The morning is cool and serene, everything limned in golden light. Touches of dew dot leaves and grass, the sun still stretching itself into the sky. The air is fresh with scents I cannot adequately describe; it’s an amalgam of early morning fragrances, the familiar smell of the world shuddering awake. That I notice these things at all is unusual; it is clear, even to me, that my mood is greatly improved.
Ella is holding my hand.
She’s been buoyant this morning. She got dressed even more quickly than I did, tugging me out the door with an enthusiasm that almost made me laugh.
Winston, who we discover waiting for us just outside the medical tent, possesses a range of emotions diametrically opposed. He says nothing when Ella and I approach, first taking in the two of us, then glancing at his watch.
“Hey, Winston,” Ella says, still beaming. “What are you doing here?” “Who, me?” He points at himself, feigning shock. “Oh, nothing. Just
waiting out here for this jackass”—he shoots me a dark look—“for over an hour.”
“What? Why?” Ella frowns. “And don’t call him a jackass.”
I process this exchange with some confusion. I’d not realized until just that moment how much I’d been hoping Winston’s appearance at my door had something to do with Ella.
I see now that it does not.
“Winston came to our room this morning,” I explain to her. “He told me he had . . . a surprise for me.”
Ella’s frown deepens. “A surprise?” “An hour ago,” Winston adds angrily.
“Yes,” I say, meeting his eyes. “An hour ago.”
He visibly clenches his jaw. “You really are the worst, you know that? I mean, everyone is always telling me that you’re the worst—not that I’ve ever doubted it—but wow, this morning has just proven to me how completely self-absorbed you are. I can’t believe I even offered to come get
—”
“Winston.” Ella’s voice is quiet, carefully controlled, but her anger is loud. I turn to look at her, not surprised, exactly, but—
Yes, surprised.
I’m still unfamiliar with this dynamic. I’m still not used to someone taking my side.
“Look,” she says. “Warner might be too nice to say anything when you talk to him like that—”
Winston sounds for a moment like he’s choking.
“—but I’m not. So don’t. Not only because it’s awful, but because you’re wrong.”
Winston is still staring at Ella, dumbfounded. “I’m sorry— You think he’s too nice to say anything? You think the reason Warner gets all quiet and gives people death stares is because he’s too nice? To say anything?” Winston glances at me. “Him?”
I am smiling.
Ella is indignant, Winston is furious, and I am smiling. Very nearly laughing.
“Yes,” Ella says, refusing to back down. “You guys are too comfortable bullying him.”
Winston looks around himself a moment, for all the world as if he’s entered some alternate universe. He opens his mouth to say something, looks at me, looks away, and then crosses his arms.
“You heard what he was like, right?” he finally says to Ella. “When you were gone? You heard all the stories about how h—”
“Yes,” she says, her voice darker now. “I heard exactly what happened.” “And? So you know about all the people he murdered and how horrible
he was to everyone and how he made a ton of people here cry and how Nouria nearly shot him for it—and you think we are the ones bullying him? That’s what you think is happening here?”
“Clearly.”
“And you,” Winston says, turning to face me, his eyes narrowing with barely suppressed anger. “You agree with this assessment of your
character?”
I smile wider. “Yes.”
“Wow, you really are an asshole.” “Winston—”
“He made me wait out here for an hour! And this was after I told him I had a surprise for him, and after he slammed the door in my face—multiple times.” Winston shakes his head. “You should’ve heard him. He’s so scathing—so rude—”
“Hey, what the hell is going on over here?” Kenji is stalking toward us. “And where have you been?” he says to Ella. “We’re all waiting for you guys!”
“Waiting for us?” I ask. “For what?”
Kenji throws up his arms in frustration. “Oh my God. You haven’t told him yet?” he says to Ella. “What are you waiting for? Listen, I thought this idea was dumb to begin with, but now it’s just getting ridiculous—”
“I was going to tell him this morning,” she says, tensing. “I just haven’t had a chance yet. We’ve been busy—”
“I bet you were, princess,” Kenji says, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “Why is your hair wet?”
“I took a shower.”
“You took a shower,” he says, eyes narrowing. “Really.”
“Okay— What is going on?” I ask, glancing between Ella and the others as a familiar dread moves up my spine. “Is this about the surprise?”
“The surprise?” Kenji is confused only a moment before understanding alights in his eyes. He looks at Winston. “Wait—I thought we sent you to go get him an hour ago?”
