WILL I EVER TELL ANYONE about Jenna and Xander—explain it all?
I don’t know. I don’t know if knowing everything—no matter how happy it made Xander at the end—really helps.
Or even if it does, if anyone would believe me.
Anyway, I’m not sure if knowing that survivors are hybrids—that part of them comes from another planet, even if it is paired to this one—would be a good thing for Shay and the other survivors. Some people are still pretty weird about how different they are: imagine what they’d make of that?
Besides, even though she doesn’t say it out loud, I know Shay somehow needs to believe that Xander did what he did to save her. And I know that isn’t true.
Xander must have worked things out after finding out about the bond between Jenna and me—she had to be somewhere, but she’d vanished from our planet. He must have guessed that if he became like Jenna, eventually they’d destroy him like they did her, and he’d escape to another world. Though I’m not sure being dissolved was in his plans.
So I’ll keep what Jenna showed me to myself.
But it seems comforting somehow to think that this Earth we live on found a way to protect itself—that we evolved in a way that would prevent us from triggering another big bang, either accidentally or on purpose. I hope that the changes survivors have been making in people now, to make them immune, don’t affect that—even as I’m glad my mum, my brother, and I were all immune.
As for now, there is still something I have to do. Jenna and I need to say goodbye.
We’re closer than I could ever be to anyone else—I know this. She even finally shared with me who she was before she ended up in Shetland. She’d been in one foster home after another. Some horrible things happened to her, and she ran away. Runaways and others from shelters were gathered up by Xander’s followers and ended up as subjects in Shetland.
My memories of Shetland were hidden by Xander and Cepta so thoroughly that even though I know the truth now, it’s foggy, like a movie I’ve watched instead of something that happened to me.
But I know I was there, with Jenna—that’s where we met. We’d talk and hold each other in the night to stop being so scared. Even then it was like we’d always known each other—now I sort of understand why. When Jenna reached out to me, she was out of time—every when, she said—so it was kind of like she’d always been in my life.
Xander had been so sure I’d be a survivor like he is. He’d convinced me to sneak out and meet him that morning I went missing in Killin; then he’d convinced me Mum had said I was to go with him. I started to question this and ran off into the woods when we stopped for gas. That was when Shay saw me. But Xander found me on the road—he knew where I’d be. He was a survivor, after all.
And I was taken to Shetland, like Jenna was, to be experimented on.
And he was so disappointed when I wasn’t a survivor, when I was immune instead—and most of all, that he was wrong. He shipped me off to Cepta to tinker with my mind so I’d forget it all.
I would have, if it hadn’t been for Shay and Jenna.
Jenna and I have shared fear. Horror. Joy. And Jenna is still here, right now, just out of reach. She’s always there.
Yet in her murmurs in my dreams, and near waking, Jenna agrees: it must be this way. We both know it’s time. It’s better for Jenna, better for me too. We can’t live anything like normal lives, not tangled together the way we are.
Goodbye, she whispers.
“Goodbye, Jenna,” I answer her. “I hope you will be happy now.”
She pulls away. There’s a sense of us both letting go, of solitude—one I can’t remember having felt before. I panic and want to call her back.
But it’s too late. She’s gone.
I get out of bed, pull the curtains. The stars are bright in the sky. Is Jenna out there somewhere I can see?
There is silence, pure and true, in the night, in my mind. Shay taught me how to block survivors like Kai can. Now that Jenna is gone too, my mind is completely my own. For the first time in my whole life, no one can see my thoughts or make me think what they want.
I’m not sure who I am, completely alone like this—like pages no one can write on but me.
It’s scary. It’s lonely.
But it’s also amazing.