Sever (The Chemical Garden #3)(29)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

The earth is shaking under my feet.

The next explosion comes. And another, and another, and another.

I can feel the heat of the flames, the perfect morning appearing rippled and distorted by it. I’m coughing when I turn around to watch the burning building that just moments ago was the Lexington Research and Wellness Institute.

The crowd is absolutely wild.

They’re glad.

That word they’re chanting with such passion is “Rowan.”

He did this. High up on the third story, a window shatters, barely audible in all the chaos. Something that was once a piece of wall lands before me.

Jared is pulling me back by the elbows, and I’m too numb to resist. Too stunned.

When we’re far enough away, Jared lets go and I just stand there in the dirt, watching the destruction and the celebration intertwine, until I can’t even tell which is which.

If Linden were here, he’d be telling me to breathe. I try to remember the motions of inhaling and exhaling. I try to slow my heart, because I’m sure it’s going to burst through my ribs.

“Now do you see?” Jared says into my ear. “Whoever your brother once was, he’s beyond your control now.”

That brings me back to myself. I shake my head. “No, he’s not,” I say.

I run forward, and Jared doesn’t come after me this time.

My brother has stepped down from his makeshift stage. The crowd is everywhere. They don’t notice me, because on the outside I’m no different from any of them—a victim of the new generation, a kid in someone else’s clothes with dirt on her hands. When people are in large groups, they lose what makes them human.

But I see him now. He’s got his eyes shielded from the sunlight as he admires his handiwork. There’s a girl wound around his arm, and I recognize her as the girl from the news, who stood beside him as he gave his speech about his dead sister. She seems fascinated by the sight of him now, though he’s paying more attention to the flames.

When I call his name, it’s a sound almost entirely out of my control. It soars over the crowd and hits him. Even from where I’m standing, I can tell that he recognized my voice. Hastily he unwinds himself from the girl, stands to attention like an animal sensing danger. And I try to call him again, but that word, that name, was all I had the energy for. I barely have the strength left to stand.

I wait helplessly for him to find the sound, and when he does, when his heterochromatic eyes meet mine, my mouth forms the word again, but just barely. The girl at his side disappears. The crowd blurs into senseless shapes and colors. I can’t feel my heart or my body or the heat of the flames.

I can only see his face—his bewildered, beautifully familiar face.

Chapter 18

THE MONTHS FALL to shards at my feet. My legs move as though kicking to be free of them. I’m all arms and legs, all motion, and I can’t move fast enough.

He catches me just before I’d crash into him. Grabs my arms, stares at my face, at my quivering mouth. His eyes are like mine and not like mine at all. They’re sharper now than I remember. He’s gotten taller, and I think so have I.

He opens his mouth, but before he can utter a word, I say, “Don’t try to tell me I’m dead. I’ve heard that so many times, I can’t stand to hear it again.”

He tries to speak, but only a little cry comes out of him, like the inflection of grief I heard when he spoke about me on the news, and then he’s pulling me to his chest and I’m throwing my arms around him.

He’s shaking, and his breaths are hot sobs going down my neck, and I’m trying to say, “It’s okay. I’m here now; it’s okay,” but I’m sobbing too.

Reality is beckoning us to return to it. I hear the crackle of the flames and I hear a stranger’s voice saying his name, asking him what’s going on. But I don’t want to return to that world. I don’t want to answer its questions and face what my brother has done.

Which is why I’m surprised to be the one to ask him, “What did you do?”

I bunch his shirt—his flimsy, dirty shirt that reeks of ashes—in my fist. His collarbone is pressed against my cheek, so close that it hurts, but I don’t pull away.

“I can explain,” he says. “I can explain everything.”

“Rowan,” another voice persists. His name sounds so alien on her tongue.

He moves away from me, but wraps his arm around my back and squeezes me to his side. “Bee,” he says to the wild-eyed girl. “This is my sister.”

I can’t tell from her expression as she looks me up and down whether she wants to spit at me or stare right through me like I don’t exist. “The dead one?” she says. “Or is there another sister you haven’t told us about?”

And that’s when he draws away so he can look at me, and everything disappears around us again. “I thought you’d been killed,” he says.

“I heard what you said on the news,” I say. “None of that is true. None of it.”

“But I—” He looks at the girl, Bee, and back to me again. “I don’t understand. I was sure. I talked to a doctor who saw you. Saw your eyes. And he knew the date that you disappeared, your name, that we’re twins.”

I can’t bring myself to say his name out loud, that awful name that seems to follow me wherever I go.

“Reporters will be here soon,” Bee says. “Wanna speak to them?”

