Chapter 12
Selfish Choices
(Olivia)
“Someone broke into our house last night,” I snap at Robin when I finally corner her.
“What?” she squeaks.
My eyes bore into her. “Someone. Broke. Into. Our. House. Last. Night.”
Robin fumbles with her backpack and almost drops it. “Olivia, that’s terrible! Is everyone okay?”
“We’re fine, but I want some answers.”
I watch as Robin’s eyes dart around for help or reassurance that I’m not crazy. She doesn’t find any. “Answers about what?” she asks.
“I think it was a Sentinel that broke into our house last night.”
“And you think I had something to do with it?” Robin asks, clearly confused.
“No,” I snap, although the thought had crossed my mind many times. Mason talked me out of the idea, but I’m still not completely convinced. “But I want to know how Sentinels find Aerlings. The truth this time.”
“What do you mean? I told you how they find them.”
Robin tries to back away, but I won’t let her get away from me. “After the police finally left, all I could think about was how there had to be some other way for the Sentinels to find Aerlings. It couldn’t just be luck and tabloid stories. There has to be something else that draws them to Aerlings. I simply can’t believe there isn’t something more.”
“Don’t… don’t you, um, have to get to class?” Robin asks.
“Mason will let me know what I miss. You, on the other hand, have a free period right now, so don’t think you’re going to escape answering,” I say.
Robin’s mouth opens. It closes right after. Something seems to go out of her as her head drops. “Can we go somewhere else to talk?”
The practice gym is empty this hour, so I turn on my heel and head in that direction, knowing Robin will follow. I don’t look back to make sure. The shuffle and squeak of her sneakers dragging her after me is confirmation. I don’t really need it, though, because I know she understands that if she doesn’t tell me, her friendship with Mason will be over. It’s obvious that she cares about him and doesn’t want that to happen. So she follows.
My nose wrinkles as the smell of old sweat that always seems to permeate the practice gym hits my nose. I toss my backpack down. Robin slumps to the first bleacher, her own backpack landing at her feet with a thud.
On the way over here, a dozen questions about Sentinels were running through my mind. When I open my mouth, none of those questions come out.
“Mason told me about Eliana,” I say quietly.
Robin’s head pops up. The surprise on her face doesn’t make sense to me. “He did?”
I nod. “We don’t keep secrets from each other.”
“He told you everything?” Robin asks, her hands trembling.
“He told me how you told your friends about Eliana and the Sentinels killed her the next night. It was clear how much it affected you. He was pretty upset himself just telling me about it. I know he believes you.” I take a deep breath, trying to keep my opinions from overruling everything else. “Mason told me that you offered to step back and stay away from him in order to protect him and he told you no.”
Robin shudders and wraps her arms around her body. “You disagree with him.”
It’s not a question. The temptation is there to agree, to tell her to back off and get out of our lives. I’m not sure that sparing Mason’s feelings is worth the risk, but he asked me to try. Being wrapped up in his arms last night as we waited for the police to leave made it impossible to deny him anything.
“I don’t trust you like he does,” I admit. Robin holds her breath. “But I don’t think you’ll hurt him either.”
Robin’s breath stutters out haltingly.
“That may change, though, if you don’t tell me how Sentinels really track Aerlings.”
Her posture makes it obvious that she isn’t any more keen on telling me now than she was in the beginning, but she squares her shoulders and opens her mouth. “They can feel them,” she says simply.
Goosebumps pop up all over body. “What do you mean they can feel them?”
“It’s not something I really understand,” Robin says with a shake of her head. “Sentinels look like anyone else, but there’s something about them that lets them sense when an Aerling is near them. I don’t know if it’s something they’re born with or a talent they develop, but it’s their biggest tool in finding Aerlings.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this when we first asked?” I demand.
“All it was going to do was scare you both. It doesn’t help you keep him safer,” Robin argues. “Unless you plan on locking him up in your house so no one can ever come in contact with him, but given how you’ve practically done that already, maybe you will.”
I tried to give her some latitude because Mason wants her around, but she just hit my last nerve. My palm knocks into her shoulder angrily. There’s no guilt when she falls back between the two bleachers, scraping her back on the one above her.
“How dare you judge us!”
Robin winces as she pushes herself back up to sitting. “Do you know what Mason told me yesterday?”
I don’t answer.
“He told me that I was his only friend,” Robin says, shocking me.
“What? Why would he say that?” I ask. “Mason is my best friend.”
Robin folds her arms across her chest. “He said he wasn’t sure if you could count family as friends, and since the only friends he’s ever had were his family, I was his first friend.”
I don’t count?
Grabbing her backpack up off the ground, Robin stands stiffly. “You claim you’re trying to protect Mason, but I wonder if it isn’t just selfishness fueling your choices. Seems to me like you’re afraid that if he actually has the chance to live his life, it won’t be with you.”
“That’s not true,” I whisper, but in the deepest, most honest part of my heart, I like Mason being my secret. I don’t want him to be friends with Robin because that may mean he won’t have room for me.
Robin shoulders her backpack and starts walking toward the door. A small amount of guilt plagues me as she rubs her back. Some of what she said might have a kernel of truth to it, but she doesn’t understand as much as she thinks she does. It kills me that I can’t fix that. Maybe I can at least try to make her see more.
