Sleep drifted over me slowly, but as I was exhausted I couldn’t resist its pull. I floated away into the black, and soon I was gone.
Again, I didn’t dream. It seemed as if no time even passed between the closing of my eyes and their opening again. I was still in the dark, thinking a second that I was home and then finding to my disappointment that I wasn’t. Would I ever wake up again and not think that everything previous had been a bad dream? I sighed, rolling over.
There was a dim light shining under my door, unnaturally turquoise.
It didn’t move like someone walking by with a flashlight. I didn’t know if I should be worried—it hadn’t been there when I’d gone to sleep. And now I wasn’t going to fall back asleep because I’d already spent too much time concentrating on it. So reluctantly, but with some curiosity, I slid my feet to the floor and walked to the door. I peered around the corner of my doorframe.
Callista was sitting on the carpet at the end with her back against the wall. Her face was illuminated by a multitude of softly glowing nightlights, one in each plug going across the floor—six in all on both sides. She was absently flicking a cigarette lighter in her hand, letting the flame pop for a second before killing it and starting over. She didn’t appear startled by my emergence, turning her head up at me.
“It’s past your bedtime,” she said in a low voice. No malice though.
“You’re the one who’s sitting out in the hall,” I replied. When she didn’t seem suspicious, I stepped outside. She leaned her head into the corner. Flick. Flick. The tiny flame kept flashing and disappearing.
“Where’s Thad?” I asked.
“Sleeping,” she replied. Flick.
“You’re not tired?”
Callista shrugged passively. “I don’t sleep easily.”
I glanced across the curious line of nightlights, their bulbs casting little glowing circles on the floor and tall ovals on the walls. I had no idea where she’d gotten them from, unless she’d somehow collected them from the bathrooms. I didn’t feel right just leaving her there, so I walked across and slid to sit a few feet from her against the opposite wall.
“You can’t sleep?” I questioned, rubbing my eyes. “It’s got to be super late by now.”
“I don’t like nighttime that much,” she said. “Insomnia.”
“You can take something for that,” I offered, trying to be as considerate as I could, to make up for earlier. “We can get you some sleep aid tomorrow.” Or Valerian Root, as my mom would have corrected.
“That won’t help,” Callista replied. At first I thought she’d stop there, then she shrugged.
“Actually,” she said, “I’m tired, but…well, it’s hard to sleep in the dark now.”
Immediately, her face told me that she regretted saying that, though it’d tumbled out in her exhaustion before she could catch it. I figured out the scene at once. From her position pressed in the corner of the room, to the lights that protected her in a soft circle, it hit me all at once that Callista was afraid of the dark.
That came as a shock. Callista was the most brutal of us all—she’d taken down a plane! But the anxiety on her face was real.
I slid down to sit until my feet touched the opposite wall, at a loss for what to say. In the low lights, though, I watched her relax slightly, now that I didn’t look to be leaving anytime soon. Her finger stopped and she set the lighter next to her. Thoughts of our fight were still swirling in the air.
“I’m sorry for earlier,” I said. It was hard to say the words but I managed to wrestle them out.
She didn’t reply. So we both sat in the empty quiet, listening to the sound of the air conditioner. I let my head rest behind me.
“Wyck came at night,” Callista broke the silence. I opened my eyes. She was staring straight ahead.
“If I’m in the dark, I start to see their faces,” she continued. “My mind makes shapes with the dark and they just slip out. Sometimes it’s my family, sometimes it’s him. That’s why I don’t like the dark.”
I said nothing. Inside, I felt arrows going through my chest.
“He didn’t have to kill them,” Callista said. “But he did it anyway, to make a point to me. He wanted to break me down so I wouldn’t fight them later.”
Her gaze remained distant. When I dared to venture a look at her eyes, it was almost like I could see a movie of the horrible night she’d gone through playing behind their pupils.
Guilt crept upon me. I still had my family. How could I have dared to think that I’d given up anything when I still had something to go back to?
I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but I couldn’t just leave her sitting there like that so I turned around, switching to the other side of the hall to sit closer to her, a safe five inches between us. At first she looked at me as if wondering what I was doing, but when I settled down she relaxed again. She didn’t push me away at least; that was good.
But again, more quiet. More wordless novels being spoken between us by our breathing. The silence composed a sonata of loss.
I absently studied her resting hands, the skin uninterrupted by lines or cuts that should have marked where the scales would emerge. Just an eternity of skin that continued up her arm and to her neck and disappeared where her hair began.
She looked uncomfortably tense. Suddenly I had an urge to reach across the four or five inches between us, to touch her shoulders and try to ease the anxiety out of her with my thumbs. Seeing her bent over made me ache. And it just looked like she needed that.
But I wasn’t brave enough, and I figured she’d recoil and ask why I was being ridiculous if I tried. Thad maybe could have, if he was there. They’d been stuck together for days before I’d even arrived, and in our situation that was almost like years. He felt like her brother, and I still felt like an outsider.
I let the inches remain, and crossed my hands so they wouldn’t wander away against my will. I just wanted her to feel better.
“Do you want to know a secret?” I said abruptly. Callista gave a half grin, her head still resting and eyes closed. It was almost a whole grin, but she suppressed it; I didn’t mind because her attempts were telling.
“Alright,” she said, playing along.
“So, when all this started,” I said, scooting down on the wall so that my head was level with hers, “I was with one of my friends, and we found a newspaper article about you…dying.”
Of all things, to bring that article up. So I deflected quickly.
“It had your picture,” I said. “And when I pulled it out, the first thing from my friend’s mouth was something like, “That’s a shame, she was hot.”
Callista couldn’t hold in the hiss of laughter that escaped when I said that. It came out as a snort through her nose, and that ridiculous sound made me chuckle too.
“I mean,” I went on, “he’d just found out you were dead, and he was sad because he thought you were hot. That was the worst thing in the world to him.”
She couldn’t wipe the grin off her face, because even when she pulled one corner down it went up when she pictured the scene again. I felt a thrill just watching her struggle. Success…
She shook her head at me in a scolding way, finally opening her eyes to glare at me. “You’re ridiculous.”
“You thought it was funny,” I told her, and she didn’t argue. The way she rolled her eyes away grabbed my attention. I’d never actually been that close to them since she’d come out of my dream, so I found myself almost enthralled by their blue infinity. She caught me staring.