Chapter 69 Chemistry class

Chapter 69 Chemistry class
Sera's Pov

Tobias came out of the room Wren laid unconscious with his hands in his pockets and his face neutral.

"Her vitals are stable," he said before anyone could ask. "Whatever the marks are doing, they're not accelerating. Her body is resting. She's not in immediate danger, yet."

"Not immediate?” Maera repeated carefully.

"That's what I said."

"That's not the same as safe."

"No," Tobias said. "But it's what we have right now. So everyone needs to stop crowding this corridor and let her sleep."

The night ended with everyone dispersing to their separate corners of the camp.

I couldn't sleep.

I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and watched the marks on my arms glow faintly in the dark and thought about three bloodlines living inside one body and wondered which one was eventually going to decide it didn't want company.

Maera came for me before sunrise.

"Up," she said from the doorway.

"I haven't slept." I looked at her. "You're serious."

"When am I not?"

I got up before I got an earful of her scolding.

The training clearing had been reconfigured overnight. I didn't know when she'd done it or whether she'd slept at all, but the usual setup was gone, it was replaced with something that looked significantly less forgiving. More distance between targets. Less room for error. A second row of markers I didn't recognize laid out across the far end.

"What are those?" I pointed.

"Your new problem," she said.

"Maera, I need five minutes to—"

"You don't have five minutes," she cut in. "That is the entire point. The Blood Moon is not going to wait because you need five minutes. Whatever came out of you last night is not going to politely pause while you collect yourself." She looked at me steadily. "You have to start now. You push until I say stop. You don't ask me for time we don't have. Are we clear?"

I held her gaze for a moment, trying so hard not to crash out.

"Crystal clear," I said.

"Good. Go, go, go."

She pushed me harder than she ever had. Every time I thought I'd found a way she moved it. Every time I flagged she gave me three seconds and then pulled me back. The marks on my arms reacted to all of it, flaring bright when I pushed the power forward, dimming when I pulled back, like they were mapping themselves to whatever I was learning alongside me.

"Stop forcing it," Maera called from behind me. "Stop trying to make it perform and let it show you what it actually does."

"That makes no sense."

"It will when it works. Go again."

By the time she finally called a break I was on my knees in the dirt with both hands flat on the ground and my entire body convinced that standing up was someone else's problem.

I reached for the water at the corner of the clearing.

And then I heard footsteps that weren't Maera's.

"She went inside," Caden said.

He crossed the clearing and sat down about two feet from me. For a moment neither of us spoke.

"You used to hate chemistry."

I stared at him. "I'm sorry?"

"At school. You sat two rows ahead of me in third period." He looked at the treeline like this was a perfectly normal conversation. "Every time Mr. Harlan started talking, you looked personally offended by the man's existence."

I blinked. Of everything I expected from this conversation.

"You remember where I sat in chemistry?"

"I remember a lot of things."

"That's a strange place to start."

"Probably." He turned the water bottle between his hands. "Everything that actually needs to be said feels too big right now. So I'm starting with chemistry and hoping we get there eventually."

Against my own better judgment, something in my chest loosened.

"I didn't hate chemistry. I hated Mr. Harlan."

"Everybody hated Mr. Harlan."

"He mispronounced my name every single class for an entire semester," I said. "Every class. Like it was a policy."

"It was on purpose," Caden said. "I always thought it was deliberate."

"Obviously it was deliberate. He told me to my face that I wasn't academically rigorous enough."

“What the hell?” Caden turned to look at me. "He said that to you?"

"Third week of school. Just dropped it like it was fact."

"What did you say?"

"Nothing." I exhaled. "Because I was scared of everything and I didn't know yet that I was allowed to push back." I paused. "I would say something extremely different now."

"I believe that," he said.

It was obvious, like there was nothing complicated about it, and that was what got me.

"I kept your notes," he said.

I frowned. "What notes?"

"Junior year biology. You left a folder on your desk one afternoon and I picked it up and then you—" He stopped. Tried again. "You stopped coming to class. And I kept meaning to give it back but you were never there and then the year ended and I still had it." He looked at his hands. "I still have it."

I stared at him for a long beat.

"Caden."

"I know it's strange. I'm not trying to make it into more than it is. I just couldn't throw them away." He said the last part quietly, like he was confessing to something small that had somehow grown too big to explain. "That's all."

I watched his face.

He wasn't angling for anything. He'd said it the same way he'd said everything else this morning, like it was simply true, like I deserved to hear it. The laugh came out before I could stop it.

One short, completely involuntary sound.

He looked at me immediately. "What?"

"Nothing." I pressed my lips together. "It's just, you kept my biology notes. Of everything that has happened in the last year. That somehow made the list."

“I'm glad it made the list," he chuckled along.

"Don't read into it."

I shook my head and looked away from him and that was the exact moment he moved. His hand came up toward the left side of my face where a strand of hair had pulled loose and was stuck to my cheek and his fingers were almost there—

He stopped his hand in the air. Then he lowered it back to his side like it had never happened at all.

Then Terry's voice called out loudly, it startled us. Then two others I didn't immediately place. Then footsteps approached us quickly.

I was on my feet, I turned toward the camp entrance. And I saw him.

He looked thinner. Moving with stiffness that told me everything about the last six days without a single word. But he was alive.

"Dad!"