He thought about this. “No. I want my mother to stay with you. Then I’ll come back too.” The answer seemed to satisfy him. “Do you like Rose?”
I hesitated. “Yes. Although . . . it’s more than that. It’s kind of difficult to explain.”
Dennis nodded sagely. “That’s okay. You can try now. She’s standing right behind you.”
I spun around. Rose met my eyes, flushed red, and looked away again just as quickly. As Dennis left us alone, she wandered over to the perimeter wall, tiptoeing the edge.
“Planning to jump?” I asked, joining her. The sheer wall plunged into stacked boulders. Waves lapped against them.
“No. Just realizing how much water there is in the world.” She crouched down, hair blown about in the wind, and tightened the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. “It’s strange, but I’ve never really thought about water until now. It just existed, like my element. Now I realize what I’ll lose if I let it all go.”
I suspected this wasn’t just about water and her element. “Dennis is going to be all right.”
“Only if my mother comes around. And I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
She raised a hand and I helped her up. We wandered past the rows of plantings. When we reached an open area, she laid her blanket on the ground. “Stay with me?”
I put my water canister down and lay beside her. Side by side we stared at evening sky.
“Do you trust the Guardians now they’ve told us everything?” she asked.
“If they’ve told us everything. That’s the problem, I guess. We’ll never know.”
“True. I heard Alice and Tarn arguing outside the main gate during dinner. They stopped when they saw me, but I don’t think Alice trusts her mother anymore.”
“I’m not sure she trusts anyone anymore.”
“You’re probably right.” Rose sighed. “Do you trust Chief?”
Maybe it was the way she asked, her voice uneven, but the question felt awkward. “Why are you asking?”
She glanced toward the battery steps before continuing. “As soon as you all left today, he stopped what he was doing and disappeared. One moment, he was tending to the goats. The next, he’d gone. I kept an eye out for him, but didn’t see him until a couple strikes later. He was coming out of the room that Jerren says he’s never seen.”
“The gunroom, he called it.”
“Exactly. It might mean nothing,” she added hurriedly. “Or it might be important.”
I almost wished she hadn’t told me that. “I don’t know who to trust, Rose.”
She tilted her head toward me and smiled. “Yes, you do. You can trust me.”
She’d rolled up the sleeves of her tunic, revealing her bare arms. The skin was slightly pink, sunburned, but perfectly smooth. I ran a finger along her right arm and she stiffened momentarily, then let out a long breath. I was relaxed for once, and the discomfort she’d braced for wasn’t there. She shuffled closer to me so that our bodies were touching.
“What does it feel like, your element?” Her words were tiny breaths punching the air. I felt them as much as I heard them.
“Like tiredness. Like ache.” I propped my head up on my arm. “Used to, anyway. It’s not as bad now, but I wish it would fade faster.”
Rose didn’t hide her disappointment. “I don’t want to lose my element. When we were on the ship, I couldn’t tell for sure that the water was fresh. We might’ve gotten sick. Someone might’ve died. And I would’ve felt like it was my fault.”
“You can do other things—”
“Anyone can do other things, Thomas. That’s not the point. I don’t see what’s so wrong about being special.”
I let my finger slide off her arm. “Being here with you . . . I couldn’t have done that at Roanoke.”
“I guess so. But you could learn. Like you learned to channel your element.” She bit her lip. It looked nervous and cute all at once. “Would you do it to me? Take over my element, I mean.”
Just thinking about it sent me back to our last night on the ship—how I’d seized control of Ananias’s apologetic sparks and propelled them into flames. How I’d sent a man to his death.
“Hey,” she whispered. “It’s all right.” She stroked my cheek as if she were calming a wild animal. “Everything is all right.”
She reached for her canister and sniffed the contents, challenging herself to connect with water the way she used to. But she couldn’t do it. I could see it in her eyes.
Before I could change my mind, I wrapped my arms around her and focused on the water inside the canister. My pulse was quick, but as long as I focused on the water, the energy surged right through her.
Rose didn’t pull away.
I could feel her regaining control of her own element, forcing the liquid out of the canister in a slow, perfect arc. She opened her mouth, ready to drink. Her eyes shone with the miracle of it. At least until the water touched her lips. Then I sent a rush of power that spattered the liquid across her face.
She gasped. “You . . . pig!” She tried to brush the water off her suddenly wet tunic, then burst out laughing instead. “I was actually thirsty!”
“So try picking up the canister with your hands. It’s what I’ve been doing all these years.”
I meant for it to come out as a joke, but it fell flat. Maybe deep down, I kind of meant it.
Rose lifted the canister and drank. “You’re right,” she said. “It works this way too.”
She lay back down then, wet tunic and all, and reached for my hands. She dragged my arms across her. “It’s your job to keep me warm now. You know, since you’re the one who got me wet.”
She held my hands and pressed them against her chest. I couldn’t decide what was more amazing: the feeling of holding her, or that she’d forgiven me for being stupid.
We were still after that. Nothing but our breathing and heartbeats to tell us apart. Concentrating so hard on my element had left me tired. My pulse wasn’t racing anymore.
“I felt you, Thomas.” Rose swallowed hard. “Felt your element running through me. It was gentle and warm. I was controlling the water, but you were controlling me.” She closed her mouth, then opened it again. Her breaths were fast and shallow. “There was no pain. I . . . I liked it.”
For a moment, the words hung between us. They were more than words, though. In them was a promise.
There was so little distance between us. I studied the arch of her eyebrows and the way the breeze toyed with her hair, each loose strand silhouetted by the setting sun. As she played with the glass pendant around her neck, her hands shook.
Rose lifted my hand to her cheek. I ran my fingers over every part of her face and lips. She closed her eyes, and I closed mine, and when our lips came together it felt completely natural. I still half expected her to pull away, for closeness to shift toward pain. But the energy, or adrenaline, or fear, or whatever usually came between us wasn’t there this time.
I ran my hand behind her head and pulled her closer. Kissed her over and over, madly, fumbling for everything at once. She dragged me on top of her and I felt her legs and her chest. The moment I’d dreamed of was finally—impossibly—here.
I was as alive as I’d ever been.
CHAPTER 22
We woke up as the sun rose. My clothes were damp from the grass and I was sore from the hard ground. Cold too. Rose and I came together for a moment and shared body heat while I ran my fingers in slow circles around the small of her back.
A strand of hair fell across her face, so I eased it away. Eyes still closed, she batted at it as if it were an insect. I couldn’t help smiling. There was something so instinctive about it. I was reminded that everything had felt that way until a couple weeks ago.