Chapter 9

On day four, Jackson brought me coffee. I didn’t ask where he’d gotten it because I deeply suspected the tin of chocolate-brown grounds had been buried somewhere nearby. There were coffee filters in the med kit, which was about par for the course for Jackson’s organization scheme. He produced an ancient coffee pot from somewhere under the sink.

I still had no idea how he’d rigged this place up with running water, let alone electricity, but he had. I didn’t drink coffee, but I made it anyway, and when Jackson tossed a baggie of restaurant sugar packets onto the table, I accepted that offering, too.

Day by day and hour by hour, it was starting to look more like Harry would live. His burns were healing slowly, if at all, but there was no sign of infection yet. I was starting to suspect his head injury might have resulted in more than just amnesia, that there might be neurological damage that affected motor abilities in the lower half of his body. But his cognition was intact, and he was conscious at least some of the time. He could swallow and had only tempted my fury by refusing water once. He’d been in and out of lucidness, and the pain seemed to be getting worse, not better, but his vitals were strong.

He was.

“We can’t keep him here forever,” I told Jackson, my voice low as I dumped the sugar packets out onto the small table between us. The piece of paper from the pocket of my scrubs had long-since been worn to shreds by my folding. I needed something to occupy my hands.

“Keep him?” Jackson snorted. “Why the hell would we want to do that? Kid’s a real piece of work.”

That was one way of putting it. With or without his memory, Harry, as I continually tried to think of him, seemed to have retained the arrogance of his pedigree, the unspoken but bulletproof certainty that the world would form itself to his liking.

I wasn’t exactly prone to kissing rings.

“One of us is going to have to go into town for more supplies soon.” I kept my voice low, but if the object of my loathing woke up, he’d probably hear me all the same. The bunker was six hundred square feet total, if that.

“And by town, I assume you mean some place other than Rockaway Watch.” Jackson gave me a look.

I’d been trying not to think about the world outside of these walls, but there was no skirting that reminder of how perilous our current situation was. If my family discovered what Jackson and I were hiding out here—who we were hiding—it wouldn’t go well.

For any of us.

“Someplace else,” I agreed quietly. I picked up two sugar packets and set them on their ends, leaning the tips against each other in an inverted V, a balancing act that I just barely managed to pull off. “I’ll go,” I said.

I turned my head toward the mattress. Harry looked deceptively angelic when he slept, the perfection of his face a sharp contrast to the blistered, weeping burns and blackened skin that I knew lay underneath his gauze. His chest rose and fell as I watched, and I picked up two more sugar packets, continuing to build a makeshift, not-card castle that I knew could fall at any moment.

“I’ll go,” I said again. “For supplies. Tomorrow.”