Obscure

Chapter 21

Elias

The orchard smelled like home.

Not the home of his childhood. Not the sick, sneezy pollen smell of the meadow, or the dark waterlogged rot of the marsh. But that home was gone. This was his home now. It was enough.

More than enough. The trees, dim in the moonlight, blurred as Elias's eyes filled with unshed tears. He stumbled on a root buried in the grass Laina had kept carefully clipped in his absence.

And then he was on his knees, hands buried in the grass, the apple tree's branches extended above him like a benediction. Like they were welcoming him home.

He had forgotten how sweet the smell of the orchard was. He had spent so long lost in childhood memories, he'd had no room to remember this.

He wanted to stay there forever, kneeling in the dirt of his home. He wanted to crawl under that well-tended grass, enveloped by the care it represented. He wanted to be buried here, if he couldn't be buried in the fire-scorched meadow of his childhood home. He had died in PERI headquarters. It would be only fitting. And if he were to be laid to rest, he wanted to be under his trees, not sliced apart and stuffed into jars in the PERI labs.

But he wasn't dead. His story couldn't end that simply. The terrible cut of mercy had come down on him. He had escaped. He had survived. Now he would have to live with what he had seen in PERI headquarters, and what he had done.

And if he didn't move quickly, they would catch up with him, and his home would burn around him. No doubt PERI would burn it anyway. But he would rather not watch it happen this time.

And, like last time, he had someone else depending on him. Someone who wouldn't survive the flames without his hand to hold. Although he had no illusions about how long Laina would continue to hold his hand after he told her the truth.

It didn't matter. As long as she survived. He had endured loss upon loss. He could endure one more.

He got up.

He stumbled across the grass. It was only when he was almost past the trees that the tickle of the grass on his bare feet registered. He couldn't have come all this way with bare feet—had he?

He steadied himself against a tree. He lifted one foot and saw a mass of raw cuts from the pavement outside PERI headquarters and the streets on the way here. No wonder that cabdriver had looked at him so strangely.

As soon as he saw the cuts, the pain hit him. He breathed in for four, out for four. It was only physical pain. It was the least of what PERI had asked him to endure.

He hobbled up the wobbly wooden steps he had meant to replace for years. He tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. He had always told Laina to keep it locked. She had always laughed, thought it was a vestigial paranoia left over from his city years that he had only described to her in broad strokes and fictionalized anecdotes. Out here, she said, there was no need for locked doors.

Even now that he had been missing for months, she hadn't started locking the door.

That alone told him PERI had fed her a lie about what had happened to him. Either they had claimed he had run off, and provided credible evidence, or they had manufactured an accident. And with an accident, with no broken body to visit him in a hospital, she had to think he was dead.

Widowed or abandoned—either way, she would be deep in her own grief right now. What did her grief look like? Did she have her own version of the big-eyed skeletal creature in his mind? Was she familiar enough with grief yet to see it that clearly, or was she still caught up in the initial shock?