Page 147 of Chaos

She hands it over gratefully and leaves to go assist in Kelly’s surgery.

I sit down on the edge of Frankie’s gurney. I haven’t missed that she’ll barely look at me.

“You didn’t tell me Renata was back,” she hisses at me.

“Renata’s here?” Shasta calls over the partition.

“Put your headphones on or something!” Frankie calls.

“No. Be glad I have good ears. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have heard that Shitsy in there trying to kill you with a syringe.”

Frankie lets out an irritable huff, and finally turns over so she’s facing me. “Any other secrets you’re keeping from me?”

“That’s a bit rich coming from you, isn’t it?”

Her eyes narrow. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I think you know exactly what I mean.” I have a lot of questions about it, too. How long did she attempt to poisonBen? Why didn’t she tell me? Though I can guess the answers. And it’s not the time or place.

“Hold still.” I stretch her skin taught along the edge of the largest bit of rubble stuck in her back. Ephie and Shane either got lucky and were blocked, or Frankie was closer to the blast than them. This one looks to be brick, and using the tweezers, I pull it out fast. There’s t-shirt stuck in there, too.

I squirt it down with the hydrogen peroxide Alice provided and it sizzles away, white and bubbly as I move on to the next one.

“You’re not leaving me,” she says when five or six chunks of rubble sit on the tray beside us.

“Frankie.” I tug another one out, and clean it, blotting away any debris that might be left. “I can’t go in there if the entire time I’m panicking that I’m going to come home and find you dead.”

“Neither can I. Every time we’re apart, I can’t breathe until you’re back. It’s not better for me here either. I’m not staying here worrying myself sick, unable to help you, with no clue what’s going on. I won’t do it. You’re not leaving me.”

“What about Auden?” I manage, and at that she blanches. “Don’t forget they were rounding up kids when we escaped.”

“He has to come. For the same reason. If we leave him, he’ll spend the whole time terrified. I’m not doing that to him. We got out of DC once, we’ll do it again.”

I finish the rest of her back in silence.

It’s fully dark out the window by then, Colleen has come for Shasta and taken her away for dinner, and both Frankie’s and my stomachs are rumbling.

I coat each of the wounds in zinc and bandage them with gauze and tape and help her stand up and get dressed in fresh clothes someone left.

When we open the door, snow is at least six or seven inches thick on the ground, the wind blowing sharply.

“I nearly died multiple times today,” Frankie says. “The world’s chaos—even without Ben, it’s chaos. Anything couldhappen now. Anything. At any time. I tried to fix it by poisoning Ben, and it only made things worse. At one point, I even thought I’d poisoned Cain. The only thing that matters to me is that we’re together. You and me and Auden and Shane and the baby.”

I don’t like it. But maybe I don’t have to like it.

She’s certainly right that staying here isn’t the guarantee of safety I’d like it to be.

There are no guarantees at all.

I got used to the idea that I might die at any moment during the war, got used to the idea that the people around me might die.

It’s just now that I’m struggling.

And she’s right.

We adapt.

We have no choice.

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