I couldn't believe I was doing this.
As I stood at the side of the lake, peeling off my outermost layers despite the cold, I really couldn't believe I was doing this.
Jace looked relatively unfazed, which I had to take as reassuring. He'd done this before and was still alive; that suggested I'd see the same outcome. As he pulled his jumper over his head, revealing a much thinner T-shirt underneath, I studied his demeanour. Instead of fear, I saw confidence: he was surprisingly calm and more at ease than I'd seen for a while.
"What's the best way to do it?" I asked, looking out at the rippling surface of the water. "Slowly, or brave it and jump in all at once?"
He thought for a moment. "I'd like to say the second one, but I haven't quite got the courage for it."
Part of me wondered whether there was a deeper meaning there, but I didn't let myself think too hard. Honestly, I was kind of glad about his answer. Diving right in without time to prepare seemed like too much of a leap of faith, and I wasn't sure I was ready. I was perfectly content with slow steps and steady progress that took us where we needed to be.
With our outer layers piled on the ground, we glanced over at each other and our eyes locked. I felt a flicker of apprehensiveness, and my stomach twisted. The corner of his lip curled into a small smile. "You ready?"
I took a deep breath, letting the cold air fill my lungs, like this would prepare me somehow. "Not really," I said, "but I'm going to do it anyway."
Jace held out his hand, the outstretched offer hovering in the space between us. Instinct told me to hesitate, but after a couple of seconds, I reached out to accept it. From here, it felt like there was no going back.
The water touched my feet first, which struggled to keep a grip on the jagged stone path as it dipped underwater. Just the contact with my ankles had me drawing a sharp breath, and I knew it was going to get worse with every step. We may have known what we were heading into, but that didn't make it any easier to keep moving forward.
Perhaps, sometimes, venturing into the unknown was the easy option.
Hearing my sudden inhale, Jace looked over. He'd left his glasses with the rest of his clothes at the side of the lake, and it was odd to see him without them. It was different here, in broad daylight, as opposed to the dense darkness of his room that first night. Less of an unnerving contrast – something I could see myself getting used to. "How are you holding up?"
I couldn't seem to find the words to string together a coherent sentence, so I just nodded. "I'm okay."
As the water hit our waists, the cold took my breath away. It was impossible to ignore; so much more than a chill in the air, this seemed to penetrate every pore. The tremors racked my body like relentless instinct. I tried to focus on something else, like the cloudless sky overhead, or the mixture of mud and stones I could now feel between my toes. However, as it turned out, the only thing that could even begin to distract me was the guy there with me.
"I'm so cold, I can't even think," I told him.
"Depending on how you look at it, that could be a good thing." He tried to keep his voice steady, but couldn't quite hide the way his teeth were chattering too. "It can be nice to forget, just for a little while."
Not when you're me, I was half-tempted to say. Not when your brain won't let go of anything. Even if I tried to forget the tiniest, most insignificant detail, I couldn't. Whatever escaped my head was only temporary; it would always come back. By now, I'd learnt to live with it.
With the water now approaching my shoulders, I was almost submerged, and everything below had turned slightly numb. It was an odd feeling, but one I kind of welcomed after feeling so much in a short period of time. We were onto something with the slow descent. My body was growing accustomed to the temperature, and despite the part that was still screaming in protest, it was becoming easier to handle.
In a strange way, perhaps this was what I needed.
When the water lapped over my collarbone, I stopped, figuring we were deep enough. I thought Jace would do the same, but he continued wading through – and when he noticed I was no longer beside him, looked back.
"You're not coming?"
"Coming where?" I called back. "I'm not trying to drown."
"That's not what I had in mind," he said. "I was actually thinking more of a proper swim."
My next words, whatever they might've been, caught in my throat. "Oh."
He noticed my hesitation; even from some distance away, I could see the frown furrowing his thick brows. I knew what was coming before the words were out of his mouth. "You can swim, right?"
In any other situation, I probably would've bluffed, but I didn't have that luxury here. It was kind of embarrassing, but swimming was a skill I couldn't claim to have mastered – and in truth, I'd never really attempted. There had been a pool back at the academy – an Olympic-sized one, at that – but it was filled with the type of athletic kids that would've taken one look at me and sneered. Sporting success was engineered, not worked for. I knew I wouldn't be any good at swimming even before I stepped in the water – and therefore there wasn't any reason to bother.
Back at school, we knew what we were good at, and we stuck to it.
My silence served as answer enough. Jace looked incredulous. "You can't swim? Really?"
