Exodus :: [Ella + Rolex]

Summer burns her until skin crackles dry with salt instead of sweat and she can't stand the way laying beneath her bedsheets feels like suffocating. For the fifth day in a row she wakes up on the floor, her body begging the wooden boards to take the heat from her back and thighs, but there is no escape, no relief. Sprawled out in the quiet desperation of the season, she imagines stitching her mouth closed, her fingertips pressed to her lips. She tastes the burn of salt and hates it. It's too honest.

Last night she dreamt of the Morenos, but not of fighting them. Instead of violence, the only thing her subconscious mind chose to remember was the sweetness of air conditioning and the contentedness of a full stomach. Her traitorous belly growls at the thought, unafraid of her clenched fists and jaw. There's nothing left within her kitchen to silence the sounds and she can't feed herself on her own empty threats.

The training center she's worked at since stepping down from the Reaping closed its doors last week, chains strung through the handles and padlocked. Until now it had been easy to hide away with her brother in this derelict excuse for a house, forgetting how unwanted she is. She had Auggie. She had a job that paid her to hold knives to people's throats. She had enough willpower to suppress the ache of what she left in the forest all those years ago.

Except her stomach twists with emptiness until she becomes a black hole. She is the center of a strange gravity and everything she thought she had abandoned is rushing back to her — not just moments with the Morenos. The breaths between her heartbeats are the whisper of forgotten names and the salt on her back turns to dust, sticking to the floor after she stands and creating pale shadows of ghosts her stitched mouth would lie about if she hadn't already bound herself into silence.

She might try to escape it all again, except fleeing into the forest would mean running toward her ghosts instead of away from them. Zane. Kade. The heart she carved from her own chest was hacked into pieces and buried in their mouths with the hope that they might chew it up for good, but she suspects they swallowed her whole because sometimes she swears she still feels the warmth of being carried within another person.

Her stomach twists and she has to grit her teeth to keep from dry heaving, pulling on a pair of tattered jeans and one of Auggie's old shirts before running out the front door in an attempt to get away from her own terrible gravity. It feels like being followed, memories at her heels, and she's supposed to be faster this —

The only place running gets her to is to the door of the training center her old boss has referred her to. No one wants to hire a trainer that stepped down from a Reaping, but they haven't told her no... yet. She walks in with something like caution clenched between her teeth. It's so quiet in this early hour that she wonders if maybe the door that closes behind her really is keeping out her ghosts and so her footsteps are light, hushed, secretive. The only disturbance is the distant THUNK of a heavy blade hitting a practice dummy and she follows the sound like tracking prey.

It's not difficult to find the person responsible and she leans against the wall to watch, pressing her back into the coolness of the cement blocks. She doesn't recognize him, but she knows one thing for certain — the only way she's going to escape her demons is with the help of a distraction. "It's better when your enemy fights back." Licking her lips, she tastes the salt. The burn. The lie.

What she really wants is to stop fighting, but she doesn't know how.