Winston explodes. “This is exactly what I’ve been trying to say— This son of a bitch made me wait outside the MT for an hour, even though I was perfectly nice to him, despite my better judgment—”
“Fucking hell,” Kenji mutters angrily, pushing his hands through his hair. “As if we didn’t have enough going on today.” He turns to me. “You made Winston wait an entire hour just to give you the damn dog?”
“The dog?” I frown. “The dog is the surprise? How is it a surprise if I already know it exists?”
“Wait, what dog?” Ella looks at me, then at the others. “You mean the dog from yesterday?”
“Yeah.” Kenji sighs. “Yara took the dog last night. She gave him a bath, scrubbed him up. She got him a collar and everything. She really wanted it to be a surprise for Warner and made us promise not to say anything about it. The dog is wearing a stupid bow on his head right now.”
Ella has stiffened beside me. “Who’s Yara?”
Her faint, almost undetectable note of jealousy—possessiveness—only cements my smile in place.
“You know Yara,” Kenji says to Ella. “Redhead? Tall? Runs the school group? You’ve talked to her—”
Kenji catches sight of my face and cuts himself off.
“And what the hell are you smiling about? You’ve messed up our entire schedule, dickhead. We’re an hour behind on everything now, all becau—”
“Stop,” Ella says angrily. “Stop calling him names. He’s not a dickhead. He’s not a jackass. He’s not self-absorbed. I don’t know why you guys think it’s okay to just say whatever terrible things you want about him—to his face—as if he’s made of stone. You all do it. You all insult him over and over again and he just takes it—he doesn’t even say anything—and somehow you’ve convinced yourselves it’s okay. Why? He’s a real, flesh- and-blood person. Why don’t you care? Why don’t you think he has feelings? What the hell is wrong with you?”
My smile is gone in an instant.
I experience a strange pain then, a sensation not unlike dissolving slowly from the inside. This feeling sharpens to a point, piercing me.
I turn to look at Ella.
She seems to sense the change in me; for a moment, they all do.
I feel a vague mortification at that, at the realization that I’ve somehow exposed myself. The proceeding silence is brief but torturous, and when Ella wraps her arms around my waist, hugging me close even in the midst of all this, I hear Winston clear his throat.
Tentatively, I lift a hand to her head, drawing it slowly down her hair. I worry, sometimes, that my love for her will expand beyond the limitations of my body, that it will one day kill me with its heft.
Kenji averts his eyes.
He is subdued when he says, “Yeah. Um, anyway, last I checked, the dog was in the dining tent, eating breakfast with everyone.”
Another awkward beat, and Winston sighs. “Should I go get Yara? Do we even have time?”
“I don’t think so,” Kenji says. “I think we should tell her to keep the dog until after.”
“After what?” I ask, trying to read the maelstrom of emotions around me and failing. “What’s going on?”
Kenji blows out a breath. He looks exhausted. “J, you have to tell him.”
She pulls away from me, panicked in an instant. “But I had a plan—I was going to take him there first—”
“We don’t have time for this, princess. You waited too long, and now it’s officially a problem. Tell him what’s happening.”
“Right now? While you’re standing here?” “Yes.”
“No way.” She shakes her head. “You have to at least give us some privacy.”
“Absolutely not.” Kenji crosses his arms. “I’ve given you tons of privacy, and you’ve proven you can’t be trusted. If I leave you two alone together you’ll either end up in bed or accomplish nothing, neither of which are conducive to our goals.”
“Was that really necessary?” I say, irritated. “Did you really feel the need to comment on our private life?”
“When it costs us an hour of our lives, yes,” Winston says, moving, in an act of solidarity, to stand next to Kenji. He even crosses his arms against his chest, matching Kenji’s stance.
“Go ahead.” He nods at Ella. “Tell him.” Ella looks nervous.
Winston and Kenji are an irritated, impatient audience; they stare us down, unrelenting, and I don’t even know whether to be angry about it— because the truth is, I want to know what’s going on, too. I want Ella to tell me what’s happening.
I look from her to them, my heart pounding in my chest. I have no idea what she’s about to say. No idea whether this revelation will be good or bad
—though her nerves seem to indicate something is wrong. I brace myself as I watch her take a deep breath.
