“Sometimes you think too much, Shiloh.”
What was that supposed to mean? Shiloh eyed him obstinately, waiting for an explanation, but he only rose and exited the fortress. Okay...
When he returned a moment later, he had scooped together two palms-full of dirt. Shiloh watched him sprinkle it over Mother Eve's form, her expression becoming wry. Nothing turned a spider web into wispy old cobweb like a little dust.
So, maybe she did over-complicate things. So, what? She was proud of her serum. Didn't Jayx realize how tricky it was to make a mixture out of juice and sap that was slippery instead of just as sticky as spider web itself? She fancied herself rather clever for perfecting it. It was impressive, Shi. Don't let some jungle snob tell you otherwise.
So defensive had his ridicule made her that it surprised her when he dropped a nuance of praise. “Don’t take it personally, Shiloh. You’re nothing if not resourceful. It’s a good trait to have.”
A swell of flattery replaced the affront. My, her emotions were so erratic these days.
Lassoing her focus back in, she unsheathed a blade and set to work helping to extract the Tribal Queen. She tried not to acknowledge Mother Eve as her form was revealed, lest she humanize the cannibal queen by lumping her in with the child she happened to harbor. Avoiding the woman's unconscious face, Shiloh tugged at the filmy membranes clustered about her dreadlocks.
An agitated buzz revved to life as the Tribal Queen's hair was untangled. Shiloh rocked back on her heels, startled, as each dreadlock levitated off the ground, lifted by the leashed little insects she had forgotten about. Those confounded beetles were still alive.
What did you expect? Their essence was where Mother Eve got her roach-esque longevity, after all.
The bugs strained against their lingering web veils, their shiny backs muted, filmy wisps trailing in the air behind them. Like ghost tails. Phantom insects rising from the dead. A perfect, macabre metaphor for the life still lurking inside Mother Eve, just waiting to rev back to life itself. The sudden need to hurry up and re-secure the tyrant consumed Shiloh. She swallowed a vision of Mother Eve buzzing back to life likewise, bending back over the task at hand to get it over with as quickly as possible.
She felt Jayx watching her while they worked.
Eventually, he broke the dormant quiet. “How do you feel?”
Great. Now they were going to talk about her. The episode upon her return to the Dauntless was a little vague in her memory, but she could remember enough to know it had indeed been an episode. And as much as she could pretend she hadn't gone a little crazy, she could not shrug off the nuisance of the wings piggy-backing everywhere she went. There was no way to deny something animal was going on with her.
“Fine,” she said evenly. “I feel fine.” Just because she couldn't deny the wings on her back didn't mean she had to acknowledge them. “Your little needle trick seems to have worked like a charm.” After a grudging moment she thought to add, “Thank you.”
“There may yet be aggression in your veins. You shouldn’t have taken the needles out yet.”
“Is that really such a bad thing? A little extra aggression?”
“Not if you can control it.”
His lack of faith was irksome. Shiloh balled up a wad of web more forcefully than necessary, then caught herself, wondering if Jayx was right to worry. She loosened her grasp. “I would never have hurt anyone. Not really.”
“That's the thing, Shiloh. Who can really say if you're dangerous...or harmless? One minute you're one, one minute the next. And either would be to your detriment.”
Whatever she had expected him to say, she had not expected it to sting quite like that. She thought she'd done at least a halfway decent job trying to become a controlled sort of savage. What did he expect? That she wouldn't go through any level of identity crisis in the process?
She tossed her wad of web onto the ground with undue fervor. “What do you want from me, Jayx? Am I supposed to X out my humanity, or tone down the feral side? You're a little all over the place yourself, sending mixed messages.”
Jayx's shoulders tensed, but it didn't reach his fingers where they deftly continued their task. He didn't respond for a long moment, and Shiloh wondered if she'd struck a nerve too.
“Forgive me,” he said at last, surprising her as much as before. “Human…complexities are not my specialty. People don't usually last long enough for me to learn to relate to them.”
