XIX: Day Three, Dawn.
Noelani Westmoreland, 16
Applicant #11
"I feel like I'm on fire," Jay complains.
He's walking like he's about to pass out, which she supposes is fair. She's just as hot, and the backs of her knees are sun-burnt to a crisp. How does that even get burnt?
"You look like it, too," she informs him. His face is beet red - she can't tell if it's from the heat as they walk, or if it's a more permanent addition to his skin.
Heat exhaustion and sun stroke are common things in Four, more common than most places, probably. Maybe some of the outer Districts, too, where they still spend so much time outside, but it seems like the people in Four just don't seem to know any better. They dive into the waves and let their skin freckle under the skin and several hour later they're toast.
Literally.
Six is pretty overcast, if she remembers correctly, the by-product and aftermath of all of the factories spewing out their smoke and exhausts all day long. It's gotten better since the rebellion, but she still can't imagine that it's anywhere near perfect. It's the same way that Four will always smell of fish, no matter what other things people begin to do on its shores.
Jay has looked terrible since about five minutes in, but she was initially blaming that on the shock.
Not so much that, anymore.
"We should stop soon," she suggests. "Find some shade, maybe an overhang or a cave?"
"A cave," he mutters. "Great."
"It's better than being in the sunlight all day. We should stick to walking at night, before one of us passes out."
"I feel like I'm halfway there already."
"Then yeah, we'll stop. Topher!"
Topher's head pops up over the rise ahead, and even from this distance she can imagine his raised eyebrows. The mountains have been growing steadily for a while, now, and now they're maybe an hour's walk from the heart of them. The ground is already uneven, rising and falling in unsteady waves.
"If you guys see somewhere good to stop, let me know! Preferably with some shade!"
He salutes her and goes skidding back down the hill, out of view. Hopefully Tarquin heard, too. She doesn't exactly trust her brother and his spot-picking abilities.
"I'm about to take that metal thing and drink the inside of a cactus," Jay informs her, and she hugs it closer to her side.
"Cacti aren't good for drinking."
"They do it all the time in movies."
"Yeah, in movies," she repeats. "That's not actually a safe thing you can do in real life."
He humphs, looking put-off, and continues trudging along, getting a good few paces ahead of her. They should have stayed at the well they found in the dead of night. It must have been connected to some sort of reservoir, and even though the bucket had been cracked and broken, spewing discolored water out of several holes, she had still drank her fill. They all had, several buckets over the better part of an hour.
They had agreed that staying in one spot wasn't a good idea, but now she wasn't so certain. They should have at least fought to get the bucket loose, so that they could use it to transport water in the future. They could have patched it up.
Maybe if they find their way into the mountains they'll find more water. They'll have to, if they want to survive.
Hopefully it's cleaner, too. She still feels a little bit nauseous. She's not sure what it could be from; the heat exhaustion, the lack of food, the dirty water? All of those things?
Probably all of them.
She clutches her metal bar closer to her chest and hurries to catch up to Jay, who's stumbling his way down the rise after them. Tarquin and Topher both are a little ways in the distance, making their way through the dips in the valley, steadily climbing higher.
"Won't it be hotter the higher up we go?" Jay pants.
"Pretty sure it's the opposite."
He sighs. He's soaked through with sweat, so she doesn't even want to imagine how tragic she looks, clutching onto their only item, a bar of unknown origin that could or could not be used as a weapon, if it comes to that.
Finally he bends over, hands on his knees, closed eyes pointed towards the ground. "Is this what it feels like to almost pass out?"
She stands over him. It's a futile, stupid amount of shade, her leaning across him, but it's something. "Probably. Just take it easy for a minute, and then we'll walk again. We're almost to the shade."
How grateful is he that she pulled him along now, in the middle of this? Certainly not very grateful at all, if he dies of heatstroke sometime in the next few hours. She shields her eyes from the sun and follows the two boys up ahead until she can no longer see them, their shapes obscured by the uneven rock that's beginning to tower into the sky.
"My head hurts," Jay says. "Actually my everything hurts."
His everything wouldn't be hurting if she had just left him back where they'd started. He'd be dead, probably. It would be six instead of five.
