Chapter Twenty-Three

“Rachel is a large woman,” Gus said. He was exponentially more jolly now that they had had a stout lunch and had booked rooms in the inn above the tavern. “I definitely condone large women.”

“I... don’t know what to do with that,” Martha said.

“It’s okay,” Ben said. “I’m pretty sure you’re not alone.”

“So, what is our business here, really?” Tess asked. She had been shyly venturing more and more words into conversations since they entered the town, and as Gus was in a much better mood, the results had overall been positive.

“I was under the impression that I was not a liar,” Guido said. “We are here to replenish our food stores, refresh our bodies, and perhaps explore life outside of Medias, give you all a better idea of what life is going to be like for you from now on.”

“Why did you choose Rachel for us to see first?” Ben asked.

“It’s the closest safe town to the forest,” Guido said. “Taksarus is south of here, almost in the forest a few miles from where we exited, but I didn’t think that your first foray into non-Median life would be best spent trying to avoid death by the grim hand of the thugs in Taksarus.”

Awkward silence hovered around the group after those words.

“Well,” Gus said, “Thanks for thinking of us.”

“So what are we going to do first?” Martha asked. “Replenish, refresh, or self-educate?”

“My vote is replenish,” Gus said seriously. “We can learn about the town as we go around buying things to fill our packs.”

“Are we planning on staying here for very long, Guido?” Ben asked. “If not, I agree with Gus. But if we’ve got some time, I would rather test out those beds upstairs, take a long nap, and maybe a bath.”

“I heartily agree,” Tess said quietly to Ben. “I feel like I have enough dirt on my legs to count for a second layer of skin.”

“We can stay as long as anyone likes,” Guido said. “But I would personally suggest we be moving on. People in the border towns, these settlements nearest the forest, are leary of visitors. The further into the country we go, the safer we’ll be and the longer we’ll be able to stay.”

“Let’s give ourselves three days, then,” Gus said. “Ben, if you want to rest, you can do that. Guido and I will go and restock while the rest of you stay here, and we’ll meet back here for dinner whenever you are ready.”

“I want to go with you,” Martha said, almost pleadingly.

“Weren’t you just complaining about your feet a while ago?” he asked.
She gave him a look that said more than Ben could read.

“It would be useless for you to go alone, Gus,” Guido said. “Among many unwritten rules of non-Median living is that doing anything alone suggests suspicious activity, especially for a man. You add a mysterious talking raven hovering around his head and there is guaranteed to be trouble. Either at least two of you go, or none of us do.”

Martha was pleading with Gus with her eyes. He was trying to say something back, but she was obviously not heeding him. He looked frustrated and conflicted.

“I’ll go,” Tess said. “Ben, you can stay, and I’ll go with Gus and Martha.”

Martha looked relieved, Ben looked confused, and Gus looked less than pleased.

“Martha, stay with me,” Ben protested.

Everyone looked around at him.

“I didn’t realize this group was so politically charged,” Guido said.

“Stay with me, Martha,” Ben repeated. This time it was a demand. Reluctantly she nodded, and they turned together to walk up the stairs.

Gus and Tess looked at each other. Tess looked down at her feet.

“Is there... something I should know?” Guido asked.

“No,” Gus shot. “Let’s get this over with.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Tamara massaged her temples, breathing deeply, concentrating on the rhythm of the rise and fall of her chest.

“Why are they giving me so much trouble?” she asked herself, trying not to focus on the negative energy she could feel herself exuding. “Where can I improve my own actions to make the whole situation better?”

She felt like she was in a self-help program.

The main problem had come when the boy randomly turned up in the kitchen during Mond’s mathematics lesson one room over. Tamara had been demonstrating a few simple derivative equations when she heard the pantry door open and close. She handed the chalk and slate to Mond and told her to continue working on the example problems while she went to investigate the origin of the noise.

What she found in the kitchen nearly made her vomit. The boy, wearing nothing but the drool-encrusted blanket he’d been sleeping with for the past three weeks wrapped precariously around him, was sticking his head into the pantry, covering his face with confectioner’s sugar and rubbing unpeeled banana mush all over his body. When he heard her come in, he looked up and grinned stupidly, his dark yellow and disgusting, his eyes red and swollen. He laughed a low and slow laugh, and began slapping his arms, making the pasty substance fly off him in little chunks.

Tamara had nearly kicked him right there, wishing she had the stomach to just kill the boy and be done with it. And the visual of his soiled face and revolting garb would have been enough to push her over the edge in that moment, but then Mond walked into the room.