“Robin,” I say before she reaches the door, “I love Mason.”
She stops and sighs. “I know you do.”
“It does scare me to think of Mason being away from me and finding something better. He’s my best friend, the person I can’t imagine living without.” My breath catches at the thought of not seeing him every day. “But if Mason did want to leave, I wouldn’t stop him. I would miss him like you could never understand, but I want him to be happy more than anything else.”
Slowly, Robin turns back around and faces me. She looks tired, sad.
“I do understand what it’s like to miss someone so much it physically hurts.” She pushes her glasses up on her nose, brushes her hair back, anything to keep her mind off what she’s saying. “Eliana was my Mason. My best friend. My only friend. It was my fault she died. I’ll never forgive myself, and I’ll never stop missing her. My selfish choices cost her everything. I worry that you’re going to fall into the same trap.”
Shaking my head, I say, “I would never tell anyone about Mason.”
The pain that flashes through her eyes makes me cringe. I didn’t mean it as a judgment of her. I try to apologize, but Robin waves me off.
“That’s not what I meant. I know you won’t tell anyone about Mason, but there are other ways you might betray him to the Sentinels.”
“What?”
“Why hasn’t your family helped Mason develop his abilities?”
Abilities?
“The dreams he has, you can’t tell me
no one in your family recognized them as an ability he needed to develop. Most Aerlings are fully trained by now. Mason acted like he’d never heard of such a thing. His abilities are meant to keep him safe from the Sentinels and your family has done nothing to help him develop them.” Robin glares at me, watching my expression carefully.
I’m not sure how to respond to her. Of course, no one in my family had any idea we were supposed to be looking for something. It was only when Mason brought it up himself that I began to wonder if his dreams were something more than simple nightmares. I don’t want to give away that we are clueless about this, but I struggle to find an answer for Robin.
“We… Mason’s dreams, they, uh, until just recently they were nothing but nightmares. The same thing every night. We didn’t realize they meant anything.”
Robin’s eyes narrow. “Until recently?”
My head bobs slowly. “He had a nightmare about someone breaking into our house last night, before it actually happened.”
A strange sense of excitement builds around Robin. “He’s never dreamt something that came true before? He said his dreams are always very real. What about those?”
“He doesn’t tell me much about his nightmares usually. They’ve never come true before, thankfully. They’re bad, really bad. And most of them are about stuff that already happened.”
“What kind of stuff?” Robin demands.
Now I’m the one folding my arms. “The kind that’s very personal and Mason wouldn’t want me talking about.”
“Does Mason have any other abilities?” Robin asks. Well, it’s more of a demand, but I can tell she’s trying to be patient.
I shrug. “I don’t know. There are things Mason is better at than other people, but maybe he’s just stronger or whatever.”
“Like what?”
“He seems stronger than a normal guy of his height and build. His endurance is really good. He outlasts everyone else when we go running, including my dad who was All American in cross country when he was in college. He sees better than us, especially at night. His hearing is better.” I shrug again, not sure whether his edge over us is enough to qualify as special abilities.
Robin doesn’t seem impressed. “No, that’s all just regular Aerling stuff. He’s got to have something more,” Robin says. Her fingers curl around her backpack strap as if suddenly nervous. “He should have had an ability that manifested much earlier.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
She shakes her head worriedly. “I don’t know. It’s not supposed to be like that. He should have shown signs of some kind of ability as a toddler. I don’t know what that means if he didn’t.”
“You don’t think the dreams are enough?”
Robin chews on her lip. “I don’t think so. Many Aerlings start developing secondary abilities in their late teen years. They usually aren’t as strong as the primary ability, though.”
Neither of us says anything for a moment. Fear builds in my mind that I missed something in Mason that could make the difference between staying hidden from the Sentinels and being killed. What escaped our notice? Could he possibly have hidden some ability out of fear that we wouldn’t understand?
I push that thought away quickly. Mason wouldn’t keep secrets from me. He knows I would never turn away from him just because he was different. No, Mason must not have seen anything unusual in himself either. He would have told me, wouldn’t he have?
“Maybe… maybe you should come over this afternoon and we can talk about it with Mason,” I say dejectedly.
Spending more time with Robin isn’t my idea of a nice time, but despite her baseless accusations, she has me scared.
“Sure,” Robin says. “I know you don’t trust me, Olivia, and I know I haven’t known either of you that long, but I care about Mason and I don’t want to see him hurt. You don’t have to like me, but I hope you can at least believe me.”
“I do believe you,” I say, surprising us both.
Robin nods. “See you after school then.”
I watch her walk away and slump down to the bleachers. My head drops into my hands. I feel like every time I turn around lately, Robin is dropping some kind of bomb on me. Mason is an Aerling. Mason isn’t human. There are Sentinels trying to kill him. You and your family screwed up his chances of surviving. Mason only loves you because he has no one else.
Okay, maybe she didn’t say that last one quite like that, but it’s what she meant.
I don’t want to doubt how Mason feels about me, about my family, but he’s been different since Robin showed up. To be honest, it started before she showed up. Everything Mason was already feeling, everything I had been blind to, is now being validated by Robin. I want to believe that he’ll always stay with me, but I’m not so sure anymore, and it breaks my heart to admit that.
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