Awake

Chapter Forty-Three - The Sound of Hearts Breaking

You couldn't bury bodies in Subterra. You couldn't hold funerals, it turned out. All you could do was cart the corpses away to a specific place and from there, Carmen was informed, they would be taken care of. Quite what that meant, nobody seemed clear.

The grief was raw still, painful in her throat and her chest. It felt as though her heart were being squeezed in a vice, slowly crushed, each beat against the pressure agonising and ineffectual. Her tongue weighed heavy in her mouth, resisting food and speech.

It was not unfamiliar. Carmen had, after all, grieved before. But it had been so long, so long, since someone she loved had disappeared. So long since she'd witnessed the demise right before her eyes. So long since it had been so close to home.

  Ashley shouldn't have died. The certainty of that was unarguable. Ashley, who was young and sweet and bright and kind, should not be dead. Someone should have saved her. No, not even that. Carmen should have saved her.

  Carmen closed her eyes and it wasn't Ashley's body she saw, not her corpse. It was an old memory, hazy round the edges, from back before she had gone to sleep. Ashley looking younger, if possible even more innocent. Big eyes. Russet curls. Long eyelashes brushing her cheeks.

The memory was dreamlike but indisputable. The way Ashley had looked, the way she had smelled, the way her skin and her hair had felt under Carmen's fingers. The way she had tasted.

  Carmen hadn't realised that she had started crying again but there were tears on her face now, hot, burning. Her eyes felt raw from them. She seemed to have an ocean inside of her, one that would never quite run out. It went on forever, a hundred lifetimes' worth of tears.

  How unfair that that memory, of all memories, had not surfaced until now. There was no reason for it to remain hidden, no reason even for Ashley to never have mentioned it, except that she was scared.

  Of course she was scared. It was illegal on two counts. She had every right to be scared.Then again, Carmen couldn't help thinking of the look on Ashley's face when she appeared that first morning outside Carmen's cell. The hug. The bright smile. The laugh. She had thought Ashley was just over excitable but maybe...maybe she'd been ready to mention it. Until Carmen looked at her and didn't know her at all.

And then she had remembered, when it was too late, when it was useless, when she was holding Ashley as she died. The universe played cruel jokes on all of them, but this was perhaps the worst Carmen had ever known. All the clues had been there, and she'd been too blind to see.

  And Ashley was dead.

Ebb lay back against Sandy's chest, his head resting in the crook of the older boy's collar bone. He was still bandaged up, still unable to walk, but Cass had demanded him out of the medical bay.

"You can be looked after elsewhere," he had snapped, "and other people can't."

So here he was now, half-lying on his own bed in his own unfamiliar cell, leaning against Sandy. He wasn't quite sure how he had ended up in this position. Sandy had been helping him get as far as his cell – a painful experience, not one to be repeated – and somehow they had reached this point.

Ebb could feel Sandy's heartbeat through his back, feel his chest rise and fall, feel his breathing brush over the top of Ebb's head. It was reassuring, in a way. Certainly, it was more comfortable than leaning against the wall.

"I'm sorry," Sandy mumbled.

Ebb sighed deeply. "Eighty-seven."

"What?"