I step back.
“I’ve been looking for you. Where did you go?”
Earlier, Kayleigh shot Harley a look, and he understood her silently. Now she shoots me one. And I understand. These ideas, these suspicions and accusations—they’re not for Harley. Harley, who counts down the days until he lands, who sees only the happy end result and none of the horror behind dead eyes, the fear of Eldest. Harley, who latched onto Elder as just another kid and never saw him as his future dictator.
Kayleigh saw something dark in me and realized she could share a dark secret. With me. Not him.
As Harley pulls Kayleigh into a kiss, I duck back into the shadows, making my way to my room in the Hospital. It’s twisted, I know, but it fills me with a sort of satisfaction to know that Kayleigh shared something with me that she hasn’t with Harley.
Everything important that has ever happened to me happened at “night.”
But they didn’t find Kayleigh’s body until the next morning.
On the 24,237th day before the ship was scheduled to land, Harley and Elder find Kayleigh in the pond.
Her body is covered in med patches. Doc says she must have plastered them on herself and let the drugs in them lull her into a sleep so deep, she didn’t feel the water fill her lungs as she drowned. Sometime in the night, after I left her, after Harley left her, she went to the pond and killed herself.
Only she didn’t.
Because I know—I know and no one else knows—that Kayleigh’s death was no suicide. She thought of twenty-four thousand days as a promise, just like Harley. And she was piecing together the lies Eldest wove, discovering the truth behind Selene’s dead eyes and forbidden blueprints.
This was no suicide.
And it was no accident.
I watch silently as Doc examines Kayleigh’s body, then orders her to be sent to the stars.
I say nothing as Harley descends into his own spiral of depression. Doc gives him new meds—and I wait for the emptiness I saw in Selene to hollow out Harley, but it seems as if Doc has decided this is a pain Harley must live with.
I avoid Elder. He might be a kid, but he’s the future Eldest.
And whatever Kayleigh died for, it was for a truth that Eldest didn’t want her to find.
I will find that truth. It may take the rest my life to understand what Kayleigh saw in the tangle of lines on the ship’s blueprints, to dredge up some sort of meaning from Selene’s dead eyes, but I will find it.
I don’t care about the truth. I only cared about her. But I will use that truth to destroy Eldest.
I cannot sink into depression like Harley. I’ve seen people look at me—they offer me sympathy for the loss of a friend. None of them know that Kayleigh was more than a friend, at least to me. I cannot mourn her like Harley does. I cannot mourn the love that never was.
I can only scribble in my notebook.
Not poems or lyrics.
Plans.
Revenge.
Kate Espey
The Sunflower Murders
I got to second base with Zachary Feldman the night Tasha disappeared.
Not that disappeared is the right word to describe what happened to her. The newspapers always used words like abduction and murder, but that’s probably because cut up into tiny pieces and scattered across a sunflower field wouldn’t fit on the page.
Anyway, it was pretty awkward explaining it to the police when they questioned us. No, officer. I don’t know where Natasha was at twelve thirty. I was a little preoccupied with Zach’s tongue.
Wow. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I just told you that. It’s not like you don’t already know what happened. Well, not the kissing Zachary Feldman part, but the other one. The Tasha part. The Sunflower Murders.
I remember the first time I heard that name. I was channel surfing maybe a week after they found the third body, and I paused on a late-night news broadcast from Kansas City. Before, they’d called it a double murder, but I guess three’s a crowd so they decided to tack a name onto it.
It still sounds ridiculous to me. Like a bunch of yellow-rimmed flowers finally drew their seeded heads away from the sun and started killing each other.
Honestly, I think the reason they decided to call them the Sunflower Murders had more to do with Tasha than it did with the six teenage bodies strewn across various sunflower fields in the state of Kansas.
Because, I mean, have you seen Tasha? Not the headline, poor-girl-who-got-murdered-by-a-serial-killer-that’s-still-at-large Natasha Robeck. The real deal—sparkly, green-eyed Tasha with freckles sprinkled across her nose and ginger hair falling into her face. She was like a sunflower personified.
Maybe that’s why the guy chose her. I mean, there were other variables, like how she was alone late at night and there weren’t any houses nearby, and the closest streetlamp hadn’t worked properly in three years so she was shrouded in darkness. But the way I figure it is that he saw her, thought she was beautiful like a flower, tried to pick her, and when she withered and died, he returned her to a field of her sisters.
If Tasha were here, she would say it was so like me to try and poetically rationalize murder. Then she’d raise her eyebrows and widen her eyes while she smiled, just like she did in the empty parking lot of the Kroger back when she was two hours premortem.
“Are you having fun?” she yelled.
“No,” I deadpanned, examining my nails. I’d broken one on a bowling ball earlier, and every time I caught sight of it, my stomach twinged with annoyance.
I could hardly see her in the pale glow of the randomly placed streetlights. I sat underneath one, and occasionally Tasha would push the shopping cart she was riding close enough that it would gleam through the darkness. Otherwise, she was all shadows and hints of red hair.
“You know, I bet it’s still going on,” I said, referencing the dance our high school was having. I looked up in time to see Tasha skid her navy blue Converse across the cracked asphalt. She let go of the shopping cart, and it rolled to a stop a few feet away from us. “If we go now, we could probably make it in time for the last song.”
“Ugh, gross.” Tasha groaned. She stepped halfway into the light, and everything but her face was illuminated. “Why would you want to do something so boring?”
“We’ve been standing in this parking lot for the past hour.”
“Yeah,” Tasha admitted. “But that’s because we’ve been trying to think of a good place to put our ball.”
She pointed at my feet, where a neon-green bowling ball was nestled against our bags. We’d stolen it from the Country Lanes bowling center along with four others and placed them at various locations throughout the night. It was our tradition: a sort of delinquent version of a game that started when Tasha and I went through a rebellious phase in seventh grade. Think regular bowling, only outside with fewer lanes and more thievery. Tasha wanted to make the last one count. I wanted to go to the dance and run into Zach.
It’s hard for me to describe what I found so appealing about Zachary Feldman. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about him—he was average looking and a mildly terrible conversationalist. But he appeared to want me, and when you live in a small town, you lower your standards and take what you can get.
There was always that part of my brain that wondered if he was lowering his standards for me, too—if we were caught in some sort of limbo made up of ignored aspirations. But that part of my brain was easy to overlook when I was too worried about how many winky faces I could send in one text message before it became overkill.