Page 51 of Uncontrolled

The only place I’ve ever felt safe is in this apartment, here, with Allie. I tap my palm against the door, struggle against the urge to punch it. I’m not losing this life.

Allie wraps herself around me, her cheek resting against my spine. I spin. I inhale, hoping for the comforting scent of apples, but there’s only the same metallic odor of the boxcars in the rain, the rust and damp saturating everything. “I don’t want to be Ploy anymore,” I murmur against her skin.

“You’re not,” she says, as if it’s simple. “You’re Christopher.”

I shift slightly, drag the tip of my nose across the line of her jaw. What if it’s Ploy who holds all the betrayals, all the ways I failed, the secrets, even now, I keep from her about the hunters? Could I do it? Split myself in two and leave the past. Or am I a monster, bent on surviving, hiding behind a proper name and excuses? What if I’m just like Jamison after all?

“Hey,” she says as my arms swallow her in an embrace. “You did good today. You did everything perfect.”

“I panicked when he came to in the car,” I say. “I swear I’ll do better next time.”

“Injured people get violent when they’re afraid.” Her squeeze tightens. “I don’t expect you to protect me. I can protect myself.”

“Not always.” The words plop between us, hard and heavy. Once she knows about Nico and the rest of them, she’ll see I can cover her in other ways.

When I don’t say anything else, she sighs. A wide line of maroon crusts her cheekbone. There’s another dried and flaking on her neck as she leans to study me.

“I’m not scared to shed blood,” she says, watching me for my reaction. “My life is measured in syringes of it.” She untangles herself from me. Her voice pitches up, almost a question. “But then there’s you. I didn’t count on you.”

She swallows and her throat moves against my palm. I stroke her thumping pulse, slide to her collarbone. Her fists rise to her closed eyes until my fingers catch her chin, tilt it, and she unwraps herself.

I kiss her, slow, lingering before I draw a breath and gather my courage. My mouth finds her ear. “Always count on me.”

I wait, sure she’ll kiss me back, that I can stretch this moment into an hour and I won’t have to tell her what I did and everything I found. Instead, she’s intent on me.

“I’m in this,” she says. My heart kicks up a notch. Her words lose their hesitancy. “You are, too.” Her fingers knot at the nape of my neck. “In order for us to—”

“Allie, I—”

“No! Me first, okay?”

Swallowing, I nod. She takes my hand and leads me to the couch.

“There are things I need to tell you,” she says, the words staggered and slow as she sinks onto the cushion. “I thought I left this life behind. I can’t.”

I shake my head while I move to sit beside her, but she ignores me.

“I have to resurrect again. I’m going to lead the cluster in Fissure’s Whipp.” The sentences are rote, dead things plummeting from her lips.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You didn’t want—”

She whispers my name, a plea for silence, and I swallow my protest as I watch her blue eyes fill with tears. “You are all I want,” she says.

My thumb brushes the wet track on her cheek. It smears the dried blood streak when she leans into my palm and catches my hand with her own. “You have me,” I promise, but it only makes her wince.

For an impossibly long moment, she’s quiet, and the little wisp of Jamison haunting me perks up, but I’m finished believing I’m not good enough or strong enough to exist in her world. I have important information she needs and can use. I’ll prove the extent I’d go to for her. “You have me, Allie. Today, I—”

“They’re going to kill us,” she says.

I freeze. “What?”

She knows. She saw me somehow, getting out of the cab or followed me when I took off this morning. Except Allie isn’t furious. She’s scared.

“That’s why Talia wants you gone.” The tremble in her voice unnerves me.

“Talia?” I repeat.

“You keep saying you want me to let you in, that you want…” Her mouth purses before she forces herself to continue. “If we’re staying together, there’s more at stake than I let on.”

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