“Okay,” she says, exhaling. “Okay.” Another quick breath and she remembers to look at me, this time pasting an anxious smile on her face. “So—I didn’t want to tell you like this, but I’d been thinking for a little while about how to do this in the best possible way, because I wanted everything to be right, you know? Right for both of us—and also, I didn’t
want it be anticlimactic. I didn’t want this big thing to happen and then it was just, like, we go back to the status quo—I wanted it to feel special— like something was going to change—and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, it was supposed to be a surprise, but it just wasn’t ready in time, and if I’d told you about it, it wouldn’t have been a surprise anymore, and Kenji kept insisting that I tell you anyway but I just—I’m sorry about yesterday, by the way, and I’m sorry about Nouria—I’ve been planning this whole thing with her since I woke up, practically, but she wasn’t supposed to say anything to you, and she knows she wasn’t supposed to say anything to you, because she and I had an agreement that I was supposed to tell you what was going on but yesterday I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen and I was waiting for more information because we were still trying really hard to make everything work in time but I know how important it is to you t—”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Winston mutters.
Kenji shouts: “You two are getting married today.” I turn sharply, stunned, to look at them.
“Kenji, what the hell—”
“You were taking too long—”
“We’re getting married today?” I turn back to meet Ella’s eyes, my heart pounding now for an entirely new reason. A better reason. “We’re getting married today?”
“Yes,” she says, blushing fiercely. “I mean—only if you want to.”
I smile at her then, smile so wide I start laughing, disbelief rendering me foreign even to myself.
I hardly recognize this sound.
The sensations moving through my body right now—it’s hard to explain. The relief flooding my veins is intoxicating; I feel as if someone punched a hole through my chest in the best possible way. This is some kind of madness.
I’m trying, but I can’t stop laughing.
“Huh,” says Winston quietly. “I didn’t even know his face could do that.”
“Yeah,” Kenji says. “It’s super weird the first time you see it.”
“I can’t look away. I’m trying to look away and I can’t. It’s like if a baby was born with a full set of teeth.”
“Yes! Exactly. It’s exactly like that!” “But nice, too.”
“Yeah.” Kenji sighs. “Nice, too.”
“Hey, did you know he had dimples? I didn’t know he had dimples.” “C’mon, man, that’s old news—”
“Could you two just—please—be quiet for a second?” Ella says, squeezing her eyes shut. “Just for one second?”
Kenji and Winston mime zipping their mouths shut before taking a step back, holding their hands up in surrender.
Ella bites her lip before meeting my eyes.
“So,” she says. “What do you think?” She clasps, unclasps her hands. “Are you busy this morning? There’s still something I want to show you— something I’ve been working on for the last few—”
I take her in my arms and she laughs, breathlessly, just until she meets my eyes. Her smile is soon replaced by a look—a softness in her expression that likely mirrors my own. I can still feel the outline of that little velvet box against my leg; I’ve been carrying it with me everywhere, too afraid to leave it behind, too afraid to lose hope.
“I love you,” I whisper.
When I kiss her I breathe her in, inhaling the scent of her skin as I draw my hands down her back, pulling her tighter. Her response is immediate; her small hands move up my chest to claim my face, holding me close as she deepens the kiss, standing on tiptoe as she slowly twines her arms around my neck.
The pilot light in my body catches fire.
I break away reluctantly, and only because I remember we have an audience. Still, I press my forehead to hers, keeping her close.
I’m smiling again. Like a common idiot. “Okay, well, that took a gross turn.”
“Is it over yet?” Kenji asks. “I had to close my eyes.”
“I don’t know. I think it might be over, but if I were you I’d keep my eyes shut for another minute just in case—”
“Can you two keep your commentary to yourselves?” I say, pivoting to face them. “Is it so impossible for you to just be happy for—”
The words die in my throat.
Winston and Kenji are both bright-eyed and beaming, the two of them failing to fight back enormous smiles.
“Congratulations, man,” Kenji says softly.
His sincerity is so unexpected it strikes me before I’ve had a chance to armor myself, and the consequences leave me reeling.
An unfamiliar, overwhelming heat erupts in my head, in my chest, pricking the whites of my eyes.
Ella takes my hand.
I can’t help but study Kenji’s face; I’m astonished by the kindness there, the happiness he does nothing to hide. It becomes more obvious by the moment that he’s played a larger role in executing Ella’s plans than I might’ve suspected, and I experience the truth then—feel it clearly, for the first time—the realization like a physical jolt.
Kenji genuinely wants me to be happy. “Thank you,” I say to him.
He smiles, but it’s only a flicker of movement. Everything else is in his expression, in the tight nod he gives me by way of response.
“Anytime,” he says quietly.