“There’s no time for that,” Rowan says. “We have to get back.” He looks over my shoulder, and I turn to see Jared standing at a distance, watching us. And now Rowan is looking at Jared the way the wild-eyed girl looked at me.

“I have to go,” I tell Jared. “Thank you for the ride.”

“You’re sure?” he says.

I nod. “Tell Linden and Cecily—tell them that when they make it back to Reed’s, I’ll come and visit them.” I’m struggling to keep my voice steady, because I don’t know if what I’m saying is the truth. I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again. But I’m thinking of what Cecily said to me that night at Reed’s. We have our own lives to take care of, and there’s only time to do so much with them. I know she was right. I know that she belongs with Linden and that I belong with my brother, with my family. “And, Jared? Promise me they’ll be safe.”

“Sure,” he says.

He turns into the crowd, and I cry after him, “Tell them both that I love them.”

Jared waves over his head without looking back.

Rowan does not ask where I’ve been, just like I don’t ask why he burned down our house or what course of events led him to be here, in the backseat of this hundred-year-old convertible that’s being driven by a young man who seems nearly as wide with muscles as he is tall. That will all come later.

The driver eyes me as coldly as Bee, who is still glaring at me from across the backseat.

I feel as though I’m in a strange dream. My brother is my Eden, but something’s amiss. There’s something dark lurking behind the picture of this beautiful valley of waterfalls and lilies. But I don’t want to acknowledge it. I want to be frozen here, where everything can be pretend-perfect, where I’m safe and Rowan’s safe.

I pretend this year apart hasn’t changed everything. I pretend that his eyes don’t have some of the coldness I saw in that of his new friends.

The speakers and the assemblage of stage pieces were packed into the trunk, which is tied down with lengths of twine. My brother didn’t have to lift a finger; he had fans in the crowd who were more than happy to help him. As he led me to the car, he didn’t introduce me to any of them; he held my wrist and led me behind him, either protecting me or hiding me, or both.

He’s become some kind of rebel celebrity. One girl asked if she could touch him, and then without asking she gripped his hand and shook it with desperation. She said he’d changed her life, and he thanked her and said he preferred that she admire his work rather than his person.

His work. Destroying the very thing our parents stood for.

And again I feel that darkness lurking. But if I look closely at him, I can see the pink around his eyes from the tears that ceased the moment we broke our embrace, and I know it’s not like Jared says. The sunlight breaks in his hair that’s every kind of blond, like mine. He isn’t gone from me. Rowan can never be gone from me.

“We’re home,” Bee says as the car pulls up to a pile of rubble that was formerly a house. She hangs on Rowan’s arm until he looks at her. She smiles at him, strokes his cheek with the back of her finger. “Should we rest before the doctor shows up?”

He regards her with only vague interest. “You two should go inside. I’ll be along eventually.”

“Sir?” the driver says. His voice is deep and menacing, even with that simple word.

“It’s fine,” Rowan says.

It’s with hesitance that they get out of the car, looking over their shoulders, not making their suspicion of me a secret. I should look away, but I watch them because I’m dumbfounded as to where they are going to go. The house has crumbling walls that barely come to their waists, and there’s nothing resembling a roof. All around us is a dead cornfield and the remains of what was once maybe a barn and a silo. The muscular one crouches down, undoes a padlock, and lifts a board that’s hinged to the ground, and they descend the staircase it reveals.

Rowan squeezes my hands.

“It’s like you’re back from the—” He cuts himself off.

“I have been trying—” My voice fails me. I clear my throat. “I’ve been trying to find you. I saw what happened to the house.”

He shakes his head, looks at our hands a moment longer, and then lets go and reaches past me to open my car door. “Let’s go for a walk,” he says.

There’s a cool breeze that rustles the brittle cornstalks. Our steps sound like crumpled paper.

“So this is your home now,” I say.

“I keep telling Bee not to use that word,” he says. “This is just a temporary base. We’ve only been here a month or so. We go where we’re needed and try to stay hidden.”

I stoop to pluck a blade of grass and toy with it so that I have something to do with my hands.

“I want to ask you where you’ve been,” he says, walking at an even pace with me and looking ahead. “I’ve believed the worst, but you seem as though you’ve been well.”

Well. I’ve endured the blackness of a Gatherer’s van, was married off to a stranger. I’ve been poisoned and swept up in hurricane winds. I’ve watched as a girl I cared for lay dying with her head on my knees, a girl whom my brother, who once knew everything about me, will never meet. I wore a wedding band, and I’ve had needles in my eyes.