A ripple caused by his movement lapped under my chin; the instinctive reaction was for my heart to skip a beat, suddenly primed for danger. There wasn't any, of course, but I couldn't stop my body's physical reaction. "Why do you sound so surprised?" I asked indignantly. "It's not that big of a deal."
"I don't know," he said, which was followed by a pause for thought. "I guess it's not a big deal. It's just... not what I expected."
Now I was confused. "What did you expect?"
His mouth opened, but no words came out on the first try. "I don't know," he said again. "I guess I just kind of assumed... the way you were brought up... you'd be good at everything, you know."
"Because of the modification?"
"Well... yeah." He sounded uncomfortable, like he was trying so hard to get his point across without offending. "I mean, I know I can't say much anymore, but I've spent my whole life not knowing. You've always known you had this advantage. I thought you would use it for everything."
"That's not exactly how it works. We each had our specific thing. Mine is my memory, which means I pretty much aced every test I've ever taken. The athletic kids were those in the pool. I'd have embarrassed myself if I went near it."
Jace didn't say anything. It looked like he'd retreated deep in thought, turning this over and over in his mind. It was odd to hear the misconception: what people thought when they weren't up close and personal with modification, when it wasn't part of their daily life. We weren't a breed of super-human, powered to succeed in every way. It was more like our paths had been chosen in advance, which in turn made every step that little bit easier.
I decided to turn the spotlight back to him. "So you can swim? Properly?"
"I took lessons when I was younger, if that's what you're getting at," he said, with a smile. "But I can't claim to be an athlete, or anything close. It's just enough to get me by."
As if to demonstrate his point, he pushed off the bottom, breaking out into a freestyle stroke in the opposite direction. I watched as his body moved through the water – not perfectly smoothly, spraying droplets into the air, but powering him forward all the same.
It wasn't natural ability – it was practice. And yet it was still more than I was capable of.
Once he'd made it a few dozen metres in that direction, he switched, beginning to make his way back to me. I felt slightly stupid, standing there with my feet planted on the bottom, unable to go anywhere.
"You don't have to look so disheartened," he said once close enough, throwing his head back to flick water from his hair. "It's not the end of the world. Unless of course the actual end of the world involves a giant flood, and the only way to survive is to swim for your life..."
By now, he was close enough to shove in the side, so I took the opportunity to do so. "Stop it."
The sound of his laugh rang out, and in some way, it seemed to cause the same kind of ripples as our bodies in the water: once it had escaped, it hit me over and over again. Even without an exceptional memory, it would've been buried in the back of my mind forever. "Sorry. I thought that was funny."
"It's not funny to make fun of somebody's insecurity," I said jokingly.
"Oh, now it's your insecurity?" He raised an eyebrow. "Because a couple of minutes ago, it seemed like it didn't bother you at all."
"That was before I knew you could do something I couldn't," I said, which only made him laugh harder. "I never want it mentioned again."
"Poor little super-human."
I shot him a look – one that I hope conveyed a message along the lines of not amused. "You can't use that anymore," I reminded him. "Not now we know you fall into the same category."
For the first few seconds, he grinned, and the whole thing still seemed like a joke. However, as the next few moments of silence lapsed between us, the humour trickled away. Left in its place was reality, which somehow felt colder than the water itself.
His face had visibly dropped, all traces of the happiness of seconds before now vanished, and my heart sunk. "Are you okay?"
He shook his head. This time, although he tried to pass it off in the same way, it seemed less about the water in his hair and more about the unwanted thoughts in his mind. "Yeah. I'm fine. Just... still getting used to the idea."
"I know," I said quietly.
"I just keep thinking back," he continued. "Back to everything that's ever happened. Everything I've ever achieved, you know, all the times I've done better than expected... and I keep wondering. Wondering if it was really me that did it, or whether I got some kind of unfair boost. It's like I can't trust anything I've done. I feel guilty, even when I don't know the answer."
I didn't know what to say. It felt like my only real option was to keep quiet.
"Do you ever feel like that?" he asked, and I suddenly found myself under the deep scrutiny of his gaze. "Like you don't trust yourself. Like... you don't know who you really are, because every decision you make is part you and part... something else."
"I don't know," I said truthfully. I hadn't ever thought about it in that way before, and it was unnerving to think I should have. "It's not like I've ever known anything different."
"But how do you cope?" he pressed. "How do you live with this knowledge, and not go crazy thinking about it every waking moment?"
"I... I don't know." It was another pathetic answer, which didn't even come close to giving him what he was looking for. "I just... do."
