2.1 | renegade effect (on hold until 2024)

03 | orenda

o r e n d a : a mystical force that empowers people to change their own destiny in this world

***

REINCARNATION IS A BEAUTIFUL THING.

Scout Taylors doesn't remember her past lives, but maybe instead of a college student, she was a florist whose fingers were stained with honeysuckle and blossoms. Maybe she met her soulmate in front of her flower shop, chalk smeared over her skin as she wrote the special bouquets on a blackboard, fingers delicate. Maybe the air smelled of hot sugar and coffee cream.

(Maybe.)

But like most all aspects of her life, those dreams go to shit the second she gets home. Scout manages to tuck her shivering body under her shower, hot water rolling off of her back in perfumed waves of ugliness and fear and worry. God, she's so worried for someone she doesn't even know, and is this what having a soulmate means? Is this what it feels like? The bond snapped into place and brought: ink and turmoil and something full of velvet. The bond snapped into place and brought: everything.

She turns the water off. Feels something empty glisten within her ribcage, claws dragging on the left side and pressing roughly until her nerves stubbornly flicker back to life, disastrously uneven. For once in her life, Scout Taylors feels cold—the kind that starts from the temperature of her blood, ice crystals encircling her wrists like a diamond bracelet, traveling up and up and up until it reaches her neck.

He's a murderer, she thinks—mourns. He had blood dripping from his hands, from his fingertips, and although maybe that's not the scariest sight she'd seen in her life (Scout had once witnessed a shooting just outside of the hospital last month), all she can think about is how wrong the red looked on his pale skin. About how wrong it felt to see the rain sliding down his cheekbones, lips chapped and split down the middle.

She wonders how many lives he's taken, and, perhaps, if he's ever wanted to take his own.

It's a paradox: to pathetically curl in on herself while logic tells her to run far, far away. Scout slips into one of her favorite sweatshirts—an oversized top the color of mint—and pads over to her bed, mind empty as a concentrated dose of agony she's positive isn't hers hits her system. It's heady and powerful, a supernatural connection that started from the first brush of her fingers against his wrist. It's potent. And it almost makes rage flicker inside of her, because she shouldn't feel emotions that aren't hers, shouldn't feel guilty for all of the lives he's taken just because they're soulmates. She shouldn't.

But still. But still, her heart bleeds.

The blood drips down, down, down.

It stains.

"You're fine," she whispers to herself, breath shallow and spirit heavy. "It's been a long day, and—and you need to sleep it off. He's gone."

Before both of her parents had died in a car crash the night Scout turned two years old, she'd learned what, exactly, soulmates were. And that if the government caught people being rebellious and settling down with others that weren't meant to be theirs, they died. It's considered a threat to defy what was written in history and stone and genetics—an act against destiny. She thinks it's all bullshit.

Scout pulls the thick covers to her chin as she flips on her side. The skin around her eyes feels taut and she contemplates whether his hands are clean now, or whether his face is still as gaunt as before, lips full, a little dry and a lot cracked. The rain patters against her windows in a methodical manner; moonlight streams in through her window panes, and she thinks it's enough to lull her to somewhere between sleep and paralysis as her heartbeat goes: I'm empty, I'm tired, I'm searching the universe for you.