She held onto an irate breath a few seconds longer, and then softened. So they don't. She couldn't really blame him for his own conflicting manner. This was new to him, too. What was it like for a wild man, trying to condition the rest of them without knowing how to relate to them? They were really nothing more than an experiment. Chances were he'd get it wrong, with them. And if he did, well...hopefully he'd know better how to cultivate the next group.
Maybe they should change the subject. She cleared her throat, suddenly feeling like some of the cobweb had caught in her lungs. “Does nobody else ever come here?”
Jayx shook his head. “The Tribal have left it alone since I adopted it. Probably figured it was for the best if I had my own space. Somewhere I'd stay out of their hair, where they wouldn't be constantly tempted to...do away with me.”
It would be fairly easy to forget about someone up here. He would pretty much be living in exile.
“It's not really the type of place other people stumble upon,” Jayx continued. “So I've kept it to myself. I've come here less and less as I realized my calling on the ground, but still retreat here now and then. To meditate, re-center myself. Silence the cries.”
A pang of compassion went through her, imagining how many gruesome deaths haunted him. It would be crucial to have a place of solitude to retreat to.
“It's the only truly pure place left in Paradise. Untainted, undisturbed. An enduring temple, if you will. Sacred to me.”
And he had brought her here. To his temple. Unexpectedly moved, Shiloh paused to look at him. Truly look at him.
It was a short-lived moment of tenderness, followed swiftly by,
What have I brought to this place?
A sinking feeling settled in her stomach.
Peeling strips of web away, Mother Eve's gaunter-than-normal form was slowly revealed. Shiloh could only hope they'd gotten to her in time, before irreparable damage had been done.
“There is water in the adjoining chamber.” Jayx jutted his head toward the wall behind Shiloh, taking an empty waterskin from his belt and handing it to her. Doing as she was bade, she went to fill it.
The 'chamber' in question was one of the open gazebos, the water sitting in a bird bath that was placed beneath an open gap in the center of the domed roof. Shiloh filled the waterskin and returned to the main chamber, finding Jayx securing the Tribal Queen to a pillar.
He reached for the waterskin and held it to the woman's lips, tipping a dribble of the contents into her mouth.
At first, nothing happened save for the water spilling out the sides of her mouth. Then, the ability to breathe unhindered by web, and the cold, reviving tonic had the desired effect.
Mother Eve sputtered.
Dread raced like static down Shiloh's spine as the woman came to, the sudden urge to be anywhere but there tempting her to run from that place.
Mother Eve's consciousness was patchy at best, though, her eyes swimming and her head lolling. She seemed to drift off again, and Shiloh grimaced at the anticlimactic response.
Jayx stood. “That might be it, for now.”
“Is there nothing else we can do?”
“I'm not a miracle worker, Shiloh.”
“You patched me up plenty of times.”
“Superficial ailments. Poisons I was lucky in treating, when caught in plenty of time. But my game is prevention. Not treatment.”
Sighing, Shiloh resigned herself to waiting. “Time, then.”
“We have made her comfortable. If the usual methods of nursing one back t
o health are adequate, in this case, then we'll see improvement. Time will tell.”
*
Shiloh kicked listlessly at the fireflies dancing in the dusk, feet dangling over the edge of the plateau. For the first time in a long time, she was cold. Not for the first time, her wings twitched to come to her aide. How glorious would it feel to wrap herself in that cloak of feathers?
Her ears perked at the subtle sound of Jayx slipping out of the fortress behind her. She tilted her head to listen as he approached, and he stopped behind her.
“It has become easier for you to sense me,” he observed.
“Has it?”
“I hardly made a sound.”
“It's quieter up here.”
“Perhaps.”
“You don't agree it's quieter?”
“Perhaps that is why you heard me. Perhaps not.”
“What, you think it's some enhancement of animal instinct still tainting my bloodstream?”
“Possibly.”