Jace tilted his head back, staring up at the sky, his face creased with lines of distress. "Sometimes I think I'm losing my mind," he said. "I just want answers. I want to know who I am, and what parts of me are real. I want to know why my dad did this. And I want to know why he's out there, going to every length to lock these people up, even though he did the exact same thing to his own son."
The words came out with enough force to scare me; I found myself staring cautiously back at him. It would only take a flicker of anger to ignite something bigger, and the situation could turn dangerous in seconds. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, I felt guilty, but it was true.
"Jace..."
I expected him to cut me off, like he had that night in his room, when the anger had refused to subside. This time, however, he took a deep breath. "Sorry. I'm just having trouble figuring things out. Sometimes it feels better to say it aloud."
"It should," I told him, silently relieved that it hadn't turned into anything more. "It's not healthy to keep it all inside. You need to talk."
I knew I was a hypocrite. Even as the words were leaving my mouth, I was pushing my own problems out of my mind. But Jace didn't have to know that.
"I just want to know the truth," he said. "All this time, my dad's been lying to me. I knew he wasn't the most honest man in the world, but this is on another level. If he lied to me about something this big, how can I trust anything he's ever said? In fact, I don't even know who he is."
More than anything, I wanted to offer an answer that would solve everything, or at least make it seem a little better. But there was nothing I could do. I couldn't insert myself into the intricacies of Jace's family; beyond his father, I didn't know anything about them. We were words apart, in more ways than one, and it was times like these that the distance that seemed to stretch well beyond the physical metres.
"I mean, why would he do that in the first place?" he continued. He seemed to be talking to himself more than me. "I don't understand. It goes against everything I thought he stood for, and I can't imagine a reason in the world that would have driven him to take those kind of measures..."
"It's not an act of desperation," I said quietly. "Sometimes it's... people thinking that's what's best for their unborn child."
"But it's not," he insisted. "How can it be?"
"I don't know." My voice was shrinking, its conviction diminishing with each second. I wasn't sure why my argument was crumbling against Jace's, but it seemed to strike a chord somewhere deep within me. "They didn't know what would happen back then. They had no way of knowing where it would end up."
"I just don't understand," Jace repeated. "Even if I accept the fact my dad seems to be a pathological liar, I still can't imagine that Mum would..."
Like a reflex, the word send a jolt through me. It had never come out of Jace's mouth before – at least not in this personal context. Once or twice before it had crossed my mind, the absence more than anything. Jace and his father were a professional unit, a show of solidarity in the public eye, at least in the beginning. I didn't know how – or where – his mother fitted into the picture. Either Max Snowdon did an exceptionally good job of keeping her hidden, or she wasn't around anymore.
Never before had I thought – or dared – to ask.
Jace noticed I'd picked up on it, and he soon realised what he'd said. For the first couple of seconds, we stared at each other, wallowing in uncomfortable silence, neither of us wanting to make the first move.
Eventually, I cleared my throat. "You've never mentioned your mum before."
This time, there was an even longer pause, long enough to make me wonder whether I'd said the wrong thing. Though my body had since become numb to the water's temperature, I started shivering again.
"I know," Jace said eventually. "There's a reason for that."
The obvious question hung in the air between us, but I wasn't sure whether it was appropriate to ask. It was a sensitive topic, and if I wasn't careful, it ran the risk of sending Jace on another downward spiral. "Is she..." I hesitated, attempting to gauge his reaction midway. "Is she still around?"
"No," he answered sharply. Immediately, I regretted the question, but it subsided somewhat when his next words softened. "She's not."
The pain on his face was excruciating, like even reliving it through words was agonising, and I realised now why we'd never talked about this. I couldn't help worrying he would resent me for pressing in the first place. He'd mentioned the name first, but that didn't mean he was ready to talk.
But then he looked up – and proved me wrong.
"It was a long time ago," he said. "A really long time ago. In fact, I never knew her. She passed away in childbirth."
I felt the stab to my heart, despite lacking any personal connection to the story. Perhaps it was just an extension of Jace's pain, which seemed to reach right across the space and pull me in. I wanted to move closer, to at least try to offer some sort of comfort, but my muscles had locked into place.
"I don't know why it happened," he continued. "I mean, medicine's so advanced nowadays, I haven't heard of anyone dying that way in years. It was a freak accident, and everybody treated it that way. And I guess, in some way, it's easier... because I've never known anything different."
I shook my head. "It's not easy."
Jace sighed. "I don't know. Sometimes I think it's pathetic, how I keep thinking about something that happened so long ago, something I've never even had. But since all this stuff came out about my dad... I just can't help wishing I had somebody else to find hope in."
