“Aaron?” I say again, this time softly. “Are you all right?”
He blinks, startled. “Yes,” he says, drawing in a sharp breath. “Yes. Yes, I’m perfect.”
I manage a small smile. “I’m glad you finally agree with me.” He frowns, confused, and then, as realization hits—
He blushes.
And for the first time in weeks, a full, genuine grin spreads across my face. It feels good. Human.
But Aaron shakes his head, clearly mortified. He can’t meet my eyes. His voice is careful, quiet when he says, “That’s not at all what I meant.”
“Hey,” I say, my smile fading. I take his hands in mine, squeeze. “Look at me.”
He does.
And I forget what I was going to say.
He has that kind of face. The kind of face that makes you forget where you are, who you are, what you might’ve been about to do or say. I’ve missed him so much. Missed his eyes. It’s only been a couple of weeks, but it feels like forever since the last time I saw him, a lifetime full of horrible revelations that threatened to break us both. I can’t believe he’s here, that we found each other and made things right.
It’s no small thing.
Even with everything else—with all the other horrors we’ve yet to contend with—being here with him feels like a huge victory. Everything feels new. My mind feels new, my memories, new. Even Aaron’s face is new, in its own way. He looks a little different to me now.
Familiar.
Like he’s always been here. Always lived in my heart.
His hair, thick and golden and beautiful, is how I remember it best—Evie must’ve done something to his hair, too, somehow. And even though he looks more exhausted than I’d like, his face is still striking. Beautiful, sharp lines. Piercing green eyes so light and bright they’re almost painful to look at. Everything about him is finely crafted. His nose. His chin. His ears and
eyebrows. He has a beautiful mouth.
I linger too long there, my eyes betraying my mind, and Aaron smiles.
Aaron. Calling him Warner doesn’t feel right anymore. “What are you doing, love?”
“Just enjoying the view,” I say, still staring at his mouth. I reach up, touch two fingers to his bottom lip. Memories flood through me in a sudden, breathless rush. Long nights. Early mornings. His mouth, on me. Everywhere. Over and over again.
I hear him exhale, suddenly, and I glance up at him.
His eyes are darker, heavy with feeling. “What are you thinking?”
I shake my head, feeling suddenly shy. It’s strange, considering how close we’ve been, that I’d feel shy around him now. But he feels at once old and new to me—like we’re still learning about each other. Still discovering what our relationship means and what we mean to each other. Things feel deeper, desperate.
More important.
I take his hands again. “How are you?” I whisper.
He’s staring at our hands, entwined, when he says: “My father is still alive.”
“I heard. I’m so sorry.” He nods. Looks away. “Did you see him?”
Another nod. “I tried to kill him.” I go still.
I know how hard it’s been for Aaron to face his father. Anderson has always been his most formidable opponent; Aaron has never been able to fight him head on. He’s never been able to bring himself to actually follow through with his threats to kill his father.
It’s astonishing he even came close.
And then Aaron tells me how his father has semi-functional healing powers, how Evie tried to re-create the twins’ DNA for him.
“So your dad is basically invincible?”
Aaron laughs quietly. Shakes his head. “I don’t think so. It makes him harder to kill, but I definitely think there’s a chink to be found in his armor.” He sighs. “Believe it or not, the strangest part of the whole thing was that, afterward, my father was proud of me. Proud of me for trying to kill him.” Aaron looks up, looks me in the eye. “Can you imagine?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “I can.”
Aaron’s eyes go deep with emotion. He pulls me close. “I’m so sorry, love. I’m so sorry for everything they did to you. For everything they’ve put you through. It kills me to know that you were suffering. That I couldn’t be there for you.”
“I don’t want to think about it right now.” I shake my head. “Right now all I want is this. I just want to be here. With you. Whatever comes next, we’ll face it together.”
“Ella,” he says softly.
A wave of feeling washes over me. Hearing him say my name—my real name—makes everything feel real. Makes us feel real.