She's glad it's not.
"Alright, a few more seconds and then we're going. Standing out here isn't doing you any good."
"Being alive isn't doing me any good," he fires back, but doesn't protest or pull away when she tugs insistently at his arm, pulling him to the bottom of the hill.
"I thought Tarquin and Topher went straight," he continues, eyes narrowed. She looks ahead, towards where they disappeared.
"They did?"
He nods off to their right, to footprints winding through the dirt away from them, a completely different direction. There's several of them, many pairs overlapping one another.
"You think there's other people around here?"
"Not recently?" he guesses. "Those look old. Like it rained and they were walking through mud, I guess?"
It does look that way, but it hasn't rained since they've been out here. The Sentinels, maybe, but why would they just have been wandering around on foot when they have other ways? It's not safe out here, even from the temperature. They wouldn't risk that.
"This is creeping me the fuck out," Jay says flatly. "Kill me, why don't you."
"Jay," she sighs, the rest of her sentence disappearing into thin air at the scream that suddenly ripples over-head, a broken howl of pain, like a wounded animal. Like something worse than that. Underneath her hand Jay goes stiff all over, feet pressing down into the dirt.
Trying not to run like she wants to run.
Because that's her brother up ahead, or Tarquin. It's one of them, and she can't tell who.
It's them, and something gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Meris Loucare, 17
Applicant #15
She's very much just numb, at this point, in every respect other than the cold.
She's dizzy, disoriented. Every point in her body is cramping with the heat. Everything hurts in an odd sort of way, even breathing.
Leaving is the hardest part of all, but she can only sit there for so long with Ria's sobbing echoing off the walls, with Mel's body.
If only Ria didn't come after her.
That's how the story goes, though. Ria retches and cries and makes Meris take the bag because it's soaked in God only knows what other than blood, she didn't ask and doesn't plan on it, and then comes with her. To think yesterday that Ria would have gone nowhere without Mel, certainly not along with her.
Yesterday she hadn't though Ria would kill anyone though, let alone him, and yet here they are.
She's still not sure what to believe, really. Between the spilled, now-empty bottle of peroxide and Ria's hysterical crying, she could put it together. Some of it, anyway. At first she thought Ria had forced it on him, killed him in cold blood, but she sort of did that anyway, didn't she?
This way it just looks like more of an accident. Like Ria was trying to stop his burning, his choking, and he was dead underneath her hands before she realized he had too little air left in his lungs to begin with.
She still killed him though. Accident or not. She knows it, Ria knows it. Maybe the Sentinels know it too, with the tracking information they're receiving, but certainly no one else.
She almost wants to hit her, or scream at her, but clamps her jaws shut and keeps her eyes fixed forward, keeps moving with Ria ambling along behind her, holding onto Mel's sweater. She's just the only thing around, now. She doesn't really want to hurt her. She just needs something to get her frustration out on, someone to vent to, and Mel's not here to listen, now.
Mel's not here because he's dead, which is a fact that she really needs to quit reminding herself of.
"You know, you're going to die if you keep that sweater on," she calls back without looking, focused on the ground at her feet. If anything Ria has retreated even further into it, trying to crawl fully inside of it. To Meris she would just look like one cozy little camper if she wasn't certainly going to sweat to death.
She's not going to get sunburnt, that's for certain. How far that will get her, Meris has no idea.
Ria's catching up to her before she can really tell if she wants that or not, arms still wrapped over her chest, clutching the sweater.
"I don't have any other shirt on under this."
"Because I care, right?" she scoffs, but it ends the idea of a conversation about her sweating to death. Like Ria of all people is going to wander around the desert half-naked. She probably rather would sweat to death.
Meris just thought she would say something, you know, before she falls over dead.
She can feel Ria's eyes on her, flicking up and down like she can't decide whether or not to look. The bag hanging off her shoulder is making it difficult to get a good look back, her eyes straying to all the blood every time she tries.
"I never said I was sorry," Ria says, just loud enough to hear. When Meris turns to glance back at her she looks away, off into the distance.
"For what?"
"You know..."
"Do I?"
She stops. Ria nudges into her side and jumps back like she's been burned, retracting her arm away from where it brushes against the stained-through bag.