"That's only natural."
I could see where he was coming from – more than I would've liked to. What Nova had told me about our parents had shook me to the core, and I was still struggling to get a grip on the idea. It didn't seem possible, that the two people you thought would always be fighting your corner were capable of sabotaging everything. I knew how it could shake your world, leaving everything to crumble in the process.
Suddenly, his gaze flickered back to me. "Do you think..." He trailed off, as if trying to gather the right words together. "I don't know, maybe this is crazy – but do you think my modification could've had anything to do with it?"
"What?"
"I'm not sure. I just thought you might have more of an idea – you'd know whether you'd heard of something like that before. And I'm not a scientist, so to tell you the truth, I don't really understand it all. I just thought... could modification have been the reason she died?"
He looked so desperate, like I was his final hope for an answer. I so badly wanted to tell him that this wasn't the case, that I couldn't give him nearly as much as I wanted to, though deep in my heart I wanted to solve his every problem.
"I'm not sure, Jace," I said. "I've not heard of that before, but I don't know everything there is to know about modification. In fact, being here has started to make me realise how much there is I don't know."
I saw the flicker of disappointment, there for a second, though he tried his best to conceal it. The long, drawn-out sigh only made me feel worse. "It's okay," he said. "I just wish I knew more."
"You will. This isn't the end of the road. Think of how much has changed since we got here, how much you've discovered. We had no way of knowing all that back in New London. We have to keep moving forward to get the information we need. It's our only hope."
I hoped it came across as convincing. Honestly, I wasn't sure what I had to back up my words. There was no way of knowing what kind of hope existed here, or whether more information was guaranteed. I had a hard enough time extracting it from Nova already.
"You're right," he said, but it hardly sounded optimistic.
"And I'll help you however I can," I assured him. "I can't promise you all the answers, but I can tell you this: I'll be there whenever you need it, Jace."
Only then did it occur to me how close we were standing in the water. His face was mere inches from mine, and I could see the droplets of water running steadily down his cheek. My eyes followed the path of one in particular, watching as it rolled over the curve of his cheek, sliding past the corner of his lip, before finding the end of its journey at his square jaw. When my gaze returned to his eyes, I realised he was studying my own features with a similar intensity.
Something had shifted between us. I could no longer process anything going on around me: not the beautifully cloudless sky, the sound of birds chirping, even the cold water lapping at my collarbone. The only thing that mattered was Jace, and that had been true for a long time.
"I don't know what I'd do without you, Astrid," he said, his voice low and breathy.
He was leaning closer. "Trust me," I whispered, right before he crossed the final inch, "you won't ever have to find out."
And then, with no further delay, it happened. His wet hands reached up to cup both sides of my face, and our lips collided like the magnetic pull finally became too much to bear. Despite this, the movement was soft and gentle, and for the first time in a long while it felt like we weren't in any rush. The moment was ours, free from intrusion in this private space, completely isolated from the war the world was waging around us.
I wanted to stay like this forever. When it was just the two of us, we could surely handle anything.
Regardless of the origin of our DNA, this was certainly us. And nobody could take that away.
But then we heard the noise behind us, a rustling of branches that somehow managed to sound ominous.
We both heard it at the same time, and it was loud enough to cause us both to pull away. I had my back to the source of the noise, but Jace was facing it head on – and the look on his face was enough to make my heart plummet.
And when I finally summoned the courage to turn around, it didn't get any better.
"What on earth do you think you're doing out here?" Nova asked. She was stood at the edge of the water, her feet just inches away from the pile of our abandoned clothes, which now felt like evidence of our immature recklessness. Even from some distance away, her figure seemed to tower over the lake, like she was staring at us from much higher ground.
Jace moved away from me, but it was already far too late. Just like that, the moment was gone – and I wasn't sure that we'd ever get it back.
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EEEEEEEEEEK. Well, I did a good enough job of building this one up, didn't I? I really hope it lived up to expectations, because I spent a lot of time reading it over and tweaking parts until it felt just right.
SO... thoughts on #jastrid now there has been a big development in their relationship? Are we shipping them? Are we thinking that Jace is still in love with Eden? Are we thinking that there are better candidates? Please please please let me know your thoughts, as I've got my own idea of where the story is going, but it's so interesting to hear whether the readers are thinking along the same lines!
Thank you so much to all the (previously) silent readers who broke their silence on the last chapter and left a comment. I absolutely loved reading them, and you are always welcome to share your opinion.
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I hope this chapter put a little bit of brightness into your Monday. Have a great rest of the week!
- Leigh