there was a windfall payday for all four of us. We didn’t find the brainwashing stuff—not yet, anyway. And maybe it was all a lie. Maybe they just told us that shit to scare us. Or make us do things. Who knows. But if it was on that disc, it’s very well-hidden.
“Brr,” Harp complains again. I know Harper is not that cold, she’s just got an aversion to it. She was excited to see snow the first time, and then she was ready to hit the tropics. But we’re still doing the Dino Smurf tour of the West. So…
“It’s the Winter Solstice, Harper. It’s like a big deal or something.”
“No,” she laughs. “The Summer Solstice is a big deal. The Winter Solstice is something no one in Wyoming gives a crap about. It’s dark at four o’clock. It’s freezing. And it’s just… wrong.”
“Hey, you know what?”
“What?” she asks as we continue to climb.
“It’s almost sundown. So we can hang out and watch the sunset.”
“No, thank you,” she laughs. “I’m all about one quick look at this wheel thing, then we’re out of here.”
When we finally get to the top Sasha is just standing there, looking over at the fenced-in area where the wheel is. Should be.
“You can’t see it,” she says, disappointed. “The snow is covering it all up.”
“Fuck.” I’m such a loser. I never even thought about the snow covering up the rocks.
“You can see some of them, Sash,” Harper says. “Look, there’s the tip of one.”
The medicine wheel is a wheel made out of rocks placed in the ground hundreds of years ago by the native people in this area. It’s pretty crooked and if you ask me, you have to use your imagination on the best of days to see a wheel. But even crooked squiggly lines of rocks are better than no rocks.
“But you can’t see the spokes,” Sasha says. “I knew it was stupid to come.”
She was supposed to come here with her father for the last Summer Solstice. But we were hiding out at Merc’s desert house that night. And her father was dead. So yeah, that trip was canceled.
And then she said she never wanted to come see it. We’ve driven by this national forest dozens of times in the past six months hunting dinosaurs. But she refused to stop.
Until I offered to bring her for the Winter Solstice.
“Let’s go,” Sasha says, turning around to head back down the hill to the truck. “I’m done.”
“Wait,” I say, grabbing her jacket as she passes me. “We can make our own spokes. Look.” I walk over to the fence and step over it. The snow is so high along the fence, that’s easy to do. And then I walk out to the center of the circle and lie down in the snow. “Come here, girls. We’ll make our own spokes and watch the sunset.”
I expect Harper to be the first to groan, but she surprises me. “Come on, Sasha. We won’t let a little snow ruin our trip.” She walks out to me and positions herself a little to the left, with her head touching mine. And then she pats the ground on her left. “Here’s your spot, Sasha! Come on.”
Sasha’s boots crunch along in the snow as she walks out towards us in silence. She takes her place on Harper’s left and my right. Her head touches both of ours, and she lets out a sigh. “Now what?”
“Now,” Harper says. “We watch the sunset. And wait for the stars.”
The mountains are so high up this way, the sun is already behind them, but the light hasn’t yet faded. We’re in the perfect moment of dusk. When the air is not yet black from night, but still has that hazy blue-grey of in-between.
We’ve watched hundreds of sunsets over the past six months. Not every night. We forget sometimes. But almost every night.
That moment passes quickly and then the night is upon us.
We lie there, three spokes in a wheel, for several minutes before Harper’s mittened hand points to the sky. “There,” she says. “You can’t see Orion in the summer. So if you came here on a summer night instead, you’d miss him.”
Sasha asks questions about the stars and Harper answers them. She tells stories of sailing the seas looking up at the sky to know where they were heading. She tells stories of the constellations and the myths behind them.
And Sasha listens with the ear of a girl deeply interested in these things. A girl who needs more than just one long road-trip as her formal education.
This is the moment I decide that my Smurf can’t stay with us anymore. She can’t lose the childhood the Company stole from her.
This is the moment I realize, maybe for the first time in my life, that what I’m doing is wrong.
Chapter Ninety-Two - Ford
Christmas Eve - Fort Collins, CO
I pace the length of the front room of our house, staring down at my minions. The face-eaters, as Spencer and Veronica affectionately call them, are lined up in front of the Christmas tree. The blinking lights reflect in their brown eyes.
We have three highly trained protection dogs now that Five is here. I look across the open space first floor of our historic bungalow in Fort Collins, and spy Veronica cuddling Five to her chest as Ashleigh hovers over her, talking a mile a minute about our baby. Veronica’s swollen belly, ready to deliver in just a few more weeks, provides a convenient place for little Five to rest his tiny bootied feet.
I smile at Ashleigh when I catch her looking at me and she smiles back, rocking a fussy one-year-old Kate to her chest. And then I take my attention back to business.
“Face-eaters,” I say. The term has caught on. They are collectively called that now. “Let’s go through the rules one more time.” I turn on my heel and pace in front of them. “One. You will not drool on her. Two. Licking is by invitation only.” I look at Jimmy for this. He’s our newest addition, purchased once we found out Ash was pregnant with Five. His ears prick up when he notices my attention. He’s a licker, so naturally, he objects to that one. “Three. No sniffing of—”
“They’re here!” Rook calls out from the couch in front of the window. I think she’s more excited than anyone. She jumps up and stands in front of me. “Are you ready?”
I nod at her. “I was just making sure the minions are on their best behavior.”
Rook straightens my tie and then pats me on the shoulder lik
e I need moral support.
I kinda do need moral support. This new addition to my family is a big deal.
My daughter, Kate, came to me through my wife, Ashleigh. My son, Five, is ours together. So Sasha is more mine than ours at the moment. I feel the need to do this right. To bring her into the fold properly.
The doorbell rings and everyone stops talking for a moment. I look back at them and see nothing but smiles. They are excited, but they go back to what they were doing and let me handle it. Spencer and Ronin are sitting at the kitchen table, drinking beer and laughing about something. Ash and Veronica are still busy with Five and Kate. And my mother is talking to Mr. Li with a little too much interest.
“You’re gonna be fine, Ford. Just answer the door,” Rook says.
I nod and walk over to the front door. I can see him through the small window.
James Fenici is coming to my house for Christmas Eve dinner. And he’s bringing me a kid. Not just any kid. Sasha Cherlin. The girl who started… well, I look around one more time before reaching for the door handle… everything. She started everything.
I open the door and Fenici smiles and extends his hand. “Aston.”
“James,” I say politely as I shake. And then I look down at his young wife and wish they were all staying. Rook would love to have a friend who is actually younger than her for once. “You must be Harper.” I shake her hand too and move aside to let them in.
But it’s the girl who’s missing who makes my heart skip a beat. “Where is Sasha?”
“In the truck,” James says. “She’s having a hard time. She said she’ll be in soon. But you know, she’s thirteen. So…” He shrugs.
I grab my coat and put it on. And then I gently place Sasha’s present in the box Ashleigh prepared. It’s a red box with a green bow. And the bow stays on, even if you open the box. Ashleigh says all the best presents have bows attached to the tops.
I take her word on that.