Page 56 of We Are the Match
She leaves us, and Helen turns to me.
“You’re laying it on thickly enough,” she tells me tartly. “This affair is becoming an absurd cover.”
Behind us, Tommy clears his throat.
“Tommy’s right,” I say, delighted when Tommy has to cough to cover his laugh behind me. “You wouldn’t sound that embarrassed if you thought what you were saying was true. And it wasn’t much of a cover when you were tied up in my bed.”
Helen gasps with indignation. “I—that’s not—”
“Let’s go,” I tell her.
Helen follows me, too shocked in this moment to do anything but follow my lead.
I know where we are going, but only because of my sisters. I lost Cass so long ago I cannot always remember the way her laugh sounded, but I could still recount the stories she and Milena and Eris told aboutworking with their “benefactor.” Eris left before the bombs. Thea too, of course.
But when Cass and Milena and Eris were young, and still training with benefactors, first they were always taken to the city of boats, and then to a small raft that carried them to a nearby island.
They spoke of it as some grand, glittering adventure, and perhaps it was. Perhaps it always would have been, if Lena had cared to return for them. Cared to pull them from the wreckage instead of waiting for their bodies to burn before building her safe house.
The words emblazoned in my group home echo differently in my memory now:en morte libertas.
In death, liberty.
Our death.
Herliberty.
Tommy only protests a few times when I lead us from yacht to yacht, holding Helen’s hand in mine in front of patrons who are drinking and dancing and—in some cases—fucking, where anyone can see them.
Helen should not still be innocent, at this age, but her eyes dart away, her bearing breaking when confronted with the pleasures unfolding in front of her.
And because I have never missed an opportunity to add to her discomfort, I offer her a grin. “Would you like me to get you an audience next time?”
She gasps, trips over her own pristine little flats, clinging to my arm for support.
Tommy shakes his head at me. “Never ask a question like that in front of me again,” he says. “That’s not in my job description.”
Helen slaps my hand away, blushing furiously as we make our way over the last yacht toward a collection of small rafts and dinghies.
We take a raft, the way my sisters once did, Tommy accompanying us.
“You are sure about this?” Helen asks me.
I am as sure as I am of the memories: Cass climbing into my bed instead of hers, curling up beside me, dark hair spilling across me as she spun stories of all she had learned and all she had seen.
And, oh, Helen can never imagine the side of this world I have lived, or how well I know the mother she still speaks of with so much love.
Lena used my sisters, and when it was convenient: she let them burn.
When we reach the island Cass spoke of, it is nothing but a dark slab of land rising from the nearby choppy sea, a few long, low buildings sprinkled across it.
The first is empty, a storage facility with abandoned lockers hanging open.
The second looks more like a warehouse, but as I approach the door, Tommy’s hand stops me, drags me backward.
“If these housed a bomb-maker,” he says sharply. “They will have this door rigged.”
“They don’t,” I tell him.