She craned her eyes up at him as he came to the edge beside her. “Well, you don't smell any different.” Even as she said it, she felt her nostrils flare to catch his scent. Pine musk filled her senses. And...orange blossom.
That wasn't something she hadn't ever noticed before.
She didn't mention it.
“What do I usually smell like?”
She shrugged. “Oh, you know. Pansies. Honey. Ophelia's perfume.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her, and at first she wondered if her dry humor would go right over his head. She was just about to plow onward over the silence with an awkward clearing of her throat when a small smirk appeared at the corner of his lips. He looked out over the jungle, and the light of the fireflies reflected a glint of amusement in his eyes, which sobered momentarily. “Ophelia is a lonely girl. One of many who realize they might grasp at the cure for that, here.”
“Is she not the first to have thrown herself at you, then?”
“I would hardly say she has thrown herself at me. But, no, not the first.”
“And what about you, Jayx? Are you lonely?” She hadn't intended for the conversation to turn personal so quickly, but there it was, and once she voiced it she was decidedly curious to hear his answer.
Jayx brooded over the question. Did he find it too personal? At last, he landed on a response:
“Some of us are lonely by definition.”
Stoic, solemn Jayx. He settled himself on the ledge next to her, and for awhile they sat in silence overlooking all of Paradise, listening to the vast echo of cicadas all around.
“You're not the only one, you know,” Shiloh spoke again after a time. “You're not the only one who doesn't know how to relate to anyone else. I thought about it, and – which one of us isn't a product of isolation, stuck in our own impressions of the divided world? We're all strangers from different arenas, glitching at the fact that we have to shed all those years of conditioning in our own personal hells and live like civilized people, all of a sudden. I don't think any one of us hasn't struggled to figure out what it's like in someone else's head.”
Jayx lifted a finger, letting a firefly land on it. “Just go ahead and say it. We’re still talking about Ophelia. You’ve been trying to wrap your head around the cringe-worthy conundrum of what in tarnation gets a girl off about the boorish, mangy Jayx Jungleborn.”
His turn for a tinge of humor. Or was he fishing for something…?
Shiloh blinked. “You don’t really consider yourself boorish and mangy, do you?” Either way, she was going to call him Jayx Jungleborn from here on out.
Shrugging, Jayx left it open-ended.
Shiloh cocked her head. “I mean, maybe a little mangy in the dreadlocks… Maybe a little boorish in the…table manners.”
“What’s a table?”
Was the brooding prince of the wilderness really sitting around joking with her?
Shiloh gave a breathy chuckle, and then her smile faded back into thoughtfulness. “Anyway, I just got to thinking about all of us grappling with some level of culture shock, and trying to form this bond of kinship out of nothing but a common cause, and…maybe that's one of our biggest weaknesses. How can we expect to stand against a keen legion of pack animals if we're divided standing right next to each other? And maybe...I don't know, maybe we'd find it in ourselves to fight a little harder if we loved who we're fighting for a little more.”
She somewhat expected him to object outright, since he’d been so set on staunching her compassionate side. Instead, he gave a hint of a nod. “Strength in unity. There is something to be said about it. Love, though...it's a strong word. You may find it too radical a concept to inspire.”
“I just mean maybe we should get to know one another a little better.”
“I find unity in the fact that we are all connected by and driven by the same things. Hunger, fear, the desire to live. To indulge.”
“Spoken like someone who is afraid to get close to anyone else. But you did list fear in there, didn't you?” It came out cheeky and bold, and completely unabashed. “Look, I'm going to hazard a guess that you're not too keen on getting close to anyone because you think we're liable to up and die within a week. But if that's the case, I'm going to resent your lack of participation as a lack of faith that I'll last the week, so do me a favor and humor me.”
Effectively cornered, Jayx awarded her a considering glance. “Alright. What would you like to know?”
“What's your favorite color?”
