Page 118 of We Are the Match
My knife is sharp, and it is ready.
I have been born for this.
Any other life—one with Helen, one far from here—was never anything but a dream. Maybe for women like Thea, who escaped before the bombs. Maybe it was not too late for her.
Live,she told me.
But how could I?
Without my sisters. Without Helen. Without anything at all.
In a group home, surrounded by other girls that no one wanted, I became a blade and war unto myself. I became the worst nightmare of the man, crime lord, god who has killed so many innocents.
I took his daughter, if not in the way I expected.
And it is almost, almost over.
What will it be, not to carry the weight of being the last survivor? The only one to remember?
They are all screaming around me, and maybe I am screaming, too, but at least I have my blade.
I push through the trapdoor beneath Helen’s floor and step out into her room, blinking at the sudden light. There is a smear of blood where Milos was, where Helen killed him and set herself free.
We used one another. We did.
But for a handful of moments, on rooftop gardens and runaway boats, we were something more.
And I loved her. Enough that now, even now, I come to finish this for the girls, for me—for—for—
I stop there, in Helen’s room.
Helen, my Helen.
Blood and silk. Poppies and ash.
Revenge in my hands, and it is hard to summon any thought but one of Helen.
If Kore were here, would Kore be climbing beside me with gasoline and a lighter?
En morte libertas,she is whispering to me.
And I do not imagine her burning, just this once.
Instead, I imagine her free. I imagine her on a boat, not confined to the harbor, leaving Troy behind. I imagine her in a little apartment in Spain, like she dreamed of, cooking with a roommate and weaving ribbons into her hair.
I imagine her the way I imagine us all—
Free.
Revenge is in one hand, and Helen in the other. Gas can and lighter. Flame and fury.
And if I choose to burn, again, instead of taking my shot at being with the woman I—the woman Ilove, I will be letting the girls of Troy down one last time.
Kore is beside me. Milena and Cass, too. Jasmine and Yara. So many of us, so young.
We just wanted to live.
Helen’s bedroom is a battlefield—blankets still in disarray, bed never made from the last time she slept here. The person who usually made the bed—Erin—dead at my hands. Milos’s blood is smeared wherever Helen walked.
