Raven: A Delirium Short Story Read Online Free PDF

speak too, her teeth flashing, superimposed over passing images of the city.
    Tack doesn’t say anything for a second. Then I feel his hand on my knee. “I would have done it for you, too,” he says, even quieter. “If you’d been taken. I would have gone back. I would have risked it.”
    I turn to look at him. “You already did come back for me,” I say. I remember that first kiss, and Blue’s warmth between us, and Tack’s lips, dry as bone, soft as shadow. I still can’t say her name, but I think he knows what I’m thinking. “You came back for us.”
     
    Recently I’ve been having the fantasy more and more: the one where Tack and I run away, disappear under the wide-open sky into the forest with leaves like green hands, welcoming us. In my fantasy, the more we walk, the cleaner we get, like the woods are rubbing away the past few years, all the blood and the fighting and the scars—sloughing off the bad memories and the false starts, leaving us shiny and new, like dolls just taken out of the package.
    And in this fantasy, my fantasy life, we find a stone cottage hidden deep in the forest, untouched, fitted with beds and rugs and plates and everything we need to liveg we neo live—like the owners just picked up and walked away, or like the house had been built for us and was just waiting all this time.
    We fish the stream and hunt the woods in the summer. We grow potatoes and peppers and tomatoes big as pumpkins. In the winter we stay inside by the fire while snow falls around us like a blanket, stilling the world, cocooning it in sleep.
    We have four kids. Maybe five. The first one is a girl, stupid beautiful, and we call her Blue.
     
    “Where the hell were you?” Pike’s in my face as soon as we make it back to the warehouse.
    I don’t like Pike. He’s moody and mean and he thinks he can boss me—and everyone else—around.
    I put a hand on his chest, easing him backward. “Get out of my airspace.”
    “I asked you a question.”
    “Don’t talk to her that way,” Tack jumps in, already wound up, ready to go.
    “It’s all right.” I’m suddenly too tired to argue. I keep thinking of Lena’s last words to me. The woman who came for me at Salvage . . . That’s my mother. Did you know? Like I should have known. Like it’s my fault Lena’s mom moved on without a So long, see you later .
    But I know it’s deeper than that. I’ve always thought of Lena as alone, like me. I always saw myself in her a little bit. But she isn’t alone. She has a mother, a free mother, a fighter. Someone to be proud of. She has family.
    I close my eyes and take a deep breath, think of a stone cottage all wrapped in a haze of snow. I open my eyes again.
    “We had to take care of something,” Tack is saying.
    “But we’re all set now,” I say quickly. I glance over at Tack, trying to communicate with my eyes— let it go, drop it, let’s get out of here .
    “We almost left without you,” Pike says, still not ready to forgive us.
    “Give us twenty minutes,” I say, and at last Pike shifts aside and lets us pass.
    The room where we’ve been sleeping has been stripped down: cots dismantled, gear packed up. Everyone’s getting ready to move on. Once the regulators fig . Igulatorure out it was Invalids who sprang Julian—maybe they’ve already figured it out—they’ll do a sweep. They’ll come looking up here eventually.
    There’s no sign of the boy who arrived late last night, the escapee from the Crypts. Young. Quiet type. Barely said a word before falling into bed. He looked like he’d been worked over pretty bad.
    He’s from Lena’s part of the world. I can’t help but wonder.
    “One of my knives is missing,” Tack says. He peels the mattress of the cot away from the frame. That’s where we stash the stuff that matters, the stuff we don’t want other people poking at and looking through. It’s not exactly a hiding place, since everyone does it—more like a boundary. Tack starts going