HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
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EVERETT AND I STAYED UP ALL NIGHT. TALKING. NOT TALKING. Remembering that we had a place in each other's hearts. And for the first time in a long time, I remembered what it was about him I had originally felt. I had grown to love him for who he was, really.
But then the winter had come between us. And I had let so many other things — not he, only I —force us apart. Now I could see that some of the decisions I pretended weren't mine were. It was my decision whether to trust him. Whether to let him in. Whether to love him.
The next morning, we both needed to rectify our actions with Cole. As Mark had said, the more Everett acted like a jerk, the harder Cole was going to fight for me. And the more I shut Cole out, the harder he'd fight his way back in. We decided that we would take Cole to the Survivors' City — only after double-checking to make sure that every Survivor inside the walls still had a beating heart and so there wasn't be a would-be vieczy in the presence of a human. We would let him be a part of this, if only for a little while.
We roused Cole and gave him a chance to get dressed. He met us a few doors down from the inn for breakfast. When he got there, he saw us at a corner booth, the two of us on one side, waiting for him. I saw it in his mind the way he saw it, and it hurt him. A lot.
When he got to the table and saw it was set only for three, suddenly, he became wary.
"Just us?" he asked.
"Just us," I said. "Is that okay?"
"It is with me," he said, eyeing Everett.
"Then we're all good," Everett said.
"Are you going to send me back, kicking and screaming?" he asked as he began to look over the list of egg dishes.
"Nope," Everett said matter-of-factly.
Cole raised an eyebrow, set down the menu, and said, "You've got my attention."
HALF AN HOUR LATER, AT THE EDGE OF TOWN, I GRABBED COLE AND TOOK OFF running. He stumbled when I put him down, dizzy and disoriented from the speed.
I turned to him once he was steady. "Okay, you and I are going to stay here. Everett's going to see if Mark has checked everyone. We're pretty sure no one is at risk of turning into anything unpleasant when exposed to a human, but the only way to know for sure is to make sure everyone's got a heartbeat. Then we'll go in, but you need to stay close. Most of them will have never seen a human before. Got it?"
"Got it," Cole said.
"Back in a few," Everett said, bounding the walls.
