The Always War Read Online Free PDF

bucket and rag in the huge, empty room, all that filthy concrete left to be scrubbed.
This is Gideon’s fault. He killed all those people and he’s the reason I’m crying and he still gets to have some hope….
    Tessa almost dropped her rag. She froze. Was that right? Could she fling the accusation “still has hope” at someone who’d looked as anguished as Gideon had, just about every single moment she’d spent in his presence?
    If he didn’t have any hope, what did he want my computer for on Saturday?
she asked herself.
Why did he want to look at that video? Was he just hoping to destroy me, too? Or …
    She remembered that he’d told her she wouldn’t want to see the video. He’d warned her not to look.
    So why …?
    She remembered how final everything had looked on the computer screen, all those dead bodies, all those lives ended. But evidently it wasn’t finished. There was still something Gideon had wanted to see, some reason he had needed to scan those horrific images again.
    Was there still something he thought he could change?
    Tessa threw down her rag. She left her bucket of water in the middle of the floor and took off running. On alternating steps she thought,
I can stop him,
and
I can help him,
and she didn’t know which one she believed.
    But what if there really was something she could do?
    Then I could be a hero,
she thought, running harder.
A real one. Whether anybody else ever knows it or not.

CHAPTER
8
    Tessa crashed into her room without a fully formed plan in her head. She couldn’t decide if it would be best to crank up her computer and scour every archive she could find—study it all intensely—or if it would make more sense to grab the computer and stalk over to the Thralls and confront Gideon, first thing. She was leaning toward the confrontation, just because it would be faster.
    But what if he lies? What if he just makes up some story, and I don’t know enough to be able to tell if it’s true or false?
    In the midst of scooping up her computer, Tessa paused just long enough to take a deep breath.
    And then she stopped completely.
    Her room smelled like paint.
    Fresh paint.
    Her room hadn’t been painted in years.
    Tessa whirled around, gazing open-jawed at walls she normally didn’t notice.
    There. Just above the bed, in the middle of the wall she now knew lay between her bedroom and Gideon’s, the paint caught the light and glistened, as if some of it wasn’t quite dry.
    And—Tessa studied it more closely—in one wide circle that contained the glistening spots, even the dry paint was a slightly different shade of industrial gray than the rest of the walls.
    Why—?
Tessa wondered.
How—?
    She remembered that a storeroom lay directly below her room. The janitor who occasionally bothered to clean the hallways kept brooms and trash cans in there. It was possible that he had cans of paint there as well.
    Instinctively, Tessa looked down. The battered rag rug that she kept across the floorboards was bunched up, slightly out of place.
    Tessa kicked it aside.
    There, in a spot that had been hidden by the rug before, someone had taken out the nails from a roughly circular area of the floorboards.
    Someone?
Tessa thought.
Oh, no. I know who did this.
    She looked from the circle of fresh paint on the wall to the circle of unattached boards on the floor. She was working on a theory.
    So Gideon wanted to get out of his room without being seen. He cut a hole in my wall, and then pried open a hole in my floor. He crawled through and then tried to erase all signs that he’d been here.
But he couldn’t put the nails back in the floorboards to completely cover his tracks because …
Tessa looked down again. She knew why.
Because he still hasn’t come back.
    Was he going to? Or was he gone for good?
    Tessa hugged her arms against her chest, as if she were capable of comforting herself. She’d forgotten she was still holding the computer, and the cold metal sent a jolt through her system.