I meet his eyes.
He smiles. “You know— I feel everything when you touch me, love. I can feel your excitement. Your nervousness. Your pleasure. And I love it,” he says quietly. “I love the way you respond to me. I love the way you want me. I feel it, when you lose yourself, the way you trust me when we’re together. And I feel your love for me,” he whispers. “I feel it in my bones.”
He turns away.
“I have loved you my entire life.” He looks up, looks at me with so much feeling it nearly breaks my heart. “And after everything we’ve been through
—after all the lies and the secrets and the misunderstandings—I feel like we’ve been given a chance to start fresh. I want to start over,” he says. “I never want to lie to you again. I want us to trust each other and be true partners in everything. No more misunderstandings,” he says. “No more secrets. I want us to begin again, here, in this moment.”
I nod, pulling back so I can see his face more clearly. Emotions well in my throat, threaten to overcome me. “I want that, too. I want that so much.”
“Ella,” he says, his voice rough with feeling. “I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”
My heart stops.
I stare at him, uncertain, thoughts pinwheeling in my head. I touch his cheek and he looks away, takes a sudden, shaky breath.
“What are you saying?” I whisper.
“I love you, Ella. I love you more th—”
“Wow. You two seriously couldn’t wait until we got back to base, huh?
You couldn’t spare my eyes?”
The sound of Kenji’s voice pulls me suddenly, abruptly out of my head. I turn too quickly, awkwardly disengaging from Aaron’s body.
Aaron, on the other hand, goes suddenly white.
Kenji throws a thin airplane pillow at him. “You’re welcome,” he says.
Aaron chucks the pillow back without a word, his eyes burning in Kenji’s direction. He seems both shocked and angry, and he leans forward in his seat, his elbows balanced on his knees, the heels of his hands pressed against his eyes.
“You are a plague upon my life, Kishimoto.” “I said you’re welcome.”
Aaron sighs, heavily. “What I would give to snap your neck right now,
you have no idea.”
“Hey—you have no idea what I just did for you,” Kenji says. “So I’m going to repeat myself one more time: You are welcome.”
“I never asked for your help.”
Kenji crosses his arms. When he speaks, he overenunciates each word, like he might be talking to an idiot. “I don’t think you’re thinking clearly.”
“I’m thinking clearer than I ever have.”
“You really thought that would be a good idea?” Kenji says, shaking his head. “Here? Now?”
Aaron’s jaw clenches. He looks mutinous. “Bro, this is not the moment.”
“And when, exactly, did you become an expert on this sort of thing?”
I look between the two of them. “What is going on?” I say. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Nothing,” they say at the same time.
“Um, okay.” I stare at them, still confused, and I’m about to ask another question when Kenji says, suddenly:
“Who wants lunch?”
My eyebrows shoot up my forehead. “We have lunch?”
“It’s pretty awful,” Kenji says, “but Nazeera and I have a picnic basket we brought with us, yeah.”
“I guess I’m up for trying the contents of the mystery basket.” I smile at Aaron. “Are you hungry?”
But Aaron says nothing. He’s still staring at the floor. I touch his hand and, finally, he sighs. “I’m not hungry,” he says.
“Not an option,” Kenji says sharply. “I’m pretty sure you haven’t eaten a damn thing since you got out of fake prison.”
Aaron frowns. And when he looks up, he says, “It wasn’t fake prison. It was a very real prison. They poisoned me for weeks.”
“What?” My eyes widen. “You never t—”
Kenji cuts me off with the wave of his hand. “They gave you food, water, and let you keep the clothes on your back, didn’t they?”
“Yes, but—”
He shrugs. “Sounds like you had a little vacation.”
Aaron sighs. He looks both annoyed and exhausted as he runs a hand down the length of his face.
I don’t like it.
