Even If We Break by Marieke Nijkamp

Author:Marieke Nijkamp [Nijkamp, Marieke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2020-09-14T18:30:00+00:00

Eighteen

Maddy

Here’s the thing. I never quite know if I’m responding the “right” way to anything happening around me. Should I be more scared? Should I be angrier? Should fear immobilize me? What happens around me and how my brain responds to it are two entirely different things, and I can’t tell all the time how they’re connecting.

But the grief is raw and angry and freezing cold.

Do I know what Thief means?

Does it matter?

Finn and Ever are whirlwinds of emotion right now. Intense, overwhelming, and inescapable. I hate it. I don’t have a healthy way to deal with them. I don’t know how to. And with Ever and Finn as broken as I am, their feelings are all the more inescapable. I’m cold.

Focused. Breaking.

Carter would’ve been fine if he hadn’t gone in to help me.

We’re getting out, that’s what we’re doing. Everything else is secondary.

We have to stay close to one another.

I should’ve kept Carter close. I should’ve stopped him.

But somehow that makes it worse too.

We’re all breaking, and I really want to dull the pain. All I want to do is to make it stop.

The pain from my knee sneaks its way up my leg and into my resolve. I’ve walked these stairs a few too many times today. I walked up a mountain today. I can hardly remember it.

And Finn’s question keeps nagging at me.

“You know what the notes mean, don’t you?” he says, persistent.

I bite my lip. “Not now, please.”

“Is this something Carter did?”

“I don’t know what’s happening! We have to keep going. Now is not the time for this. If the door has closed, we’ll be locked in.”

The same pounding noise keeps coming from the direction of the door. It’s weirdly visible, a dimly lit outline where a sliver of moonlight falls into the cabin. It’s the next level stage of a video game, or the hints you get when you play in more accessible modes.

I beeline toward it—and immediately crash my knee into a chair that I could’ve sworn wasn’t there when we walked in. The pain is sharp and angry. “Frack.” I can feel myself start to lose control of my breathing, and it’s like I live on the edge of panic now—or the edge of anger.

There’s a black hole inside my chest, and everything gets slowly pulled into it.

Carter’s determination when he went back in to get my painkillers.

The first time Liva invited me here, and the blue room she decorated specially for me.

The laughter that somehow got lost between all of us.

Our joy. Our adventures. Feeling like we could save the world.

Everything tears at me, and I don’t know how to respond to any of it anymore.

“Maddy? Are you okay?” Ever reaches out a hand to me, and I allow it. For a second. But instead of making me feel better, I want to take the chair and hurl it through the room. I want to take Ever and scream at them, not because of anything they did, but because of everything I did.

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