Page 81 of Anchor

I pushed the trunk closed and shook my hands to try to get some feeling back into them—didn’t work. The engine came to life with a press of a button, and I drove it all the way to the cabin near the exit, numb all over.

The guards looked at me. Smiled at me. Said something I laughed at but didn’t really understand.

I kept the stupid smile on until I reached the back gate I always used to come in and out now.

“Taking the car tonight, are we,” said a guard—this one I knew. It was the same guy who’d been dragging Taylor by the arm that day.

“My grandmother needs it,” I said, without thinking or planning or checking that I had voice to speak with. I just said the words and the guard smiled, barely glanced at my badge that I kept in front of him—instinctively, of course. I was operating on pure instinct here.

“With a grandmother like yours, who needs more?” He eyed the car, and he was feeling envious, too.

I just continued to smile.

Then the bar pulled up and the gates opened. I thought I saidgoodnight,but I’m not sure. The dark sky was over me, the road ahead clear. Reporters, fewer than before, on the sidewalk, and people, fewer than before, holding signs that demanded my execution and/or imprisonment.

Meanwhile Taland was singing in the trunk, and I heard his voice, though it came out muffled. I drove away from the IDD Headquarters, the place where I’d escaped to since I could remember. The place I was now escapingfrom, and nobody was chasing us. Nobody was shooting at us, magic or bullets. Nobody was in our way as I drove, opened the window and threw out my phone to make sure nobody could track me through it, then made the first turn onto the nearest highway.

Smiling for real now.

Feeling better about myself than I ever had before—me, Rora La Rouge, an agent gone rogue, and not an ounce of regret was in me.

Goddess, I should have done this before. I should have fought that night at the school alongside Taland. I should have rescued him from prison, should have helped him escape the Tomb myself. Should have put him in my trunk and drove away a long time ago.

I hadn’t known any better then, and I’d been so fucking afraid. Always afraid and always pretending. Always hesitant to just be who I wanted to be for once.

I had tears in my eyes and wet cheeks by the time I was far enough away that I felt confident to stop by the side of the highway, get out of the car, and pull the trunk open.

“…yeah, I ought to leave young thing alone, but ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,”Taland finished singing, moving his hand to the rhythm in his head—and mine. And I stayed there, hands up on the trunk lid, looking down at him and smiling and crying while he hummed the melody to the very end of the song.

Until this very moment I had had no idea just how much I’d wanted to do this. How much I’d needed to do this, to sayfuck youto the whole world and just be with Taland—as a free woman or a fugitive, it really didn’t matter. Until this very moment, I never quite believed thatthiswas what I was made for.

Then Taland pulled himself up and jumped out of the trunk, and he grabbed me in his arm and spun me around in the middle of the highway, screaming, “Yeeeehaawwww!”

No concern, no questions, no nothing here, just us as we truly were, bare, separate from the things the world saw in us, and the things we wanted the world to see.

And I thought,I never want to be anything else ever again.

“Rosabel?”

I moved my head just slightly on his shoulder.

“Yeah?”

Taland said nothing.

We still hadn’t driven away because we’d just needed a moment to breathe. So, we decided to sit on the ground, back against the back wheel of my grandmother’s car, looking out at the empty land and the dark sky dotted with stars, the moon somewhere at our back.

Cars passed by, not too many. No sirens or anything close to us yet.

We had time, we thought. We had all the time in the world now.

“What, Taland?” I asked because I was sitting on his lap, my head on his shoulder, and we had our arms wrapped around one another, and it was perfect. I was going to fall asleep, even knowing what we just did less than an hour ago. It was too comfortable here.

“Nothing,” he muttered against my head, kissed my hair. “Just making sure you’re really here.”

“I am,” I said slowly as my heart broke a little bit, and a smile tugged at my lips. “My goddess, Taland,I am.” With him, on the side of the highway somewhere in Maryland—I washere.

Taland chuckled. “You turned against them, sweetness. You helped a wanted criminal escape from the IDD Headquarters. Tell me, how does that feel?”

---