"For what?" she repeats, until Ria looks up at her once again. She feels like she's scolding a little puppy, still unfamiliar with and afraid of it's new owner.
Mel would know how to deal with this. Mel is also extremely dead.
There's another reminder for you.
"I wasn't really friends with him," Ria explains. "He was trying, maybe, I guess... I don't know. But you were, or at least you seemed like it, and I did something stupid because I panicked and I wasn't watching him. He— he's dead because of me. You know that."
She stares. It's hard to believe that Ria's only a year younger than her, maybe even less. She seems so much more fragile than sixteen.
"I'm sorry," she continues, rambling on. "If he hadn't come back and grabbed me he probably wouldn't be dead, or if I hadn't grabbed the supplies that I did—"
"Just stop," she insists. "Stop. It wasn't all on you. Someone else attacked him. Something..."
She trails off. Something what? They still don't know. Mel only saw a flash of them, a person he insisted wasn't a Sentinel, and that was the extent of the information they got out of him, before he effectively ended his own life, or convinced Ria to finish him off by accident.
"It's not all on you," she finishes. Present tense. If she hadn't left the two of them alone, he could still be alive. There's no way to know.
So his death is on her hands, too.
"I wanna know what it was," Ria murmurs. "Who, I guess. I mean I don't, but... I do."
It's the most Ria's spoken in the past two days, and she's not sobbing anymore, which is a win in Meris' book. Her face is still puffy, eyes rimmed red, but she can't expect a miracle overnight.
Not anymore.
She looks out over the desert, the flatness of it all. They've left most of the hills and mountains behind. Being out in the open where they can see things coming is clearly the safer option, after what happened to Mel when they couldn't properly see what was going on around them.
It may not be the smartest one, though, or the one she wants to take.
Because like Ria, she wants to know as well.
Faye Ackerman, 12
Applicant #7
"Why are you stopping?" she asks, hitting Sabre in the back of the shoulder. She nearly knocks him off the bike.
He flinches, too, but that doesn't stop her from unwinding her arms from around his waist and clambering off into the dirt. In front of them is an absolute behemoth of a structure, a monolith of rock that almost looks black in the sunlight next to the pale ground.
There are mountains and hills in every direction, but this mass of towering rock, split into two distinct chunks, is alone in the middle of nowhere.
"That's pretty cool," she decides, flattening a hand against one of the boulders. It towers into the sky, at least fifty or sixty feet into the air. It would be easy enough to scramble up. Most of the rock, if not all of it, is connected, jutting out in a few specific places. It's hot to the touch, but not unbearable. It's more used to the sun than she is.
"It's a rock," Sabre says quietly.
"A very big rock," she says, and clambers up it a ways. A very big rock, and an absolutely amazing lookout point. It'll be too hard to take the bike into the mountains with the terrain, so they don't have that choice. They could sit up here and see everything for miles, get a little bit of warning if something was going to happen.
"Be careful," Sabre says as she continues climbing. It really is easy, for someone who has so little experience with it. Nolan likes climbing, though he never offers to take her to the gym with his friends to do so. It's not that hard.
It's like climbing the spine of some massive, prehistoric creature. There's some bits where she can almost walk, even if it's at an angle, continuing her way up. The whole thing is topped with one rock, bigger than the rest, that pokes out from the rest of them, pointed towards the sky. It's tall, too high to just step onto, but she finds a few easy handholds and hauls herself up, listening to the sounds of Sabre's feet behind her. He's climbing after her, no doubt, judging by the previous concern in his voice.
She finally hauls herself to the very top, remaining in a crouch. Now that she's up here it looks so much higher than it did when she was standing on the ground. She stands up, slowly, with her arms held out.
"Faye," Sabre says slowly.
"Don't be such a baby," she insists. "Get up here. There's plenty of room."
It's not hard to balance. The rock up here isn't flat, per say, but it's plenty wide for at least two of them to stand on.
Sabre's acting like this is looking death in the face, like this is the worst thing they could possibly be doing. She really wonders about him. He never looks sure about anything, never looks like he has a concrete direction in mind. He also doesn't look like he trusts her yet either, but she could say the same about him.