“Boy? Is that you? I can hear you. What are you doing?” she asked. She ran to him and put out her hand, wiping the tips of her fingers against his coated chest. “What happened to you?” she gasped. “Why... what is that smell?”

Tamara had successfully kept them from seeing each other for the past two weeks, and as such, she had stopped really caring about the boy’s hygiene or appearance, as it had all been a façade for Mond’s sake anyway.

Mond turned like lightning to look up at Tamara. Her startling milky eyes didn’t meet Tamara’s but the fury and hatred clearly visible on her face frightened Tamara. She envisioned the past few months of mother-daughter bonding attempts slipping away, as if down a bottomless pipe.

“Fix it,” Mond ordered. “Make him better.”

“It looks like he hasn’t been taking his medicine correctly, Mond,” Tamara said. “I didn’t realize—”

“You’re lying,” Mond said, her voice high, with a texture like gravel tossed on cement. “You’ve kept him from me so I wouldn’t see, and those medicines are making him like this. Fix it. Now.”

Tamara, speechless, and feeling practically breathless as well, caught off her guard by the ferocity of Mond’s words and the harsh expression on her face, stood stupidly slouching and still.

“Fix it!” Mond yelled. Her voice was unnaturally loud, even for an adult male four or five times her size, and Tamara thought he saw a flash of red glint across her eyes.

Tamara grabbed the boy’s arms, coating the palms of her hands in crusty banana paste. She began pulling him towards the stairs, planning on throwing him into a hot bath and soaking his blanket in a tub for a day or so, and he fought her every step. He mumbled and growled incoherently; Tamara felt like she was pulling teeth from the mouth of a loud and confused buffalo. Mond followed them both up the stairs and tended to the boy as Tamara struggled to set up the water. Tamara tried to protest, tried to hide the boy’s nakedness from Mond, even though she had sightless eyes, but Mond gave her a look that had a hint of death and suffering, and Tamara instinctually fled from it.

The cleaning of both blanket and boy took several hours, and when he was finally back into a bed with clean linens and Tamara and Mond were ready to return to the math lesson, Mond was beyond her ability to pay attention. She spent the rest of the light of day asking Tamara questions about the medications the boy was taking and why Tamara insisted he take them.

“They help him with his headaches,” Tamara kept saying. “They were hurting him so badly, and I remember when his mother had a similar issue, so I asked a doctor and he told me that these pills would help.”

“Why was he so messy, then? What about them makes him be so... dirty?”

“That has nothing to do with his medicine, Mond,” Tamara said. Not that the girl had calmed down, she seemed more amenable to believing what Tamara had to say. “That’s just how he is. He’s not like you and me. He’s more like a... like an animal or a monster.”

Mond looked crushed when Tamara said this. Her face slowly fell until every emotion but concern and despair had left it. Her eyes, though nondescript in and of themselves, were much more expressive than any other eyes Tamara had seen. Sometimes Tamara saw feelings deep within them that she could not understand.

“A... monster?” Mond asked. “What does that mean? How can he be anything different than I am?”

“You’re a smart girl, Mond,” Tamara said. “Think about the differences between him and you. He doesn’t take these classes with you because he’s not as intelligent. He gets sick more easily than you do and is not as talented or as good looking as you are.”

“I don’t think he’s bad looking,” Mond said. “That’s not any way to judge someone objectively.”

“You can’t see him, Mond. You can’t know what he looks like. He’s hideous, like a dog or a horse, not a human like you and I.”

None of this was true, but Tamara knew she was dancing on a taught string now, and the only way she could safely herd Mond back to her side of the field was to make the boy an untouchable, therefore taking the merit out of everything he said or did.

“I haven’t seen him with my eyes,” Mond said thoughtfully, “but I think I know what he looks like. It’s like I’ve felt his presence so often that I’ve assigned a visual component...”

She continued to talk, to theorize about her relationship with the boy and what it was based on, what her blindness subtracted from or added to it and what his abstractness, as she called it, subtracted from or added to it.

But Tamara stopped paying attention. She was caught up in the fear that bubbled under the surface as Mond described the boy. They had grown closer than she had seen or guessed. How much did Mond know about him, and how much did he know about her? How much had they interacted; was it to the point where nothing she said to Mond was safe from his ears? If they were passing secrets back and forth, Tamara could never be sure of her bond with Mond, because she would never be able to know if the boy was coming between them. She would have to do a lot of deconstructive work to get Mond to pull loyalty away from him.

