| lest we ever forget | life is like a tangled dream | we'll take this way too far |
| counting up the lines on the highway | go tell the world that I'm still alive | sing me anything you want |
scale the walls around my heart | let me hold your hand | even in the darkest night |
we'll take this way too far
They are not children. Shift never bothers to explain this, never points out to their targets that they were brought down by adolescents and younger. She just digs in the knife, cuts the wires, and washes the blood off her hands before keeping vigil by the beds of her own.
She loves these men and women in their child bodies, loves them because they're
hers, and she'll protect them with everything she is: all her fierceness, all her strength. She cradles them in her arms and whispers truths into their ears to block out the nightmares.
This wasn't our choice. We'll make it out. It wasn't your fault. You're
alive.They look at her with ancient eyes. They are not children, but their hands are clean of blood. She washed them herself.
go tell the world that I'm still alive
They all think that Mirage is dead. She slips out of silence and failure to communicate to drop beside her brother at his campfire. He is not surprised, and she has never expected less of him. She would have been disappointed had he not known she would come.
"Kalien," he rumbles softly in a man's voice.
The last time she heard him speak, he was a boy, scrawny but strong and protective. He wrapped himself around her when she could not protect herself.
She places her palms on her knees and kneels before the fire, a promise to keep her abilities to herself and away from causing him harm. "Kiernan," she says, respect in her tone because he is the one person left she has any for.
His name was Rett and her name was Anna to the man who abused them so badly. His name is Storm and her name is Mirage to the ones who know them now. But between each other, they have always gone by the names their mother gave them.
He stares at her with dark eyes, unreadable. She would think less of him if she saw unmitigated affection. He leans forward, breathes, "Sister."
She waits a moment, a beat of a heart, a crackle of flame. "Brother," she answers with a warmth in her voice she will only ever save for him.
scale the walls around my heart
Rachelle reads each entry as Justus casts them aside, paper forays into the Word of a God he wishes he could stop believing in.
Justus was raised unlike Rachelle. He was raised to right and wrong, good and bad, and he still has a conscience that bruises him for all the things he's done.
She reads this journal he is writing to his God about every word of this Book he is reading again, every argument in which she recognizes Shift's dark resignation, every scattering of Justus' own stubborn hope. And there she finds the description of a virtuous wife and stops cold when she sees what Justus thinks of her.
Rachelle is
not virtuous by her own understanding. She is not a good woman in the eyes of this world that has treated her harshly and been treated harshly in return. She is not a good daughter, not a good
anything but perhaps a sister, and here Justus writes that she will do him good and not evil all the days of her life, that she is the blessing he has received from all that has happened.
She doesn't know what to make of it, and she is no romantic, but when she sinks down onto the bed beside him that night, she brushes gentle fingers over his sleeping face and feels a flare of something soft and protective and wholly unlike the fierce, harsh way she has guarded him before. She wonders if this is what others call in love.
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