I don’t know how long I’d been in the vaults before that, but after he’d left, I had a second lease on life.
A second chance.
And with it, I’d asked to go to the floor in the vaults that had given me a chance at freedom.
I’d asked to go to Anarchy.
I opened my mouth to speak when Umbra voiced the words I’d been about to.
“Wouldn’t be here without you.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “None of us would.”
I stared at him, frowning, parsing through what he could mean by that.
“Without the information you gave us, we’d be dead and she’d be…” He trailed off, gaze lingering on Shatter, a shadow crossing it for a moment.
I remember so little of that conversation.
Just the scent of poison. The insanity. The way speaking to him had taken me back to a worse place than even the vaults: to the white walls and flickering lights of a centre where alphas came to die. To be animals. A place I’d survived only because a scientist had taken an interest in me, and how my eyes might affect the experiments done.
I took a breath trying not to let it drown me, catching Crescent’s golden eyes peering at me from the seats of the van, as if she’d sensed my tenseness.
I looked back at Umbra, who’d lived one of those stories, too. I held out my hand. “Even, then?”
The tension within the pack bond slowly unwound as the van took off down the highway.
Not completely.
I noticed Sin kept shooting glances through the rear window, as if expecting sirens to start blaring to drag us back.
Karma held Crescent in the crook of his arm. She was still shell shocked, but occasionally nuzzled his chin, and he’d calmed down further in the bond. Phantom was on her other side, and I was in the back row of seats with Sin.
I’d told myself I needed to hold on until we were safe, but now we were hurtling away from the prison, I still couldn’t take my hand from my side, pressing against my wounds occasionally to make sure I stayed alert.
The bandages, at least, were secured well, and there was no more bleeding to soak the seats of the van.
Time started to behave a little oddly, the world blurring occasionally, and the conversation around me jumping topics as if I was missing pieces.
At one point I felt warmth, and glanced up, eyes focusing on a hand pressed to my shoulder. Sin was steadying me. I think he’d said something.
“I’m alright…” My words were weaker than I’d meant.
“You want to rest…?”
I shook my head, though when I blinked, I was leaning against him. His arm had come around my shoulders to steady me.
From here, I could see into the rows of seats before me.
“I might have…” Shatter’s voice floated in. She was leaning over her seat, and rummaging in her backpack. I watched as a pencil case spilled onto the floor of the van. “Oh… bother,” she muttered, glancing up at Dusk. “We don’t even have snacks. I told you we should have packed more?—”
“They said it was urgent,” Dusk snorted from the driver’s seat.
“It’s okay,” Ransom said. “We’ll get somewhere safe, then we’ll sort out food and clothes.”
“I did bring my spares…” I heard a rummaging and the pull of a zip, and then Shatter leaned around the seat she was in to press a pencil case into Crescent's hands as if that was a very normal thing to do.
And what did I know? I’d never been a part of polite society.
Crescent stared at it for a long moment, and I could see worry flash in her eyes, as if she didn’t know what to do with it. But before anyone could intervene, she relaxed, a smile lighting her face as she unzipped it. She was handing back fistfuls of pencils and pens to a very startled Shatter before digging in her pocket.