Tamara hadn’t imagined there would be so much politics in raising children. Mond was only six-years-old. How was it possible she was already so complex?

“It’s not enough to say I haven’t seen him, you see,” she was saying when Tamara tuned back in. “I haven’t seen him like you have, perhaps, but I know he is not a ‘monster,’ as you say he is.”

“Have you considered the possibility that he is a master of deception?” Tamara suggested, choosing her words closely. “That he can imitate a creature deserving of your sympathy so thoroughly as to fool you into caring about him in the way that you do?”

Mond seemed to chew on this for a moment before speaking again. “If that is the case, how have you managed to remain undeceived?”

The question took Tamara by surprise. It wasn’t as though she hid her dislike for the boy — to do so would have been nearly impossible, not to mention very taxing on her emotions — but she had hoped that Mond would connect it with necessity, with the monster she had been portraying him as.

“I... it’s hard sometimes,” Tamara lied. “I find myself overly empathetic, too, on some days. But then I remember that he killed his mother, my sister, and I strike those feelings from my heart.”

How many times had she driven that point home? How many times had she called him a murderer? It made her feel like some sort of activist every time she said it, and the feeling never got old.

“How did your sister die?” Mond asked for the first time.

Again, Tamara found herself having to sift through her thoughts to find the correct ones to say out loud. “It was a slow... a slow, painful process,” she said. “Over the months that she was pregnant with the boy, he sapped her first of all her energy, youth, and life, until, in the third month, she was bedridden entirely, and then he attacked her brain, draining her personality and intellect until she was an empty shell, broken, a shattered image of the woman she had once been.”

“How do you know that it was his fault?” Mond asked. “Maybe your sister was unfit to carry a baby. Do you have any conclusive proof that another baby would have behaved differently?”

Tamara felt as though she had been slapped in the face. In the long time since her sister’s death, no one had ever come close to insulting her memory, and aside from the boy’s mere existence, nothing had dredged up the pain from those nine long months. Mond, just then, had done worse damage in one short sentence than anyone else had done in four years.

“My sister was not ‘unfit’ for anything,” Tamara said, keeping her calm. “The doctors couldn’t understand it, I couldn’t understand it, and she couldn’t understand it. There was nothing wrong with my sister that would cause her body to do that to itself naturally.”

Mond looked thoughtful. “Maybe you’re deceived by some force, Tamara, just as you suggest I am deceived by the boy. Maybe your sister deceived you.”

______________

Again, more stuff I'm going to have to fix later, like my changed tense in the middle there. Also, unpublished here was Tamara's recitation of a Sociology textbook.

Chapter Sixteen

“Your calligraphy is lovely,” Tamara cooed over Mond as the little girl struggled to control the pen that was too big for her hands. She had mastered straight lines with little effort, but the curves were giving her trouble as the top of the pen swung out of her control. “Grip it tighter at the base there and it should make the writing easier.”

The Ms and the Ns in her name that she was practicing writing in repeated lines over the paper looked well-practiced, like she’d been writing for years. But the Os and the Ds an anything she wrote in the rounded lowercase was more elementary, about on the same level as the letters Ben could write.

Tamara pretended not to know that Mond retaught all of her daily lessons to the boy at night when they were supposed to be sleeping. She knew she would have to do something to end it eventually, but she also had noticed a frightening downturn in Mond’s overall appreciation of Tamara, and she guessed that it was directly linked to the way Tamara treated the boy. The more apathy she showed at this point, the better it would be for the mother-daughter relationship she was trying so hard to foster.

She had been able to convince Mond that she shouldn't see the boy during the day anymore. She hadn’t told her it was because his medicine made him look and act something more akin to a hibernating ground squirrel than a human. Every once in a while, Tamara would hear a loud thump from the room upstairs where he was penned in. She never reacted to it in a way that Mond would notice, but she couldn’t help wondering what could possibly be happening up there when he was about as mobile as a calcified starfish.

This happened while Mond was practicing her calligraphy. “Why don’t you go back to cycling through the whole alphabet, Mond,” Tamara said. “I’m going to go make us some lunch. Would you rather steamed asparagus or some of that spinach soufflé from last night?”

“Spinach,” Mond said quietly, her lips pursed tightly as she struggled to make the arch in her lowercase a.

