INTREPID ▸ connor stoll

[𝟐.𝟎𝟐] the wounds of our past

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chapter eight
the wounds of our past
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Devi is and has always been a sensitive creature of habit, dependent on her routine and little rituals to keep her bearings.

Banana milk before bed helps her sleep deeper at night with the taste of something sweet in her mouth, working out before the sun rises makes the day longer and more fulfilling, chewing at least two sticks of blackcurrant gum together before doing Calculus homework magically makes the questions easier (a proven method to change Cs to Bs), running at sundown puts her in a better mood to handle dinner with her cabin but only if she makes it back ten minutes before the horn sounds.

The world could end and Devi would not forfeit any of this.

Mostly.

In the winter before she started eleventh grade, she'd discovered a new running route around camp, well-trodden by woodland creatures and spirits, grass worn thin by thousands of footsteps back and forth. A barely-noticeable satyr path that cut around Half-Blood Hill and then undulated through the hills around the boundary of the camp, crossing the strawberry fields to the Big House.

Mostly deserted, especially during the early weeks of winter but that late in the season, year-round campers were littered in the valleys, making snow angels or having vicious, oddly competitive, snowball fights.

She passed by the rest of her cabin, locked in a battle with some Athena kids.

Ellis, who'd just arrived the preceding summer, waved at her as she passed. She ignored him, hoping he'd think she hadn't seen him. (She'd been itching to talk to him, but out of spite, only to wonder if he'd been welcomed to the cabin the way she was. Maybe Clarisse hadn't put her entire weight into strangling him. Devi had found no bruises on his throat or anywhere visible when the two of them had come back after a tour of the camp on his first day.)

She was jealous that he'd assimilated so easily, while she was still fighting the same uphill battle. But he was also built like the rest of them, with muscle and nothing but raw brutal strength in both his fists, a Spartan hunger in his eyes, which would explain how he'd survived till 15 on his own. Once again, he was everything she was not but strangely enough, Ellis had been the only one who charitably did not think so much of this. She was full of resentment, which he had done nothing to earn. (Everyone who isn't Raj is so incredibly hard to love.)

She found the Hermes and Apollo cabins building an intricate snow fort near the volleyball court, deep in a debate led by Travis who was passionately trying to convince Lee Fletcher that there was no real harm in putting real dynamite in their snow cannons and they could make it work if they just opened their minds to it because what's a fort without its defense system.

Connor wasn't there – it took her one cursory glance to realise it. She'd developed a separate radar for him, which went from being a practice of vigilance to a habit and then it simply became something she'd accepted into her life. (It must be the way he moves, the ripples he sends into a room just by walking through the door, the echoes of himself he leaves behind when he walks out of it – all of it reverberates through her body in these little aching pangs, it stays behind often in fleshwounds that bleed something sweet and vital.)

She found him in the strawberry fields, cross-legged on the ground, sluggishly picking fruit and dropping it into an empty basket. It must have been the tight posture, or the fatigued motion of his normally deft fingers that first inspired suspicion and Devi slowed to change course, cutting across the field to where he was sitting by himself, brazenly alternating between plucking a strawberry and eating one. He didn't even have to look up; she assumed he'd recognised her by the touch of her shadow as it fell over him.