This is easy. Too easy. Sabre's just too boring to get that.
His hands poke over the top of the rock and she shuffles over, until he crawls up beside her. He stays there, crouched, looking in the opposite direction.
"See? Pretty cool, right?"
He nods, slowly, although doesn't look all that impressed. It's such a nice view, such an interesting find. It's certainly something to appreciate in the midst of all the other chaos. Sabre just doesn't seem to get that.
"Don't be such a stick in the mud," she chastises. "It's cool, c'mon."
"Sure," he admits. "I just don't think we should be taking any risks."
"What risks?" she asks incredulously.
"One of us could fall."
"Yeah, but we won't," she scoffs. "What, do you think I'm going to push you, or something?"
It was a joke, even though it wasn't a great one, but Sabre looks up at her like he didn't take it that way. His hands tighten around the lip of the rock, to the point where his knuckles go white. The stone beneath them is probably starting to burn his palms.
Faye never liked to chastise herself on her charisma and humor, but sometimes it didn't come off the way she intended it to.
"I wasn't thinking that, no," he says, but now there's a slightly unsure tinge to his voice, like he's confused about that himself.
"You need to be more confident in something, at least," she insists. "It's tiring. Why would you think I'm going to push you?"
"I don't know you all that well," he admits. "It's certainly possible, isn't it?"
"No," she snaps. "No, it wasn't."
The wasn't slips out before she means it too, and his eyes widen a bit. The past tense is dangerous.
He stands up, arms slightly outstretched. She's suddenly reminded of the fact that even though Sabre isn't anything impressive, he's still bigger than she is. One wrong move and one of them could indeed fall, the way he said.
She just doesn't understand it, how someone three years older than her could be so confused, so lost, about nothing more than themselves. Certainly in this relationship one would expect him to be the confident one, the one with a firm head on his shoulders. In a normal situation he would be the leader and she the follower. He would be pushing and she would be following.
Not likely.
"I can't just change myself," he says quietly.
"Yeah, well try," she insists. "Because it's annoying."
It's harsh. Harsher than she really means. She'll apologize later once she's not stuck up here with him. She edges around him, brushing against his shoulder, and he even grabs onto her arm to keep her steady, to hold her firm as she crouches back down, letting her legs slip over the side. He looms behind her like a monolith of his own, not nearly as tall or as impressive, not standing out like this rock below them does.
Her foot slips out of the first hold she finds, not even halfway over the edge. Sabre's arm tightens as she scrabbles for a grip, looking for better purchase. There isn't any. All of the grooves she could see so easily on the way up aren't visible anymore, not from this angle.
"Shit," she mutters, a nasty word, something her mother would chastise her for, something Esma would tell on her for.
They're not here right now. Because she doesn't think Esma or her mother would let go.
And that's exactly what Sabre does.
He lets go. She feels his fingers slip away from her arm, almost uncertain, so Sabre-like that it's almost painful.
She flails back as she slips over the edge, arms searching for something to hold onto. Her hand catches his ankle; she holds tight and pulls, trying to bring him closer. He stumbles to his knees, nearly crashing over the edge after her. He can't seem to right himself, either, can't find any steady ground.
She's slipping, too. She's slipping.
Her hand finds something - hair, she realizes, as her other fingers lose their grip. She gets a handful of his hair in-between her fingers, nails catching in the dips and grooves of his ears, pulling. Desperate for something to hold onto, to keep her from falling. Something rips, she feels it, the same way she feels something hot and wet splatter over her hand. Blood, she knows, blood from his ear as her nails tear through his skin, and bits of metal earring tinker away down past her, bouncing off the rock and disappearing.
He yanks himself away. All she has left is the blood.
And then she's falling.
It looked so high, up there. It looks just as high now, as she tumbles head over heels off the top rock. Her ankle and foot catch against something - a snap there, as her bone protrudes out through the shin. She knows it, as the pain registers. It flares through her entire body. She only flips over one time in the air, and all she can see is one last bit of rock, right below her. Right where she's going to land.
She even thinks she hears a sharp, vicious crack, before everything fades away.
Jupiter Valentine, 18
Applicant #9
"Pretty day," they hum.