Tamara stood up and walked out, closing the accordion door behind her. She stalked carefully around the corner to the stairs and up them, stepping over the three that creaked. The room at the top of the stairs had a large, darkly stained door with two locks high up on the frame. Tamara deftly undid them and burst into the room, using the door both as a shield and as a weapon, whichever was needed.

But when she got into the stark, gray, dimly lit room, she was relieved to find that her startling entrance was not necessary. The boy was lying on his side in his bed, just as she had let him that morning, eyes half open, and a thin line of drool dripping out of his mouth.

“Good boy,” Tamara said with a sigh and a grimace. In his present state, he reminded her all too much of the last few weeks she had seen her sister. He always resembled her too closely for comfort, but now, with his lifeless gaze and vulnerable position, she could easily have mistaken him for his mother.

“You’re the monster here, you know,” Tamara whispered as she walked out the door and closed it quietly behind her. “Between the two of us. I’m just protecting myself. You’re the monster.”

Chapter Fifteen

For immeasurable moments, Ben and Tess could do nothing but stand staring in awe at the other’s unexpected presence, a feeling they always had when they met up randomly, though it was augmented this time by the gravity of their mutual purpose, and the pain both still carried from the last time they were together in the very same clearing.

Gus cleared his throat from his position standing a few paces back from Ben. Martha “shh”ed him. But the silence was already broken, and Tess had already reacted by giving a little yelp and jumping a few feet backwards.

“I... didn’t realize this was a... a... group outing,” she said, so quietly only Ben could really hear it; Gus and Martha had to perform a combination of reading her lips and guessing. She looked very confused and conflicted, two feelings obviously exacerbated by the appearance of two people she’d only ever heard stories about.

“You’re different than we’d imagined,” Martha said. “Prettier,” she clarified, and winced and tried to backpedal. “I mean, we imagined you’d be pretty, we just didn’t think you would be so pretty. Ben always described you as pretty, we just thought—”

“We’ve just never held much stock in his taste,” Gus salvaged. “He once told me he thought a Raven’s croak was ‘pretty’ too, so I kind of imagined you to be the personification of a Raven croaking.” He smiled broadly, and Tess blushed.

Ben hadn’t taken his eyes away from her yet. He was still looking for something in her face. A sign of forgiveness, maybe, or even an assurance of her happiness. Regret for having ever even considered letting him leave without her? He didn’t know what, but he didn’t find any of that. Even though all signs pointed to yes, she was coming, he felt like there was still a chance she would stay behind and force him into life without her.

“You’re about what I imagined,” Tess told Gus.

“That’s because there’s only one word anyone could use to describe us,” Gus said.

“Average,” Martha conceded with a sigh. “If Medias had a brochure, we’d be the poster children for mediocrity within the borders.”

“No, no. Ben didn’t say that,” Tess said, smiling a little. “He... well... you just... make sense.”

Gus looked mockingly startled. “Do mine ears deceive me or did someone just accuse me of the foulest curse of fundamental boringness ever conceived?” he asked, putting his hand dramatically to his chest to check for a heartbeat.

“The fellow dost protest too much, methinks,” Martha retorted. “She said we look like we make sense. No one’s accusing you of accurately playing the part.”

“I meant you... you fit... the descriptions... you’re...” She flushed even further.

“Eventually*** you’ll structure a sentence successfully,” Gus said reassuringly. Martha slapped him on the shoulder. Tess laughed.

“Are you mad at me?” Ben asked, miscalculating the approximate volume of his voice, practically yelling across the pond at her.

Her eyes moved slowly from Gus and Martha to his eyes where they rested and bored into him. Burning pain seared across his face.

He felt his knees hit the ground and his hands fly to cover what he felt had to be deep and oozing cuts across his eyes and cheeks, and he heard Martha gasp, but he didn’t have time to make anything of it before everything went brown and fuzzy and he was curled in a pile on the ground, unable to hear or see anything about what was going on around him.

He felt someone shaking his shoulders, someone with large, rough hands. And he felt a pair of frantic feet prancing anxiously and almost comically around him. But then he felt the cold touch of tiny shaking fingers prying his hands away from his eyes. They held his face, jolting energy through to his brain until he could almost feel words coming through them.

“Ben! Ben! Please tell me you’re alive! Please tell me I didn’t do this to you! I don’t know what happened; I just wanted you to know without me having to say... oh, Ben, come back. Come back! I’m not mad anymore. I’m fine! I want you to come back! I want to leave Medias with you. I need to leave! I need you! Come back!”

