Page 70 of Obliterated
My knuckles lock.
My whole body shakes in anguish.
And I push.
Chapter seventeen
Kieran
I’mgoingfuckingcrazy.
It’s been almost five days since I saw him. Since Max and Tass went up north. With every day that passes, every night I lay in his bed and hope and pray and beg that he’ll come home, my anxiety gets worse.
I’m a mess. A fucking ghost. I keep my ears open for any gossip as me and Sami walk through the city to my work. If I’m polishing glasses that don’t need polishing, I tune in to the surrounding conversations. Any whisper I can grab, I grab.Anything about Watchers, about Joyeus, about that facility… I hang on it.
But I hear nothing.
Yeah, I went back to work, even though Max was clear about me staying put. It’s the smart play. If I disappear, it’ll look suspicious. Maybe the other workers wouldn’t care, but Joyeus would. She always does.
Ever since she’s been back, I swear I feel her cold eyes on me, like she somehow knows. Knows about the investigation, knows about the carnage in my room, knows Ikilledsomeone.
So I keep up the routine. Keep my face easy. Wipe the counter the right way. Smile when people ask stupid questions and laugh at their lame jokes.
And all the while I’m dying inside. Dying to see him, hear from him. Dying to pack up a bag and go after them north, to face the lands beyond the wall alone.
And it terrifies me how willing I am to actually do it.
It would mean breaking my promises. To Max that I would stay put, and to Sami that I’d let him and Roe handle it. They sent up a search party yesterday. A squad of Watchers they trust to keep it on the down-low. Quiet, under wraps. They said they’d handle it properly. It should be enough. That should be enough.
It isn’t. Iknowit isn’t.
So here I am, packing a bag after another sleepless night. I don’t care anymore. I’m not waiting for another godsdamned day. I’m going to search for them myself.
I’m rifling through Max’smanycabinets and supplies, pulling out spare bandages, a roll of tape, a neat stack of throwing knives, some fresh bread with olive oil which he loves so much… anything that might help, and toss it in one of his backpacks. If I show up with that “ratty old thing” he’d probably laugh, and shit, it does almost fall apart at the seams.
Max’s apartment… is something else. It’s not the luxurious hideout I half-imagined after seeing that cliff mansion, but it’s big. And clean. And, weirdly enough; light and airy. It has lots of windows with a perfect view of the beach.
It’s also full of shit I’ve never even seen in real life before: tools I don’t know the names of, boxes of spare parts, stacks of books that look like they belonged to another century. There’s a system to it. Everything packed away, neat and organized. He’s methodical in a way he hides from the rest of us.
And it fits, at least from what I know of him.
The funniest thing is the row of rubber ducks on the little windowsill in his bathroom. Tiny, colorful ducks from the old world, lined up like a stupid army, and I can’t help but smile every time I spot them.
Somehow I think Tass has something to do with that.
She’s here, her presence scattered in those ducks, in the bag of strawberries in the humming old fridge, in a pair of shoes in the hallway that are way too small for him.
Thinking about shoes…I wiggle my toes in the sneakers Max bought me months ago. I threw them at his head at the time,meddling ass,but found them stuffed in the closet in his bedroom. Figured they would be the better choice if I have to hike all the way up north.
Or have to run from Walkers. He’d never let me hear the end of it if my flip-flops made me trip and I got bit because of it.
Fuck, I hope he’s okay. That she’s okay. My gut says they walked into something at that facility that went sideways—loud, wrong, fast—and the image keeps looping behind my ribs until my chest tightens.
A hard knock on the door snaps me out of it just as I zip the backpack closed.
Frowning, I get up from where I was crouched before the dresser and go to open the door. Max wouldn’t knock, obviously, and I think Tass would just barge in whenever she pleases.
No one else knows Max lives here, that I live here. No one, besides…
