Deception | Sequel

Chapter Twenty: For the Rest of My Days

The comforting scent of wet earth coats my lungs like the black soil covering my pale hands. I kneel in the dirt over a freshly transplanted plant and sit back on my heels with a long sigh. The waxy green of the wide, pointed leaves of the plant reflect the warm ambient of the biodome, making it seem to shine.

Somewhere to my left, behind a row of flowering bushes, the hiss of sprinklers turning on fills the quiet. A smile twitches onto my lips. It's never silent in the biodome. There's always a sprinkler, or a rustle, or a twitter from one of the local birds, and occasionally the rustling of artificial wind through leaves. Perhaps that is why I like it here so much now. It is a far cry from that dead-quiet, dim room in Deception's lair.

The quiet tapping of footsteps alerts me to someone approaching and I pull myself from my thoughts, shaking off clumps of dirt from my hands.

Wraith rounds the cobblestone path, a watering can held awkwardly in one hand. She stops and eyes my hands. "You know they have gardening gloves."

The half smile stays on my face as I shrug. "I don't mind getting dirty." Rather, I like the feel of the dirt, the wet coolness of the earth, and the way the smell lingers on my hands long after I leave. To use Dr. Egret's terms, it's my way of grounding myself.

She sniffs, her opinion on the matter clear on her face as she strides forward and places the watering can on the retaining wall just above my head. She folds her arms, looking uncomfortable without her signature grey, black, and purple clothes and bandages wound up her arms. Instead she wears a pale blue long sleeve sweater and loose black pants. Her feet are bare, like mine.

I wave to the spot next to me, and, after a moment's hesitation and a sigh of her own, she tentatively kneels, pulls on gloves, and picks up a trowel. We work in companion silence, a thing that has been increasingly more common since I returned to End and she was accepted soon after.

"Why didn't you blank her?"

I glance at her, arm inside a bag of fertilizer. She frowns over a hole she's dug too deep. "Who?"

Wraith sighs and starts pushing dirt back in. "Deception."

"Ah." Deception's resigned look as she fell away from me flashes in my mind. Stomach clenching, my gaze drops to the waxy plant and I draw my arm out of the fertilizer bag to gently shake the trowel-full of pellets around the plant's base. "I don't know."

The moment is still clear in my head, details down to the way the light glinted off the gun held to my hand and the scratch of her sleeve as she squeezed her arm around my neck. My clothes had stuck to my skin, glued by sweat, and my fingers were stark, bloodless white on her arm. There's no sound to the memory, and it is detached, but it is clear in a sea of blurred and corrupted files of that day. I remember the feel of teetering on the edge of letting go, and the look in Edison's eyes. He'd known what I had been about to do. And was there acceptance in his eyes? Encouragement? Denial? I don't know, but whatever it was...I didn't blank her.

I sweep my fingers through the dirt, feeling the way the wet soil clumps to my skin. "I guess," I say slowly, "because it's a fate worse than death."

Wraith stares down into her hole—now too shallow—hands still and brows deeply furrowed. "She deserved it."

"Don't you see? All I ever do, all I ever have wanted, is to save them!" Her voice cracks at the peak, ringing with emotions so strong and face scrunched in such visible anguish that I almost take a step back. Somewhere down there, I think she believed it, that she was helping us. Does that change whether she deserved the death she got? Or the death she could have had at my hands?

Wraith stops what she's doing and levels me with a narrow-eyed stare, her grip on her trowel tightening. "You can't seriously think she didn't," she says lowly in her raspy, but getting smoother, voice.