There’s a beat of silence, broken only by the sound of Winston sniffing. “All right, okay, that was a really beautiful moment, but you guys need
to knock it off before I start crying,” he says, laughing even as he tugs off his glasses to rub at his eyes. “Besides, we still have a shit ton of work to do.”
“Work,” I say, searching the sky for the sun. “Of course.” It can’t be much later than eight in the morning, but I’m usually at my desk much earlier. “I’ll need to make a quick stop at the command center. How long do you think we’ll be gone today? I have to reschedule some calls. There are time-sensitive materials I’m supposed to deliver today, and if I—”
“Not that kind of work,” Kenji says, a strange smile on his face. “You don’t need to worry about that today. It’s all been taken care of.”
“Taken care of?” I frown. “How?”
“Juliette already notified everyone last night. Obviously we can’t check out of work completely, but we’ve divvied up today’s responsibilities. We’re all going to take shifts.” He hesitates. “Not you, two, obviously. Both your schedules have been cleared for the day.”
Somehow, this is a greater surprise than everything else.
If our schedules have been cleared, that means today wasn’t some spur- of-the-moment decision. It means things didn’t just serendipitously align in time to make it happen.
This was orchestrated. Premeditated.
“I don’t think I understand,” I say slowly. “As much as I appreciate the time off, this shouldn’t take much more than an hour. We only need an officiant and a couple of witnesses. Ella doesn’t even have a dress. Nouria said there was no time to make food, or a cake, or even to spare people to help set up, so it won’t—”
Ella squeezes my hand, and I meet her eyes.
“I know we’d agreed to do something really small,” she says softly. “I know you weren’t expecting much. But I thought you might like this better.”
I stare at her, dumbfounded. “Like what better?”
As if on cue, Brendan pops his white-blond head around a corner. “Morning, everyone! All right to bring everyone through? Or do you lot need another minute?”
Winston lights up at the sight of him, assuring Brendan that we need just a few more minutes.
Brendan says, “Roger that,” and promptly disappears. I turn to Ella, my mind whirring.
Save the birthday cake she surprised me with last month, I have very little in my life to offer me a frame of reference for this experience. My brain is at war with itself, understanding—while incapable of understanding
—what now seems obvious. Ella has organized something elaborate.
In secret.
All of her earlier evasiveness, her half-truths and missing explanations
—my fear that she’d been hiding something from me— Suddenly everything makes sense.
“How long have you been planning this?” I ask, and Ella visibly tenses with excitement, emanating the kind of joy I’ve only ever felt in the presence of small children.
It nearly takes my breath away.
She wraps her arms around my waist, peering up at me. “Do you remember when we were on the plane ride home,” she says, “and the adrenaline wore off, and I started kind of losing my mind? And I kept looking at the bone sticking out my leg and screaming?”
Of all things, this was not what I was expecting her to say.
“Yes,” I say carefully. I have no interest in recalling the events of that plane ride. Or discussing them. “I remember.”
“And do you remember what I said to you?”
I look away, sighing as I stare at a point in the distance. “You said you couldn’t wear a wedding dress with part of your bone sticking out.”
“Yeah,” she says, and laughs. “Wow. I was pretty out of it.” “It’s not funny,” I whisper.
“No,” she says, drawing her hands up my back. “No, it’s not funny. But it was strange, how nothing was really making sense in my head. We’d just been through hell, but all I could think as I stared at myself was how impractical it was to be bleeding so much. I told you I couldn’t marry you if the bleeding didn’t stop, because then I’d get blood all over my dress, and your suit, and then we’d both just be covered in blood, and everything we touched would get bloody. And you”—she takes a deep breath—“you said you’d marry me right then. You said you’d marry me with my bleeding teeth, with a visibly broken leg, with dried blood on my face, with blood dripping from my ears.”
I flinch at that, at the memory of what my father put her through. What her own parents did to her. Ella suffered and sacrificed so much for this world—all to bring The Reestablishment to its knees. All because she cared so much about this planet, and the people in it.
I feel suddenly ill.
What I hate, perhaps more than anything else, is that it doesn’t stop. The demands on her body never stop. It doesn’t seem to matter what side of history we’re on; good or evil, everyone asks for more of her. Even now, after the fall of The Reestablishment, the people and their leaders still want more from her. They don’t seem to care that she’s only one person, or that she’s already given so much. The more she gives, the more they require, and the quicker their gratitude shrivels up, the desiccated remains of which become something else altogether: expectation. If it were up to them, they’d keep taking from her until they’ve bled her dry—and I will never allow that to happen.