“Hey— Why are you giving him such a hard time?” I say, frowning at Kenji. “Just before he and Nazeera showed up you were going on and on about how wonderful he is, and n—”
Kenji swears, suddenly, under his breath. “Jesus, J.” He shoots me a dark look. “What did I say to you about repeating that conversation out loud?”
Aaron sits up, the frustration in his eyes slowly giving way to surprise. “You think I’m wonderful?” he says, one hand pressed against his chest in mock affection. “That’s so sweet.”
“I never said you were wonderful.”
Aaron tilts his head. “Then what, exactly, did you say?” Kenji turns away. Says nothing.
I’m grinning at Kenji’s back when I say, “He said you looked good in everything and that you were good at everything.”
Aaron’s smile deepens.
Aaron almost never smiles widely enough for me to see his dimples, but when he does, they transform his face. His eyes light up. His cheeks go pink with feeling. He looks suddenly sweet. Adorable.
It takes my breath away.
But he’s not looking at me, he’s looking at Kenji, his eyes full of laughter when he says, “Please tell me she’s not serious.”
Kenji flips us both off.
Aaron laughs. And then, leaning in—
“You really think I look good in everything?” “Shut up, asshole.”
Aaron laughs again.
“Stop having fun without me,” Nazeera shouts from the cockpit. “No more making jokes until I put this thing on cruise control.”
I stiffen. “Do planes have cruise control?”
“Um”—Kenji scratches his head—“I don’t actually know?”
But then Nazeera saunters over to us, tall and beautiful and unbothered. She’s not covering her hair today, which I suppose makes sense, considering it’s generally illegal, but I feel a faint panic spread through my body when I realize she’s in no hurry to return to the cockpit.
“Wait— No one is flying the plane,” I say. “Shouldn’t someone be flying the plane?”
She waves me down. “It’s fine. These things are practically automatic now, anyway. I don’t have to do more than input coordinates and make sure everything is operating smoothly.”
“But—”
“Everything is fine,” she says, shooting me a sharp look. “We’re fine. But someone needs to tell me what’s going on.”
“Are you sure we’re fine?” I ask once more, quietly. She levels me with a dark look.
I sigh. “Well, in that case,” I say. “You should know that Kenji was just admiring Aaron’s sense of style.”
Nazeera turns to Kenji. Raises a single eyebrow.
Kenji shakes his head, visibly irritated. “I wasn’t— Dammit, J, you have
no loyalty.”
“I have plenty of loyalty,” I say, slightly wounded. “But when you guys fight like this it stresses me out. I just want Aaron to know that, secretly, you care about him. I love you both and I want the two of you to be frien—”
“Wait”—Aaron frowns—“What do you mean you love us both?”
I glance between him and Kenji, surprised. “I mean I care about both of you. I love you both.”
“Right,” Aaron says, hesitating, “but you don’t actually love us both.
That’s just a figure of speech, isn’t it?”
It’s my turn to frown. “Kenji is my best friend,” I say. “I love him like a brother.”
“But—”
“I love you, too, princess,” Kenji says, a little too loudly. “And I appreciate you saying that.”
Aaron mutters something under his breath that sounds suspiciously like, “Unwashed idiot.”
“What did you just say to me?” Kenji’s eyes widen. “I’ll have you know I wash all the time—”
Nazeera places a calming hand on Kenji’s arm, and he startles at her touch. He looks up at her, blinking.
“We have another five hours ahead of us on this flight,” she says, and her voice is firm but kind. “So I recommend we put this conversation to bed. I think it’s clear to everyone that you and Warner secretly enjoy each other’s friendship, and it’s not doing anyone any good to pretend otherwise.”
Kenji blanches.
“Does that sound like a reasonable plan?” She looks around at all of us. “Can we all agree that we’re on the same team?”
“Yes,” I say enthusiastically. “I do. I agree.” Aaron says, “Fine.”
“Great,” Nazeera says. “Kenji, you okay?”
He nods and mumbles something under his breath.
