“No, I’m just saying you’re wrong about all the girls liking me instead of you.”
“I don’t care if girls like me, especially my sister.”
Rocco sighed. “Shame. It’d be harder for you to leave if someone prettier than me asked you to stay.”
“You haven’t asked me to stay.” I rose from the bench as the bus appeared on the horizon. “And you’re moving to Devon anyway. It’s not like you’ll never see me.”
“Yeah, but...”
The bus drowned Rocco out, unnaturally loud as it rumbled up the street. I threw my bag over my shoulder and looked for him, but he was gone, and time seemed to tumble forward at breakneck speed, careening through weeks and months and years until my surroundings made no sense. The landscape. The people. Why was Rocco in Helmand?
I moved towards him, barging through the chaos of Camp Bastion as mortar fire fell around us, but I wasn’t a Marine anymore. I was something else—something I’d never be able to explain even if I didn’t die trying to cross the camp to reach him.
“Folk.”
He said my name, his Norfolk accent as broad as mine had been before special forces selection knocked it out of me.
Play the grey man, soldier. Be forgettable.
Rocco had never been forgettable. I heard his laugh tangled with Asher’s as they stole boats from the harbour and threw traffic cones at passing police cars. I watched him shy away from the few teachers who noticed how clever he was when he wasn’t too busy chasing girls.
I watched his face fade as I found myself hurtling from Afghanistan to Yemen. From Sudan to Syria with no time to breathe in between.
“Folk.”
He said my name again. In the desert, the Arab sun beating down on us. I looked up and there he was, his feet in the sand, but he had no face. It had rotted away, ropes binding his arms, burned skin peeling from his body. Dead, but still tied to the world, screaming my name.
Begging.
Pleading.
But for what? The last time he’d begged me for anything it had been to save myself, not him, because he’d needed me. And he needed menow, but as fast as I ran towards him, I—I couldn’t reach him. I never reached him, and he died?—
Because you left him.
NOW
I gasped awake, rolling from the couch and reaching for a weapon, cold sweat coating my skin, my pulse beating out of my ears.
Rocco. Rocco. Rocco.
My knee hit the coffee table—Iknewit was the coffee table. I knew where I was. But I kept reaching for that gun, my shaking hands finding nothing but air, and I tripped over my feet before I got a hold of myself.
Heart thundering, I pressed my hands over my ears, willing the blaring noise away, the whistling static of the radio embedded in my brain. But I knew this feeling—it wasn’t going anywhere until I did, and I was in motion again before I made a conscious decision.
My bike keys were still in my pocket. I stamped into my boots and ran from the house, on the road so fast my head spun hard enough for me to wonder how it was still on my shoulders. Or why it wasthisbeach I rode to. The one I’d brought Ivy to yesterday after school, to swim in the sea pool in her lilac wetsuit, the last time before the water got too cold.
I abandoned my bike where I’d left it the day I’d found Decoy here, and the beaten-down sadness in his gaze had hurt so much I’d been grateful to him for giving me something to care about again. I still cared. About him, about Ivy. Aboutmyself. Beyond the numbness, I knew that.
But I needed relief. A reset before the healed parts of me broke again and the choice was no longer mine to make.
I scaled the cliff path.
And this time, without Viktor to stop me, I broke my promise.
I jumped.
5