“Aaron.”
Finally, I meet her eyes. “I meant what I said, love.” “I was hideous.”
“You have never been hideous.”
“I was a monster.” She smiles as she says this. “I had that huge gash in my arm, the skin on my hands had split open, my nose wouldn’t stop bleeding, my eyes wouldn’t stop bleeding. I even had a freshly sutured finger. I was Frankenstein’s monster. You remember? From that book—”
“Ella—please— We don’t have to talk about this—”
“And I couldn’t stop screaming,” she says. “I was in so much pain, and I was so upset that I wouldn’t stop bleeding, and I kept saying the craziest things, and you just sat next to me and listened. You answered every ridiculous question I asked like I wasn’t completely out of my mind. For hours. I still remember, Aaron. I remember everything you said to me. Even after I passed out I heard you, on a loop, in my dreams. It was like your voice got caught in my head.” She pauses. “I can only imagine what that experience must’ve been like for you.”
I shake my head. “It wasn’t about me. My experience doesn’t matter—” “Of course it does. It matters to me. You don’t get to be the only one who worries about the person you love. I get to do that, too,” she says, breaking away to better look me in the eye. “You spend so much time thinking about what’s best for me. You’re always worried about my safety and my happiness and the things I might need. Why don’t I get to do that
for you? Why don’t I get to think about your happiness?”
“I am happy, love,” I say quietly. “You make me happy.”
She looks away at that, but when she meets my eyes again, she’s fighting tears. “But if you could marry me however you wanted, you’d choose to do it differently, wouldn’t you?”
“Ella,” I whisper, tugging her back into my arms. “Sweetheart, why are you crying? I don’t care about having a wedding. It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll marry you as you are right now, in the clothes we’re wearing, right where we’re standing.”
“But if you could do it however you wanted, you’d do it differently,” she says, looking up at me. “You’d do it better than that, wouldn’t you?”
“Well— Yes—” I falter. “I mean, if it were a different world, maybe. If things were different for us, if we had more time, or more resources. And maybe one day we’ll have a chance to do it over again, but right now all I
—”
“No.” She shakes her head. “I don’t want to do it over again. I don’t want you to look back on our wedding day as a placeholder for something else, or for what might’ve been. I want us to do it right the first time. I want to walk down an aisle to reach you. I want you to see me in a pretty dress. I want someone to take our picture. I want you to have that. You deserve to have that.”
“But—how—”
I look up, distracted by the sounds of movement, voices. A crowd of people is swarming, moving toward us. Nazeera and Brendan lead the charge; Lily and Ian and Alia and Adam and James and Castle and Nouria and Sam and dozens of others—
They’re all holding things: bouquets of flowers and covered trays of food and colorful boxes and folded linens and—
My blood pressure seems to plummet at the sight, leaving me dangerously light-headed. I take a sharp breath, try to clear my head. When I speak, I hardly recognize my voice.
“Ella, what did you do?”
She only smiles at me, eyes shining with feeling. “How did you find so many flowers? Where—”
“All right,” Winston says, holding up his hands. He sniffs, twice, and I see then that his eyes are red. “No more divulging secrets. We’re done here.”
Kenji, I notice, is looking determinedly away from all of us.
He clears his throat then, still staring at the sky when he says, “For what it’s worth, bro, I tried to get her to tell you. I don’t approve of this whole surprise-wedding nonsense. I told her—I said, if it were me, I’d want to know.” Finally, Kenji meets my eyes. “But she wouldn’t listen. She said it had to be a surprise. I said, You’re going to go back to your room tonight smelling like paint, and he’s going to know! The man is not an idiot! And she was like blah blah blah he’s not going to know, blah blah blah, I’m the queen of the world, blah blah—”
“KENJI.”
“What?”
Ella’s fists are clenched. She looks like she might punch him in the face. “Please. Stop speaking.”
“Why?” Kenji looks around. “What’d I say?”
“Paint,” I say, frowning as I remember. “Of course. I thought you smelled like something faintly chemical last night. I wasn’t sure what it was, though.”
“What?” Ella says, crestfallen. “How? I thought you were asleep.”
I shake my head, smiling now, though mostly for her benefit. Ella’s guilt is palpable, and multiplying quickly.
“What was the paint for?” I ask.
“Nope!” Winston claps his hands together. “We’re not doing that right now! You guys ready to get started? Good. Kenji and I will lead the way.”
