Fire & Ash (Rot & Ruin) by Maberry Jonathan

Author:Maberry, Jonathan [Maberry, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2013-08-13T05:00:00+00:00

58

JOE TURNED AND WALKED INTO the hangar. Grimm was right at his heels. Riot and Lilah exchanged a glance, then followed. Benny paused, touching Nix’s arm. He didn’t like the wild look in her eyes.

“You okay?”

“Oh, sure,” she said tightly. “I’m just fine. I shouldn’t even be surprised. After everything that’s gone on with Charlie and the Hammer, Preacher Jack, Mother Rose, Saint John . . . I don’t know why I don’t just give up on believing in people.”

“I know why,” said Benny.

She gave him a long, cold look. “Oh really? Why?”

“Because we’re people. Your mom was a good person who never hurt anyone. Tom died trying to help people. That guy George who spent all those years taking care of Lilah and her sister. The Greenman. Guys like Solomon Jones and Sally Two-Knives and everyone who helped destroy Gameland . . . they’re people. Eve is a person. So is Riot, and she was raised to be a monster. She left all that behind, and for the last few years she’s done nothing but risk her life to help people. They’re good people, and that’s what I believe in, Nix. That goodness exists and that it’s powerful. And I think that’s what you believe in too.”

She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against his chest. “But there are so many of them. Look at what they’ve done. They destroyed the whole world. . . .”

“No,” Benny said softly. He hooked a finger under her chin and gently raised her face. “Not the whole world. And not the best of it.”

Nix’s mouth trembled and she hung there at the edge of tears, pinned to the moment by the enormity of Joe’s words.

“I can’t live in a world like this,” she said. “I can’t live if everything’s broken and there’s only pain.”

“No,” agreed Benny, “neither can I. So let’s live in a better world than that.”

She suddenly wrapped her arms around him, and they clung to each other.

“Promise me,” she begged.

“I promise,” he said.

As he held her, Benny looked into that promise. It was a simple enough thing to say in the heat of heartbreak and tears. But he knew as he said it that this was going to mean more to him than anything else. Something shifted inside his head and his heart, like a switch being thrown on some machinery that had been carefully built but never turned on. He wasn’t sure, then or ever, what powered that machinery. Maybe love, maybe hate, maybe a moral outrage so hot that it caused gears to turn and motors to combust.

There are such moments in a life. Solitary seconds on which the reality of what life means pivots and turns from a dead end toward a road of untrodden grass that stretches on forever. It was a moment in which the words he said aloud and the whispers of his inner voice spoke in perfect harmony. And Benny knew thereafter that he would never hear that inner voice as a thing separate from himself.

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