“Perfect. Now here’s the plan,” she says briskly. “We’re going to eat and then take turns trying to get some sleep. We’ll have a ton of things to deal with when land, and it’s best if we hit the ground running when we do.” She tosses a few vacuum-sealed bags at each of us. “That’s your lunch. There are water bottles in the fridge up front. Kenji and I will take the first shift—”
“No way,” Kenji says, crossing his arms. “You’ve been up for twenty-four hours straight. I’ll take the first shift.”
“But—”
“Warner and I will take the first shift together, actually.” Kenji shoots Warner a look. “Isn’t that right?”
“Yes, of course,” Aaron says. He’s already on his feet. “I’d be happy to.”
“Great,” Kenji says.
Nazeera is already stifling a yawn, pulling a bunch of thin blankets and pillows from a storage closet. “All right, then. Just wake us up in a couple of hours, okay?”
Kenji raises an eyebrow at her. “Sure.” “I’m serious.”
“Yup. Got it.” Kenji offers her a mock salute, Aaron offers me a quick smile, and the two of them disappear into the cockpit.
Kenji closes the door behind them.
I’m staring at the closed door, wondering what on earth is going on between the two of them, when Nazeera says—
“I had no idea you two were so intense.”
I look up, surprised. “Who? Me and Aaron?” “No,” she says, smiling. “You and Kenji.” “Oh.” I frown. “I don’t think we’re intense.” She shoots me a funny look.
“I’m serious,” I say. “I think we have a pretty normal friendship.”
Instead of answering me, she says, “Did you two ever”—she waves a hand at nothing—“date?”
“What?” My eyes widen. A traitorous heat floods my body. “No.” “Never?” she says, her smile slow.
“Never. I swear. Not even close.” “Okay.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with him,” I hurry to add. “Kenji is wonderful. The right person would be lucky to be with him.”
Nazeera laughs, softly.
She carries the stack of pillows and blankets over to the row of airplane seats and begins reclining the backs. I watch her as she works. There’s something so smooth and refined about her movements—something intelligent in her eyes at all times. It makes me wonder what she’s thinking, what she’s planning. Why she’s here at all.
Suddenly, she sighs. She’s not looking at me when she says, “Do you remember me yet?”
I raise my eyebrows, surprised. “Of course,” I say quietly.
She nods. She says, “I’ve been waiting awhile for you to catch up,” and sits down, inviting me to join her by patting the seat next to her.
I do.
Wordlessly, she hands me a couple of blankets and pillows. And then, when we’re both settled in and I’m staring, suspiciously, at the vacuum-sealed package of “food” she threw at me, I say—
“So you remember me, too?”
Nazeera tears open her vacuum-sealed package. Peers inside to study the
contents. “Emmaline guided me to you,” she says quietly. “The memories. The messages. It was her.”
“I know,” I say. “She’s trying to unify us. She wants us to band together.”
Nazeera shakes out the contents of the bag into her hand, picks through the bits of freeze-dried fruit. She glances at me. “You were five when you disappeared,” she says. “Emmaline was six. I’m six months older than you, and six months younger than Emmaline.”
I nod. “The three of us used to be best friends.”
Nazeera looks away, looks sad. “I really loved Emmaline,” she says. “We were inseparable. We did everything together.” She shrugs, even as a flash of pain crosses her face. “That was all we got. Whatever we might’ve been was stolen from us.”
She picks out two pieces of fruit and pops them into her mouth. I watch as she chews, thoughtfully, and wait for more.
But the seconds pass and she says nothing, and I figure I should fill the silence. “So,” I say. “We’re not actually getting any sleep, are we?”
That gets her to smile. Still, she doesn’t look at me.
Finally, she says, “I know you and Warner got the absolute worst of it, I do. But if it makes you feel any better, they wiped all of our memories, in the beginning.”
“I know. Emmaline told me.”
“They didn’t want us to remember you,” she says. “They didn’t want us to remember a lot of things. Did Emmaline tell you she’s reached out to all of us? You, me, Warner, my brother—all the kids.”