Over and over this litany against his growing urge to fade ran silently through his mind several times before he realized that the words were growing louder, clearer, and more obviously audible. Someone was actually saying them, or at least he was actually hearing them. They sounded far away, like someone yelling from across a large clearing, but as he grew more aware of the reality of his surroundings, he deciphered that they had to be coming from Tess, who couldn’t be too far away from him, since it had to be her hands that were holding his face, even though they seemed to be meeting with some resistance from an outside force.

Then all of a sudden, Ben felt the familiar and unwelcome sensation of prickling vines shooting up through his body from the ground, through his back, wrapping painfully around his spine and ribs. As quickly as it had come, though, it was gone, and he was blinded by the sunlight in his eyes and deafened by the instantly loud voices around him. He sputtered as if coming up to breathe.

“Get away from him, witch!” Gus was yelling.

“Ben, are you all right? Please talk to me!” Tess screamed, her voice uncharacteristically taught and shrieking.

“Gus, don’t hurt her,” Martha pleaded, her voice quietest of the three.

When the blurry and highly contrasted shapes came into better focus, he was internally horrified by the scene, even though he was not reacting quickly enough to do anything about it externally.

The hands on his face were indeed Tess’, and the hands on his shoulders were Gus’, and the two people, those four hands, were battling against each other, each trying to take sole possession of Ben as he lay there uselessly on the ground. They were nearly attacking one another to get to him. Martha was dancing ditheringly around behind them, trying half-heartedly to restrain Gus.

Then all at once his strength and presence of mine came back into him, like it was an entity being shot directly at his chest from a cannon at short-range.

“Get off me!” he yelled, sputtering again, taking gasping breaths and shunning all three of them away. He rolled over and pushed himself onto his knees. He could feel the silent presence of them all hovering behind him, but he didn’t acknowledge it as he tried to wrap his mind around the past ten minutes of his life.

“What... just happened?” he asked with his back to them, struggling to keep his breaths even while his heart was still racing.

“Tess tried to kill you,” Gus said coldly.

“Shut up, Gus,” Ben said.

“Me shut up?” Gus said in disbelief. “She’s the one you sent you writhing to the ground in pain and you want me to shut up?”

“She didn’t do it on purpose, Gus,” Martha said.

“She can explain it,” Ben said.

All four of them sat in silence for a minute before Tess began talking. When she did, her voice was timid and quiet again, like usual, but also scared.

“You asked me if I was still mad at you,” she said, “and I wanted to tell you that I was without saying it out loud, so I tried... I tried to... give you a sort of angry look. And, I don’t understand what happened then; my eyes got all hot and stingy, and then you fell down screaming.”

“It was like you shot something at me,” Ben said, remembering the pain as it had whipped across his face. “And then I couldn’t see or hear anything until...” He turned his head around and looked at her, “until you grabbed my face. You started talking to me and I... I could hear you.”

“Was she saying, ‘Get off him Gus, you’re going to hurt him’?” Gus asked angrily. “That’s what she was saying to me. It’s ridiculous.”

“No,” Ben said. “You were telling me to come back.”

The four stood in stillness — no movement, no noise, save for the orange leaves falling from the trees and the occasional croak of a nearby raven. Ben was looking at Tess, who was glancing between him and her shoes. Martha was staring at the back of Gus’ head, who was staring obstinately into the empty space beyond Ben’s left ear.

“Maybe we shouldn't leave,” Martha said. “Not today, anyway.”

“No,” Ben and Tess said together.

“You two can go home,” Ben said to Gus. “I should have told you yesterday what Medias said about not being able to come back. I should have realized you wouldn’t want to—”

“I can’t leave you alone with her,” he jerked his thumb at Tess. “Who knows when she could accidentally blow you up with her mind.”

“I’m sorry, Gus,” Tess said. “I swear; I would never want to hurt Ben like—”

“Well, you already have, and you evidently had no control over it, so someone’s got to keep an eye on you,” Gus said. He turned to look her coldly in the face. “I’m not going to call you sister, let’s just put it that way.”

“Gus, don’t be stupid,” Ben said. “It was just an accident.”

“One that can happen again,” he said. “I’m coming with you.”

Ben looked up at Martha, who gave him the same look she had when she had finished her story about the Monk E Paw. “And you?”

“Of course I’m coming,” she said without hesitation. He couldn’t tell if she actually wanted to, though. Maybe he didn’t understand the real power of the lash, after all.

He stood up and brushed the dead leaves off his back. “Okay. We’re going west,” he said. “We can’t be too far from the edge now.”

