Chapter Thirty-Nine
Aris wiped at the redness splashed across Thomas's face and arms as Thomas stared again at the rise and fall of Newt's chest. Silent for now. He was almost sure he was in shock. Aris rubbed the piece of damp fabric across Thomas's skin quietly. Thomas hadn't asked him to, hadn't noticed the boy leave the tree again. He hadn't remembered to tell Aris to look away. Why hadn't he remembered?
They'd killed her, right there. Minho had dragged her body far enough away from them for the Hovercraft to take her. Thomas didn't hear the Canon blare but he knew it had. He remembered her fighting with the girl they'd named Braids. He remembered the way she'd spun, ducked and wove in a practiced fashion. She hadn't had any time to put that in to play before Thomas had thrown himself at her. He sat against his tree and breathed in and out. Blinking required more focus than he could be bothered finding. Minho sat beside him again and cleaned their knives.
It would have been dinner time at home when their next visitor arrived. This one managed to reach their presence undetected, floating down from the sky and glinting in the light. Thomas and Minho noticed it at the same time, their heads turning in unison. When Minho reached for it it darted out of reach as though shifted by a breeze that wasn't there.
It floated down and alighted delicately on the moss in front of Thomas. He stared at it, resting there like a tube of mercury in the dark green of the forest floor. It was a silvery cylinder. And it had dangled from the thin strings of a parachute of pale grey cloth.
He stared at it, blinking in surprise. The gears in his head jammed and creaked.
In the end it was Aris who lifted it up, who handed it tentatively over. It was Aris who slipped his hand into Thomas's much larger one and squeezed. It was Aris who looked up at him and gave him a dazzling smile, so bright and unexpected that Thomas looked back at the silvery tube.
In the end it was Aris who had to open the top for him, and it was Aris who gently shook the glass-and-metal object into his cupped hands.
A syringe.
It was a syringe. The glass was clear and Thomas could see the contents lapping as his hand trembled. There were tiny black lines on the glass, looping cursive that his brain didn't want to focus on because in his hand he held a syringe.
Antidotes came in glass syringes, didn't they?
"Be sure to hit what you're aiming for."
Thomas looked up at the kid's voice and saw his wide eyes, saw the little white slip of curled paper.
"It's the only way you'll achieve Bliss."
It was the antidote.
A whole shot of it, beyond expensive. It didn't escape him how much he held in his palms, the worth of the token. Janson had come through. They either had an awful lot of dedicated sponsors or some very, very rich ones. Thomas looked up, the sky bright with the energy and light of the day.
When he tried to smile this time it came easily, shaky and raw. He didn't care that Minho and Aris saw him.
"Thank you."
He looked back at it in awe, afraid to breathe too much incase he broke it open.
"Well, shuckface? You gonna use it or sit around looking like a dumb klunk-ass crank?"
Minho was right, and Thomas crawled to Newt's side, brushed his fingers over one scarlet, searing cheek and gave the familiar chapped mouth a swift kiss. He took a breath to steady himself.
The blue of Newt's veins were so easy to pick out that it made him feel vaguely sick. He slid the sharp point of the needle into the pale skin and hesitated. The latest in a long list of worries awoke and stretched out its deadly claws to pluck at his heart.
"Go on. He needs it."
He met the determined green eyes and wondered if Aris knew.
He thought that he probably did, and the knowledge that the kid might still be hoping so fervently made Thomas's heart swell. The longer the kid was around the more like Chuck Thomas found him to be, and the more it hurt to know he was in the Arena. His vivid green eyes watched Thomas as he placed his thumb on the plunger, and he was biting his bottom lip so hard it had gone white. His heart thumped painfully. Aris was so very obvious. His hope and trepidation was written across his face as clearly as though it had been inked there.
Because what he had been deliberately avoiding thinking about, yet another fear he had forced from his mind was that the Antidote, the aptly nicknamed Bliss, was not always effective.
Just like the burning venom it negated, it affected everyone differently. There were people, albeit a very small percentage of the world's population, who were Immune. It meant that no matter how quickly the antidote was given, no matter how much of the unjustly expensive serum they received, no matter their status or age or how unfair their situation was it wouldn't help them.
5%
Statistics would average two of the tributes put in the Arena that year were Immune.
It was enough of a possibility to give him pause.
Thomas cried frightened tears as he pushed the little plunger down, as he watched the liquid trapped beneath the glass disappear under his best friend's skin. He withdrew the needle with a wince, his eyes apologetic even though Newt couldn't see. He sat back. He tried to stop his hands from shaking as his grip found Newt's fever-heated fingers. And he hoped. He hoped so desperately hard it hurt, so hard he felt he'd never feel any other emotion.
Thomas held his breath and his brain began to count against his will. He squeezed his eyes shut and he hoped. He hoped against all hope and everything he feared that Newt was not Immune.
His heart stuttered its way inelegantly through precisely two hundred and fifty full beats before the blare of the Death Canon rent the air.