Myra hums something, too, though there's no words in the mix. They take it as agreement, because anything else seems worse.
It really does seem like an every-day, happy coincidence. Sitting perched on the edge of the cliff, slightly shaded by the wide frame of the truck behind them. Mal's interrupting the scene a bit, kicking the dirt around behind them, but at least he's being quiet about it.
Arwen and Emmi are talking behind them, quiet murmurs that Jupiter can't quite make out, and Jahaira is off snapping pictures some fifty feet away. Click after click after click.
"Should she really be doing that?" Emmi asks.
"What, taking pictures?" Myra clarifies. "Sure?"
"It just feels like she's deluding herself, is all. It's nice, I'm glad she can do that, it just doesn't seem very... productive."
"And anything else we're doing right now is?" Myra fires back. "It's helping her. Just leave her be."
Emmi wasn't bugging Jahaira, is the thing. Merely stating a fact that even Jupiter believes, though they'll never say it aloud. Jahaira does appear to be deluding herself into some sort of greater mission, like she's off on a field assignment taking pictures for some sort of famous magazine. Something about desert vacations that only the rich can afford.
Toes nudge them in the back and they turn around to look at Mal, who jerks his head in the opposite direction, asking them to follow. They clamber up and follow after him, out of earshot from the others.
"What?" they ask.
"Nothing. They're just worrying me."
"Why?"
"I just don't like the look of the inevitable Myra and Jahaira versus Emmi and Arwen. I don't want to wind up caught in the middle of it."
And I don't want you to be either, he leaves out, although they hear it loud and clear.
"Do you think it's going to come to that?"
"I don't think, I know. Look at them."
They don't need to look. Emmi and Myra are talking again - bickering, really. They almost wish they could press their hands over their ears and ignore it, but that would be pot calling the kettle black. They can't very well speak of Jahaira doing something when they're trying to do the same.
"Guys," they chastise, but both Emmi and Myra very clearly, and easily, tune them out. Not that anyone's really listened to them since the beginning save for Mal. It's clear - their opinion isn't valued, their uses, few as they are. They're seen as the weakest link. Despite the arm issue at least Emmi's got a mouth on her - they can't very well say that about themselves.
"Jahaira!" Emmi calls. "Want to go look for water, or something?"
Myra actually reaches back to nudge her in the leg, and isn't gentle about it either. "Quit it out. If you want to go do something so badly, I'll come with you."
"I don't want you to come with me."
Next to them, Mal sighs and scrubs a hand over his very dirty face. They hadn't noticed it until now; they wonder if they look the same. Considering Emmi and Myra certainly do, and even Jahaira looks a shade off from a distance, they'd bet on it.
"We'll just leave, then," Myra decides. "We shouldn't have stayed in one place this long anyway. The Sentinels are going to come after us sooner or later."
"Who died and made you leader?" Emmi asks. "There's signs of life around here. Plants, clearly, and we've seen enough birds. If we can find water..."
"We have water, in case you hadn't noticed."
The bickering dissolves into something even louder, so this time they do briefly press their hands over their ears. They have water, yes. Not very much of it, and they're starving to boot. If Mal can find plants, and if the flocks of birds they keep seeing overhead are any sign, then Emmi's right. There probably is water around here.
"I'm with her," Mal announces. "No point in leaving. We have the high ground - we'll see them coming, if they are. And we do need to look for water."
Myra shoots him a glare, one that's positively foul.
"Don't look at me," Arwen says flatly. "You know who I'm siding with."
Myra has looked very tired these past few days, and contemplative. Trying to plan their next move, no doubt, but she hasn't done any of that. She hasn't even spoken much. Now she looks more tired, and far more annoyed.
Like Mal said, it's worrying.
Myra also has the keys, although they know more than one of them here can drive. It doesn't seem likely that she'll give them up in a circumstance such at this one, when everyone seems at such odds. They would sooner expect someone to suddenly drop dead, like it came out of thin air.
Jahaira finally comes trotting back, holding her camera tight to her abdomen. She glances between the five of them, only half-focused until she steps directly into the middle of the thickness in the air, where it wraps around her, too.
"What's going on?"