“Maybe that’s why all this happened in the first place,” Tess said as they turned and began walking, leaving the catfish pond, the forest, and everything they could remember behind them in the pile of dried leaves dried wood that were the hills of Medias.

___________

***For Jared

P.S. As my life gets gradually more hectic, I do a lot more dirty things to reach my word count. You may notice this eventually.

Chapter Eleven

“I’m leaving,” Ben whispered in Tess’ ear. He had found her sleeping next to the catfish pond.

She opened her eyes without looking at him. They were bloodshot and puffy. “I knew you would,” she said. “How did I know you would?”

“Tomorrow, probably around noon,” he said. “I figure if Medias isn’t going to try to stop me—”

“No, Ben,” Tess said loudly, angrily. “Answer my question. How did I know you were going to want to leave? How do I always know? I find you when you yourself don’t even know where you’re going, I can tell when you’re lying, or when you’re hiding your emotions.” Tears started reforming at the corners of her eyes. “I’ve known you forever and I know everything about you and I don’t remember meeting you or what life was like without you…”

She continued to talk for a long time, but her eventual sobs began to muddle her words. Ben couldn’t think of anything constructive to do, so he just stood there, watching her. Once she had given herself over to weeping and lay curled up on her side, shaking and moaning incoherently, Ben knelt down and put an arm around her shoulders.

“Tess?” he asked tentatively. “Tess, come back.”

Several minutes passed. Ben sat quietly as Tess’ sobs relented and her shaking subsided. After what could have been a quarter of an hour, she was lying there, breathing in short, deep bursts, but she was in control again.

“You’re leaving.” Her eyes were closed and her face was peaceful.

“I don’t think I belong here anymore,” he said. “Martha told me something…” He trailed off. Tess’ eyes were pressed closed and she was biting her lip. “Wait, don’t get upset. Listen to me.”

She opened her eyes and looked up at him. Her eyes looked bluer than he had ever seen them before. The contrast between them and her face and hair was more startling this way.

“I want you to come with me,” he said. “I wouldn’t know what to do without you.”

She blinked and her nose wiggled a little, something Ben recognized as her response to being caught off guard. “You want me to come with?”

“Yeah.” He tried to make his voice light and excited. “Think about all the things we’d see and experiences we’d have, and no one would be able to stop us.”

“I can’t go with you,” Tess said, sounding incredulous. “I can’t leave Medias.”

“What? Why not” Ben asked.

“My family is here—the other girls in the pre-lash house. As much as you mean to me, I don’t know that I can just leave them,” she said. “And what about Gus and Martha? Are you going to tell them before you go, or were you more hoping to leave a note on the table?”

A faint, high-pitched ringing bounced around the inside of Ben’s ears. “You mean…” He was unbelievably crestfallen. “You mean, you’d stay? You wouldn’t come with?”

“How can I?” she asked, her face pleading with him. “You’re tearing me in two! I knew this was going to happen as soon as Medias told you he wasn’t going to lift the denial, or even as soon as I saw that you were denied. I saw that look in your eye, the one you get when you get tired of fighting and realize your other options are limited. You get an idea in your head and you won’t stray from it, no matter what it means to anyone, including you and anyone around you.”

“I have to leave, Tess! There is no other way. What else am I supposed to do now? Sit around, doing nothing, knowing that the creature in charge of this forest is merely forestalling its death, and that it is the reason you and I can never—”

“What is so bad about Medias?” she asked. “What about this place is so abhorrent to you that it gives you no reason to stay?”

He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he just begged her with his eyes to understand. Her face, hardened against tears, became grave. She turned slowly and began to walk away.

“Tess…” he said, but he didn’t have anything to follow it.

She stopped, gave a small shudder, and broke into a run, leaving the clearing, heading straight for the heart of Medias.

Ben fell to his knees, torn with indecision. He looked up at the darkening sky overhead, feeling his face get hot and his eyes get wet. He screamed, hoping to burn his throat with the force of it, hoping to give himself physical pain to take away the pain in his mind.

____________
*Author's note: In the Word document where all of the story is originally written, this chapter has a couple thousand words I left out of here. That's because it was while writing this chapter that I realized just how far behind I was on word count and I had Ben and Tess start reciting the script from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. It was epic, but also unimportant to the plot.

Also, for anyone wondering about the conspicuous lack of certain chapters such as seven and four, I will assure you that there's most likely nothing of important information in them and I am simply uncomfortable with sharing them as they are. Thank you for your patience.