Perhaps unused to dwelling on such trivial novelties, Jayx seemed to spend a moment recalibrating his thought process before replying. But humor her he did. “Green. Dark, as from the deep woods.”
Strangely delighted by his answer, Shiloh felt a smile tug at her lips.
He wasn't done, though. “And gold. The color of the sand at sunset, or a stag's rich coat in the dying light.”
She hadn't expected so poetic a response. “Very well, Jayx who likes dark green and gold. Mine is blue. The color of the water and the sky, out here beyond the pollution.”
“What color is the sky where you come from?”
Grimacing at the memory, Shiloh tried to put herself back in that bleak, drab place. “Bruise-colored. Ugly.”
Holding up his arm against the sky, Jayx tilted his head back and forth in consideration.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to imagine the sky like this.”
Only then did she see the large shiner on his forearm, one of many injuries it was too difficult to keep track of across his person. “In the dark?” she teased. “You can't even see it.”
“Let that be the next thing you learn about me – I have a ravishing imagination.”
He was being a much better sport about this than she had anticipated. Maybe it was that he was in his special place, up here, at ease more than anywhere else, or just that she really had cornered him with opening up to her lest he give off the impression it wasn't worth it because he expected her to be gone soon. Either way, she wasn't sure she'd get the same chance ever again, so she resolved to take full advantage.
Jayx rested his palms on the edge of the plateau and propped himself forward, raising his brow at her expectantly. “What's next?”
Chewing her lip, Shiloh dredged up her next question. “What is someone who likes green and gold afraid of?”
“Nice try, but it would be presumptuous of me to speak for all who find themselves partial to the same hues on the spectrum.”
If he thought he was going to get out of answering the personal questions that easily, he was wrong. “I'll rephrase, then. What is a man who wears a shark tooth and traipses through the jungles of hell, defying savages, wrestling tigers – what is he afraid of? I know it's something. You told me once there was something. Implied it, anyway. I said you didn't seem afraid of anything and you said it was an illusion necessary for survival.”
The reflection of the fireflies seemed to go darker in his pupils at the subject, a haunted
lens shadowing the windows to his soul. Would he shut down the line of questioning just as they were getting started? But then he nodded, as if admitting it to himself: “The ocean. He is afraid of the ocean.”
Shiloh sat straighter in surprise, not expecting that at all. “The ocean? I thought you grew up on the ocean.”
“And you'll also recall I was ship-wrecked here. Half-drowned. It stays with you, the feeling of drowning. Believe me when I say I have no great love for the water. Or the sharks that haunt it – those are the two greatest evils in my world.”
“But you jumped into shark-infested waters after me without a second thought.”
“I was under the impression the point of this exercise was to get to know one another, and yet you claim to know what I was thinking or was not thinking.”
Biting her lip, Shiloh conceded. “Fair enough. What about that?” She jutted her chin toward the shark tooth hanging around his neck. “All this time I revered you as some shark-wrestler, and are you just going to tell me you found it on the beach?”
Chin to chest, Jayx looked down at the token. “No. It is a trophy I earned trying to conquer my fear.”
“So you did wrestle a shark.”
“I did.”
Please don't ask me what I'm afraid of, or I might just have to tell you it's you. Jayx. I'm afraid of Jayx.
“With a...knife, or...?”
Jayx actually laughed, albeit softly, at that. “Not my bare hands, correct. There was a very sharp object involved.”
Who would have known it, but Jayx had an infectious laugh. Shiloh chuckled right along with him, and the strangest feeling of relief came with it. Like she'd been waiting to laugh for a hundred years, or maybe secretly craving this very breakthrough with the intrepid wild-man commander, needing him to be...human.
Needing to relate to him. Connect, somehow.
“That's a relief,” she said. “I was about to have to tell you my greatest fear might just be you.”
“More than some savage who wants to feast on your flesh? Unless you fancy yourself a shark, you have nothing to fear from me.” I would never hurt you. The unspoken promise.
Wonderland (Deadly Lush Book 2) Page 19