"Do you wanna leave?" Myra asks, no explanation.
"Uh... if everyone else does, I guess? I could find something new to take pictures of."
"Enough with the damn pictures," Emmi snaps. "I'm not trying to be a dick, here, but it's not helping."
"It's helping me—"
"And no one else, got it. As this entire alliance seems to be doing."
"Hey, I fed you," Mal protests, but it falls on deaf ears. They expected as much. No one cares what the two of them have to say. They're just the stragglers, the ones picked up at the last moment, a nearly forgotten about decision. And now they're the bystanders to all of this. They almost wish they had done as Mal wanted and stayed alone, forged their own way.
"If it's helping her, then leave it be," Myra protests. "Just shut the fuck up about it."
"Because a few pictures are going to fix this, right? Can't wait until someone finds that on your corpse a year from now."
The conversation dissolves into something Jupiter can't even understand, they're all talking so fast. They're all involved, and a hell of a lot closer together than they were before. Too close, in fact. They don't like the sudden proximity between the four of them, not when Mal seems so convinced that they'll come to blows, eventually. Even the two of them have gotten closer, drifting closer to the confrontation. Maybe if they can get closer they can get in-between them, stop the inevitable from happening.
Inevitable is inevitable, though.
"Can you guys back up?" they plead. Away from the cliff's edge, at least. Further in nothing too bad can happen. No one has any weapons on hand.
Besides Mal, anyway, who's clutching the baseball bat with increasingly tight fingers. They put a hand on his arm only to feel every muscle locked tight in anticipation, clearly waiting for something...
They don't back up from the cliff, and that's what Jupiter was fearing all along.
They're not sure who throws the first punch. It's a mess, like a group of high school seniors fighting in the back field after school, though they'd know nothing about that. It's what they always imagined high school to be like, what they dreamed about.
Why did they ever dream about this?
They see a whirlwind of arms, hear a few furious yells. It seems to make sense, now, the two of them. Myra and Emmi just weren't meant to be, that's all this is, all it ever will be. Mal grabs them and tugs them back several paces, wrapping his arms around them to keep them from getting any closer. They allow themselves to be tugged away, and Mal spins them around.
There's a scream. It's not angry. Terrified, amidst the sounds of a bit of tumbling rock.
And fading, very rapidly. Fading into nothing.
Silence.
They close their eyes, even though they feel Mal turn back, still holding onto them.
"Fuck," he whispers. "Fuck, fuck, fuck—"
He lets go, and it's only the sound of his feet turning towards the cliff's edge that makes her force her eyes open. Not Mal too, they plead. Not him.
Mal makes it to the cliff ledge unscathed, standing at the brittle edge, looking down. Myra is looking down in shock, too, hands held up, slowing backing up. Jahaira is already half on the ground, hands over her mouth, and Arwen is a statue, frozen in horror, something in her trembling, maybe all of her, and Emmi...
There's no Emmi.
Emmi's gone.
Soran Faerber, 18
Applicant #8
He's getting sick of driving.
Issue is there's not much else to do. Nothing, really, except drive on and on and on with someone in the passenger seat who he can't let take over because he fears they'll crash.
Icarus admitted it himself. It's not rude to say so if he admitted it.
Icarus has also been asleep for most of the last day, though he blames that on how close he must have come to heatstroke, wandering around in the desert after them. It's one of the only reasons he let him back in the car; he was too disoriented to do much of anything, after Trojan. Much too confused.
Beyond that he doesn't have a reason. He's not sure having one would make things any better.
Now Icarus is awake, it appears, for good, and he's just waiting for the choir to start back up. It's going to, any minute now. Icarus has more words in him for any given situation than people do bones in their body. It's truly a marvel.
He glances at him more than once, still slumped against the window, staring aimlessly out across the desert. Finally Icarus looks back.
"What?" he snaps. "You're creepy as fuck."
He shrugs and goes back to full-focus on the drive, even though he doesn't really need to. He's mostly just driving in circles, a bit wider each time until he catches sight of something interesting. It's better than risking hitting one of the boundaries. He doesn't really have any desire to know what the Sentinels will do if they dare cross them. Kidava and Trojan were one thing - he's not willing to bet his skills against them, let alone Icarus'.
