Page 18 of The Last One
“None of this would’ve happened,” he says from up high, “if you just resisted the urge to be a criminal, Olivia.”
“I’m not a criminal,” she sniffs. “There are perfectly good reasons for swiping. Feeding your family, for instance.”
Jadon climbs back down the ladder and stands over his sister. “Did you or did you not swipe her clothes and pendant?”
Olivia tilts her head as she pulls the amulet from her pocket to examine it. “You say ‘swipe,’ I say repurpose and reuse.” When neither Jadon nor I react, she scowls at me. “I thought you weredead! Why were you out in the woods anyway?”
I open my mouth to retort, but for the first time, I don’t have anything to say. Uneasy, I make a fist and bounce it against my lips.
“What’s wrong?” Jadon asks, stepping toward me.
Revealing the truth will render me vulnerable, but they’ll figure it out eventually. I take a breath and stare at one of the soot-covered, knotty-wooded poles that support the barn loft before confessing, “I don’t remember anything before waking up with Oliviaswipingmy belongings.” Saying this feels like I’m overreacting and wrongly accusing Olivia of doing something horrible. But she stole from me. I have nothing to be ashamed of.
“When you say, ‘anything,’” Jadon says, “does that include where you’re from?”
“Yes.” Desperation bordering on panic tightens my throat. “Not my name. Not my town. Not one thing.”
Jadon gapes at me.
Olivia gasps. “Maybe you were dropped here by a giant eagle who caught you for dinner or—” She gasps again. “Maybe you’re a hunter and you were hiding in a blind and a falling star hit you and knocked you out of a tree. Or maybe you were in a gigantic explosion, like a volcano eruption.”
“A falling star?” Jadon asks incredulously. “A volcano? There aren’t any volcanoes in this part of Vallendor.”
I want to laugh, but something stays my humor. Maybe the Olivia-concocted giant eagle bullshit theory could also be part possibility. A hunter in a blind. Now,thatscenario feels right. Maybe not a volcano, but something explosive had to have launched me across the forest.
“Or…” Olivia grins and then snorts. “Maybe you were flitting about in the heavens, napping on your perfect little cloud, and then, out of nowhere, that falling star hit you and sent you tumbling down, down, down until you landed here.”
Falling star.Something aboutthattugs at the back of my mind.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jadon says. “That sounds—”
I hold up my hand to stop him. “Why do you say a falling star?”
“Because,” Olivia says, “I saw this bright light streaking down from the sky, and I ran into the woods to see what it was, and I found you.”
Jadon gapes at his sister. “You’re not serious. People don’t fall from the sky.”
I hold up my hand again. “Did I fall far? Was there fire or smoke? How long between when you saw that bright light streaking down and when you found me?”
Olivia shrugs. “I don’t know. Not long?”
“If Olivia really saw something,” Jadon says, “it really could have been a falling star, like she said.”
I say, “Hmm,” unable to saynooutright.
Because there’s something to this story. I feel it. Like a burr on my sock. Like a fly buzzing in my ear. The more I think about it, the quicker my heart beats. Are there mountains around here? Geysers? Anything that I would have fallen from? A giant eagle? A tornado possibly? Falling. Hitting my head from the force.
A gust of wind could’ve carried me from wherever I was and lost some of its power and dropped me in the woods. There were clouds and rain in a town that hadn’t seen wet weather in a long time. “Was there wind?” I ask. “From which direction did I fall? Straight or slanted?”
“I don’t know.” Olivia throws her hands up with a frustrated huff. “All I know is, I saw a burst of light and found you sprawled out there, beneath the trees. You weren’t moving, you weren’t breathing, but you had on that fierce leather vest and that absolutely ferocious cloak, and it was like…like…someone pushed you off the fancy-nancy cart and left you there to die. Then I saw that necklace!”
Olivia pulls the pendant and chain out of her pocket and strokes the black stone in the moth’s thorax.
My fingers itch to yank it from her thieving hands, but my yanking could result in some private time with Narder. So I hold—for now.
“All these jewels caught the light, and Jadon—” She spins to her brother, who’s staring at my amulet with his brow furrowed. “We’rereallynot in a position to just leave treasure sitting there on the ground!”
“It wasn’t sitting on the ground,” I retort. “It was dangling from myneck.”
