Across the Deadzone

Chapter 15: Wystan

"Did you ever consider the fact that you could convince her to stay?" Callum asked me shrewdly after my shift ended. He forked another bite of canned peach into his mouth.
I tore my gaze away from a Garbage Collector, carrying what looked suspiciously like a body bag. "What?" I said blankly. Callum rolled his eyes and repeated himself. "I-"
"-Didn't think of it?" he interjected with a raised eyebrow. "Didn't think so. Honestly, how do you get through a day?"
I leaned back in my chair, folding my hands across my stomach and ignoring his last question. "There's no way she'll listen. I mean, if I was her and there was even a chance that my family was alive, I would cross the Deadzone to find them, too."
Callum fixed me with a disbelieving stare. "Alright, hotshot," he said condescendingly. "You can drop the heroic act. I know you're terrified to set foot out there." He shrugged, looking out at the sea of people. "But, I don't think you'd go out there for your family. Because if they survived this long, they're probably fine. More or less. That's how I know this girl friend of yours has a hold on you. If you're willing to risk everything for her."
I squinted at him. In my many years of knowing him, I've never heard him make a speech like that. It almost didn't sound like him. I sat forward in my chair. "You feeling okay?"
He shook his head as if to gather his thoughts before he turned to me.
"Are you coming to the party tonight?" he asked, changing the subject abruptly.
"O and I are, yeah." I expected him to give me his usual smirk and tease me about that, but his face remained stoic. Scarily so. Again, I was struck with how unlike him he was acting. In my time knowing him, he'd never kept a straight face for so long.
He laid a hand on my shoulder, giving me a hard look. "Make. Her. Stay."

Later on, back in my flat, I wondered if that was Callum's way of trying to get me to stay without flat out saying it. Even so, the whole conversation had given me the creeps.
"Hey," Ophelia called out to me from the living room. Her voice echoed off the cavernous ceiling. "How many people usually come to this thing?"
She'd gotten back to my place long before I had. She was fast asleep on the couch with her new dog curled up on the floor next to her. When she finally heard me nearly twenty minutes after I'd gotten back, she told me she was catching up on lost sleep.
I poked my head out from the bedroom where I was changing out of my sweat-dampened shirt. I threw a clean one over my head before going out to join her on the couch.
"I don't know," I replied. "Twenty, maybe thirty at the most. There aren't too many people our age in Hemmington." Even less now that Thayer was dead.
She was laying on her back, tossing a ball she'd found up into the air. Timber followed the ball, her head bobbing up and down. I patted the dog on the head and threw myself down on the couch beside her.
Sitting up and wrapping her arms around her knees, she said, "I'm sorry about your shirt. The scorpion sliced it up pretty good." She brandished her arm, displaying both the tear in my shirt and the soiled gauze underneath. I could sense the hint of a smirk in her words.
"I can get you a new one," I offered. She shook her head softly, picking at the charm on her bracelet.
"It's fine. I cleaned my old clothes so I won't be needing these after today."
I nodded. "Are you-" I made a tiny half-cough and forced myself to look her in the eyes. "Are you all packed?"
"There's not much to pack, Wys," she laughed, gesturing to her backpack thrown in the corner. Timber laid her head on O's thigh, her eyes closing as Ophelia rubbed her head right between her eyes. "But Cleo gave me a few extra dice. I bought a new knife, so I'll have to find a place for that."
"That's cool," I muttered. Mentally, I slapped myself. I had never found the need to buy a weapon of any kind while I've lived here. We had guards for a reason. But if I was leaving, it would be suicidal to go out there empty-handed.
What kind of weapons shop would be open this late?
"Time to go?" she asked, not noticing how I'd gone silent. And, unless my ears deceive me, she almost sounded... eager.
"Fashionably early," I said with a smile. I pushed myself off the couch. "Sounds like a plan."