Icarus sighs, loud enough to wake the dead. He looks over again to see Icarus staring dead-faced at the bracelet, lips pursed.
"How long has it been at eighteen?"
He raises his own arm, lets go of the steering wheel to look himself. It has indeed ticked down to eighteen, sometime in the last hour. He knows he looked a little while ago, after Icarus fell asleep as the sun rose. How long has it been like that, though? Since then, or just a few minutes?
"Wonder who it was," he hums.
"I fucking don't," Icarus says. "I don't want to know who it is."
"Who it was," he repeats, correcting him. "Past tense."
"Like I said, creepy," Icarus says flatly. "Then again, you murdered someone yesterday, so why am I even surprised?"
"You did it first."
"Can we please get over that?"
"No," he decides. "It was funny."
"Funny?" Icarus asks incredulously. "Are you serious?"
"Yeah. Your face was pretty funny. You did it and then you looked shocked when there was suddenly a body at your feet. Like whoops, shit, didn't mean to do that, except I totally did!"
"He was going to kill me if I didn't do it first."
"You don't know that."
"Yes, I do," Icarus insists. "Just... the look in his eyes. He was totally going to kill me."
Soran throws the car into a sliding halt so fast that he nearly hurts his own neck. Icarus grabs his own seat with an alarmed little noise, something far more innocent than anything else that's come out of his mouth thus far. He swivels in the seat to stare at him.
Icarus stares back, and then very slowly reaches back to push the lock on the door down, like he's afraid he's going to get shoved out again.
The car's stopped, now, but that's beyond the point.
"Do you know what I'm thinking right now?"
"No?" Icarus questions. "Do I want to?"
He rolls his eyes and pushes down on the gas again, urging the car into a slower crawl. "See what I mean? You have no idea what people are thinking just by the look in their eyes. If you did, you'd have probably leapt out of the car just then."
"If you were going to kill me you'd have done it from the get-go," Icarus grumbles, looking none too happy about it. He crosses his arms over his chest like a petulant child, looking properly annoyed. It's funny, how things can change so easily like that. "You don't know everything, you know. You should start acting that way."
"I know more than you, though."
"Like what?"
"Lots of things. And maybe you should consider deferring to the other person in the car with even a little bit of training."
"It's not like you're a Career," Icarus says, waving his hands around. "You're not."
"Not technically, but a year and a half of training is better than none."
This time it's Icarus that swivels around to look at him, eyes slowly widening. "Mel said you'd lived in one for eleven years."
"True," he offers. "My mom died six months after we got there. The Academy took me in for the year and a half they had until it burned down to the ground."
"Oh, God," Icarus moans. "I am in the car with a Career. This is the worst."
"You have a very odd definition of worst."
"Well, it's not like you're going to use it to help me, are you?"
"You never know." Soran shrugs. "May just surprise you."
Icarus rolls his eyes. "Academy kids are the worst. Especially the ones that lived in the dorms."
"You wouldn't be yourself if you didn't vaguely hate the homeless, would you?"
"I do not vaguely hate the homeless."
"Fully, then."
Icarus opens and closes his mouth a few times like a dying fish before he tugs one of the water bottles out of the glove-box, busying himself with taking little sip after sip of it. It's more than he should probably drinking when they haven't found anymore, but he really doesn't have the energy to stop him. It's keeping him quiet, after all. Who knows how many more of those moments he'll have in the future.
In the future, like this is going to be the way things are for a while. Icarus doesn't really seem scared of him, not properly, and he hasn't felt the urge to get rid of him again. Company's nice, even if it's annoying. And he's been sleeping a lot.
Icarus may not be able to figure out what's going on in Soran's eyes, but he knows exactly what's going on in his. It's just the beginning of something, a barely-there flicker, but Soran can see it.
He can see it, and it's definitely not hatred.
He knew it when Icarus got back in the car after him, and he still knows it now.
It's funnier than he'd like to admit. And damn, is it going to be good.
So, someone's dead... but who? Next chapter we'll backtrack just a bit and see just who bit the dust. For now it's just best guesses, so let me know what you think! Or who you think.
Until next time.