“She told me a little bit, yeah. Have you talked to any of the others about
it?”
Nazeera nods. Pops another piece of fruit in her mouth. “And?”
She tilts her head. “We’ll see.”
My eyes widen. “What does that mean?” “I’ll know more when we land, that’s all.”
“So— How did you even know?” I say, frowning a little. “If you’d only
ever had memories of me and Emmaline as children—how did you tie it all back to the present? How did you know that I was the Ella from our childhood?”
“You know— I wasn’t a hundred percent positive I was right about everything until I saw you at dinner that first night on base.”
“You recognized me?” I say. “From when I was five?”
“No,” she says, and nods at my right hand. “From the scar on the back of your wrist.”
“This?” I say, lifting my hand. And then I frown, remembering that Evie repaired my skin. I used to have faded scars all over my body; the ones on my
hands were the worst. My adoptive mom put my hands in the fire, once. And I hurt myself a lot while I was locked up; lots of burns, lots of poorly healed wounds. I shake my head at Nazeera when I say, “I used to have scars on my hand from my time in the asylum. Evie got rid of them.”
Nazeera takes my hand, flips it over so my palm is up, open. Carefully, she traces a line from my wrist to my forearm. “Do you remember the one that was here?”
“Yes.” I raise my eyebrows.
“My dad has a really extensive sword collection,” she says, dropping my hand. “Really gorgeous blades—gilded, handmade, ancient, ornate stuff. Anyway,” she says, tapping the invisible scar on my wrist. “I did that to you. I broke into my dad’s sword room and thought it’d be fun for us to practice a little hand-to-hand combat. But I sliced you up pretty bad, and my mom just about beat the crap out of me.” She laughs. “I will never forget that.”
I frown at her, at where my scar used to be. “Didn’t you say that we were friends when we were five?”
She nods.
“We were five and we thought it would be fun to play with real swords?” She laughs. Looks confused. “I never said we had a normal childhood.
Our lives were so messed up,” she says, and laughs again. “I never trusted my parents. I always knew they were knee-deep in some dark shit; I always tried to learn more. I’d been trying, for years, to hack into Baba’s electronic files,” she says. “And for a long time, I only ever accessed basic information. I learned about the asylums. The Unnaturals.”
“That’s why you hid your abilities from them,” I say, finally understanding.
She nods. “But I wanted to know more. I knew I was only scratching the surface of something big. But the levels of security built into my dad’s account are unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I was able to get through the first few levels of security, which is how I learned of yours and Emmaline’s existence, a few years back. Baba had tons of records, reports on your daily habits and activities, a log with the time and date of every memory they stole from you—and they were all from recent years and months.”
I gasp.
Nazeera shoots me a sympathetic look. “There were brief mentions of a sister in your files,” she says, “but nothing substantial; mostly just a note that you were both powerful, and had been donated to the cause by your parents. But I couldn’t find anything on the unknown sister, which made me think that her files were more protected. I spent the last couple of years trying to break into the deeper levels of Baba’s account and never had any success. So I let it go for a while.”
She pops another piece of dried fruit in her mouth.
“It wasn’t until my dad started losing his mind after you almost killed Anderson that I started getting suspicious. That was when I began to wonder if the Juliette Ferrars he kept screaming about wasn’t someone important.” She studies me out of the corner of her eye. “I knew you couldn’t have been some random Unnatural. I just knew it. Baba went ballistic. So I started hacking again.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says, nodding. “Right? Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that I’ve been trying to sniff out the bullshit in this situation for a few years, and now, with Emmaline in my head, I’m finally getting close to figuring it all out.”
I glance up at her.
“The only thing I still don’t know is why Emmaline is locked up. I don’t know what they’re doing with her. And I don’t understand why it’s such a secret.”
“I do,” I say.
Her head snaps up. She looks at me, wide-eyed. “Way to bury the lede, Ella.”
I laugh, but the sound is sad.
