Page 43 of Anchor

She stepped closer to me. “A death trap thatyousurvived. You look perfectly fine to me.” She made a point of looking up and down my body.

I shook my head, more afraid by the minute, as if I was picked up and thrown into the City of Games all over again.

“You’re…you’rea kid.” She couldn’t be serious about this—she was fourteen years old.

“I won’t be for the next Iris Roe. I’ll be an adult, just like you,” she argued, and yes—she still meant it.

It made me panic so badly. It made me want to grab her and shake her, this stranger, justmakeher understand the absurdity of what she was saying.

“You’reMud,” I told her—she had to know what Mud meant. She knew plenty about the Iris Roe—she had to know that it was a game of magic.

She tried to hide another flinch, really tried. “So were you.”

Stabs at my chest and gut and the back of my head that was suddenly threatening to explode with an ache that came out of nowhere. Like it had been lying just there in hiding, waiting for the perfect moment to jump out and take over. Make me see double from the sheer intensity of it.

“Didn’t you hear the news?” I said, now pissed off all of a sudden, and so many different emotions in such a short timewere making me dizzy. Or maybe that was just the headache? And the lies that came out of my lips? “I was never Mud. Those were just rumors. I was a Redfire all my life.”

Filthy, filthy, disgusting Rora…

“I don’t believe it,” the girl said without batting a lash, and the look in her eyes defied me. “I saw the news. I’ve read everything there is to read online, including what they said about the players who were conscious after the end of the game. Everyone on social media says they said that you were Mud and then you drained the Rainbow and now you’renotMud anymore—I saw that for myself.” She looked down at my hands fisted tightly—soshewouldn’t see them shaking now, but not because I was afraid. Just because I was tired of feeling so damn awful about myself.

“Youcan’tdrain the Rainbow if you’re Mud,” I forced the words out through gritted teeth, going against every instinct in my body.

“Butyoudid it anyway,” the girl said. “Which is why you need to teach me how.”

Goddess, it was so hard to breathe.

I looked into those wide brown eyes, her young face, her skinny limbs. She looked beaten up, fragile, yet tough as nails at the same time. Someone who’d never give up out of sheer stubbornness. Someone who was actually worthy of winning a game like the Iris Roe. Her conviction shocked me all over again—how did she look sooldand mature at just fourteen?

I shook my head again and stood up straighter because it didn’t matter. None of it mattered.

“I was never Mud, kid,” I said, not even half as guilty to lie as a second ago because if Ididn’tlie, this girl was actually really going to attempt to get into the Iris Roe. And I’d lie all day for the rest of my life to make sure that didn’t happen.

“Yes, you were,” she said. “You were Mud—everyone says so.”

“ButIsay that I wasn’t. Who are you going to believe—me or them?” I tried to sound convincing, and I was good at pretending to feel something I didn’t feel.

Or maybe I should sayI used to begood at pretending because the look in her eyes remained suspicious. The girl didn’t believe me, not a hundred percent. But before she could say so, I forced a smile on my face.

“Now, you can either tell me where you live so I can drop you off myself, or I can get on my bike and go, and you can find your own way home. What’s it gonna be, Taylor Maddison?”

I would never leave her here, obviously, even though something told me she’d be perfectly capable of going back home on her own. Maybe because she’d actually managed to get through the gates of the IDD without getting caught?

“Fine,” she said with a defeated sigh, and she looked angry now. Very angry. “I’ll tell you where I live. But keep the helmet this time. I can’t breathe in that thing.”

I didn’t, of course. She ended up putting the helmet on, anyway, but when I got on my bike and started driving to the address she gave me, I couldn’t help the smile on my face. This girl was really something, and she had balls. She wasn’t afraid to speak her mind and make demands, and it occurred to me that she was everything I always wanted to be as a kid. As an adult. The courage to stand up for myself, to say what I really thought, to not be so afraid to ask for what I wanted all the damn time. I envied her a little, but more than that—I found I actually had respect for her.

She lived on the outskirts of the city, and I had to enter the street name on my maps app to find it because I’d never been to it before. It was a wide street lined with houses, close together and on the smaller side, and there were kids playing in their yards, and people sitting on their porches, teenagers hiding in the shadows, smoking cigarettes. All pretty standard.

I thought the girl lived in one of these houses, but then she told me to drive all the way to the end, to this trailer chained to a tree at the edge of a forest near a kids’ playground, currently empty. The trailer was one of the bigger ones, and it looked to be in good condition, but it was still a trailer.

I stopped my bike close to it, near this thick grey rock shaped almost into a perfect cube with a spigot in the middle that marked the beginning of a narrow path into the forest at the trailer’s back.

“Is this it?” I asked when the girl took the helmet off.

She pressed her lips into a tight smile, and her eyes looked a bit bloodshot, but maybe I was just imagining things. She wasn’t crying that I could see.

“Home sweet home,” she said, and the way she looked at me with her arms crossed and her brows narrowed…

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